The Wanderer

Chapter Fifteen

Paul Hagbolt had to admit to himself that walking through sand does get tiring, even when you’re with new friends and under a sky bright with a new planet. The exhilaration of defying Colonel Humphreys and the Moon Project had worn off very quickly, and this backbreaking trudge across the beach seemed peculiarly purposeless and depressing.

“It gets lonely, doesn’t it?” Rama Joan said softly, “when you cut yourself off from the big protector and throw in your lot — and your girl friend’s — with a bunch of nuts, just to attend a dog’s funeral.”

They were walking at the tail end of the procession, well behind the cot borne between Clarence Dodd and Wojtowicz.

Paul had to chuckle. “You’re frank about it,” he said. “Margo’s not my girl friend, though — I mean the feeling’s all on my side. We’re really just friends.”

Rama Joan looked at him shrewdly. “So? A man can waste his life on friendship, Paul.”

Paul nodded unhappily. “Margo’s told me that herself,” he said. “She claims I get my satisfaction out of mother henning her around and trying to keep other men away from her. Except for Don, of course — and she thinks my interest in him is more than brotherly, even if I don’t know it.”

Rama Joan shrugged. “Could be, I suppose. The set-up of you and Margo and Don does seem unnatural.”

“No, it’s perfectly natural in its way,” he assured her with a kind of gloomy satisfaction. “The three of us went to high school and college together. We were interested in science and things. We meshed. Then Don went on to become an engineer and a spaceman, while I took the turn into journalism and PR work, and Margo into art.

But we were determined to stick together, so when Don got into the Moon Project, we managed to, too, or at least I did. By that time Margo had decided she liked him a little better than she did me — or loved him, whatever that means — and they got engaged. So that was settled — maybe simply because our society frowns on triangular living arrangements. Then Don went to the moon. We stayed on Earth. That’s all there is to it, until this evening, when I seem to have thrown in with you people.”

“Maybe because you had an explosion overdue. Well, I can tell you why I’m here,” the red-blonde woman continued. “I could be safe in Manhattan, an advertising executive’s wife: Ann going to a fancy school, myself fitting in an occasional lecture on mysticism to a women’s club. Instead, I’m divorced, eking out a tiny inherited income with lecture fees, and dressing up the mysticism with all sorts of carnival hokum.” She indicated her white tie and tails with a disparaging laugh. ” ‘Masculine protest’, my friends said. ‘No, just human protest’, I told them. I wanted to be able to say things I really meant and say them to the hilt — things that were mine alone. I wanted Ann to have a real mother, not just a well-dressed statistic.”

“But do you really mean the things you say?” Paul asked. “Buddhism, I gather — that sort of thing?”

“I don’t believe them as much as I’d like to, but I do believe them as much as I can,” she told him. “Certainty’s a luxury. If you say things with gusto and color, at least you’re an individual. And even if you fake it a bit, it’s still you, and if you keep trying you may some day come out with a bit of the truth — like Charlie Fulby did, when he told us he knew about his wild planets not by flying-saucer trips, as he’d always claimed, but by pure intuition.”

“He’s paranoid,” Paul muttered, gazing ahead at the Ramrod where he marched behind the cot, with Wanda to his right and the thin woman to his left. “Are those two women his disciples, or patrons, or what?”

“I’m sure he is somewhat paranoid,” Rama Joan said, “but you surely don’t believe, do you, Paul, that sane people have a monopoly of the truth? No, I think they’re his wives — he grew up in a complex-marriage sect. Oh, Paul, you do find us alarming, don’t you?”

“Not really,” he protested. “Though there’s something reassuring about moving with the majority.”

“And with the money and the power,” Rama Joan agreed. “Well, cheer up — the majority and the nuts spend most of their time the same way: satisfying basic needs. We’re all going back to the pavilion on the beach simply because we think there’ll be coffee and sandwiches.”

At the head of the procession, Hunter was telling Margo Gelhorn very much the same sort of thing. “I started going to flying-saucer meetings as a sociological project,” he confessed to her. “I went to all kinds: the way-out contactees like Charlie Fulby, the sober-minded ones, and the in-between-ers and freewheelers, like this group. I wanted to analyze a social syndrome and write a few papers on it. But after a while I had to admit I was keeping on going because I was hooked.”

“Why, Professor Hunter?” Margo asked, hugging Miaow to her. She was cold without her jacket, and the cat was like a hot water bottle. “Does saucering make you feel bohemian and different, like wearing a beard?”

