The Wanderer

by Fritz Leiber

“How about a hyperspatial tube?”

“Um…m. Distinctly a possibility…”

One instant space was empty; the next it was full of warships…

Planets. Seven of them. Armed and powered as only a planet can be armed and powered.

—Edward E. Smith, Ph. D., in Second Stage Lensmen

Tyger, tyger; burning brightIn the forests of the night.What immortal hand or eyeCould frame thy fearful symmetry?

In what distant deeps or skiesBurnt the fire of thine eyes?…In what furnace was thy brain?…—William Blake

And I beheld when he had opened the sixth seal, and lo, there was a great earthquake; and the sun became black as sackcloth of hair, and the moon became as blood;

And the stars of heaven fell unto the earth, even as a fig tree casteth her untimely figs, when she is shaken of a mighty wind.

And the heavens departed as a scroll when it is rolled together; and every mountain and island were moved out of their places…

And the third angel sounded, and there fell a great star from heaven, burning as it were a lamp, and it fell upon the third part of the rivers, and upon the fountains of waters.

—The Revelation of Saint John the Divine

Actual interstellar voyaging was first effected by detaching a planet from its natural orbit by a series of well-timed and well-placed rocket impulsions, and thus projecting it into outer space at a speed far greater than the normal planetary and stellar speeds…

Then followed wars such as had never before occurred in our galaxy. Fleets of worlds, natural and artificial, maneuvered among the stars to outwit one another, and destroyed one another with long-range jets of sub-atomic energy. As the tides of battle swept hither and thither through space, whole planetary systems were annihilated.

—Olaf Stapledon in The Star Maker

Chapter One

Some stories of terror and the supernormal start with a moonlit face at a diamond-paned window, or an old document in spidery handwriting, or the baying of a hound across lonely moors. But this one began with an eclipse of the moon and with four glisteningly new astronomical photographs, each showing starfields and a planetary object. Only…something had happened to the stars.

The oldest of the photographs was only seven days out of the developer at the time of the eclipse. They came from three widely separated observatories and one came from a telescope on a satellite. They were the star-graven runes of purest science, at the opposite extreme from matters of superstition, yet each photograph struck a twinge of uneasiness in the young scientist first to see it.

As he looked at the black dots that should have been there…and at the faint black curlicues that shouldn’t…he felt the barest touch of a strangeness that for a moment made him kin to the caveman and the devil-worshipper and the witch-haunted Middle Ages.