The Wanderer

Chapter Four

The convertible carrying Paul Hagbolt and Margo Gelhorn and her cat softly jounced along the rutted trail, raw cliff again to the right, beach sand to the left, both now only a yard or so off. Away from the big highway, the night pressed in. The three wayfarers shared more fully the lonely obscurity of the eclipsed moon climbing the starry sky. Even Miaow sat up to peer ahead.

“Among other things, this road probably leads to the back door of Vandenberg Two,” Paul ruminated. “The beach gate, they call it. Of course I’m supposed to use the main gate, but in a pinch…” Then after a bit: “It’s really funny how these saucer maniacs are always holding their meetings next door to missile bases or atomic installations. Hoping a little glamor will leak their way, I guess. Did you know that at one time the Space Force was really suspicious about it?”

The headlights picked up an earth-fall blocking more than half the road. It was as high as the hood of the car, and recent, judging by the damp look of the granulated dirt. Paul let the car stop.

“End of saucer expedition,” he announced cheerfully.

“But the others have gone on,” Margo said, standing up again. “You can see where they’ve gone around the fall.”

“Okay,” Paul said mock-doomfully. “But if we get stuck in the sand, you’re going to have to hunt drift boards to put under the tires.”

The wheels spun twice, but the convertible had no real trouble getting traction. A little beyond, they came to a shallow pocket in the cliff, where the road expanded to thrice its width. A dozen cars had used the extra space to park side by side, their rear bumpers snug to the cliff. The first comers included a red sedan, a microbus and a white, open-back pickup truck.

Beyond the last car was another green lantern and an elegantly lettered sign: PARK HERE, THEN FOLLOW THE GREEN LIGHTS.

“Just like the Times Square subway station,” Margo exclaimed delightedly. “I’ll bet there are New Yorkers in this crowd.”

“Newly arrived,” Paul agreed, eyeing the cliff distrustfully as he parked beside the last car. “They haven’t had time to find out about California slides.”

Margo jumped out carrying Miaow. Paul followed, handing her her jacket.

“I don’t need it,” she told him. He folded it over his arm without comment.

The third green lantern was out on the beach, by a stand of tall sea-grass. The beach was very level. They could at last hear the hiss of tiny breakers — little more than wavelets, from the sound. Miaow mewed anxiously. Margo talked to her softly.

Just beyond the cars, the cliffs swung sharply to the right and the level beach followed them inland. Paul realized they must be at the mouth of the wash they’d crossed and re-crossed back on the highway. Some distance beyond the wash, the ground began to rise again. Still farther off he could see a red light blinking high up and, much lower down, the glint of a mesh fence. He found these evidences of Vanden-berg Two obscurely reassuring.

They headed oceanward past the sea-grass toward the green spark of the fourth lantern, tiny almost as a planet. The crusted sand sang faintly as they scuffed it. Margo took Paul’s arm.

“Do you realize the eclipse is still going on?” she whispered. He nodded. She said, “Paul, what if the stars around it should squiggle now?”

Paul said, “I think I can see a white light beyond the fourth green one. And figures. And some sort of low building.”

They kept on. The low building looked as if it had once been someone’s large beach house, or else a small beach club. The windows were boarded up. On this side of it was a rather large floor, unsided and unroofed, about two feet above the sand, that could hardly be anything else but an old dance floor. On it had been set about a hundred folding chairs, of which only the front twenty or so were occupied. The chairs faced the sea and a long table, slightly elevated on what had once been the orchestra’s platform. Behind the table sat three persons with a little white light shining on their faces — the only illumination besides the green lantern at the back of the audience.

One of the three persons had a beard; another was bald and wore glasses; the third was in evening dress with a white tie and wore a green turban.

Beardy was speaking, but they weren’t yet near enough to hear him distinctly.

Margo clutched Paul’s arm. “The one with the turban is a woman,” she whispered loudly.

A tiny figure got up from the sand near the lantern and approached them. A small white light blinked on, and they saw it was a narrow-faced girl with pale reddish braids. She couldn’t have been more than ten. She had some sheets of paper in one hand and she held the forefinger of the other across her lips. The white light was that of a small battery lamp hanging against her chest by a cord around her neck. As she came close she lifted the sheets to them, whispering, “We’ve got to be quiet. It’s started. Take a program.”

Her eyes lit up when she saw Miaow. “Oh, you’ve got a cat,” she whispered. “I don’t think Ragnarok will mind.”

After Margo and Paul had each taken a sheet, she led them to a central step going up to the floor and gestured that they should sit down in front. When Margo and Paul, smiling but shaking their heads, sat down in the back row instead, she shrugged and started to go away.

Margo felt Miaow stiffen. The cat was staring at something lying across two end chairs in the front row.

Ragnarok was a large German police dog.

The moment of first crisis passed. Miaow relaxed a little, though continuing to stare unblinkingly with ears laid back.

The little girl came behind them. “I’m Ann,” she whispered. “The one with the turban is my mother. We’re from New York.”

Then she went back to her vigil beside the green lantern.

General Spike Stevens and three of his staff sat close-crowded in a dimmed room of the Reserve Headquarters of the U.S. Space Force. They were watching two large television screens set side by side. Each screen showed the same area of darkened moon, an area which took in Plato. The image on the righthand screen was relayed from an unmanned communication-and-observation satellite hanging 23,000 miles above Christmas Island, 20 degrees south of Hawaii, while the one on the lefthand screen came from a similar equatorial satellite over a point in the Atlantic off the coast of Brazil where the “Prince Charles” was atom-steaming south.

The four viewers crossed their eyes with practiced skill, fusing the images which had originated 30,000 miles apart out in space. The effect was exaggeratedly three-dimensional, with the moon section bumping out solidly. “We can give the new electroamplif a limited O.K.,” the general said. “I’d say that’s adequate crater definition now Christmas has got rid of its herringbone. Jimmy, let’s have an unmagnified view of the whole moonward space sector.”

Colonel Mabel Wallingford studied the General covertly, knitting together her long, strong fingers. Someone had once told her that she had a strangler’s hands, and she never looked at the General without remembering that. It gave her a bitter satisfaction that Spike should sound as casually confident as might Odin surveying the Nine Worlds from Hlithskjalf tower in Asgard, yet that he knew no more of where they now were than did she: that they were within fifty miles of the White House and at least 200 feet underground. They had all been driven here, and had entered the elevator hooded, and they had not met the staff they had relieved.

Arab Jones and High Bundy and Pepe Martinez sipped at their fourth stick of tea, passing the potent thin reefer from fingers to fingers and holding the piney smoke long in their lungs. They sat on cushions and a carpet in front of a little tent with strings of wooden beads for a door, pitched on a rooftop in Harlem, not far from Lenox and 125th Street. Their eyes sought each other’s with the friendly watchfulness of weed-brothers, then moved together toward the eclipsed moon.

“Man, I bet she on pot too,” High said. “See that bronzy smoke? Those lunar spacemen gonna get high.”

Pepe said, “We’re gonna be way out there ourselves. You planning to eclipse, Arab?”

Arab said, “The astronomical kick is the most”