The Wanderer (12 page)

He at once accepted the fact that it was a massive planet and that the moon had gone into a tight orbit around it, because that alone, as far as he could reason, could explain the sights and happenings of the past three hours: the light deluging Earth's night side, the highlight in the Atlantic, and above all the shattering of Luna.

And, beyond reason, there was that inside him—since he was out here and facing it—that cried out to
believe
it was a planet.

He swung ship, and there, only fifty miles below him, was the moon's vast disk, half inky black, half glaring white with sunlight. He could see where the chasm walls had truly crashed shut behind him by the line of dust-geysers rising gleaming into sunlit vacuum almost along the moon's night line, and by the surrealist, jagged-squared chessboard of lesser cracks marked by lesser geysers radiating outward from the crash line. Monstrous cross-hatching!

He was poised fifty miles—and receding—over what every moment looked more like a rock sea churning.

Then, because he didn't want to plunge—not yet, at least—at a mile a second into the glow-spotted black hemisphere now beneath his jets, he fired the main jet to kill that part of his velocity—at last checking the tank gages and discovering that there was barely enough fuel and oxidizer for this maneuver. It should put him into an orbit around the strange planet—inside even the tight orbit of the moon.

He knew that the sun would soon sink from view and the metamorphosing moon be blackly eclipsed, as the Baba Yaga and Luna swung together into the shadow-cone—into the night—of a mystery.

Fritz Scher sat stiffly at his desk in the long room at the Tidal Institute at Hamburg, West Germany. He was listening with amusement tending toward exasperation to the demented morning news flash from across the Atlantic. He switched it off with a twist that almost fractured the knob and said to Hans Opfel: "Those Americans! Their presence is needful to hold the Communist swines in check, but what an intellectual degradation to the Fatherland!"

He stood up from his desk and walked over to the sleekly streamlined, room-long tide-predicting machine. Inside the machine a wire ran through many movable precision pulleys, each pulley representing a factor influencing the tide at the point on Earth's hydrosphere for which the machine was set; at the end of the wire a pen drew on a graph-papered drum a curve giving the exact tides at that point, hour by hour.

At Delft they had a machine that did it all electronically, but those were the feckless Hollanders!

Fritz Scher said dramatically: "The moon in orbit around a planet from nowhere?

Hah!" He tapped the shell of the machine beside him significantly. "Here we have the moon nailed down!"

The "Machan Lumpur," her rusty prow aimed a little south of the sun sinking over North Vietnam, crossed the bar guarding the tiny inlet south of Do-Son. Bagong hung noted, by a familiar configuration of mangrove roots and by an old gray piling that was practically a member of his family, that the high tide was perhaps a hand's breadth higher than he'd ever encountered it here. A good omen! Tiny ripples shivered across the inlet mysteriously. A sea hawk screamed.

Richard Hillary watched the sunbeams slowly straighten up as the big air-suspended bus whipped smoothly on toward London. Bath was far behind and they were passing Silbury Hill.

He listened idly to the solemn speculations around him about the nonsensical news items that had been coming over the wireless concerning a flying saucer big as a planet sighted by thousands over the United States. Really, science fiction was corrupting people everywhere.

A coarsely attractive girl from Devizes in slacks, snood, and a sweater, who had transferred aboard at Beckhampton, now dropped into the seat ahead of him and instantly fell into small talk with the woman beside her. She was expatiating, with exactly equal enthusiasm, on the saucer reports—and the little earthquake that had nervously twitched parts of Scotland—and on the egg she'd had for breakfast and the sausage-and-mashed she was going to have for lunch. In honor of Edward Lear, Richard offhandedly shaped a limerick about her:

There was a Young Girl of Devizes

Whose thoughts came in two standard sizes:

While most fitted a spoon,

Some were big as the moon;

That spacestruck Young Girl of Devizes.

Thinking of it kept him amused all the way to Savernake Forest, where he fell into a doze.

Times Square at five a.m. was still as packed as it had been on the nights of the moon landing and of the False War With Russia. Traffic had long stopped. The streets were full of people. The Wanderer, now masking half the moon, was still visible down the crosstown streets, including 42nd, but low in the sky, its yellow mellower and its purple turning red.

