The Wanderer

Chapter Eleven

Doc puffed out rapidly: “I don’t care how near we are to the gate, I got to rest.” He lowered his corner of the cot to the sand and knelt there, arm on knee and with bald head bent, panting.

“Your evil life catching up with you,” Hunter jeered lightly, then muttered to Margo: “We better go easy on the old goat. He normally gets about as much exercise as a Thuringer sausage.”

“I can take over again,” eagerly volunteered the one who had had Doc’s corner earlier — a thin-faced high school student who had ridden to the symposium from Oxnard with Wojtowicz.

“Better we all have a breather, Harry,” the latter said. “Professor—” He addressed himself to Hunter. “It looks to me the moon’s slowed down again. Like back to normal.”

All of them except the fat woman studied the situation in the western sky. Even Doc raised his head while continuing to gasp. Unquestionably the black isthmus between the Wanderer and the moon hadn’t widened during the last short march.

“I think the moon’s getting smaller,*’ Ann said.

“So do I,” the Little Man agreed. He squatted on his hams with an arm around Ragnarok and soothingly kneaded the huge dog’s black-and-brown throat while he squinted upward. “And — I know this is utterly fantastic — but it looks to me as if the moon were becoming oblate, flattening a little from top to bottom, widening from side to side. Maybe it’s just eyestrain, but I’ll swear the moon’s becoming egg-shaped, with one end of the egg pointing at the new planet.”

“Yes,” Ann told him shrilly. “And now I can see…oh, just the teensiest line going from the top of the moon to the bottom.”

“Line?” the Little Man asked.

“Yes, like a crack,” Ann told him.

The Broken Egg and the Dire Batching, the Ramrod thought. It comes to pass as I foretold. Ispan-Serpent fecundates and the White Virgin gives birth.

“I must confess I don’t see that,” the Little Man said.

“You’ve got to look very close,” Ann told him.

“I’ll take your word for it,” Wojtowicz said. “Kids got sharp eyes.”

Doc gasped excitedly, “If there’s a crack up there that any of us can see, it must be miles across.”

Hunter said slowly and heavily, pushing out the words, “I think the moon is going into orbit around the new planet…and way inside Roche’s limit.” He added swiftly, “Rudy, do solid satellites break up like liquid ones inside Roche’s limit?”

“I don’t think anybody really knows,” Doc answered.

“They’re going to find out,” the bearded man said.

Rama Joan said: “And we’re going to find out what ants feel like when someone steps on their nest.”

Wojtowicz said: “The moon…breaking up?”

Margo clutched Paul. “Don!” she cried. “Oh my God, Paul, I’d forgotten Don!”

The Wanderer first appeared twenty-five thousand miles away from the moon, ten times closer to Luna than Earth is. Its deforming or tide-producing effects on the moon were therefore one thousand times greater than those the Earth exerts on Luna, since such effects vary inversely with the cube of the distance between bodies. (If they varied inversely only as the square, the massive sun would exert a tidal effect on Earth many times greater than the moon, instead of being outweighed tidewise by that small body eleven to five.)

When Luna went into orbit around the Wanderer at a distance of twenty-five hundred miles, she was a hundred times closer to that planet than she is to Earth. Accordingly, her whole body, crust and core, was being wrenched by a gravitational grip one million times stronger.

The Baba Yaga’s spacescreen was swinging up toward Earth when the gentle bumping of his spacesuit against the walls of the cabin finally awoke Don Merriam, just as he himself was rolling across the inside of the spacescreen. He woke clearheaded and ready for action, refreshed by the extra oxy. Two yanks and a wriggle got him into the pilot’s seat. He strapped down.

White moon, jagged with crater walls and with something else, came into view, visibly swelling in size as the screen swung. Then came a vertical precipice of glittering raw rock stretching down, interminably it seemed, toward the moon’s core. Then a narrow ribbon of black gulf, bisected along its jet length by a gleaming thread that was mostly violet but bright yellow toward one end. Then another glittering and interminable chasm wall shooting down sheer toward Luna’s very center.

His eyes told Don he was no more than fifteen miles above the moon’s surface and hurtling toward it at about a mile a second. There was nowhere near enough time to break fall by swinging ship and main-jetting to cancel the mile-a-second downward velocity.

As those thoughts flashed, Don’s fingers flicked the keys of the vernier jets, halting the Baba Yaga’s slow tumbling so that the spacescreen — and Don — looked straight down the chasm.

