The Wanderer (49 page)

Margo said loudly: "Professor Opperly, we've been hunting you for two days. I have here a gun that dropped from a saucer. It puts momentum in things. We thought you should be entrusted with it. Unfortunately we've used up all its charge, getting here."

He glanced quickly into her face, then down at the gray pistol she had taken from her jacket. His lips thinned in a small, quite nasty smile.

"It looks to me a great deal more like something from a dime store toy counter," he told her briskly. Then, turning again to the man beside him: "How about the radio sky, Denison? Is it clearing, or—"

Margo had quickly turned the arrow on top of the gun away from the muzzle, then pointed it across the table and pressed the trigger button. Both Opperly and the young man in the sweatshirt started to grab her, then stopped. Some papers drifted toward the gun and then along with them three paper clips and a metal pencil that had been holding some of the papers down. For a second they all clung to the gun's muzzle, then dropped off.

"It must be electrostatic," the young man in the sweatshirt said curiously, watching the papers as they fluttered down.

"It works on metal objects, too," the one addressed as Denison pointed out, seeing the paper clips as they fell. "Induction?"

"It pulled my hand! I distinctly felt that," Opperly himself said, spreading the fingers of the hand he had reached across the table toward the gun. He looked at Margo again.

"Did you say it actually fell from a saucer?"

She smiled as she handed it to him.

Hunter said: "We also bring you a message from Lieutenant Donald Merriam of the Space Force. He'll be landing here—"

Opperly had turned to someone else beside him. "Wasn't there a Merriam among those lost at Moonbase?"

"He wasn't lost" Margo cut in. "He got away in one of the moon ships. He was on the new planet. He'll be trying to land here—maybe he's already coming in."

"And he had a special message for you, Professor Opperly," Hunter added. "The new planet has Earth-radius linear accelerators and an Earth-circumference cyclotron."

Opperly grinned.."We just had a demonstration of that, didn't we?"

None of them noticed a star wink belatedly on very close to Mars. An escaping laser beam had struck Deimos, the tiny outer moon of Mars, heating it white hot—to the considerable excitement of Tigran Biryuzov and his comrades.

Opperly put down the gray gun and moved around the desk. "Come with me, please," he told Margo and Hunter. "We should alert the landing field to this possibility."

"Wait a minute," Margo said. "Are you just going to leave the momentum pistol lying there?"

"Oh," Opperly said apologetically. He reached for it and handed it to Margo. "You'd better look after it for me."

Richard Hillary and Vera Carlisle tramped along a little road that wended south near the crests of the Malvern Hills. Once more there were other trampers with them, dotting the little road.

They had discovered that not even sex and companionship can still the lemming urge, at least by day. Richard was thinking once more of the Black Mountains. It might be possible to reach them without leaving high ground.

The morning sun was hidden by a gray overcast that had come in from the west just as the Wanderer had been setting at a quarter to its
D
face. There had been a weird phenomenon then. Just as the Wanderer had vanished in the cloud curtain, it had seemed to be reborn, all silver gray and bigger than itself, an hour above its vanishing spot. They had speculated as to whether this was a mirage of the Wanderer or a second strange planet. Then the mirage or the strange planet had vanished in the overcast.

Vera stopped and turned on her transistor wireless. Richard stopped beside her with a sigh of resignation. Two nearby walkers had stopped too, out of curiosity.

Vera slowly turned the dial. There was no static. She turned up the volume full and turned the dial again. Still only silence.

"Maybe it's broken, Miss," one of the people suggested.

"You've worn it out," Richard told her unsympathetically. "And a good thing."

Then the voice came, tiny and whistling at first, but then, as she tuned it, clear and loud in the gray-roofed silence of the hills:

"Repeat. A report, cabled from Toronto and confirmed by Buenos Aires and New Zealand, definitely states that the two strange planets have vanished as they came. This does not mean an immediate end to tidal reverberations, but…"

They went on listening. From up and down the road people were gathering, gathering…

Bagong Bung decided the waves had gone down enough to make it safe, so he took the stout cloth sack out from under him, where he'd been sitting on it for safety, along with the lashed-down little bags of coin from the "Sumatra Queen," and he opened it so that he and Cobber-Hume could peer in.

The wild waters, washing again and again across the orange life raft, had carried away all the mud and scoured clean all the tiny objects in the sack. Along with bits of coral and pebble and shell, there was the dark glow of old gold and the small, dark red flames of three—no, four!—rubies.

Wolf Loner stopped feeding soup to the Italian girl, because she had turned away to look at the rim of the rising sun overtopping the gray Atlantic. "
Il sole,"
she whispered.

She touched the wood of the "Endurance."
"Una nave."

She put her hand against the wrist of the hand holding the spoon and looked up into his face.
"Noi siamo qui."

