The Wanderer

“You — ape!” Tigerishka snarled. She thrust her great-jawed head down so that he winced his eyes three-quarters shut. Then, spacing out the words as one might to a barely literate peasant, she said: “You treat — little one — like beast — like pet?” The horrified contempt in the last word was glacial-volcanic.

All Paul could do in his frantic terror was snatch at something Margo was always saying, and gibber: “No! No! Cats are people!”

Don Merriam had stood on the rim of Earth’s Grand Canyon. He had also looked over the edge of the Leibnitz Cleft near the south pole of the moon. But never — except when he had driven the Baba Yaga through Luna — certainly never from a solid footing, had he peered into anything remotely as deep as the open, mile-wide circular pit that yawned only two dozen paces across the silver pavement from where the Baba Yaga stood with its ladder thrust down between its three legs.

How far did the pit go down? Five miles? Twenty-five? Five hundred? It seemed to maintain its one-mile width indefinitely. The equivalent in emptiness of what the plunging pillar of moon rock was in solidity, it narrowed somewhere far below to a tiny, hazy round that was little more than a point — and that narrowing was only the consequence of the laws of perspective and the limitations of his visual powers.

He toyed with the notion that the shaft went straight through the center of the planet to the other side, so that if he leaped off the edge now he would never hit bottom, but only fall four thousand miles or so — a weary fall, that, taking twenty hours at least, if terminal velocities in this planet’s atmosphere were like those on Earth, almost time enough to die of thirst — and then, finally, perhaps after a few reverberations of reversed and re-reversed fall, come to rest in the air at the planet’s center and slowly swim to the side of the shaft, just as he’d swum through the air of the Baba Yaga’s cabin in free fall.

Of course the air pressure down there, four thousand miles down, would be more than enough to crush him — perhaps enough to drive oxygen monatomic! — but they would surely have ways of dealing with that, ways of making the air exactly as thin or as thick as they wanted it at every depth.

Already he was doing a great deal of thinking in terms of their powers — powers which increased each time he turned his eyes, each time he thought, though he had yet to see a single one of them.

The false memory of his childhood came again, of the pit he’d found that went through the earth behind his family’s farm. So now he stared down the shaft hunting for a star, or rather for a hint of the captive antipodean day under its section of vaulted sky-film eight thousand miles down there. But even as he hunted he knew it was a visual impossibility, and in any case it was made quite infeasible by the multitude of lights glowing, flashing, and twinkling from the sides of the shaft at every floor.

For the strangest and most unnatural thing about the shaft was simply that it was unnatural, not something occurring in or driven through solid rock — in fact, there was no sign of rock anywhere — but floor after floor, tiered endlessly downward, of artificial structure and habitable inner volume. The floors began after a blank hundred feet or so at the top and were never afterwards interrupted.

He could count hundreds of those floors, he was sure, before they began to merge and run together, again due solely to the limitations of his vision. Yet judging by the ones toward the top, they were very tall, spacious floors, suggesting a life of perhaps more than human grandeur and scope, despite the, to him, claustrophobic feel of such a downward infinity of rooms and corridors.

The only comparisons for it that he could dredge from his memory — and they were most inadequate comparisons — were the inner courts, tiered with balconies, of certain large department stores and office buildings, or perhaps a skylight shaft shooting down through the stacks of some vast unmicro-filmed old library.

Far below now he thought he could see small airships winging across the shaft, and perhaps up and down it, like lazy beetles, and some of those seemed to twinkle too, like the phosphorescent beetles of the tropics.

In his desire to peer deeper into the pit, he leaned out farther over it, gripping tightly with his bare hands the upper of two satin-smooth silver rails that fenced it. Even that simple feature of his surroundings was unnatural and indicative of their powers, for the rails had no supports. They were a pair of mile-wide, thin silver hoops hung two and a little more than three feet above the pit’s margin. Or, if there were invisible uprights, he had not yet touched or kicked into them. He could see only a couple of hundred yards of the hoops in either direction; beyond that they vanished like telegraph wires. However, he assumed they went all the way around.