by Fritz Leiber
“But Doc’s a bachelor, while I believe you implied you had a family…Ross?” Margo pointed out with faint malice.
“Oh yes,” Hunter conceded a bit wearily. “Up in Portland there’s a Mrs. Hunter and two boys who think Daddy spends altogether too much time consorting with saucer bugs, considering the very few papers he’s got out of it and the nothing it’s done for his academic reputation.”
He was thinking of adding: “And, right now, they’re sitting up asking why Daddy wasn’t home the night the heavens changed and saucers came true”—but just then he realized they’d reached the boarded-up beach house and the old dance floor. There was the green lantern, he saw, still burning, and beside it a chair with a little stack of unused programs, and there were the empty chairs sitting in rows, though with the first rows much disarranged (when would Doddsy ever reclaim the deposit they’d made on them at the Polish funeral parlor in Oxnard?)—and there was a coat someone had forgotten laid over one of the chairs, and there was the panelists’ long table and under it some cardboard boxes they’d left in their hurry. And thrust deep into the sand nearby there was even the big furled umbrella Doc had used as part of a crude astrolabe when first checking the movement of the Wanderer.
As Ross Hunter saw these things standing out against the purple-gold-speckled, spectrally calm Pacific, he felt a great, unexpected surge of affection and nostalgia and relief, and he suddenly realized why, after being rebuffed by a landslide and a steel mesh fence and a red-tape major, they had trudged back to this spot.
It was simply that it was home to them, the spot where they’d been together in security and where they’d witnessed the change in the heavens, and that each of them knew in his heart that this might be the last home any of them would ever have.
Without haste Wanda and the thin woman and young Harry McHeath made for the boxes under the table.
Wojtowicz and the Little Man set down the cot with Ragnarok on it, half shrouded by Margo’s jacket.
Wojtowicz looked around, then pointed at the umbrella and said in a firm voice: “I somehow think that would be the right spot—that is, if you wouldn’t mind?” he added to Doc, who’d walked silently all the way from Vandenberg Two beside the Little Man.
“No, I’d be proud,” Doc answered gruffly.
They lugged the cot up, and Doc recovered his umbrella. Then Wojtowicz took a flat-bladed spade from under the edge of the mattress on the cot and began to dig.
The fat woman noticed and called down from the platform: “No wonder I felt something sticking in my side all the way.”
Wojtowicz paused to call out: “You should just be damn thankful you got that free ride when you thought you was having a heart attack.”
Wanda called back angrily: “Look, when I have a heart attack, it’s bad—and there’s no thinking about it! But when my heart attack’s over, it’s over.”
“O.K.,” Wojtowicz told her over his shoulder.
The spade made a faint, clean, rasping thud as he dug. The thin woman and Harry McHeath wiped sand from some cups and set them out. The rest of them watched the moon emerging from behind the Wanderer, which seemed to tip over as it sank toward the Pacific.
Luna looked visibly conical—mashed. And instead of the smooth smudges of “seas” on her face, there was the faintest tracery of shadow-lines, here and there palely flashing the Wanderer’s colors. The effect was horrid, somehow suggesting a sac of spider’s eggs.
A forceps birth, the Ramrod thought The White Virgin, fecundated by Ispan, bears herself in pain—and must birth herself again and again in torture. I had not thought of that.
Margo thought, I’m sorry I called her a bitch. Don…
Rama Joan whispered to Paul: “Her young man was up there, wasn’t he? Then she could be your girl now, Paul.”
Wojtowicz straightened up. “That’s all the deep we can have it,” he told the Little Man huskily. “Any further we’d get water.”
They turned toward the cot. Clarence Dodd unsnapped the leash from the heavy collar and lifted the jacket a little from Ragnarok’s body, looking at Margo, but she shook her head, and he grimaced a smile at her and let the jacket fall again. He and Wojtowicz and Doc let down the shrouded dog into his shallow grave. Miaow lifted in Margo’s arms to watch curiously.
Over the Pacific the Wanderer hung as strangely as if the blind spot had acquired imperial colors, and was as perfectly spherical as the emergent moon was maimed. The western yellow spot had rotated out of sight, so that the face the orb showed had become a Three-Spot; but the most striking impression, with the two thick eastern arms of the purple cross widening above and below the great eastern yellow spot, was of the head of a purple beast with jaws agape.
Fenris Wolf, thought Harry McHeath. And now it looks like it’s really eating the moon, with the moon orbiting around in front between its jaws.
“It looks like a big dog getting ready to snap,” Ann said thoughtfully. “Mommy, do you suppose the gods have put Ragnarok up there, like they used to put Greek heroes and nymphs up in the stars?”
“Yes, I think that’s happened, dear,” Rama Joan told her.
The Little Man pulled out his notebook and pen automatically and then looked dully at the next empty page. Margo gave Miaow to Paul to hold while she took the things out of the Little Man’s hands and sketched the Wanderer for him, imitating his diagrammatic style.
FOUR
HOURS
The Serpent gorges on the Egg, thought the Ramrod. Or is it that roads divide?
Wojtowicz swiftly spaded first dry, then wet sand back into the grave. Doc took the leash out of the Little Man’s fingers and wove it tightly around the head of his furled umbrella and fastened it that way. When Wojtowicz had patted the sand flat with his spade and stepped back, Doc thrust the umbrella deep into the center of the grave.
