The Wanderer

Chapter Five

Paul Hagbolt and Margo Gelhorn began to listen to what the man with the beard was saying: “A human being’s hopes and fears, his deepest agitations, will always color what he sees in the skies — whether it’s a plane or a planet or a ship from another world, or only a corpuscle of his own blood. Put it this way: every saucer is also a sign.”

Beardy’s voice was mellow yet youthfully intense. Doc — the big bald man with thick glasses — and the She-Turban listened inscrutably. (It hadn’t taken Margo two minutes to nickname all three panelists and several members of the audience.)

Beardy continued: “The late Dr. Jung has explored this aspect of saucer sightings thoroughly in his book, Ein Moderner My thus von Dingen die am Himmel gesehen werden.” His German was authentically gargled. He immediately translated: “A Modern Myth of Things Seen in the Skies.”

“Who is Beardy?” Margo demanded of Paul. He started to study his program, but that was useless in the back-row darkness.

Beardy went on, “Dr. Jung was particularly interested in saucers with the appearance of a circle divided into four parts. He relates such shapes to what Mahayana Buddhism calls mandalas. A mandala is a symbol of psychic unity — the individual mind embattled against insanity. It is apt to appear at times of great stress and danger, as today, when the individual is torn and shaken by his horror of atomic destruction, his dread of being depersonalized, made into one more soldier-slave or consumer-robot in a totalitarian horde, and his fear of completely losing touch with his own culture as it goes chasing off into ten thousand difficult yet crucial specializations.”

Paul found himself going through one of his usual guilt spasms. Not five minutes ago he’d been calling these people saucer maniacs, and here was the first one he heard sounding sensible and civilized.

A little man, sitting at the same end of the first row as the dog Ragnarok, now stood up.

“Excuse me, Professor,” the Little Man said, “but according to my watch there are only fifteen minutes of full eclipse left. I want to remind everyone to keep up the watch, while paying attention of course to what our interesting speakers have to say. Rama Joan has told us of cosmic beings able to attend to a dozen lines of thought at once. Surely we can manage two! After all, we did hold this meeting because of the unusual opportunity for sightings, especially of the less bold saucers that shun the light. Let’s not lose what’s left of this precious opportunity to see Bashful Saucers, as Ann calls them.”

Several heads in the front row dutifully swiveled this way and that, showing profiles with uplifted chins.

Margo nudged Paul. “Do your duty,” she whispered gruffly, peering about fiercely.

“Good hunting, everybody,” the Little Man said. “Excuse me, Professor.” He sat down.

But before Beardy could continue, he was challenged by a man with high shoulders and folded arms who sat tall in his seat — Margo tagged him the Ramrod.

“Professor, you’ve given us a lot of fancy double talk,” the Ramrod began, “but it still seems to me to be about saucers that people imagine. I’m not interested in those, even if Mr. Jung was. I’m only interested in real saucers, like the one I talked to and travelled in.”

Paul felt his spirits lift. Now these people were starting to behave as saucer maniacs should!

Beardy seemed somewhat flustered by the challenge. He said, “I’m very sorry if I gave that impression. I thought I made it clear that—”

Doc lifted his bald head and cut short Beardy’s defense by laying a hand on his arm, as if to say, “Let me handle this character.” The She-Turban glanced at him with a faint smile and touched the tie of her evening clothes.

Doc leaned forward and bent his gleaming dome and glittering glasses down toward the Ramrod, as if the latter were some sort of insect.

“Excuse me, sir,” he said with an edge to his voice, “but I believe you also claim to have visited other planets by flying saucer — planets unrecognized by astronomy.”

“That’s right,” the Ramrod replied, sitting an inch taller.

“Just where are those other planets?”

“Oh, they’re…places,” the Ramrod replied, winning a few chuckles by adding: “Real planets don’t let themselves be bossed around by a pack of astronomers.”

Ignoring the chuckles, Doc continued, “Are those planets off at the edge of nowhere — the planets of another star, many light years away?” His voice was gentle now. His thick glasses seemed to beam benignly.

