The Wanderer

The Wanderer Page 3

Paul Hagbolt looked at the heights ahead, where the Pacific Coast Highway swung inland and began to climb. Beyond this approaching bend, between the road and the sea, loomed the three-hundred-foot plateau on which stood Vandenberg Two, home of the Moon Project and the U.S. Space Force's newest base and rocket launching and landing area. Gleamingly wire-fenced around its foot and showing only a few dark red lights along its crest which stretched off endlessly, the space base towered mysteriously between the diverging highway and ocean  -  an ominous baronial stronghold of the future.

The highway hummed more hollowly as the convertible crossed a flat concrete bridge over a wash and Margo Gelhorn sat up sharply beside him. Miaow flinched. The girl's gaze swung back past Paul. "Hey, wait a minute."

"What is it?" Paul asked, not slowing down. The highway had begun its climb.

"I'd almost swear," Margo said, staring back down the road, "that I saw a sign with the words 'Flying Saucer' on it."

"Flying Saucer-Burgers?" Paul suggested. "Same shape, you know."

"No, there wasn't a cafe or anything like that. Just one little white sign. Right before the wash. I want to go back and have a look at it"

"But we're almost to V-2," Paul objected. "Don't you want to see the moon through a 'scope while the eclipse is still on? You'll be able to see Plato, only we'll have to put up the top and leave Miaow locked in the car. You can't take pets into Vandenberg."

"No, I don't," Margo said. "I'm sick of being given the slick Project treatment. What's more, I abominate any organization that denies cats are people!"

"All right, all right," Paul chuckled.

"So let's turn back right now. We'll be able to see the moon better facing that way."

Paul did his best to drive past the little white sign, but Margo brought him up short. "There! Where the green lantern is! Stop there!" As the car bumped on the uneven shoulder, Miaow sat up and stretched and then looked around with no great interest.

There was a dirt road going down beside the beach, along the foot of the headland the highway had swung inland to climb  -  a lesser bump before the big plateau of Vandenberg Two.

On one side of the dirt road there hung a flickering kerosene lantern with green glass around the flame. To the other side, standing out sharply in the convertible's headlights, was a rather small white sign. The black lettering on it, not at all crudely drawn, read: THIS WAY TO THE FLYING SAUCER SYMPOSIUM.

"Only in Southern California," Paul said, shaking his head.

Margo said, "Let's drive in and see what's going on."

"Not on your life!" Paul assured her loudly. "If you cant stand Vandenberg, I can't stand saucer maniacs."

"But they don't sound like maniacs, Paul," Margo said. "The whole thing has tone. Take that lettering  -  it's pure Baskerville."

Snatching up Miaow, she clambered out of the car for a closer look.

"Besides, we don't know if the meeting's tonight," he called after her. "It was probably earlier today, or even last week. Who knows?" He stood up too. "I don't see any lights or signs of life."

"The green lantern proves it must be tonight," Margo called back from where she stood by the sign. "Let's go, Paul."

"The green lantern probably has nothing to do with the sign."

Margo turned toward him, holding up a black finger in the headlight's glare.

"The paint's still wet," she said.

The moon burrowed deeper into the earth's shadow, nearing that central point where the three bodies would be lined up. As always the moon  -  and much less strongly in its effects, the sun  -  plucked at the planet between them with invisible gravitational fingers, straining earth's rock crust and steel-strong inner parts, lightly brushing the triggers of immense or tiny earthquakes, and setting the ponderous film of Earth's oceans and seas, gulfs and channels, straits and sounds, lakes and bays resonating in the slow and various music of the tides, whose single vibrations are a little longer than a night or day.

On the other side of the earth from Southern California, swart Bagong Bung, sweat dropping from under his splotched yellow turban onto his bare shoulders and chest, called to his naked Australian mate to cut the engine of the "Machan Lumpur." If they didn't lose any time, they'd be getting to the little inlet south of Do-Son before the ten-foot tide could lift them over the bar, and here in the Gulf of Tonkin the demon-controlled high tide came only once every twenty-four hours. A patrolling helicopter might take note if they hung about outside the inlet before slipping in to deliver the arms and drugs to the North Vietnam anticommunist underground!  -  afterwards proceeding to Hanoi to deliver the main cargo (also arms and drugs) to the Communists.

