The Wanderer

The Wanderer Page 42

The saucer students entered Vandenberg Two without hindrance or fanfare and altogether unromantically  -  like workers on the graveyard shift arriving at their factory.

There was no one at the mesh fence that had so lately been many yards under salt water, no one at the big gate now sagging open  -  nothing at all of note, in fact, except six inches of stinking mud  -  so they just drove through, most of them out of the cars to lighten them, and they started up the ramp to the plateau.

Hunter drove the Corvette. Occupying all of the small back seat and overlapping it a bit, lay Wanda, breathing heavily. Not even Wojtowicz had been able to bully her out of this heart attack.

Mrs. Hixon was driving the truck because Bill Hixon wanted to watch the sky, where the Wanderer in mandala face and the Stranger now bracketed the zenith  -  and because she didn't give a damn, as she said more than once. She was alone in the cab  -  Pop had wanted to stay, but she'd told him right out he smelled worse than the mud, and it was Bill's truck, and she wouldn't take it.

In the back of the truck were Ray Hanks and Ida, she nursing both his broken leg and her own swollen ankle. She didn't believe in sleeping pills and was feeding both herself and the feebly protesting Ray large quantities of aspirin.

"Chew them," she told him. "The bitterness takes your mind off things."

The rest were walking. Three times already some of them had had to heave at the truck to get it through bad places, and twice the truck had had to nudge the Corvette out of spots in which its tires just spun. Everybody was smeared with mud, their shoes globbed with it; and the truck tires were so muddied that their chains didn't chink.

There was a blue surge in the almost shadowless, mixed planet-light bathing the mucky landscape. Harry McHeath, by his youth better able than most of them to keep an eye on two things at once, called out: "It's started again! They're both doing it!"

Four ruler-straight, string-narrow, bright blue beams stretched across the gray sky from the Stranger to the Wanderer. But now instead of shooting past her they converged. Yet they did not strike the Wanderer, but stopped short of her by just a hair of gray sky, and were thrown back in four faint, semicircular, bluish-white fans.

"They must be hitting a field of some sort," the Little Man guessed.

"Like the Lensmen battles!" McHeath chimed excitedly.

Similarly three violet beams shot from the Wanderer to the Stranger and were intercepted. Blue and violet beams stretched, criss-crossing, between the two planets, like a long, geometrically drawn cat's cradle.

"This is it!" Hixon yelled fiercely.

Wojtowicz was watching so singlemindedly that he walked off the ramp. From the corner of his eye, McHeath noted him drop out of sight and raced over.

"I'm O.K., kid, I just slipped down here a little ways  -  see, I can reach you," Wojtowicz replied reassuringly to McHeath's anxious call. "Only give me a hand up, will you, so I don't have to stop watching?"

Hixon called up to the truck: "You should be out here seeing this, babe  -  it's amazing!"

From inside the cab Mrs. Hixon shouted back: "You watch the fireworks for me, Billy boy  -  I'm driving the truck!" And she honked viciously at the Corvette, which seemed to be stopping.

But Hunter was only slowing a bit. He'd taken a couple of quick glances at the battling planets, and it still seemed to him more important to get this gang into the Space Force base while the excitement lasted and perhaps as it ran interference for them. He had to get that done and the juiceless momentum pistol delivered, too  -  he had come to share much of Margo's obsession on the latter point. While she, tramping along to the left of the hood, was obviously still of the same mind and mood.

So Hunter called out: "Come on, everybody! Here we turn right. Don't walk off the end!" And he swung the car up onto the plateau.

There at last they found personnel  -  three soldiers who might well have been on guard duty, judging from the three weapons leaned against the wall of the tin hut behind them, but who were now crouching restlessly on their hams to stare up at the interplanetary battle. One of them was snapping his fingers.

As the truck swung up onto the plateau after the Corvette and both cars almost stopped, Margo quickly walked up behind the soldiers.

Overhead three more blue lines and two more violet ones added themselves to the laser barrage, complicating the cat's cradle.