“No, they’re not that,” the Ramrod said. “Why, I visited Arietta just a week ago and the trip only took two days.”

Doc was not to be diverted. “Are they little tiny planets that are hiding behind the sun or the moon or perhaps Jupiter, in a sort of permanent eclipse, like people hiding behind trees in a forest?”

“No, they’re not that either,” the Ramrod asserted, squaring his shoulders afresh, but nevertheless beginning to sound a shade defensive. “They don’t hide behind anybody’s skirts — not them. They’re just…out there. And they’re big, you can bet — as big as Earth. I’ve visited six of them.”

“Humph,” Doc grunted. “Are they by any chance planets that are concealed in hyperspace and that pop out conveniently once in a blue moon — say, when you come visiting?”

Now it was Doc who was getting the chuckles, though he ignored those, too.

“You’re being negativistic,” the Ramrod said accusingly, “and a darn sight too theoretical. Those other planets are just out there, I tell you.”

“Well, if they’re just out there,” Doc roared softly, “why can’t we just see them?” His head was thrown back in triumph, or perhaps it was only that his glasses had slipped down his nose a bit.

There was quite a pause. Then: “Black-negativistic,” the Ramrod amended loftily. “Be a waste of time to tell you how some planets have invisibility screens to make starlight curve around them. I don’t care to talk to you any longer.**

“Let me make my position clear,” Doc said hotly, addressing the whole audience. “I am willing to consider any idea whatsoever — even that there’s an alien planet lurking in our solar system. But I want some hint of a rational explanation, even if it’s that the planet exists in hyperspace. I give Charles Fulby — (he waved toward the Ramrod) — a fractional plus score for his screens notion.”

He subsided, breathing victoriously. The Little Man took this opportunity to pop up from beside the big dog Ragnarok at the end of the front row and say: “Only ten minutes left I know this argument is interesting, but keep watching, please. Remember, we’re first and foremost saucer students. Flying planets are exciting, but just one little saucer, witnessed by a whole symposium, would be a real triumph for us. Thank you.”

Asa Holcomb had been blinking his flashlight toward town from the mesa top near the Superstition Mountains. After all, he was supposed to try to save his own life. But now, growing tired of that duty, he looked up again at the stars, diamond-bright during the full eclipse, and he named them without effort, and then lost himself once more in the earth-shadowed moon, standing there in the foreground like some great Hopi emblem hammered out of age-blackened silver. There was always something new to be seen in the unchanging night sky. He could easily lie here and watch all night without a moment of boredom. But the weakness and the strangeness were growing greater, and the rock beneath him had become very cold.

Pepe Martinez and High Bundy rose from their cushions and drifted like leaves toward the grimed brick wall of the roof in Harlem. Pepe said, waving toward the moon: “One more puff and then — poof! I’ll be there, just like John Carter.”

High said: “Don’t forget your spacesuit.”

Pepe said: “I’ll take a big lungful of pot and live on that.” He waved toward the stars. “What’s all that black billboard of jewelry advertising say, High?”

High said: “Billboard! That’s motorsickles, man, every one of them with a diamond headlight, going every way there is.”

Arab, still on his cushion before the tent, and now trickling down his gullet a few drops of muscatel from a thin liqueur glass, called: “What of the night, oh my sons?”

Pepe called back: “Beautiful as a silken serpent, oh my Daddy-o.”

The moon continued to swing through Earth’s cold silent shadow at her sedate pace of forty miles a minute, as irrevocably as the blood leaking into Asa Holcomb’s chest, or the spermatozoa lashing their tails in Jake Lesher’s loins, or the hormones streaming from Don Guillermo’s adrenal glands, or the atoms splitting to heat the boilers of the “Prince Charles,” or the wavicles carrying their coded pictures to Spike Stevens’ cave, or Wolf Loner’s unconscious mind opening and shutting its windows in the rhythm he called sanity. Luna had been doing it a billion years ago; she would be doing it a billion years hence. Some day, astronomers said, obscure tidal forces would draw her so close to earth that racking internal tides would shatter her, turning her into something like the rings of Saturn. But that, astronomers said, was still a hundred billion years away.