“Call me Ross. No, I don’t think so, though I suppose vanity plays a part.” He touched his beard. “No, it was simply because I’d found people who had something to follow and be excited about, something to be disinterestedly interested in — and that’s not so common any more in our money-and-sales-and-status culture, our don’t-give-yourself-away yet sell-yourself-to-everybody society. It got so I wanted to make a contribution of my own — the lecturing and panel bits. Now I do almost as much saucering as Doc, who knocks himself out selling pianos — he’s a whiz at that — so he can divide the rest of his time between saucering, chess, and living it up.”

“But Doc’s a bachelor, while I believe you implied you had a family…Ross?” Margo pointed out with faint malice.

“Oh yes,” Hunter conceded a bit wearily. “Up in Portland there’s a Mrs. Hunter and two boys who think Daddy spends altogether too much time consorting with saucer bugs, considering the very few papers he’s got out of it and the nothing it’s done for his academic reputation.”

He was thinking of adding: “And, right now, they’re sitting up asking why Daddy wasn’t home the night the heavens changed and saucers came true” — but just then he realized they’d reached the boarded-up beach house and the old dance floor. There was the green lantern, he saw, still burning, and beside it a chair with a little stack of unused programs, and there were the empty chairs sitting in rows, though with the first rows much disarranged (when would Doddsy ever reclaim the deposit they’d made on them at the Polish funeral parlor in Oxnard?) — and there was a coat someone had forgotten laid over one of the chairs, and there was the panelists’ long table and under it some cardboard boxes they’d left in their hurry. And thrust deep into the sand nearby there was even the big furled umbrella Doc had used as part of a crude astrolabe when first checking the movement of the Wanderer.

As Ross Hunter saw these things standing out against the purple-gold-speckled, spectrally calm Pacific, he felt a great, unexpected surge of affection and nostalgia and relief, and he suddenly realized why, after being rebuffed by a landslide and a steel mesh fence and a red-tape major, they had trudged back to this spot.

It was simply that it was home to them, the spot where they’d been together in security and where they’d witnessed the change in the heavens, and that each of them knew in his heart that this might be the last home any of them would ever have.

Without haste Wanda and the thin woman and young Harry McHeath made for the boxes under the table.

Wojtowicz and the Little Man set down the cot with Ragnarok on it, half shrouded by Margo’s jacket.

Wojtowicz looked around, then pointed at the umbrella and said in a firm voice: “I somehow think that would be the right spot — that is, if you wouldn’t mind?” he added to Doc, who’d walked silently all the way from Vandenberg Two beside the Little Man.

“No, I’d be proud,” Doc answered gruffly.

They lugged the cot up, and Doc recovered his umbrella. Then Wojtowicz took a flat-bladed spade from under the edge of the mattress on the cot and began to dig.

The fat woman noticed and called down from the platform: “No wonder I felt something sticking in my side all the way.”

Wojtowicz paused to call out: “You should just be damn thankful you got that free ride when you thought you was having a heart attack.”

Wanda called back angrily: “Look, when I have a heart attack, it’s bad — and there’s no thinking about it! But when my heart attack’s over, it’s over.”

“O.K.,” Wojtowicz told her over his shoulder.

The spade made a faint, clean, rasping thud as he dug. The thin woman and Harry McHeath wiped sand from some cups and set them out. The rest of them watched the moon emerging from behind the Wanderer, which seemed to tip over as it sank toward the Pacific.

Luna looked visibly conical — mashed. And instead of the smooth smudges of “seas” on her face, there was the faintest tracery of shadow-lines, here and there palely flashing the Wanderer’s colors. The effect was horrid, somehow suggesting a sac of spider’s eggs.

A forceps birth, the Ramrod thought The White Virgin, fecundated by Ispan, bears herself in pain — and must birth herself again and again in torture. I had not thought of that.

Margo thought, I’m sorry I called her a bitch. Don…

Rama Joan whispered to Paul: “Her young man was up there, wasn’t he? Then she could be your girl now, Paul.”

Wojtowicz straightened up. “That’s all the deep we can have it,” he told the Little Man huskily. “Any further we’d get water.”

They turned toward the cot. Clarence Dodd unsnapped the leash from the heavy collar and lifted the jacket a little from Ragnarok’s body, looking at Margo, but she shook her head, and he grimaced a smile at her and let the jacket fall again. He and Wojtowicz and Doc let down the shrouded dog into his shallow grave. Miaow lifted in Margo’s arms to watch curiously.