Margo touched the nearest soldier on the shoulder, and when he didn't react, shook him by it He turned a wild sweating face up at her.

"Where is Professor Morton Opperly?" she demanded. "Where are the scientists?"

"Christ, I wouldn't know," he told her. "The longhairs are over there somewheres." He waved vaguely toward the interior of the plateau. "Don't bother me, lady!" He whirled back, his face on the sky again, and pounded one of his buddies on the shoulder.

"Tony!" he yelled. "I got two more bills says Old Goldy beats the bejesus out of Cannonballl"

"You're faded!"

(Twenty-five hundred miles east, Jake Lesher clutched Sally Harris and gasped: "Oh, Sal, if I could have made book on this!")

Margo walked on. Mrs. Hixon honked again. Hunter drove on slowly, following Margo. He called sharply to the figures close around the two cars: "Keep moving, everybody. Watch and walk."

Ahead floodlights went on against white walls, silhouetting knots and huddles of men, none of them moving, all of them staring at the sky.

Two more blue beams flashed on, not exactly from the Stranger, but from points a half diameter out from her  -  huge battleships of space, perhaps. One of the new beams needled through to the Wanderer. There was an incandescent gout at the edge of the north yellow notch of the mandala, and when the dazzling white light faded there was a long ragged black hole there in the Wanderer's golden and purple skin.

Ann's voice cut through, shrill with tragedy. "Mommy, they're hurting the Wanderer! I hate it!"

Pop, stumbling along and shaking his fists once more, snarled gleefully: "Fry 'em, oh, fry 'em! Keep it up! Kill yourselves!"

Suddenly the nine blue beams impinging just short of the Wanderer spread out, generating a pale blue hemispherical shroud half masking the Wanderer  -  a sort of mist-curtain through which the yellow and violet features of the planet showed dimly. The violet beams vanished.

"They're drowning them," Hixon yelled. "It's the kill!"

"No, I think the Wanderer's putting up a new kind of defensive screen," the Little Man contradicted.

Five blinding points of white light sprang out on the steely surface of the Stranger.

"Missiles exploding!" McHeath guessed. "The Wanderer's fighting back!"

The Ramrod, breathing heavily and leaning against the truck as he strode along with it, now cried out in an agonized appeal: "But what must we understand from this? Do hate and death rule the cosmos, even among the most high?"

Rama Joan, her eyes on the sky as she pulled Ann along, called back to him in a swift, bell-like voice: "The gods spend the wealth the universe gathers, they scan the wonders and fling them to nothingness. That's why they're the gods! I told you they were devils."

Ann said accusingly: "Oh, Mommy."

True to McHeath's guess, the five white points had swollen to the pale hemispheres of explosion fronts, through which the steely surface of the Stranger showed unbroken.

Hixon said: "I don't know about devils, but I know now there'll always be war." He waved a hand at the zenith. "What more proof could you ask than that?"

Mrs. Hixon shouted cryptically from the cab: "Now you're talking sense, Bill, and what good is it?"

The Ramrod gasped: "But when the highest...and the wisest...Is there no cure?"

Young Harry McHeath's imagination took fire from the tragedy of that question, and for a moment he saw himself in an almost all-powerful, one-man spaceship poised midway between the Wanderer and the Stranger, turning back their bolts from each other, somehow healing their sanity.

The Little Man said, not in a loud voice, almost as if to himself: "Maybe the cure always has to come from below. And keep coming from below. Forever."

But Wojtowicz heard him and without looking away from the sky asked: "How do you mean from below, Doddsy? Not from us?"

The Little Man looked at htm. "Yes, Wojtowicz," be said with a chuckle at the ridiculousness of it, "from little nothing guys like you and me."

Wojtowicz shook his head. "Wow," he laughed. "I'm punch-drunk."

Moving steadily forward all the time, the cars and the walkers were almost to the floodlit walls. A young man in a sweatshirt rushed by Margo and grabbed a major and yelled in his ear: "Opperly says douse those goddamn floodlights. They're spoiling our observations!"