The advertisements were a bit brighter by contrast, especially the new sixty-foot genie bafflingly juggling the three oranges big as bushel baskets.

But the streets were no longer still. While some people just stood there and stared west, the majority were rhythmically swaying: not a few had joined hands and were snaking about with a compulsive stamp, while here and there young couples danced savagely. And most of them were humming or singing or shouting a song that had several versions, but the newest of these was being sung at the source, where Sally Harris still danced, though now she had acquired a supporting team of half a dozen sharp, aggressive young men besides Jake Lesher. And the song as she sang it now, her contralto more vibrant for its hoarseness, went:

Strange orb!…in the western sky…

Strange light!…streaming from on high…

It's a terrifying sight

But we're gonna live tonight,

Live with a neo-bop beatl

Golden!…like treasure ships…

Crimson!…as sinful lips…

But there'll be no more June

'Cause there ain't no more moon—

Just a Planet!…on Forty-second Street!

All of a sudden the singing and dancing stopped everywhere at once—because the dance floor had begun to tremble. There was a brief shaking. A few tiles, not many, and other trifles of masonry fell, cracking sharply against the sidewalks. There were screams—not many of those, either. But when the little earthquake was over, it could be seen that the sixty-foot genie had lost his three oranges, though he still kept going through the motions of juggling.

Arab Jones and his weed-brothers walked rapidly, three abreast, along 125th Street away from Lenox, in the direction all the other dark faces were peering: west, where the Wanderer was setting, a great gaudy poker chip—bloated purple X on orange field—that almost covered the pale gold-piece of the moon. Soon the heavenly pair would be hidden by the General Grant Houses, which emphasized with their tall, remote bulking the small-town look of Harlem, the two-and three-story shop-fronted buildings lining 125th.

The three weed-brothers were so loaded that their excitement had only been heightened by the quake, which had brought out onto the street most of those who weren't already watching the Wanderer.

The east was rosy, where the sun, pausing in the horizon wings for his entrance, had washed out all the stars and brought the morning twilight to Manhattan. But no one looked that way, or gave any sign that it might be time to be off and doing or trying to get some sleep. The spires of lower Manhattan were an unwatched fairy-tale city of castles to the south.

Arab and Pepe and High had long since quit trying to push through the staring, mostly silent crowd on the sidewalks and had taken to the street, where no cars moved and fewer people clustered and where the going was easier. It seemed to Pepe that a power came out of the planet ahead, freezing all motors and most people like some combined paralysis-and-motor-stalling ray out of the comic books. He crossed himself.

High Bundy whispered: "Old moon
really
going into her this time. He circle in front of her, decide he like her, then
whooshl"

Arab said, "Maybe he hiding 'cause he scared. Like we."

"Scared of what?" asked High.

"The end of the world," said Pepe Martinez, his voice rising in a soft, high wolf-wail.

Only the rim of the Wanderer showed above the General Grant buildings, which were mounting swiftly up the sky as the weed-brothers approached them.

"Come on!" Arab said suddenly, catching hold of the upper arms of Pepe and High and digging his fingers in. "World gonna end, I gettin' off. Get away from all these owly-eyed deaders waitin' for the tromp and the trump. One planet go smash, we take another. Come on, before she get away!—We catch her at the river and climb aboard!"

The three began to run.

Paul and Margo and their new friends were sitting on the sand fifty feet in front of the dark gate when the second quake jolted the beach. It did nothing beyond rocking them, and there was nothing they could do about it, so they just gasped and rocked there. The soldier ran out of the tower with his submachine gun, stopped, and after a minute backed inside again. He did not answer when Doc called cheerily: "Hey, wasn't that a sockdolager!"

Five minutes later Ann was saying: "Mommy, I'm really getting hungry now."

"So am I," said young Harry McHeath.

The Little Man, diligently soothing a very upset Ragnarok, said: "Now, that's a funny thing. We were going to serve coffee and sandwiches after the eclipse. The coffee was in four big thermos jugs—I know, because I brought it. It's all still down at the beach."

Wanda sat up on her cot, despite the thin woman's protests.

"What's all that red glow down the coast?" she demanded crossly.