Over the Pacific the Wanderer hung as strangely as if the blind spot had acquired imperial colors, and was as perfectly spherical as the emergent moon was maimed. The western yellow spot had rotated out of sight, so that the face the orb showed had become a Three-Spot; but the most striking impression, with the two thick eastern arms of the purple cross widening above and below the great eastern yellow spot, was of the head of a purple beast with jaws agape.

Fenris Wolf, thought Harry McHeath. And now it looks like it’s really eating the moon, with the moon orbiting around in front between its jaws.

“It looks like a big dog getting ready to snap,” Ann said thoughtfully. “Mommy, do you suppose the gods have put Ragnarok up there, like they used to put Greek heroes and nymphs up in the stars?”

“Yes, I think that’s happened, dear,” Rama Joan told her.

The Little Man pulled out his notebook and pen automatically and then looked dully at the next empty page. Margo gave Miaow to Paul to hold while she took the things out of the Little Man’s hands and sketched the Wanderer for him, imitating his diagrammatic style.

The Serpent gorges on the Egg, thought the Ramrod. Or is it that roads divide?

Wojtowicz swiftly spaded first dry, then wet sand back into the grave. Doc took the leash out of the Little Man’s fingers and wove it tightly around the head of his furled umbrella and fastened it that way. When Wojtowicz had patted the sand flat with his spade and stepped back, Doc thrust the umbrella deep into the center of the grave.

“There, Doddsy,” he said, putting an arm around the Little Man’s shoulder. “He’s got a marker now. A sort of caduceus.”

From the platform the thin woman called: “Come and get it, everybody! The coffee stayed real hot.”

Donald Merriam was in darkness again. The Baba Yaga had once more been eclipsed, this time by the moon as it passed in front of the Wanderer. The tiny moonship fell free between the two bodies. It was continuing to gain on the moon, but had not yet quite out-nosed it.

The cabin had swiftly wanned from the direct sunlight, but before it had become uncomfortably hot, the moon had swung between the Baba Yaga and the sun.

The darkness of this eclipse was not nearly as great as that of the first, being pervaded by sun-reflected violet and yellow from the Wanderer. This Wanderer-light revealed the continuing rock-churning of the moon’s surface, looking like a stormy sea seen from an airplane by brilliant moonlight.

At his altitude above the Wanderer — 1,600 miles now by radar check — Don could see only about a fifth of the planet’s disk. Passing across the face variously named on Earth the X, the Notched Disk, the Wheel, St. Andrew’s Cross, and the Mandala, he saw only the western yellow spot and a rim around it widening ahead — the eastern and two polar yellow spots were out of sight for him around the curve of the Wanderer.

By watching the yellow spot emerge from the Wanderer’s night side across the sunrise line, Don had got confirmation that the Wanderer was rotating and that its top and bottom were indeed its poles, its axis being roughly parallel to that of Earth.

By timing the speed of the spot’s emergence Don had estimated the Wanderer’s period of rotation as six hours — a “day” only one quarter as long as Earth’s. And it was rotating in the same direction as he and the moon were moving in their two-hour orbits — the planet’s surface features following, but falling swiftly behind.

The greenish glow-spots on the Wanderer’s night side did not seem to show up in any way on the day side — perhaps they were some sort of phosphorescence visible only in the dark. Nor, so far as he could recall, had there been any indication of the distinction between violet and yellow areas on the night side — apparently it took sunlight to bring that out.

A good half of the great yellow spot was occupied by the moon’s shadow — inky, and undeniably elliptical and growing more so. Studying it, Don noted a very ghostly pale green round beginning to intrude into its forward edge — apparently the green spots did carry around, though being invisible in sunlight.

The plain weirdness of his situation suddenly hit him — a midge between a black plum and a pink grapefruit, all three careening free.

He fancied himself, a little boy, in the kitchen of the Minnesota farmhouse, with the darkness of early evening pressing on the window, and he, Donnie, saying: “Ma, I found a deep black hole in the woods, and I know it has to go all the way through to the other side of the earth because I saw a star twinkling at the bottom. I got scared and, Ma, I know you won’t believe this, but as I came running home I saw a big yellow and purple planet behind the barn!”

He shook off the pseudomemory. However weird this situation might be, it was a little less so because he had lived a month on the moon and had now driven a spaceship through it.

He turned his attention to the white threads looping up from the nose of the moon. He swung ship to follow with his eyes their curving course against the stars, diverging at first and then beginning to converge again as they vanished north over the violet horizon of the Wanderer.

Well, if the white threads somehow tied the moon and the Wanderer together, it made sense that they should be tied to a pole of the latter. Attached to a spot on the equator of the Wanderer they’d get stretched and broken, or wound around the Wanderer, since the moon was orbiting three times as fast as the planet was rotating.