Hunter, hearing that, had to think of Archimedes saying to the enemy soldier treading on his sand-diagram: "Don't spoil my circle!"

The soldier in the legend had killed Archimedes, but this major was violently nodding his head as he turned around. Hunter recognized Buford Humphreys from two nights back. At the same time Humphreys saw him, saw Rama Joan and Ann, saw the whole lot of the "saucer bugs" he had kept out of Vandenberg. He goggled wildly, then with a shrug of incomprehension and a quick glance at the sky, raced off, calling: "Goddamn it, corporal, kill those floods!"

Meanwhile Margo had grabbed the young man by his sweatshirt before he could dart away. "Take us to Professor Opperly!" she ordered. "We've got to make a report. Look, I've got a note from him."

"O.K.," he agreed without glancing at the dirty, crumpled sheet. "Follow me." He pointed a hand at the cars. "But douse those headlights!"

The Corvette's and the truck's beams winked out a moment before the white wall went dark, but Margo held on to the young man. His pale sweatshirt made it easy for Hunter to follow them. Beyond them Hunter saw now the loom of radar screens and the white barrel of a field telescope.

Overhead the blue beams flashed off along their length, and the mist-curtain around the Wanderer faded, to be instantly replaced by a hundred points of white light, stabbingly bright.

But even as McHeath, squinting his eyes, called: "Implosion globe!" it was to be seen that the Wanderer had slipped aside twice her diameter up the sky, with the dizzying feeling of the foundations of the universe shifting. The implosion globe brightened as the white blasts that had been on the other side of the Wanderer shone through and the globe now had a wide ragged neck where the Wanderer had burst out.

"They've gone inertialess  -  the whole planet," Clarence Dodd cried.

There were a half dozen ragged holes in the Wanderer's skin now, black but glowing dull red toward their central depths  -  so many of them that the mandala was barely identifiable.

Tangentially from the ravaged planet's side there shot out toward the Stranger a violet beam thicker and many times brighter than any of the earlier ones.

But before it was halfway to the Stranger, the bigger planet moved as swiftly as one of its beams  -  a rhinoceros rush across the sky, destroying all feelings of stability  -  to a position alongside the Wanderer. There was not a moon's width between them.

The Wanderer vanished.

A blue broadside burst from the Stranger and laced through the space where the Wanderer had been.

"Goddamn, they blew her to bits!" Pop screamed ecstatically.

"No, she disappeared a fraction of a second earlier," the Little Man contradicted. "You've got to observe!"

The Stranger, her steely surface unholed, though streaked with brown and greenish scars, hung there three, four, five seconds, then she vanished too  -  like a big dim electric globe, the solar highlight its filament, switched off.

The sheaf of blue laser beams and the single thicker violet one crawled away from each other, dimming and shortening but ruler-straight, into the astronomic distance, while the pearlike implosion globe from which the Wanderer had first burst grew momently paler, bigger, and ghostlier.

"The Wanderer escaped into hyperspace," McHeath said.

"Maybe, but she was a goner," Hixon said. "She'd have knocked to bits, and the Stranger's gone in after her. She's done."

"But we can't be sure," Hunter said. "She might go on escaping forever." In his thoughts he added, Like the Flying Dutchman.

"We can't even be sure they're really gone," Wojtowicz said with a nervous guffaw. "They might of just jumped to the other side of the earth."

"That's true," the Little Man said, "but we didn't see them even start to move...they just vanished. And I've got a feeling..."

Only then, as the bright yellow and orange afterimages faded from their retinas, did the saucer students begin to realize, one by one, that they were all standing quite still in inky darkness. Hunter had switched off the Corvette's ignition. Behind him he heard the truck's motor die. By twos and threes the stars began to wink on in the black heavens  -  the old familiar stars that the slate sky had masked for three nights.

Don and Paul gazed up through the spacescreen of the Baba Yaga at the empty starflelds and the blue and violet laser beams straight-lining off toward infinity.

