The Wanderer

Chapter Twelve

Don Merriam had been fifteen minutes in the body of the moon, doing much of it at two miles a second, and now the violet-and-yellow thread, after widening to a ribbon, was staying the same width, which couldn’t be good, but there was nothing to do but bullet toward it through the incredible flaw that split the moon along an almost perfect plane like a diamond tapped just right, and nothing to be but one great piloting eye, and suffer what thoughts to come that would, since he couldn’t spare mind to control them.

After the first big shove, he fired the main jet in brief bursts, aiming the Baba Yaga with the verniers.

Don Merriam was making a trip through a planet’s core. He had passed through its very center, and so far the trip had been glitter and blur and blackness and a violet thread halving a spacescreen turned milky in patches. That and an aching throat and smarting eyes and the picture of himself as a glass bee with a Prince Rupert’s Drop tail buzzing through a ripple in a stack of metal sheets miles long, or an enchanted prince sprinting down a poisoned corridor wide as his elbows — to brush a wall, what a faux pas!

Toward midpassage there had been soot-black streaks and a flash of green fire, but no guessing what made them.

The milkiness in the spacescreen, at any rate, should be erosion from the fantastic thin-armed dust swirls that at one point had almost lost him the thread.

He had lost the aftward sunlight, too, sooner than he’d hoped, and had to aim the Baba Yaga solely by the fainter purple and golden wall-glimmers, and that was deceptive because the yellow was intrinsically brighter than the purple and tempted him to stay too far away from it.

But now the violet ribbon began to narrow and he knew it was the doom of him, worse than collision course, for there came unbidden to his mind a vision of the riven halves of the moon crashing together behind him, cutting oft all sunlight, and then — in ponderous reaction and by the fierce mutual attraction of their masses moving — to crash together ahead of him, swinging through yards while he rocketed through miles, but swiftly enough to beat him to the impact point.

Then, just as he seemed almost to reach it, just as by his rough gauging he’d moon-traversed close to two thousand miles, the violet ribbon blacked out altogether.

And then, as incredible as if he’d found a life after death, he burst out of the blackness into light, with stars showing off to all sides and even old shock-headed Sol shooting his blinding white arrows.

Only then did he take in what lay straight ahead of him.

It was a great round, as big as Earth seen from a two-hour orbit. This vast, mounded disk was all radiantly violet and golden to the right, where Sol lay beyond, but to the left inky black save for three pale greenish oval glow-spots curving off the disk in the distance.

The unblurred night line between the radiant and the inky hemispheres was slowly drifting to the right as he watched, just as Sol was slowly drifting toward the violet horizon. He realized that back there in the moon he had lost sight of the violet ribbon, not because the jaws of the moon had clamped together, but simply because the night side of the planet ahead had moved over and looked down the chasm at him.

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.