Hunter started to tell her, not without a touch of sarcasm, that it was merely the light of the new planet, when he saw that there really was another light-source—an ugly red furnace-flaring which the other light had masked.

"Could be brush fires," Wojtowicz suggested somberly.

The thin woman said: "Oh dear, that would have to happen now. As if we didn't have enough trouble."

Hunter pressed his lips together. He refused to say: "Or it could be Los Angeles burning."

The Little Man recalled their attention to the heavens, where the purple-and-yellow intruder now hid the moon completely. He said, "We ought to have a name for the new planet. You know, it's funny, one minute it's the most important thing in creation to me, but the next minute it's just a patch of sky I can cover with my outstretched hand."

"What's the word 'planet' really mean, Mr. Brecht?" Ann asked.

" 'Wanderer,' dear," Rama Joan told her.

The Ramrod thought:
Ispan is known to man by a thousand names, yet is still Ispan.

Harry McHeath, who'd just discovered Norse mythology and the Eddas, thought:
Moon-Eater would be a good name—but too menacing for most people today.

Margo thought:
They could call it Don,
and she bit her lip and hugged Miaow so that the cat protested, and tears lumped hotly under her lower eyelids.

"Wanderer is the right name for it," the little Man said.

The yellow marking that was the Broken Egg to the Ramrod and the Needle-Eye to Ann now touched the lefthand rim of the Wanderer as they viewed it. The yellow polar patches remained and a new central yellow spot was crawling into view on the righthand rim. In all, four yellow rim-spots: north, south, east and west.

The Little Man got out his notebook and began to sketch it.

THREE HOURS

"The purple makes a big
X,"
Wojtowicz said.

"The tilted cross," the Ramrod said, speaking aloud at last "The notched disk. The circle split in four."

"It's a mandala," said Rama Joan.

"Oh yeah," Wojtowicz said. "Professor, you was telling us about those," he addressed himself to Hunter. "Symbols of psychic something-or-other."

"Psychic unity," the bearded man said.

"Psychic unity," Wojtowicz repeated. "That's good," he said matter-of-factly. "We're going to need it."

"For these we are grateful," Rama Joan murmured.

Two big yellow eyes peered over the hump of the big gully in Vandenberg Two.

There was a growling roar. Then the jeep was careening down toward the gate, its headlights swinging wildly over brush and rutted dry earth.

"Everybody on your feet," Paul said. "Now we'll get some action."

Don Merriam could see a thick-waisted, asymmetric hourglass of stars in the spacescreen of the Baba Yaga. Some of the stars were slightly blurred by the dust-blasting the screen had suffered during his trip through the center of the moon.

The black bulk shouldering into the hourglass from port was the moon, now totally eclipsed by the vast, newly appeared body.

The Wanderer, shouldering into the starry hourglass from starboard, was not entirely black—Don had in view seven pale green glow spots, each looking about 300

miles across, the farther ones being ellipses, the nearest, almost circular. They were featureless, though at times there was the suggestion of a phosphorescent pit or funnel.

Of what they signified, Don had no more idea than if they had been pale green spots on the black underbelly of a spider.

In company with the moon, the Baba Yaga was orbiting the Wanderer, but slowly gaining on Luna because the little ship, nearer the Wanderer, had the faster orbit.

He warmed the radar. The return signal from the moon showed a surface more irregular than craters and mountains alone could account for, and even in five minutes the patterns had greatly changed: the tidal shattering of Luna was continuing.

The surprisingly strong signal from the intruding planet showed a spherical, matte surface with no indication at all of the greenish glow spots—as if the Wanderer were smooth as an ivory ball.

Intruding planet!—impossible, but there it was. At the top of his mind Don tried to recall the scraps of speculation he'd read and heard about hyperspace: the notion that a body might be able to travel from
there
to
here
without traversing the known continuum between, perhaps by blasting or slipping into some higher-dimensioned continuum of which our universe is only a surface. But where in all the immensity of stars and galaxies might the
there
of this intruding planet be? Why should the
there
even be anywhere in our universe? A higher-dimensioned continuum would have an infinity of three-dimensional surfaces, each one a cosmos.