They were both strapped down. Paul held a reddened handkerchief to his cheek. Don kept an eye on the skin temperature gauge and on the green-glowing aft radar picture of Southern California and the Pacific below. Although all but a trace of Earth's atmosphere was still under them, he'd already braked once, mostly to assure himself that the main jet would fire.

"Well, they're gone," Don said.

"Into the storm," Paul finished the thought "The Wanderer was a wreck."

"Nothing's a wreck that can boost into hyperspace," Don assured him quite cheerily. The stars began to crawl across the screen, and he tripped a vernier or two and they steadied.

"Maybe the Wanderer will drift to another cosmos," Paul muttered thoughtfully. "Maybe that's the way: don't try to force it, just drift like a wrecked ship with the hyperspatial currents, surrender to the storm."

Don glanced at him sharply. "She told you quite a bit, didn't she? I wonder if she got back aboard in time."

"Of course," Paul said shortly. "I think even those little ships can move as fast as light, or faster."

"That was quite a clawing she gave you," Don remarked casually, then rapidly added: "Me, I didn't have any big romances up there." He rippled the verniers again and frowned at the skin temperature gauge. He continued briskly: "And I don't think I got any left down below, either. Margo's really serious about this Hunter character, I'd say."

Paul shrugged. "What do you care? You always liked loneliness better than you liked people. No offense  -  liking yourself s the beginning of all love."

Again Don gave him a quick glance. "I bet you loved Margo more than I did," he said. "I think I always knew that."

"Of course I did," Paul said dully. "She'll be angry I lost Miaow."

Don chuckled. "What things that cat'll see." Then his voice changed. "You wanted to go with Tigerishka, too, didn't you? You stayed behind to ask her."

Paul nodded. "And she wouldn't have me on any terms. When I asked her what she felt toward me, she gave me this." He hugged his cheek against the bloody rag.

Don chuckled. "You're a glutton for punishment, aren't you?" Then, quite lightly: "I don't know, Paul, but if I were in love with a cat-lady, that clawing would be the one thing that would convince me she did love me back. Grab hold of the barrel now  -  here we go over Niagara Falls."

The saucer students stood in inky darkness roofed with stars. Then, so near at hand it seemed for a moment they were in a room, a small low light went on, showing a cluttered table and behind it a man with the ageless, thin, sharp-featured face of a pharaoh. Margo moved toward him, following the young man in the sweatshirt, and Hunter got out of the car and came up after her.

The man behind the table looked to one side. Someone there said: "The magnetic fields of both planets are gone, Oppie. We're back to Earth-normal."

Margo said loudly: "Professor Opperly, we've been hunting you for two days. I have here a gun that dropped from a saucer. It puts momentum in things. We thought you should be entrusted with it. Unfortunately we've used up all its charge, getting here."

He glanced quickly into her face, then down at the gray pistol she had taken from her jacket. His lips thinned in a small, quite nasty smile.

"It looks to me a great deal more like something from a dime store toy counter," he told her briskly. Then, turning again to the man beside him: "How about the radio sky, Denison? Is it clearing, or - "

Margo had quickly turned the arrow on top of the gun away from the muzzle, then pointed it across the table and pressed the trigger button. Both Opperly and the young man in the sweatshirt started to grab her, then stopped. Some papers drifted toward the gun and then along with them three paper clips and a metal pencil that had been holding some of the papers down. For a second they all clung to the gun's muzzle, then dropped off.

"It must be electrostatic," the young man in the sweatshirt said curiously, watching the papers as they fluttered down.

"It works on metal objects, too," the one addressed as Denison pointed out, seeing the paper clips as they fell. "Induction?"

"It pulled my hand! I distinctly felt that," Opperly himself said, spreading the fingers of the hand he had reached across the table toward the gun. He looked at Margo again. "Did you say it actually fell from a saucer?"

She smiled as she handed it to him.

Hunter said: "We also bring you a message from Lieutenant Donald Merriam of the Space Force. He'll be landing here - "

Opperly had turned to someone else beside him. "Wasn't there a Merriam among those lost at Moonbase?"