"Yes, we're here," he said.

Captain Sithwise looked down from the bridge of the "Prince Charles" at the leagues of mud-filmed green jungle beginning to steam in the low red sunlight.

The purser said: "Extrapolating from the casualties in view, sir, we have eight hundred broken limbs and four hundred fractured skulls to deal with."

The executive officer said: "Brazil has for herself the core of an atomic jungle city. I fancy that's the way it might turn out in the end, sir, though it should be quite a case in the international courts!"

Captain Sithwise nodded, but continued to study the strange green sea in which his ship had come to harbor.

Barbara Katz looked at the blue waters around the "Albatross." Hardly one wave in ten was even white-crested. The sun was rising over a coast of broken and bedraggled palms barely two miles away. Hester sat in the hatchway, holding the baby.

"Benjy," Barbara said, "There's a spare room below, and the blankets, at any rate, if there isn't canvas. Do you think you could rig up a little mast and sail and—"

"Yes, Miss Barbara, I'm sure I could," he told her. He stretched and yawned widely, pushing his chest at the sun. "But this time I'm going to take a rest first"

Sally Harris said to Jake Lesher: "Oh, Christ, now the excitement's all over."

"Jesus, Sal, don't you ever want to sleep?" Jake protested.

"Who could sleep now?" she demanded. "Let's start signaling people. Or better yet, now we got all the material, let's really work on the play!"

Pierre Rambouillet-Lacepede regretfully pushed aside his three-body calculations, which could never now be fully verified, and gave ear to Francois Michaud.

The younger astronomer said excitedly: "We have pinned it down beyond the possibility of doubt! The sidereal day has been lengthened by three seconds a year! The intrusive planets have had a measurable effect upon the earth!"

Margo and Hunter stood in the dark arm in arm on the edge of the landing field toward the north end of the plateau of Vandenberg Two.

"Are you bothered about meeting Don and Paul?" he whispered to her. "I shouldn't ask that, of course, when we're all keyed up over whether they'll even make it."

"No," she told him, putting her other hand over his. "I'll just be glad to greet them.

I've got you."

Yes, she has,
he reflected, not altogether happily. And now he had to fit his life to his conquest. Could he give up Wilma and the boys? Not altogether, he was sure.

Then something else occurred to him.

"And now you've got Morton Opperly," he whispered.

Margo grinned, then asked: "Just what do you mean by that, Ross?"

"Nothing in particular, I think," he told her.

Around them were gathered the rest of the saucer students. The truck and the Corvette stood just behind them.

To one side were Opperly and a few members of his section. Radio contact with the Baba Yaga had been reported from the tower a few moments ago.

Over their heads the old familiar stars of the northern sky spread between the two constellations of Scorpio and the Dipper, but high in the west there lay among them a spindle-shaped scattering of new stars, some faint, some brighter than Sirius—the glittering remnants of Luna.

"It's going to be funny, not having a moon any more," Hixon said.

"A hundred gods sponged out of mythology at one sweep," Rama Joan remarked.

"I'm more sorry to lose the Wanderer," Ann piped up. "Oh, I hope they got away."

"More than the moon gods are gone," the Ramrod said gloomily.

"Never mind, Charlie," Wanda told him. "You've seen great things come to pass. All your predictions—"

"All my dreams," he corrected her. He frowned, but pressed her hand.

Hunter said: "We'll get two gods back for every one we lost. That's my prediction."

Pop said grumpily: "I don't give a damn about the moon going. She never did a thing for me."

"She never even softened up one pretty girl, Pop?" Margo asked him.

McHeath said, as if he'd just worked it out: "No moon—no tides."

"Yes, there'll still be solar tides," the Little Man corrected. "Small ones, of course, like they have at Tahiti."

"I wonder what'll happen to what's left of the moon?" Margo asked, looking toward the west "Will it just keep going in a ring?"

Opperly heard that and said in explanation: "No, now that its gravitational center has gone with the Wanderer, the fragments will spread out at the velocity they had in orbit-five miles a second, about. Some of them will strike Earth's atmosphere in approximately ten hours. There'll be a meteor shower, but not too destructive, I imagine.

The ring lay in a plane passing above our North Pole. Most of the fragments should miss us. Many of them will take up long, elliptical orbits around Earth."

"Gee, " Wojtowicz remarked rather cheerily, "it's like having Doc back to explain things."

"Who's Doc?" Opperly asked.

The group was silent for a moment Then Rama Joan said: "Oh…a man."

At that moment a yellow flare shone in the zenith, became a lemon flame pointing and dropping earthward. There was a softly mounting roar, such as comes from a fireplace when all the wood catches. The Baba Yaga touched down, its yellow jets dying, to a perfect landing.

2007.08.16/MNQ

121,000 words