The Wanderer

He shrugged and shook his head. “It’s too big,” he said. “I’ve lost my feelings.”

“Like see things closer?” she asked, pushing off and drifting slowly toward him.

“What would be the use?” he asked.

“Then you feeling bad ’bout something smaller, Paul, something nearer you,” she told him. “Girl? You worry ’bout her?”

He grimaced. “I don’t know. Margo’s not my girl, really.”

“Then you feeling bad ’bout nearest thing of all: you-self,” Tigerishka informed him, checking her drift beside him. She laid a velvet paw on his bare shoulder. “Poor Paul,” she purred. “All mixed up. Poor, poor Paul.”

He angrily twisted his shoulder away from the thrilling touch, flipping air toward her with a short sweep of his hands to keep a few inches back. “Don’t treat me like a pet that’s out of sorts,” he demanded angrily. “Don’t treat me like a sick monkey. Treat me like a man!”

She grinned at him, her whiskers laying back across her violet cheeks, the black pupils of her eyes shrinking to pinpoints, and she pointed a violet-gray foreclaw at his heart and said: “Bang!”

After a moment he chuckled miserably and admitted, “All right, Tigerishka, I guess I have to be some sort of lower animal to you, but in that case look into my mind and tell me what’s wrong with me. Why am I so mixed up?”

The pupils of her eyes expanded to stars — black spidery stars in a violet sky.

“Why, Paul,” she said gravely, “ever since you forced me to treat you as an intelligent being — primitive but intelligent, bearing a little living universe inside — it has no longer been a simple thing for me to go deep into your mind. It’s more than a matter of having to ask your permission now. But I have gathered some notions about you, and if you want I will tell them to you.”

He nodded. “Go on.”

“Paul,” she said, “you resent being treated like a pet, yet that is how you treat the people around you. You stand back and watch their antics with tolerant understanding and you nurse and guard and cajole the ones you love: Margo, Don, your mother, several others. You call this friendship, but it’s nursemaiding and devouring. A decent cat wouldn’t do it to her own kittens.

“You stand back and watch yourself more than is healthy. You live too much in the self watching you and in the third self watching the second, and so on. Look!” She switched the windows to mirror. Her foreclaw placed itself between his right eye and his own stacked reflections and somehow ticked off the edges of the first six of them exactly.

“See?” she said. “Each watching the one in front I know — all intelligent animals are self-observing. But you live too much in the reflections, Paul. Best to live mostly in front of the mirror and just a little in the watchers. That way courage comes. Don’t live in Watcher Number Six!

“Also, you think other people same as your watchers. You cringe from them, then criticize. But they not. They got watchers too, watching just them.

“Also, love yourself more, or you can’t like anybody.

“ ’Nother thing ’bout you,” she finished, dropping wholly back into monkey-talk, “fight-reflexes pretty poor. Likewise dance. Likewise sex. Not ’nough practice. That’s all.”

“I know you’re right,” Paul said haltingly in a small, tight voice. “I try to change, but—”

“ ’Nough thinking ’bout self! Look! See one our big saucers save one your towns.”

Ceiling and floor were transparent again. They were descending at a rapid slant toward a dark branchwork merged with a pale checkerboard mesh, from the center of which brown rings were expanding outward toward a circular brown rim that merged into bluish gray. High above the center of the circles hung a golden and violet saucer which he judged had to be huge from the cloud-arm between them.

The mesh grew larger — it was streets. And the squares were blocks of buildings.

The brown rings were humpings of silt-laden water being driven out of the city.

He recognized, from remembered pictures, the great buildings of Elektrosila and the Institute of Energetics, the blue-green of the Kirov Theater, the Square of the Decembrists. The branchwork must be the streams of the Neva delta, and the city itself, Leningrad.

“See? We save your beloved cities,” Tigerishka said complacently. “Momentum engine of big saucer move only water. Very smart machine.”

Suddenly the saucer dipped so close he saw the cobblestones, a mud-buried gutter, and the sprawled, silt-drifted, water-grayed bodies of a woman and a little girl. Then a low brown wave surged over them, a gray arm and a gray, bearded face lifelessly flinging out of the dirty foam.

“Save?” Paul demanded incredulously. “Yes, after killing your millions — and if the rescue isn’t worse than the disaster! Tigerishka, how could you bring yourself to wreck our world just to get fuel a little faster? What frightened you into it?”

She hissed: “Stay off that subject, Paul!”