The Wanderer (9 page)

Tonight the inhabitants of Pershing Square spilled into Olive Street at the corner of Fifth, where a bronze statue of Beethoven broodingly faces the Biltmore Hotel, Bunker Hill, and the Baptist Auditorium which serves as one of the city's chief theaters. Their lifted faces were bright with Wanderer-light as they silently stared south at the monstrous sign in the heavens, but Beethoven's visage remained introspectively in the shadow of its great brow and hair-mop as he peered down at his half-buttoned vest whitened with pigeon droppings.

There was a momentary intensification of the awed silence, then a faint distant roaring. A woman screamed, and the watchers dropped their gaze. For a long moment it looked to them as if black ocean were coming toward them up Olive in great waves crested with yellow and violet foam—great black waves that had traveled all the twenty miles north from San Pedro along the Harbor and Long Beach Freeways.

Then they saw that the waves were not black water but cold black asphalt, that the street itself was surging as great earthquake shocks traveled north along it. In the next instant the roaring became that of a hundred jets, and the asphalt waves tossed the watchers and broke up the walls of the buildings around them in a stone and concrete surf.

For a second an infinitely sinister violet light flashed from the deep eyesockets of the giant metal Beethoven, as he slowly toppled over backwards.

The saucer students had trouble enough coping with the results of the fringe reverberation of the big Los Angeles-Long Beach quake. After the thin woman and two others had been half dug, half pulled out of their light entombment in the edge of the landfall, a hurried count showed three others still missing. There followed a frantic ten minutes of digging, mostly with two bright-bladed shovels that the Little Man had produced from the back of his station wagon, which was solidly buried only as far as the rear wheels and its top dented in only about a foot Then someone remembered the red sedan that had left ahead of the rest; and someone else, that it had been the one in which the three missing people had arrived.

While the diggers caught their breath, Paul, whose convertible was hopelessly buried, explained his connection with the Moon Project and his intention of making with Margo for the beach gate of Vandenberg Two, and he offered to take anyone along with him who wanted to come and to vouch for them to the guards—their obvious distress in any case ensuring admission.

Doc enthusiastically endorsed this suggestion, but it was opposed by a thick-armed man wearing a leather windbreaker and named Rivis, who had a very low opinion of all military forces and the degree of helpfulness to be expected of them—and whose car had only its radiator and front wheels dirt-encumbered. Rivis, who also had four cute kids, a swell little wife, and an hysterical mother-in-law—all of them in Santa Barbara—was for digging out and getting home.

Rivis was seconded by the owners of the microbus and the white pickup truck, both only lightly buried vehicles. The truck's people, a trimly handsome couple named Hixon wearing matching pale gray slacks and sweaters, were particularly insistent on getting out quickly.

There followed a progressively more embittered argument involving such points as: Would the Pacific Coast Highway be traffic-jammed and/or quake-blocked? Was Paul what he claimed? Would the motors of the buried cars start when dug out? (Rivis proved something by starting his, though his car radio got only the howlingest static.) Was Wanda's heart attack genuine? Finally, weren't the panelists and their dubious new friends a bunch of oyster-brained intellectuals scared of getting a few blisters on their hands?

In the end, half the saucer students, most of them with cars rather lightly buried, stuck with Rivis and the Hixons and, in a burst of hard feelings, even refused to promise to care for the fat woman who had had the heart attack until Paul could send a balloon-tired sand jeep from Vandenberg Two to pick her up.

The other half set off for the beach gate.

Don Guillermo Walker knew the Wanderer had to be something like a planet, for it and its glaring image in black Lake Nicaragua below had followed him sixty miles southeast now without shifting position—except that it was nearer the western horizon and maybe nearer the moon. And now there was showing on the thing what looked like a golden cock crowing to wake Simon Bolivar.
I once played in
Le Coq d'Or,
didn't I?
the lonely bomb-raider asked himself.
No, it's an opera, or a ballet.

The general glare had turned pinkish here and there along the western horizon; he didn't know why. Skirting the long ridgy island of Ometepe, he saw more lights at Alta Gracia than you'd ever expect after midnight. Everybody up and gawking at it and going ape or diving into churches, he supposed.

