The Wanderer

From that room he flashed into a busier one crowded with command tables, maps, charts, screens and tanks for three-dimensional viewing. On and in the latter were ever-changing scenes of catastrophe: landscapes and cities riven by earthquake, seared by fire, inundated by great waves and silent rises of water. He peered excitedly for a while, then it came to him with horror that this was his own planet Earth suffering tidal mutilation in the grip of the Wanderer’s mass — the Wanderer, which could turn gravity on and off as suited its purposes.

He wanted to stay and watch, or thought he did, but instead he was irresistibly hurried off through several walls into a chamber that was one great dark viewing tank with alien faces all around it, some with two eyes, some with three and some with eight. In the tank hung models of Earth and the Wanderer and a looping, swelling quarter-ring that was the remnants of Luna. Here and there, mostly clustering close to the two planets, were points of violet and yellow light which he guessed were spaceships.

The larger globes were the right distance apart — some thirty times their diameter — and Don could not tell whether they were replicas or three-dimensional projections. The illusion was so good that he felt he was drifting in space, with the weird alien faces replacing the constellations.

Then without warning other planets, green, gray, gold, some as strangely figured as the Wanderer, began to appear by ones and twos. Bright bolts of light that traveled with a curious slowness shot between them — radiation moving 186,000 miles a second, but slowed down to scale. There were miniscule explosions. Light-point spaceships moved in warring fleets. Then all the planets but Earth began to move about swiftly as if maneuvering in a battle.

But he never saw the outcome of the engagement, for the forces moving him through, the Wanderer began to work on him with greater urgency, as if he were nearing the end of his trip. For the first time he felt a pang of weariness.

The next three rooms he was hurried through were all viewing tanks with backgrounds velvet black except for the alien faces of the viewers. The first showed a swirled lens of bright points and clusters of light — a galaxy, certainly, probably the Milky Way.

The second room held a great swarm of tiny, soft, spherical and disk-shaped puffs of light spaced rather more than their own diameters apart There was something strange about the space in this tank — it seemed to curve back upon itself mysteriously, so that as he moved about everything changed more than it ought. Just before he was whirled on, Don guessed he was seeing the entire cosmos of star-islands: the totality, the universe.

His imagination began to wander sleepily, independently of his viewing. Phrases drifted through his mind: This artificial planet…the umbilicus of the cosmos…the central brain…the eternal eye…the book of the past…the womb and zygote of the future…transcendent as God, yet not God…

He returned to himself, or to his winging viewpoint, with a start, to realize that he was gazing into a great black viewing tank in which the cosmos he had just seen — it was recognizable by its mysteriously twisted shape — was only one small, pale puff of light floating alone. Then ghostlier light-puffs of other shapes and hues began to appear and vanish, some swiftly as a firefly’s flash, some lingering a while. Don wondered dreamily if these were other universes known to the beings of the Wanderer. Or perhaps only universes guessed at…sought…there was something hypothetical about their ghostliness and their swift vanishing…and stars and galaxies and universes are truly such unreal things, no more than the dim points of light that swim before one’s eyes before one sleeps…

Then the one bright cosmos began to dip and dart about like a leaf in a whirlwind, and he worried dreamily why that should be, since surely the universe is firm-based…and then the ghost cosmoses began to swirl too, hypothetically…

The last room Don traversed shocked him briefly awake as no other sight might have, and there seemed to be a moral to it, though his weary mind was unable to put it into words. It was a huge, worldlike room, similar to that of the harpies, with a furnace-red sky arching above a veldt dotted with rocks and tree clumps. Small hoofed animals more delicate than deer and armed with a single slim horn grazed fastidiously. Birds with ruby and topaz and emerald plumage and with elaborate combs and wattles flew low, frequently settling into the tall grass and the tree clumps as if in search of seeds and fruit.