"He wasn't lost" Margo cut in. "He got away in one of the moon ships. He was on the new planet. He'll be trying to land here  -  maybe he's already coming in."

"And he had a special message for you, Professor Opperly," Hunter added. "The new planet has Earth-radius linear accelerators and an Earth-circumference cyclotron."

Opperly grinned..."We just had a demonstration of that, didn't we?"

None of them noticed a star wink belatedly on very close to Mars. An escaping laser beam had struck Deimos, the tiny outer moon of Mars, heating it white hot  -  to the considerable excitement of Tigran Biryuzov and his comrades.

Opperly put down the gray gun and moved around the desk. "Come with me, please," he told Margo and Hunter. "We should alert the landing field to this possibility."

"Wait a minute," Margo said. "Are you just going to leave the momentum pistol lying there?"

"Oh," Opperly said apologetically. He reached for it and handed it to Margo. "You'd better look after it for me."

Richard Hillary and Vera Carlisle tramped along a little road that wended south near the crests of the Malvern Hills. Once more there were other trampers with them, dotting the little road.

They had discovered that not even sex and companionship can still the lemming urge, at least by day. Richard was thinking once more of the Black Mountains. It might be possible to reach them without leaving high ground.

The morning sun was hidden by a gray overcast that had come in from the west just as the Wanderer had been setting at a quarter to its D face. There had been a weird phenomenon then. Just as the Wanderer had vanished in the cloud curtain, it had seemed to be reborn, all silver gray and bigger than itself, an hour above its vanishing spot. They had speculated as to whether this was a mirage of the Wanderer or a second strange planet. Then the mirage or the strange planet had vanished in the overcast.

Vera stopped and turned on her transistor wireless. Richard stopped beside her with a sigh of resignation. Two nearby walkers had stopped too, out of curiosity.

Vera slowly turned the dial. There was no static. She turned up the volume full and turned the dial again. Still only silence.

"Maybe it's broken, Miss," one of the people suggested.

"You've worn it out," Richard told her unsympathetically. "And a good thing."

Then the voice came, tiny and whistling at first, but then, as she tuned it, clear and loud in the gray-roofed silence of the hills:

"Repeat. A report, cabled from Toronto and confirmed by Buenos Aires and New Zealand, definitely states that the two strange planets have vanished as they came. This does not mean an immediate end to tidal reverberations, but..."

They went on listening. From up and down the road people were gathering, gathering...

Bagong Bung decided the waves had gone down enough to make it safe, so he took the stout cloth sack out from under him, where he'd been sitting on it for safety, along with the lashed-down little bags of coin from the "Sumatra Queen," and he opened it so that he and Cobber-Hume could peer in.

The wild waters, washing again and again across the orange life raft, had carried away all the mud and scoured clean all the tiny objects in the sack. Along with bits of coral and pebble and shell, there was the dark glow of old gold and the small, dark red flames of three  -  no, four!  -  rubies.

Wolf Loner stopped feeding soup to the Italian girl, because she had turned away to look at the rim of the rising sun overtopping the gray Atlantic. " Il sole," she whispered.

She touched the wood of the "Endurance." "Una nave."

She put her hand against the wrist of the hand holding the spoon and looked up into his face. "Noi siamo qui."

"Yes, we're here," he said.

Captain Sithwise looked down from the bridge of the "Prince Charles" at the leagues of mud-filmed green jungle beginning to steam in the low red sunlight.

The purser said: "Extrapolating from the casualties in view, sir, we have eight hundred broken limbs and four hundred fractured skulls to deal with."

The executive officer said: "Brazil has for herself the core of an atomic jungle city. I fancy that's the way it might turn out in the end, sir, though it should be quite a case in the international courts!"

Captain Sithwise nodded, but continued to study the strange green sea in which his ship had come to harbor.

Barbara Katz looked at the blue waters around the "Albatross." Hardly one wave in ten was even white-crested. The sun was rising over a coast of broken and bedraggled palms barely two miles away. Hester sat in the hatchway, holding the baby.