There was one hope, based on nothing more than a matching of colors. There had been something violet and yellow glaring with tremendous brilliance behind the moon. Now there was a violet-and-yellow thread gleaming in the blackness of the moon’s core. He might be looking through the moon.

The moon, split like a pebble? Planetary cores should flow, not fracture. But any other theory meant death.

The walls of fresh-riven rock rushed up at him. He was too close to the righthand one. A baby solid-fuel rocket fired on that side set the Baba Yaga drifting away from it — and started a secondary tumbling which another ripple of the verniers neutralized almost before it manifested itself.

When he was a boy, Don Merriam had read The Gods of Mars by Edgar Rice Burroughs. In that romance of science fantasy, John Carter, greatest swordsman of two planets, had escaped with his comrades from the vast, volcanic, subterranean cavern-world of the Black Pirates of Barsoom and their hideous Issus-cult by racing a Martian flyer straight up the miles-long narrow shaft leading to the outer world, instead of rising slowly and cautiously by the buoyancy of the flyer’s ray tanks. The latter had been the normal and only sane course, but John Carter had found salvation for himself and his companions in sheer blinding speed, steering vertically for a star visible at the top of the well-like shaft.

Perhaps the Gods of Mars were the arbiters of all Don Merriam’s actions at this point. At any rate, he suddenly felt around him in the cabin of the Baba Yaga the ghostly presences, in their jeweled harness, of Xodar the Black renegade, Carthoris the mysterious Red Martian, Matai Shang the sinister Father of Holy Therns, and his brave, beautiful, love-struck, infinitely treacherous daughter Phaidor. And it is a fact that as the plummeting Baba Yaga was engulfed between blurs of raw rock touched by sunlight for the first time in billions of years, and as Don fired the G-rich main jet and was pinned by it up against his seat, where he steered by the verniers and the solid-fuel rockets to keep the glitter of the rock walls equal and the violet-and-yellow thread splitting the black ribbon into equal halves, he cried out sharply in the empty cabin: “Hold on for your lives! I am flying straight down the chasm!”

The saucer students felt sand give way to a stretch of adobe-hard earth sloping sharply up to the high mesh fence ringing the base of the plateau of Vandenberg Two. But here — seaward of the point where the blinking red light sat atop its mast a hundred feet behind the fence — and two hundred feet, at least, above it — a broad gully cut through the ridge, gentling the slope. Tire and caterpillar tracks ran up the gully. There was a big gate in the fence where it crossed the road, and beside the gate, built like it into the fence, a two-story guard tower. The gate was closed and the tower was lightless, but the small door in the outside of the tower was open.

The sight cheered Paul considerably. He straightened his shoulders and his necktie. The little cortege halted fifty feet in front of the gate and he, Margo, and Doc walked forward, preceded by their inky, purple-and-yellow-edged shadows.

A brazen mechanical voice came out of the box over the door, saying, “Stop where you are. You are about to trespass on restricted property of the United States Government. You may not pass this gate. Return the way you came. Thank you.”

“Oh, my sainted aunt!” Doc exploded. Since being relieved of cot-lugging by young Harry McHeath, he’d got his bounce back. “Do you think we’re an advance deputation of little green men?” he shouted at the box. “Can’t you see we’re human beings?”

Paul touched Doc’s arm and shook his head, but continued to advance. He called out in a mellow voice: “I am Paul Hagbolt, 929-CW, JR, accredited PR captain-equivalent of Project Moon. I am asking admission for myself and eleven distressed persons known to me, and requesting transport for the latter.”

A soldier stepped from the darkness of the doorway out into the light of the Wanderer. There was no mistaking he was a soldier, for he had boots on his feet and a helmet on his head; a pistol, knife, and two grenades hung from his belt; his right arm cradled a submachine gun, and tightly harnessed to his back — Paul noted incredulously — were jump rockets.

The soldier was pokerfaced and he stood stiffly, but his right knee was jouncing up and down a little, rapidly and steadily, as if he were about to go into a stamping native dance or, more reasonably, as if he were trying to control a tic and not succeeding.

“CW and JR, eh?” he said to Paul, suspiciously but also respectfully. “Let’s see your ID cards…sir.”

There was a faint, acid odor. Miaow, who had been remarkably calm since the landslide, lifted a little in Margo’s arms, looked straight at the soldier, and hissed like a teakettle.

Handing the soldier the cards, which he had ready, Paul caught a sharp tremor.

