The Wanderer

The next instant he was grabbed from behind and slammed flat on his back against a hard, satin-smooth surface that had somehow been somewhere in the omni-surrounding flowers. The thing that terrified him most was that the limb that snaked around his neck — a sleek, spring-strong, green-furred limb, barred with violet — had two elbows.

With a whirling speed that did not allow his seeing it clearly, the green and violet tiger-thing worked at his out-flung wrists and ankles. Paws with claws of violet-gray pinched without stabbing; once he felt the grip of something more like a snake. Then the thing kicked off from his side and dived into the flowerbank after Miaow. A long green violet-ringed tail, smoothly furred and tapering, vanished in a larger explosion of petals.

He tried to push himself up from the surface under him and discovered he could budge only his head. Though still in null gravity, he was somehow gyved tautly to that same surface — as was next brought home to him most graphically when he looked straight up and saw not ten feet above him (or below, or out to the side — he didn’t know how to feel about it in null gravity) a spread-eagled, wet-sand-specked, pale, wildly staring reflection of himself, backed by a dozen dimming reflections of reflections of the same ridiculous, poignant picture.

The inner shape and decor of the saucer began to come clear to him. More than half the flowers he’d seen had been reflections. Ceiling and floor were round, flat mirrors facing each other, about nine feet apart and twenty feet in diameter. He was spread-eagled near the center of one of them. The rim between the mirrors was luxuriant with exotic, thick-petaled flowers, large and small — pale yellow, pale blue, violet, magenta, but mostly pink and pinkish red. Seemingly live flowers, for there were leaves shaped like sickles and swords and spears, and there were glimpses of twisting branches — probably their hydroponic or whatever underpinnings filled much of the saucer’s tapered outside rim.

But the triangularly cross-sectioned doughnut of the rim couldn’t be entirely filled with vegetation, for bowered in it beyond his fettered feet he now made out a silvery gray control panel — at any rate some sort of flat surface with smooth silvery excrescences and geometrical shapes limned on it. Straining his head around, he could see similar panels beyond each of his spread and outstretched arms, the three panels being situated relative to each other at the apices of an equilateral triangle incribed in the saucer, but each of them half hidden by the embowering flowers — very much as crassly functional objects such as heater and sink and phone and hi-fi might be masked in the small apartment of a modish and esthetically-minded woman.

The whole was bathed in bright, warm, beachy light coming from…he couldn’t see where. An invisible indoor sun — most eerie.

Eerier still and infinitely closer to home was the feeling that next came to him: that his mind was being invaded and his memories and knowledge riffled through like so many decks of cards. He tritely recalled how a drowning man is supposed to relive his life in a few seconds, and he wondered if it applied when you drowned in flowers — or were crucified by a tiger preparatory to being torn apart and devoured.

The sensations in his mind flashed so fast he could see and hear only blurs. They were his own private mental possessions, yet he was unable to note them as they flashed and faded — an ultimate humiliation! A few images he was able to catch toward the end of this mental “customs search” showed an odd preoccupation with zoos and ballets.

He looked around but could catch no glimpse of the tiger-thing or of Miaow. The invisible sun radiated on. The flower-banks were deathly still, exuding their perfumes.

Donald Merriam was midway in his third passage through the Wanderer’s shadow. To his right was the strange planet’s green-spotted night side, which still made him think of a spider’s underbelly. Ahead lay the sheaf of stars, and to his left the black, ever-lengthening ellipsoid of the moon with the cobwebby black threads looping up from its nose against the thickly glittering background. He was beginning to feel tired and cold, and he’d quit working the radio.

A dim, yellowish point appeared against the Wanderer’s face, ahead, near the star-sheaf. It rapidly became a yellowish dash, horizontal to him, then a double dash with a little black stretch in the middle like the popular new fluorescent auto headlights, then two yellowish spindles that grew in size.