"Benjy," Barbara said, "There's a spare room below, and the blankets, at any rate, if there isn't canvas. Do you think you could rig up a little mast and sail and - "

"Yes, Miss Barbara, I'm sure I could," he told her. He stretched and yawned widely, pushing his chest at the sun. "But this time I'm going to take a rest first"

Sally Harris said to Jake Lesher: "Oh, Christ, now the excitement's all over."

"Jesus, Sal, don't you ever want to sleep?" Jake protested.

"Who could sleep now?" she demanded. "Let's start signaling people. Or better yet, now we got all the material, let's really work on the play!"

Pierre Rambouillet-Lacepede regretfully pushed aside his three-body calculations, which could never now be fully verified, and gave ear to Francois Michaud.

The younger astronomer said excitedly: "We have pinned it down beyond the possibility of doubt! The sidereal day has been lengthened by three seconds a year! The intrusive planets have had a measurable effect upon the earth!"

Margo and Hunter stood in the dark arm in arm on the edge of the landing field toward the north end of the plateau of Vandenberg Two.

"Are you bothered about meeting Don and Paul?" he whispered to her. "I shouldn't ask that, of course, when we're all keyed up over whether they'll even make it."

"No," she told him, putting her other hand over his. "I'll just be glad to greet them. I've got you."

Yes, she has, he reflected, not altogether happily. And now he had to fit his life to his conquest. Could he give up Wilma and the boys? Not altogether, he was sure.

Then something else occurred to him.

"And now you've got Morton Opperly," he whispered.

Margo grinned, then asked: "Just what do you mean by that, Ross?"

"Nothing in particular, I think," he told her.

Around them were gathered the rest of the saucer students. The truck and the Corvette stood just behind them.

To one side were Opperly and a few members of his section. Radio contact with the Baba Yaga had been reported from the tower a few moments ago.

Over their heads the old familiar stars of the northern sky spread between the two constellations of Scorpio and the Dipper, but high in the west there lay among them a spindle-shaped scattering of new stars, some faint, some brighter than Sirius  -  the glittering remnants of Luna.

"It's going to be funny, not having a moon any more," Hixon said.

"A hundred gods sponged out of mythology at one sweep," Rama Joan remarked.

"I'm more sorry to lose the Wanderer," Ann piped up. "Oh, I hope they got away."

"More than the moon gods are gone," the Ramrod said gloomily.

"Never mind, Charlie," Wanda told him. "You've seen great things come to pass. All your predictions - "

"All my dreams," he corrected her. He frowned, but pressed her hand.

Hunter said: "We'll get two gods back for every one we lost. That's my prediction."

Pop said grumpily: "I don't give a damn about the moon going. She never did a thing for me."

"She never even softened up one pretty girl, Pop?" Margo asked him.

McHeath said, as if he'd just worked it out: "No moon  -  no tides."

"Yes, there'll still be solar tides," the Little Man corrected. "Small ones, of course, like they have at Tahiti."

"I wonder what'll happen to what's left of the moon?" Margo asked, looking toward the west "Will it just keep going in a ring?"

Opperly heard that and said in explanation: "No, now that its gravitational center has gone with the Wanderer, the fragments will spread out at the velocity they had in orbit-five miles a second, about. Some of them will strike Earth's atmosphere in approximately ten hours. There'll be a meteor shower, but not too destructive, I imagine. The ring lay in a plane passing above our North Pole. Most of the fragments should miss us. Many of them will take up long, elliptical orbits around Earth."

"Gee, " Wojtowicz remarked rather cheerily, "it's like having Doc back to explain things."

"Who's Doc?" Opperly asked.

The group was silent for a moment Then Rama Joan said: "Oh...a man."

At that moment a yellow flare shone in the zenith, became a lemon flame pointing and dropping earthward. There was a softly mounting roar, such as comes from a fireplace when all the wood catches. The Baba Yaga touched down, its yellow jets dying, to a perfect landing.