The Wanderer (3 page)

"As if the light had been twisted this side of Venus?"

"Yes, between Venus and Earth. Of course it could have been atmosphere-waver this time, but the boys didn't think so."

Then Paul grew silent.

"Well?" Margo prodded him. "You said there were four photos."

"I saw the fourth today," he told her guardedly. "Taken last night. Still larger areas of twist. This time the edge of the moon was in it. The moon's image hadn't wavered."

"Paul! That must have been what the man who was driving saw. The same night."

"I don't think so," he told her. "You can hardly see any stars near the moon with the naked eye. Besides, these reports by laymen just don't mean anything."

"Well," she countered, "it certainly
does
sound as if something were creeping up on the moon. First Pluto, then Jupiter, then Venus, getting closer each time."

The road curved south and the darkly bronzed moon came swinging out over the Pacific as it rode along with them.

"Now, wait a minute, Margo," Paul protested, lifting his left hand for a moment from the wheel. "I got the same idea myself, so I asked Van Bruster about it He says it's completely unlikely that one single field, traveling through space, was responsible for the four twists. He thinks there were four different twist fields involved, not connected in any way—so there can't be any question of something creeping up on the moon.

What's more, he says he's not too surprised at the photos. He says astronomers have known the theoretical possibility of such fields for years, and that evidence for them is beginning to show up now, not by chance, but because of the electronically amplified

'scopes and superfast photographic emulsions that have just gone into use this year. The twists show up in star snapshots where they wouldn't in long exposures."

"What did Morton Opperly think of the photos?" Margo asked.

"He didn't…No, wait, he was the one who insisted on plotting the course of the twist fields from Pluto to the moon. Say, we just passed Monica Mountainway! That's the fancy new road across the mountains to Vandenberg Three where Opperly is right now."

"Was the Pluto-moon course a straight one?" Margo asked, refusing to be deflected.

"No, the darndest zig-zag imaginable."

"But did Opperly say anything?" Margo insisted.

Paul hesitated, then said, "Oh, he chuckled, and said something like, 'Well, if Earth or Moon is their target, they're getting closer with each shot.' "

"You see?" Margo said with satisfaction. "You see? Whatever it is, it's aiming at planets!"

Barbara Katz, self-styled Girl Adventurer and long-time science-fiction fan, faded back across the lawn, away from the street-globes and the Palm Beach policeman's flashlight, and slipped behind the thick jagged bole of a cabbage palmetto before the cold bright beam swung her way. She thanked Mentor, her science-fiction god, that the long-hoarded, thirty-inch nylon foot-gloves she was wearing below her black playsuit were black, too—one of the popular pastel shades would have shown up even without the flash. The bag dangling from her shoulder was a black one, of the Black Ball Jetline.

She didn't worry about her face and arms, they were dark enough to melt with the night—and get her mistaken for colored by day. Barbara was willing to do her bit for integration, but just the same she sometimes resented it that she tanned so dark so fast.

Another burden for Jews to bear bravely, her father might have told her, though her father wouldn't have approved of stouthearted girls hunting millionaires in their home lair in Florida, which they shared with the alligators. Or of such girls carrying bikinis in their swiped shoulder bags, either.

The policeman's flash was prodding the shrubs across the street now, so she continued across the lawn springy as foam rubber. She decided that this was certainly the house from beside which she'd seen a lens flashing while she'd sneaked her swim at sunset.

It got very dark around her as she advanced. As she rounded another palmetto, she heard the whisper of a tiny electric motor, and she almost overran a white suit that was seated at the eyepiece of a big white telescope supported on a white-legged tripod and directed at the western sky.

The suit got up with a kind of lurch that showed it was helped by a cane, and a voice quavered from atop it "Who's that?"

"Good evening," Barbara Katz responded in her warmest, politest voice. "I believe you know me—I'm the girl who was changing into the black-and-yellow striped bikini.

May I watch the eclipse with you?"

