by Fritz Leiber
“I tried other stations,” the woman told Hunter, “but the static was even worse.”
Abruptly the music broke off. As one, they stopped, and several of the people ahead of them did, too.
The radio said, quite clearly: “This is a Sigalert Bulletin. The Hollywood and Santa Monica Freeways—no, change that—the Hollywood, Santa Monica and Ventura Freeways are closed by congestion. Motorists are requested to use none of the freeways until further notice. Please stay home. The appearance in the sky is not an atomic attack. Repeat: not an atomic attack. We’ve just been talking over the phone with Professor Humason Kirk, noted Tarzana College astronomer, and he tells us that the appearance in the sky is unquestionably—get that, folks, unquestionably—an orbiting cloud of metallic powders reflecting sunlight. He tentatively identifies the powders as gold and roseate bronze. The total weight of the powders can be no more than a few pounds, Professor Kirk assures us, and they can’t hurt—”
“Oh, the stupid ass!” Doc broke in. “Powders! Puffballs!”
Several people shushed him, but by the time they could listen again, there was only the sound of the piano rippling through A minor runs.
DON MERRIAM figured he had to be within a hundred yards of the Hut when the second big moonquake came, a vertical one this time, but heralded by the same horrible grinding roar, as if Luna were tearing her guts out. His teeth stung and the metal of his suit vibrated fiercely, as if resonating a cosmic piano note.
Solid moon dropped from under his boots, then smashed up against their corrugated soles, then dropped away and smashed again. The dust carpet fell and lifted with him. Here and there bushels of it shot up a dozen feet or more, then fell back, abruptly compared with dust on Earth.
The jolts went on. Don fought to keep his footing as if he were standing on the back of a bucking horse, his hands ready to move to whichever side toward which he should overbalance. The jumping dust made bright vertical scrawls—thick, hairpin brushstrokes—against the starfields. Some solid sunlight was once more bathing Plato’s plain.
The jolts subsided. Don upped the polarization of his helmet window to four-fifths max and scanned for the Hut. He’d quit trying to raise them by suit radio. He couldn’t make out the portholes, but that was always harder in sunlight. He figured the right direction from the stars and started out. He thought he saw the gleam-edged, long-legged trapezoids of two of the Baba Yagas.
A second horizontal moonquake threw him on his face. He got his forearms raised in time to catch the impact. This ground-parallel temblor was protracted. There were a half dozen sideways surges. Plato’s gray dust-lake rippled to the horizon. Dust spray rose and fell. The stuff really did behave more like water (on Earth) than like dust. Rock knobs thrusting up through it made dust wakes. Dust squirts peppered Don’s helmet.
A vertical component added itself to the horizontal quake. The roar dazed him. Don’s suit shook like an empty tin can in a paint-mixer.
He gave up waiting and began to crawl toward the ships like a dust-drenched silver beetle. He wished he had a beetle’s two extra legs.
THE SAUCER STUDENTS were sorting themselves out as they headed for their cars, which showed up colorfully at the base of the brown cliffs. The general effect of the Wanderer’s light, mixing complementary yellow and violet, was yellowish white, except where mirror surfaces such as water reflected the entire orb, or in the edges of shadows where one color was cut off.
Hunter said to Paul, a shade enviously, “I suppose you Moon Project people already have this thing a lot more thoroughly comprehended than we do. More data, for one thing. Satellite ’scopes, radar, all the rest.”
“I’m not so sure of that, Ross,” Paul replied. “On the Project you develop a kind of tunnel vision.”
The Little Man came back toward them with Ragnarok on short leash and his clipboard in the other hand.
“Remember me?—I’m Clarence Dodd. Mayn’t I have your signature now, Miss Gelhorn?” he said winningly, holding out the clipboard to Margo. “Tomorrow a lot of people are going to be saying: ‘Why didn’t we sign it?’ But then it’ll be too late.”
Margo, struggling to contain Miaow, snarled: “Oh, get away, you idiot!”
“I’ll sign it for you, Doddsy,” Doc called cheerfully. “Only, come on over here and quit trying to provoke felino-doggy war.”
Ann giggled. “I like Mr. Brecht, Mommy.” The red-haired woman in evening clothes smiled down at her faintly.