As the soldier studied the cards, tipping them forward to catch the Wanderer’s light, his face stayed expressionless, but Doc noticed that his eyes kept jumping away from the cards to the Wanderer.

Doc asked conversationally, “Heard anything about that?”

The soldier looked Doc straight in the eye and barked: “Yes, we know all about that and we’re not intimidated! But we’re not releasing any information, see?”

“Yes, I do,” Doc told him softly.

The soldier looked up from the cards. “Very well, Mr. Hagbolt, sir, I’ll phone your request to the main gate.” He backed off toward the doorway.

“You’re sure you’ve got it right?” Paul asked, repeating and amplifying it and mentioning the names of several officers.

“And Professor Morton Opperly,” Margo put in with strong emphasis.

Paul finished: “And one of our people has had a heart attack. We’ll want to bring her in the tower, where it’s warmer. And we’d like some water.”

“No, you all stay outside,” the soldier said sharply, raising the muzzle of the submachine gun an inch as he continued to back away. “Wait,” he called to Paul. “You come here.” From the darkness inside the tower he handed Paul first a loose blanket, next a half-gallon bottle of water. “But no paper cups!” he added, choking off what might have become a high-pitched laugh. “Don’t ask me for paper cups!” He drew back into the darkness, and there was the sound of dialing.

Paul returned with his booty, handing the blanket to the thin woman. The water was passed around. They drank from the bottle.

“I expect we’ll have to wait a bit,” Paul whispered. “Tm sure he’s O.K., but he’s pretty nervous. He looked all set to stand off the new planet singlehanded.”

Margo said: “Miaow could smell how scared he was.”

“Well,” Doc philosophized softly, “if I’d been all alone when I first saw the thing, but with the hardware handy, I think I’d have switched the lights off and draped myself with the hardware and shook a bit myself. We met the new planet under just about the best circumstances, I’d say — peering around for saucers and talking about hyperspace and all.”

Ann said: “I’d think if you were scared, Mr. Brecht, you’d switch on all the lights you could.”

Doc said, “My wicked idea, young lady, was that I’d be so terrified I wouldn’t want something big, black, and hairy able to see where I was, to grab me.”

Ann laughed appreciatively.

The Little Man said to them all in a small, almost unfeeling, faraway voice: “The moon is swinging behind the new planet. She’s…going away.”

Eyes confirmed what the words had said. A chunk of the moon’s rim was hidden by the purple-and-gold intruder.

Wojtowicz said: “My God…my God.”

The thin woman began to sob shudderingly.

Rama Joan said: “Give us courage.”

Margo’s lips formed the word, “Don,” and she shivered and hugged Miaow to her. Paul put his arm around her shoulders, but she moved away a little, head bowed.

Hunter said: “The moon’s in a very constricted orbit. There can’t be more than three thousand miles between their surfaces.”

The Ramrod thought: Her birth-pangs upon her, the White Virgin shelters in Ispan’s robes.

The Little Man made a cup of his hands and Rama Joan poured a drink for Ragnarok.

Colonel Mabel Wallingford said stridently: “Spike, I’ve been talking with General Vandamme himself and he says that this isn’t a problem. They’ve been letting us handle a lot of it because we were faster on the jump. Your orders have gone out approved-and-relayed.”

Spike Stevens, his eyes fixed on the twin screens showing the moon moving behind the Wanderer, bit off the end of a cigar and snarled: “O. K., tell him to prove it.”

“Jimmy, warm up the inter-HQ screen,” Colonel Mabel ordered.

The General lit his cigar.

A third screen glowed on, showing a smiling, distinguished-looking gentleman with a bald head. The General whipped his cigar out of his mouth and stood up. Colonel Mabel felt a surge of hot joy, watching him play the guilty, dutiful schoolboy.

“Mr. President,” Spike said.

“I’m not part of a simulated crisis, Spike,” the other responded, “though it’s hard to believe that’s been bothering you, considering the masterly way your gang’s been operating.”

“Not masterly at all, sir,” the General said. “I’m afraid we’ve lost Moonbase. Not a word for over an hour.”

The face on the screen grew grave. “We must be prepared for losses. I am now leaving Space HQ to meet the Coast Guard. My word to you is: Carry on!…for the duration of this…” You could sense him reaching for one of his famous polished phrases…"astronomical emergency.”

The screen faded.

Colonel Willard Griswold, his eyes on the astronomic screens, said: “Moonbase? Hell, Spike, we’ve lost the moon.”