Paul Hagbolt looked at the heights ahead, where the Pacific Coast Highway swung inland and began to climb. Beyond this approaching bend, between the road and the sea, loomed the three-hundred-foot plateau on which stood Vandenberg Two, home of the Moon Project and the U.S. Space Force's newest base and rocket launching and landing area. Gleamingly wire-fenced around its foot and showing only a few dark red lights along its crest which stretched off endlessly, the space base towered mysteriously between the diverging highway and ocean—an ominous baronial stronghold of the future.

The highway hummed more hollowly as the convertible crossed a flat concrete bridge over a wash and Margo Gelhorn sat up sharply beside him. Miaow flinched. The girl's gaze swung back past Paul. "Hey, wait a minute."

"What is it?" Paul asked, not slowing down. The highway had begun its climb.

"I'd almost swear," Margo said, staring back down the road, "that I saw a sign with the words 'Flying Saucer' on it."

"Flying Saucer-Burgers?" Paul suggested. "Same shape, you know."

"No, there wasn't a cafe or anything like that. Just one little white sign. Right before the wash. I want to go back and have a look at it"

"But we're almost to V-2," Paul objected. "Don't you want to see the moon through a

'scope while the eclipse is still on? You'll be able to see Plato, only we'll have to put up the top and leave Miaow locked in the car. You can't take pets into Vandenberg."

"No, I don't," Margo said. "I'm sick of being given the slick Project treatment. What's more, I abominate any organization that denies cats are people!"

"All right, all right," Paul chuckled.

"So let's turn back right now. We'll be able to see the moon better facing that way."

Paul did his best to drive past the little white sign, but Margo brought him up short.

"There! Where the green lantern is! Stop there!" As the car bumped on the uneven shoulder, Miaow sat up and stretched and then looked around with no great interest There was a dirt road going down beside the beach, along the foot of the headland the highway had swung inland to climb—a lesser bump before the big plateau of Vandenberg Two.

On one side of the dirt road there hung a flickering kerosene lantern with green glass around the flame. To the other side, standing out sharply in the convertible's headlights, was a rather small white sign. The black lettering on it, not at all crudely drawn, read:
THIS WAY TO THE FLYING SAUCER SYMPOSIUM
.

"Only in Southern California," Paul said, shaking his head.

Margo said, "Let's drive in and see what's going on."

"Not on your life!" Paul assured her loudly. "If you cant stand Vandenberg, I can't stand saucer maniacs."

"But they don't sound like maniacs, Paul," Margo said. "The whole thing has tone.

Take that lettering—it's pure Baskerville."

Snatching up Miaow, she clambered out of the car for a closer look.

"Besides, we don't know if the meeting's tonight," he called after her. "It was probably earlier today, or even last week. Who knows?" He stood up too. "I don't see any lights or signs of life."

"The green lantern proves it must be tonight," Margo called back from where she stood by the sign. "Let's go, Paul."

"The green lantern probably has nothing to do with the sign."

Margo turned toward him, holding up a black finger in the headlight's glare.

"The paint's still wet," she said.

The moon burrowed deeper into the earth's shadow, nearing that central point where the three bodies would be lined up. As always the moon—and much less strongly in its effects, the sun—plucked at the planet between them with invisible gravitational fingers, straining earth's rock crust and steel-strong inner parts, lightly brushing the triggers of immense or tiny earthquakes, and setting the ponderous film of Earth's oceans and seas, gulfs and channels, straits and sounds, lakes and bays resonating in the slow and various music of the tides, whose single vibrations are a little longer than a night or day.

On the other side of the earth from Southern California, swart Bagong Bung, sweat dropping from under his splotched yellow turban onto his bare shoulders and chest, called to his naked Australian mate to cut the engine of the "Machan Lumpur." If they didn't lose any time, they'd be getting to the little inlet south of Do-Son before the ten-foot tide could lift them over the bar, and here in the Gulf of Tonkin the demon-controlled high tide came only once every twenty-four hours. A patrolling helicopter might take note if they hung about outside the inlet before slipping in to deliver the arms and drugs to the North Vietnam anticommunist underground!—afterwards proceeding to Hanoi to deliver the main cargo (also arms and drugs) to the Communists.