“That’s what I like to hear,” Doc called. “Keep on propagandizing your mother.”
Paul took Margo’s elbow to guide her to his car, but then something made him stop and look up at the Wanderer. The purple-bordered yellow figure had rotated completely into view now and stood out sharply, thick at the base, thinner and sharply bent at the top. It teased Paul’s imagination.
AFTER
ONE
HOUR
Clarence Dodd—or the Little Man, as Paul still called him in his mind—gave Ragnarok’s leash to Doc and made another quick simplified sketch, using criss-cross lines to show the purple. He labeled it “After One Hour.”
One of the cars, a red sedan, backed and took off, far ahead of any of the others.
From ahead the thin woman called: “Please help us, someone. I think Wanda’s having a heart attack.”
Ragnarok whimpered. Miaow hissed.
Suddenly Paul realized what the yellow figure reminded him of: a dinosaur. A long-jawed dinosaur rearing on its great thick hind legs. His skin prickled. Then he was trembling and there was a faint low roaring in his body.
When Paul was a little boy, he had liked to stand on the middle of the porch swing, a cushioned, solid seat for three hanging from the ceiling by chains at the four corners. It had seemed at the time a daring feat of equilibrium. Now, all at once, he was standing on that swing again, for the ground under his feet moved, gently but solidly with a ponderous muffled thud, a few inches back, a few inches forward, and then back again, and he was swaying his body to keep balanced, just as he’d used to do on the swing.
Over inarticulate exclamations and calls, Hunter shouted with strident anxiety: “Come away from the cars!”
Margo clung to Paul. Miaow, squeezed between them, squeaked.
People were whirling and running. The brown cliff appeared to swell; cracks opened in it all over; and then it sank, slowly, it looked, but with shuddering sledge strokes at the end. Gravel pattered. A grain stung Paul’s cheek. There was a puff of gritty air. Suddenly the smell of raw earth was very strong.
“Come on!” Hunter yelled. “Some of them were caught!”
But Paul first looked upward again at the uprearing yellow figure on the purple orb now perceptibly nearer the moon.
Tyrannosaurus Rex!
PERSHING SQUARE is a block of little fountains and neatly manicured greenery roofing a municipal garage and atomic shelter in the heart of old Los Angeles, where the signs read “Su crédito es bueno” more often than “Your credit is good.”
Tonight the winos and weirdies and anonymous wayfarers who, next to the furred squirrels and feathered pigeons, are the Square’s most persistent inhabitants, had something more exciting to observe than the beards of Second Coming preachers and the manic gesticulations of threadbare lecturers.
Tonight the inhabitants of Pershing Square spilled into Olive Street at the corner of Fifth, where a bronze statue of Beethoven broodingly faces the Biltmore Hotel, Bunker Hill, and the Baptist Auditorium which serves as one of the city’s chief theaters. Their lifted faces were bright with Wanderer-light as they silently stared south at the monstrous sign in the heavens, but Beethoven’s visage remained introspectively in the shadow of its great brow and hair-mop as he peered down at his half-buttoned vest whitened with pigeon droppings.
There was a momentary intensification of the awed silence, then a faint distant roaring. A woman screamed, and the watchers dropped their gaze. For a long moment it looked to them as if black ocean were coming towar
d them up Olive in great waves crested with yellow and violet foam—great black waves that had traveled all the twenty miles north from San Pedro along the Harbor and Long Beach Freeways.
Then they saw that the waves were not black water but cold black asphalt, that the street itself was surging as great earthquake shocks traveled north along it. In the next instant the roaring became that of a hundred jets, and the asphalt waves tossed the watchers and broke up the walls of the buildings around them in a stone and concrete surf.
For a second an infinitely sinister violet light flashed from the deep eyesockets of the giant metal Beethoven, as he slowly toppled over backwards.
THE SAUCER STUDENTS had trouble enough coping with the results of the fringe reverberation of the big Los Angeles-Long Beach quake. After the thin woman and two others had been half dug, half pulled out of their light entombment in the edge of the landfall, a hurried count showed three others still missing. There followed a frantic ten minutes of digging, mostly with two bright-bladed shovels that the Little Man had produced from the back of his station wagon, which was solidly buried only as far as the rear wheels and its top dented in only about a foot Then someone remembered the red sedan that had left ahead of the rest; and someone else, that it had been the one in which the three missing people had arrived.