Suddenly red glare and rocks erupted from beyond the town and for an instant he thought he'd dropped a bomb he didn't know about. Then he realized it had to be one of Ometepe's volcanoes letting go. He banked east—get away, get away from the blast!

Those pink glares—why, the whole Pacific Coast must be in eruption, from the Gulf of Fonseca to the Gulf of Nicoya.

Don Merriam, a battered and grievously weak-legged beetle, pushed himself up on his arms beside the Hut's proud magnesium flagpole and saw, where the Hut should be, a raw-walled chasm twenty feet across with little waterfalls of dust trickling down its farther lip.

One of the ships was gone with the Hut, one was lying on its side across the chasm with two of its three shock-absorbing legs sticking up like the legs of a dead chicken, while he'd almost crawled under the third Baba Yaga without seeing it.

They called the little moon-type rocket ships "Baba Yagas" because—Dufresne had first thought of it—they suggested the witch's hut on legs that figures in a couple of popular bits of classical Russian music and that, in the underlying folklore, runs about by night on those legs. It was rumored that the Soviet moonmen called their ships

"Jeeps."

But now the walking-hut comparison was getting altogether too close, for the continuing vertical moonquake, which Don hardly noticed any more, was making the last Baba Yaga step about on its plate-shod legs as it rocked this way and that. One of the shoes was only a yard from the chasm and as Don watched, it tramped six inches closer.

Don carefully pushed himself into a wide-based crouch. He told himself Dufresne might have taken off in the missing rocket, though he'd seen no jet flare. And Yo might be alive or dead in the ship across the chasm. Gompert…

The Baba Yaga took another step toward the gulf. Don took a couple of quick ones himself across the jolting surface and then straightened and grabbed the last rung of the ladder that hung down from the body of the ship midway between the three legs.

He chinned himself and climbed toward the hatch, set ominously between the five trumpetlike tubes of the jet. The Baba Yaga rocked. Don told himself that his weight lowered its center of gravity a little, making its steps a little shorter.

Sally Harris and Jake Lesher were on one of the subway trains to be halted and emptied at 42nd Street. The traffic jams had been hopeless and Jake's car was parked in Flatbush.

Police helped the guards clear the subway cars and hurry the passengers topside.

"Buy why, but why?" Jake was demanding. "It looks bad."

"No, good," Sally told him. "Bombs, and they'd be herding us
down.
Besides, here we're near Hugo's penthouse. This is exciting, Jake!"

Emerging, they found Times Square more packed than they'd ever known it to be at three a.m.

Looking west on 42nd Street, they could see the Wanderer still quite high in the sky, with the moon so close they almost touched. On the south side of the street the shadow edge made a swath of motionless yellow people and on their side a swath of purple ones. The electric ads were all going full blast, but paled way down by the supermoon-light.

The Square was quieter than they'd ever known, too, except that just now a man emerged from behind them crying: "Extra! Read all about it! Read all about the new planet!"

Jake traded two bits for a
Daily Orbit.
Its tabloid front page was a pic of the Wanderer in wet, acrid red and yellow inks and six lines of information anyone could have got by looking at the sky and his watch. The headline was:

STRANGE ORB BAFFLES MAN.

"Doesn't baffle me," Sally said in the highest spirits and then, grinning at Jake, "I created it. I put it up there."

"Don't be blasphemous, young woman," a lantern-jawed man admonished her sourly.

"Ha, you think I didn't do it, huh?" she demanded. "I'll show you!" She cleared a place around her with her elbows and tossed Jake her jacket. Then, stabbing a finger successively at Lantern Jaw and at the Wanderer, and next snapping her fingers as she swayed provocatively, she began to sing, in an electrifying contralto and a melody borrowed half-and-half from "Green Door" and "Strange Fruit":

Strange orb!…in the western sky…

Strange light!…streaming from on high…

Don Merriam had ignited the Baba Yaga's jet before he'd strapped down and when the aniline and nitric pumps had barely started to spin. The reason was simple enough: he'd felt the jouncing ship step off the edge.