Tied together! Wound wound! Here he was thinking of them as actual threads, as though the Wanderer and the moon were two Christmas tree ornaments.

Still, the white threads had to be something actual.

He followed them back along their course to the nose of the moon. The Baba Yaga was ahead of the moon now, but still in its shadow because they were both starting to swing behind the Wanderer again — its black sunset line that he had first seen through the moon-chasm was already in sight once more, chopping off the violet horizon.

So the nose of the moon was in shadow, its surface bronze-dim and churning. He took from the rack a pair of binoculars with big objective lenses and carefully focused them.

In the churning nose of the moon were a dozen huge, conical pits, their inner surfaces spinning rapidly clockwise, as though they were maelstroms in the fracturing rock.

Each sleek white thread, turning bronze-dark as it entered the moon’s shadow, led to the bottom of one of the whirlpool pits and kept swinging around in a tiny circuit, in pace with its whirling. The threads thickened somewhat down toward their restless roots. They resembled waterspouts or tornado-funnels.

Around each pit were three or four bright violet or lemon dots. He had seen one or two other such dots along the strands. It struck Don that they might be big spaceships, presumably from the Wanderer, and possibly generating gravitational or momentum fields of some kind.

For the inference to be made from the whirlpool pits and the entering strands was clear: Somehow, the substance of the moon, in the form of dust and gravel and perhaps larger rocks, was being sucked out and carried looping through space toward the north pole of the Wanderer.

Arab and Pepe and High stood over the Hudson, sharing a stick, ready to shred it into the pale, oil-filmed water if anyone should come.

But no one did. The city was strangely still, even for six in the morning. So High flipped away the half-inch butt, and Arab lit another reefer, and they passed it around.

Their arrival at the river, after slanting north past the General Grant Houses, and under the Henry Hudson Parkway, had been anticlimatic. There had been simply nothing, over to the west, but pale sky and distant piers and Edgewater and the southern end of the Palisades.

“She disappear somehow,” High decided. “Maybe just set.” He laughed. His gaze switched south to Grant’s Tomb. “What you think, General?”

“River look high, Admiral,” Arab adjudged, frowning, as he lit a third reefer for them.

“Sure do,” High agreed. “See it washin’ over that dock!”

“That no dock,” Arab protested scornfully. “That a sunken barge.”

“Just the same, water’s ten feet higher’n when we come.”

“You crazy!”

“I know where she disappear to,” Pepe cried suddenly. “That big purple’n golden thing a amphi-whamf — a balloon-submarine combo! She submerge. That why river high — she bulk it up. She lurkin’ down there, glowin’ in the wet-wet dark.”

As the others quivered at the delicious horror of the thought, Pepe threw up his spread-fingered hands beside his cheeks and cried again, piling it on: “No, wait! She not that. She a frozen atomic blast. They start the blast, then freeze the fireball. She float around like a ball lightning, first over the river, then under. When she unfreeze, city go whish! Look there!”

Red sun was glinting from banks of windows across the river, so low they looked like part of the water. Suddenly the pretended horror became appallingly real to all of them — the sudden fear against which no weed-smoker can wholly ensure himself.

“Come on!” Arab screamed in a whisper.

They turned and ran back toward Harlem.

Jake Lesher curled his lip at the thinning crowd. With the sinking of the Wanderer and the seeping in of gray morning light, the excitement had drained out of Times Square. The earthquake litter now looked merely untidy and gritty — one more Manhattan demolition project.

Incredulously, as if they were something from a musical extravaganza, he remembered Sal’s song and the stamping crowd under the vast purple-and-amber floodlight. Then his lip relaxed and his eyes widened a little but stopped watching, as he felt brushing against the edges of his imagination the first tendrils of a dream — or of a scheme, for the two were very close in Jake’s universe.

Sally Harris suddenly snaked her arm through his from behind. As she pulled him around, she whispered rapidly in his ear: “Come on, let’s get out of here before those other wolves find me. It’s only four blocks.”

“You shouldn’t startle me that way, Sal,” Jake complained. “I was getting a money-making thought. Where to?”

“You were just saying nothing could startle you any more. Ha! I’m taking us to breakfast at Hugo Hasseltine’s penthouse — me and my little key. After that quake, the higher I get, the safer I’ll feel.”

“You’ll have farther to fall,” Jake pointed out.

“Yeah, but things won’t fall on me. Come on, you’ll scheme better on a full stomach.”

Way up, a little pink was showing in the sky.