While the diggers caught their breath, Paul, whose convertible was hopelessly buried, explained his connection with the Moon Project and his intention of making with Margo for the beach gate of Vandenberg Two, and he offered to take anyone along with him who wanted to come and to vouch for them to the guards—their obvious distress in any case ensuring admission.
Doc enthusiastically endorsed this suggestion, but it was opposed by a thick-armed man wearing a leather windbreaker and named Rivis, who had a very low opinion of all military forces and the degree of helpfulness to be expected of them—and whose car had only its radiator and front wheels dirt-encumbered. Rivis, who also had four cute kids, a swell little wife, and an hysterical mother-in-law—all of them in Santa Barbara—was for digging out and getting home.
Rivis was seconded by the owners of the microbus and the white pickup truck, both only lightly buried vehicles. The truck’s people, a trimly handsome couple named Hixon wearing matching pale gray slacks and sweaters, were particularly insistent on getting out quickly.
There followed a progressively more embittered argument involving such points as: Would the Pacific Coast Highway be traffic-jammed and/or quake-blocked? Was Paul what he claimed? Would the motors of the buried cars start when dug out? (Rivis proved something by starting his, though his car radio got only the howlingest static.) Was Wanda’s heart attack genuine? Finally, weren’t the panelists and their dubious new friends a bunch of oyster-brained intellectuals scared of getting a few blisters on their hands?
In the end, half the saucer students, most of them with cars rather lightly buried, stuck with Rivis and the Hixons and, in a burst of hard feelings, even refused to promise to care for the fat woman who had had the heart attack until Paul could send a balloon-tired sand jeep from Vandenberg Two to pick her up.
The other half set off for the beach gate.
DON GUILLERMO WALKER knew the Wanderer had to be something like a planet, for it and its glaring image in black Lake Nicaragua below had followed him sixty miles southeast now without shifting position—except that it was nearer the western horizon and maybe nearer the moon. And now there was showing on the thing what looked like a golden cock crowing to wake Simon Bolivár. I once played in Le Coq d’Or, didn’t I? the lonely bomb-raider asked himself. No, it’s an opera, or a ballet.
The general glare had turned pinkish here and there along the western horizon; he didn’t know why. Skirting the long ridgy island of Ometepe, he saw more lights at Alta Gracia than you’d ever expect after midnight. Everybody up and gawking at it and going ape or diving into churches, he supposed.
Suddenly red glare and rocks erupted from beyond the town and for an instant he thought he’d dropped a bomb he didn’t know about. Then he realized it had to be one of Ometepe’s volcanoes letting go. He banked east—get away, get away from the blast! Those pink glares—why, the whole Pacific Coast must be in eruption, from the Gulf of Fonseca to the Gulf of Nicoya.
DON MERRIAM, a battered and grievously weak-legged beetle, pushed himself up on his arms beside the Hut’s proud magnesium flagpole and saw, where the Hut should be, a raw-walled chasm twenty feet across with little waterfalls of dust trickling down its farther lip.
One of the ships was gone with the Hut, one was lying on its side across the chasm with two of its three shock-absorbing legs sticking up like the legs of a dead chicken, while he’d almost crawled under the third Baba Yaga without seeing it.
They called the little moon-type rocket ships “Baba Yagas” because—Dufresne had first thought of it—they suggested the witch’s hut on legs that figures in a couple of popular bits of classical Russian music and that, in the underlying folklore, runs about by night on those legs. It was rumored that the Soviet moonmen called their ships “Jeeps.”
But now the walking-hut comparison was getting altogether too close, for the continuing vertical moonquake, which Don hardly noticed any more, was making the last Baba Yaga step about on its plate-shod legs as it rocked this way and that. One of the shoes was only a yard from the chasm and as Don watched, it tramped six inches closer.