As the bow-ripples died, the 200-mile-wide gulf around the tiny rusty steamer glowed like a lake of molten brass. Bagong Bung, squinting about at the shimmering horizon, hand resting on the brass spyglass thrust in his belt, had no thought for the eclipse which noon and the globe hid from him. For that matter, the little Malay, his tired ship (mortgaged to Chinese bankers), and the lukewarm sea were all standing on their heads in relation to the Americas, and the sun baking his turban would have been toasting the soles of a billion Occidental feet, could it have shone through the planet between.

Bagong hung was dreaming of the host of wrecked ships' under the shallow waters around him and south and east away, and of the treasure he would win from them when he had accumulated enough money from this accursed smuggling to pay for the equipment and the divers he'd need.

Don Guillermo Walker told himself that the cluster of feeble lights he'd just droned past must be Metapa. But  -  his celestial navigation being as much boast as his European Shakespearean career  -  what if they were Zapata or La Libertad? Better, perhaps: in widely missing his target he'd miss the torture. Sweat itched on his chin and cheeks. He should have shaved his beard, he told himself. His captors would say, jiggling the bull prod in the steaming cell, that the beard proved he was a Castro-inspired Communist and his cards of the John Birch Society forgeries or worse. Burn la barba off his face with la electricidad! "Damn you for getting me into this, you whore in black underwear, you nigger-Indian bitch!" Don Guillermo yelled at the sooty orange moon.

The "Prince Charles" and the dory "Endurance" went their diverging ways across the dark Atlantic. Most of the nylon-shod ones had gone to their rendezvous with sleep or each other, but Captain Sithwise was taking a turn on the bridge. He felt strangely uneasy. It was having those Brazilian insurgents aboard, he told himself: this new lot of empire-snatchers did such unaccountably crazy things  -  as if they lived on ether.

Wolf Loner rocked in the arms of the sea, cushioned by a mile of salt water. The cloudbank under whose eastern verge the "Endurance" had entered was a vast one, trailing veils of fog and stretching to Edmonton and the Great Slave Lake, and from Boston north to Hudson Strait.

Sally Harris granted Jake Lesher another burst of hand-clutching at a dark turn in the House of Horror, but, "Hey, don't ruck up my skirt  -  use the auxiliary hip placket," she admonished.

"Are your pants magnetically hung, too?" Jake demanded.

"No, just Goodyear, but there's a vanishing gadget. Easy there  -  and for God's sake don't tell me they're like the big round loaves of good homemade bread Mama Lesher used to bake. That's enough now, or the Rocket'll close down before we've seen the eclipse."

"Sal, you were never astronomical like this before and we don't need that kind of roller-ride. You got the key to Hasseltine's place, don't you, and he's away, isn't he?  -  and besides, you've never taken me there. If that skyscraper isn't high enough for you - "

The roller coaster's my skyscraper tonight," she told him. That's enough, I said!"

She twisted away from him and ran off, past an eight-foot-tall gray Saturn-man who reared out of a wall, gripping a yard-long raygun and peppering her with sizzling blue light.

Asa Holcomb, puffing a bit, surmounted the top of the little mesa west of Arizona's Superstition Mountains. Just at that moment the wall of his aorta tore a little, and blood began to seep into his chest There was no pain, but he felt a weakness and sensed a strangeness, and he quietly lay down on the flat rock, which still had a little heat in it from the day of sun.

He was neither particularly startled nor very afraid. Either the weakness would pass, or it would not. He'd known this little climb to a good spot to watch the eclipse was a dangerous thing. After all, his mother had warned him against climbing by himself in the rocks, seventy years ago. Doubly dangerous, with an aorta paper-thin. But it was always worth everything to get away by himself, climb a bit, and study the heavens.

His eyes had been resting, a little wistfully, on the lights of Mesa, but now he lifted them. This was about the fiftieth time he had seen Luna shrouded, but tonight she seemed more beautiful in her bronze phase than ever before, more like the pomegranate Proserpine plucked in the Garden of the Dead. His weakness wasn't passing.