As the bow-ripples died, the 200-mile-wide gulf around the tiny rusty steamer glowed like a lake of molten brass. Bagong Bung, squinting about at the shimmering horizon, hand resting on the brass spyglass thrust in his belt, had no thought for the eclipse which noon and the globe hid from him. For that matter, the little Malay, his tired ship (mortgaged to Chinese bankers), and the lukewarm sea were all standing on their heads in relation to the Americas, and the sun baking his turban would have been toasting the soles of a billion Occidental feet, could it have shone through the planet between.

Bagong hung was dreaming of the host of wrecked ships' under the shallow waters around him and south and east away, and of the treasure he would win from them when he had accumulated enough money from this accursed smuggling to pay for the equipment and the divers he'd need.

Don Guillermo Walker told himself that the cluster of feeble lights he'd just droned past must be Metapa. But—his celestial navigation being as much boast as his European Shakespearean career—what if they were Zapata or La Libertad? Better, perhaps: in widely missing his target he'd miss the torture. Sweat itched on his chin and cheeks. He should have shaved his beard, he told himself. His captors would say, jiggling the bull prod in the steaming cell, that the beard proved he was a Castro-inspired Communist and his cards of the John Birch Society forgeries or worse. Burn
la barba
off his face with
la
electricidad!

"Damn you for getting me into this, you whore in black underwear, you nigger-Indian bitch!" Don Guillermo yelled at the sooty orange moon.

The "Prince Charles" and the dory "Endurance" went their diverging ways across the dark Atlantic. Most of the nylon-shod ones had gone to their rendezvous with sleep or each other, but Captain Sithwise was taking a turn on the bridge. He felt strangely uneasy. It was having those Brazilian insurgents aboard, he told himself: this new lot of empire-snatchers did such unaccountably crazy things—as if they lived on ether.

Wolf Loner rocked in the arms of the sea, cushioned by a mile of salt water. The cloudbank under whose eastern verge the "Endurance" had entered was a vast one, trailing veils of fog and stretching to Edmonton and the Great Slave Lake, and from Boston north to Hudson Strait.

Sally Harris granted Jake Lesher another burst of hand-clutching at a dark turn in the House of Horror, but, "Hey, don't ruck up my skirt—use the auxiliary hip placket," she admonished.

"Are your pants magnetically hung, too?" Jake demanded.

"No, just Goodyear, but there's a vanishing gadget. Easy there—and for God's sake don't tell me they're like the big round loaves of good homemade bread Mama Lesher used to bake. That's enough now, or the Rocket'll close down before we've seen the eclipse."

"Sal, you were never astronomical like this before and we don't need that kind of roller-ride. You got the key to Hasseltine's place, don't you, and he's away, isn't he?—and besides, you've never taken me there. If that skyscraper isn't high enough for you—"

The roller coaster's my skyscraper tonight," she told him. That's enough, I said!"

She twisted away from him and ran off, past an eight-foot-tall gray Saturn-man who reared out of a wall, gripping a yard-long raygun and peppering her with sizzling blue light.

Asa Holcomb, puffing a bit, surmounted the top of the little mesa west of Arizona's Superstition Mountains. Just at that moment the wall of his aorta tore a little, and blood began to seep into his chest There was no pain, but he felt a weakness and sensed a strangeness, and he quietly lay down on the flat rock, which still had a little heat in it from the day of sun.

He was neither particularly startled nor very afraid. Either the weakness would pass, or it would not. He'd known this little climb to a good spot to watch the eclipse was a dangerous thing. After all, his mother had warned him against climbing by himself in the rocks, seventy years ago. Doubly dangerous, with an aorta paper-thin. But it was always worth everything to get away by himself, climb a bit, and study the heavens.

His eyes had been resting, a little wistfully, on the lights of Mesa, but now he lifted them. This was about the fiftieth time he had seen Luna shrouded, but tonight she seemed more beautiful in her bronze phase than ever before, more like the pomegranate Proserpine plucked in the Garden of the Dead. His weakness wasn't passing.

The convertible carrying Paul Hagbolt and Margo Gelhorn and her cat softly jounced along the rutted trail, raw cliff again to the right, beach sand to the left, both now only a yard or so off. Away from the big highway, the night pressed in. The three wayfarers shared more fully the lonely obscurity of the eclipsed moon climbing the starry sky.