Don carefully pushed himself into a wide-based crouch. He told himself Dufresne might have taken off in the missing rocket, though he’d seen no jet flare. And Yo might be alive or dead in the ship across the chasm. Gompert…
The Baba Yaga took another step toward the gulf. Don took a couple of quick ones himself across the jolting surface and then straightened and grabbed the last rung of the ladder that hung down from the body of the ship midway between the three legs.
He chinned himself and climbed toward the hatch, set ominously between the five trumpetlike tubes of the jet. The Baba Yaga rocked. Don told himself that his weight lowered its center of gravity a little, making its steps a little shorter.
Chapter
Ten
SALLY HARRIS AND JAKE LESHER were on one of the subway trains to be halted and emptied at 42nd Street. The traffic jams had been hopeless and Jake’s car was parked in Flatbush. Police helped the guards clear the subway cars and hurry the passengers topside.
“Buy why, but why?” Jake was demanding. “It looks bad.”
“No, good,” Sally told him. “Bombs, and they’d be herding us down. Besides, here we’re near Hugo’s penthouse. This is exciting, Jake!”
Emerging, they found Times Square more packed than they’d ever known it to be at three A.M.
Looking west on 42nd Street, they could see the Wanderer still quite high in the sky, with the moon so close they almost touched. On the south side of the street the shadow edge made a swath of motionless yellow people and on their side a swath of purple ones. The electric ads were all going full blast, but paled way down by the supermoonlight.
The Square was quieter than they’d ever known, too, except that just now a man emerged from behind them crying: “Extra! Read all about it! Read all about the new planet!”
Jake traded two bits for a Daily Orbit. Its tabloid front page was a pic of the Wanderer in wet, acrid red and yellow inks and six lines of information anyone could have got by looking at the sky and his watch. The headline was: STRANGE ORB BAFFLES MAN.
“Doesn’t baffle me,” Sally said in the highest spirits and then, grinning at Jake, “I created it. I put it up there.”
“Don’t be blasphemous, young woman,” a lantern-jawed man admonished her sourly.
“Ha, you think I didn’t do it, huh?” she demanded. “I’ll show you!” She cleared a place around her with her elbows and tossed Jake her jacket. Then, stabbing a finger successively at Lantern Jaw and at the Wanderer, and next snapping her fingers as she swayed provocatively, she began to sing, in an electrifying contralto and a melody bo
rrowed half-and-half from “Green Door” and “Strange Fruit”:
Strange orb!…in the western sky…
Strange light!…streaming from on high…
DON MERRIAM had ignited the Baba Yaga’s jet before he’d strapped down and when the aniline and nitric pumps had barely started to spin. The reason was simple enough: he’d felt the jouncing ship step off the edge.
He’d done everything he could to cut time. He’d blown the ship, letting its air escape in a great puff to clear a direct entry for himself, rather than waiting for the airlock between the fuel and oxidizer tanks to empty and fill. He’d barely dogged the hatches behind him and made only the most perfunctory swipe at the oxygen release lever although he knew his suit oxy was running out—and he’d been almost too late at that.
The cold jet fired strongly, however. Lemon-hot molecules streamed out of the Baba Yaga’s tail at almost two miles a second, and after a sticky moment she lifted, but sideways rather than up—like an old airplane taking off.
Perhaps Don’s mistake was in trying to correct at all—his present vector would likely have got him into some sort of orbit, perhaps quite efficiently. But he was flying by eye and he didn’t like the way white moon crossed by cracks kept bulking so large in the spacescreen, and he knew that the sooner you corrected the less power it took, and he wasn’t sure how much fuel and oxidizer he had—in fact, he still wasn’t quite sure which of the three sister ships he was in—and, besides all that, he was probably already quite giddy and illogical from oxygen-lack.
So, careless of the gravity and a half dragging at him, he reached out sideways—it was quite a reach: normally it would have been a robot’s or copilot’s job—and slapped the keys to fire three solid-fuel rockets on the side of the ship toward the moon.
The sudden extra, jolt they gave the Baba Yaga was enough to unseat him. Inexorably, but with agonizing slowness, the stick slipped out of his hand and he fell heavily—a lot more heavily than he would have on the moon—to the floor a dozen feet below, and his helmet smashed against the back of his head, knocking him out.