He'd done everything he could to cut time. He'd blown the ship, letting its air escape in a great puff to clear a direct entry for himself, rather than waiting for the airlock between the fuel and oxidizer tanks to empty and fill. He'd barely dogged the hatches behind him and made only the most perfunctory swipe at the oxygen release lever although he knew his suit oxy was running out—and he'd been almost too late at that.

The cold jet fired strongly, however. Lemon-hot molecules streamed out of the Baba Yaga's tail at almost two miles a second, and after a sticky moment she lifted, but sideways rather than up—like an old airplane taking off.

Perhaps Don's mistake was in trying to correct at all—his present vector would likely have got him into some sort of orbit, perhaps quite efficiently. But he was flying by eye and he didn't like the way white moon crossed by cracks kept bulking so large in the spacescreen, and he knew that the sooner you corrected the less power it took, and he wasn't sure how much fuel and oxidizer he had—in fact, he still wasn't quite sure which of the three sister ships he was in—and, besides all that, he was probably already quite giddy and illogical from oxygen-lack.

So, careless of the gravity and a half dragging at him, he reached out sideways—it was quite a reach: normally it would have been a robot's or copilot's job—and slapped the keys to fire three solid-fuel rockets on the side of the ship toward the moon.

The sudden extra, jolt they gave the Baba Yaga was enough to unseat him.

Inexorably, but with agonizing slowness, the stick slipped out of his hand and he fell heavily—a lot more heavily than he would have on the moon—to the floor a dozen feet below, and his helmet smashed against the back of his head, knocking him out.

Ten seconds later, the aniline-nitric jet died, as was the automatic way in these ships when you let go the stick. The solid-fuel rockets had burnt out a fractional second earlier. The correction had been calculated with remarkable accuracy, under the circumstances. The Baba Yaga was mounting almost straight up from Luna with nearly enough kinetic energy to kick free. But, now, Luna's mild gravity was slowing the ship second by second, although the ship was still rising swiftly in free fall and would continue to do so for some time.

Don's helmet lay across the lightly-dogged hatch. A tiny flat jet of white vapor about the size and shape of a calling card was escaping through a fine slit in the view window.

Frost formed along the crack.

Barbara Katz said to Knolls Kettering III: "Less than a minute now until contact, Dad."

She meant by "contact" the moment the Wanderer would overlap the moon, or the moon the Wanderer, or—

"Excuse me, suh," came a soft deep voice from behind them, "but what's going to happen when they hit?"

Barbara turned. Some light was on at the back of the big house now. It silhouetted a big man in a chauffeur's uniform and two women grouped tightly together. They must have come out very quietly.

From beside her Mr. Kettering said with thin exasperation: "I told you people to go to bed hours ago. You know I don't want you fussing over me."

"Excuse me, suh," the voice persisted, "but everybody's up and outside watching it.

Everybody in Palm Beach. Please, suh, what's going to happen when it hit the moon?"

Barbara wanted to speak up and tell the chauffeur and maids many things: that it was the moon that was moving toward the Wanderer, because the telescope's electrically-driven mounting had been set to track the moon across the sky and the moon was now running five diameters ahead of its normal course; that they still didn't know the distance of the Wanderer—for one thing, its surface showed no sharp details except its rim, just a velvety yellow or maroon under all magnifications; that bodies in the heavens mostly didn't hit but went into orbit around each other.

But she knew that men—even millionaires, presumably—like to do the scientific talking; and, besides that, she disliked having to fool around with Palm Beach interracial etiquette.

Then she looked up and saw that the problem had solved itself.

"They're not hitting," she said. "The moon is passing in front of the Wanderer." She added impulsively: "Oh, Dad, I didn't believe it was really out there until now."

There were little gasps from the women.

"The Wanderer?" the chauffeur asked softly.

Knolls Kettering III took over. He said, a bit primly: "The Wanderer is the name Miss Katz and I have selected for the strange planet. Now please go to bed."

Arab Jones called across the roof to Pepe Martinez and High Bundy, who were waltzing together free-style: "Hey, man, look, they mating now! Old Moon going into her like a sperm into a purple egg."