The Wanderer

All at once he began to move swiftly in that direction, straight toward the wall. He flinched his eyes shut — he could do that, at least, or somehow momentarily turn off his vision — and when he opened them, although there had been no blow, not the least sensation of resistance, he was flying rapidly along a silver corridor etched with arabesques and hieroglyphs. It opened almost at once into one of the great pits or wells, and with a sudden rush of exultation he plunged down.

In this way there began for Don Merriam an experience that might be pure vivid dream, or a dream induced in him by his captor-hosts, or a clairvoyant extrasensory experience presented to him in the form of a flying dream, or even — and this was how it felt — that his body had been made perfectly permeable to all walls and airs and other barriers by an alien physics and chemistry, and immune to gravity and all other ordinary forces, and whirled and swooped about, half involuntarily yet guided to a degree by its mind’s raging curiosities, on a wonderful nightmare journey.

Or perhaps, it occurred to him, this was all taking place in a single instant, outside time.

Don Merriam could not tell which of these, or some yet unimagined other, was the basis of his experience. He could only flit and plummet and see.

At first his movements were limited to empty corridors and shafts. Or if there were beings or perambulating machines or small ships in them, they were blurred to invisibility by the speed of his passage. The rule was that for a few instants he would travel almost as fast as light, it seemed, aware only of the general shape and attitude of the passageway he was traversing; then he would float rather slowly for a brief space, able to glimpse all that was immediately around him; then he would dart off again, in part involuntarily, in part because an imperious urge to see something else would take hold. This process went on interminably, yet without weariness or boredom, as though time were unlimitedly telescoped.

Gradually the three-dimensional picture firmed in his mind of the Wanderer, artificial throughout, globe within globe of floors — fifty thousand of them at least — everywhere veined with corridors, like a vast silvery sponge. Many of the great wells did go all the way through the planet, intersecting at its center in an immense empty globe that had a dark sky of its own glittering with random lights like stars between the mile-wide holes of the pits with their darkness and their softly glimmering lights.

But although his imagination surged delightedly with its increasing grip on the structure of the Wanderer, one feature of the planet oppressed and then began to frighten him, more by its implications than by its simple nature: the thirty-yard-thick skin of dark metal that was its silver-filmed roof — the ground on which the Baba Yaga and the Soviet moon ship had landed — and the mile-wide rounds of equally thick metal set to swing across the mouths of the pits, sealing up the planet like a fortress.

Re-enforcing this particular ominousness were sets of great coils circling some of the planet-piercing pits, as if the pits might sometimes serve as monstrous linear accelerators.

Recoiling inward from the forbidding armor plating, Don found himself again in the very center of the star-speckled, central immensity. It might be only twenty miles across, but now it seemed a universe, and the great holes in its starry sky doorways to other universes, and he felt that there were invisible beings around him, impalpable thinking mists that lived in the cold intergalactic depths of space, and this engendered in him a sudden fear sharper than had the planet’s defensive skin.

It was perhaps this sharper fear that launched his winging vision on its second exploration of the Wanderer. He no longer stuck to corridors, but flashed without flinching through wall after wall, aware of the thickest of them only as a fleeting blink in his seeing as he sped through room after room. And now when he paused, it was always near living beings. These living beings were not of one sort, but many.