“There, Doddsy,” he said, putting an arm around the Little Man’s shoulder. “He’s got a marker now. A sort of caduceus.”
From the platform the thin woman called: “Come and get it, everybody! The coffee stayed real hot.”
DONALD MERRIAM was in darkness again. The Baba Yaga had once more been eclipsed, this time by the moon as it passed in front of the Wanderer. The tiny moonship fell free between the two bodies. It was continuing to gain on the moon, but had not yet quite out-nosed it.
The cabin had swiftly warmed from the direct sunlight, but before it had become uncomfortably hot, the moon had swung between the Baba Yaga and the sun.
The darkness of this eclipse was not nearly as great as that of the first, being pervaded by sun-reflected violet and yellow from the Wanderer. This Wanderer-light revealed the continuing rock-churning of the moon’s surface, looking like a stormy sea seen from an airplane by brilliant moonlight.
At his altitude above the Wanderer—1,600 miles now by radar check—Don could see only about a fifth of the planet’s disk. Passing across the face variously named on Earth the X, the Notched Disk, the Wheel, St. Andrew’s Cross, and the Mandala, he saw only the western yellow spot and a rim around it widening ahead—the eastern and two polar yellow spots were out of sight for him around the curve of the Wanderer.
By watching the yellow spot emerge from the Wanderer’s night side across the sunrise line, Don had got confirmation that the Wanderer was rotating and that its top and bottom were indeed its poles, its axis being roughly parallel to that of Earth.
By timing the speed of the spot’s emergence Don had estimated the Wanderer’s period of rotation as six hours—a “day” only one quarter as long as Earth’s. And it was rotating in the same direction as he and the moon were moving in their two-hour orbits—the planet’s surface features following, but falling swiftly behind.
The greenish glow-spots on the Wanderer’s night side did not seem to show up in any way on the day side—perhaps they were some sort of phosphorescence visible only in the dark. Nor, so far as he could recall, had there been any indication of the distinction between violet and yellow ar
eas on the night side—apparently it took sunlight to bring that out.
A good half of the great yellow spot was occupied by the moon’s shadow—inky, and undeniably elliptical and growing more so. Studying it, Don noted a very ghostly pale green round beginning to intrude into its forward edge—apparently the green spots did carry around, though being invisible in sunlight.
The plain weirdness of his situation suddenly hit him—a midge between a black plum and a pink grapefruit, all three careening free.
He fancied himself, a little boy, in the kitchen of the Minnesota farmhouse, with the darkness of early evening pressing on the window, and he, Donnie, saying: “Ma, I found a deep black hole in the woods, and I know it has to go all the way through to the other side of the earth because I saw a star twinkling at the bottom. I got scared and, Ma, I know you won’t believe this, but as I came running home I saw a big yellow and purple planet behind the barn!”
He shook off the pseudomemory. However weird this situation might be, it was a little less so because he had lived a month on the moon and had now driven a spaceship through it.
He turned his attention to the white threads looping up from the nose of the moon. He swung ship to follow with his eyes their curving course against the stars, diverging at first and then beginning to converge again as they vanished north over the violet horizon of the Wanderer.
Well, if the white threads somehow tied the moon and the Wanderer together, it made sense that they should be tied to a pole of the latter. Attached to a spot on the equator of the Wanderer they’d get stretched and broken, or wound around the Wanderer, since the moon was orbiting three times as fast as the planet was rotating.
Tied together! Wound around! Here he was thinking of them as actual threads, as though the Wanderer and the moon were two Christmas tree ornaments.
Still, the white threads had to be something actual.
He followed them back along their course to the nose of the moon. The Baba Yaga was ahead of the moon now, but still in its shadow because they were both starting to swing behind the Wanderer again—its black sunset line that he had first seen through the moon-chasm was already in sight once more, chopping off the violet horizon.
So the nose of the moon was in shadow, its surface bronze-dim and churning. He took from the rack a pair of binoculars with big objective lenses and carefully focused them.
In the churning nose of the moon were a dozen huge, conical pits, their inner surfaces spinning rapidly clockwise, as though they were maelstroms in the fracturing rock.
Each sleek white thread, turning bronze-dark as it entered the moon’s shadow, led to the bottom of one of the whirlpool pits and kept swinging around in a tiny circuit, in pace with its whirling. The threads thickened somewhat down toward their restless roots. They resembled waterspouts or tornado-funnels.
Around each pit were three or four bright violet or lemon dots. He had seen one or two other such dots along the strands. It struck Don that they might be big spaceships, presumably from the Wanderer, and possibly generating gravitational or momentum fields of some kind.
For the inference to be made from the whirlpool pits and the entering strands was clear: Somehow, the substance of the moon, in the form of dust and gravel and perhaps larger rocks, was being sucked out and carried looping through space toward the north pole of the Wanderer.
ARAB AND PEPE and High stood over the Hudson, sharing a stick, ready to shred it into the pale, oil-filmed water if anyone should come.
But no one did. The city was strangely still, even for six in the morning. So High flipped away the half-inch butt, and Arab lit another reefer, and they passed it around.
Their arrival at the river, after slanting north past the General Grant Houses, and under the Henry Hudson Parkway, had been anticlimatic. There had been simply nothing, over to the west, but pale sky and distant piers and Edgewater and the southern end of the Palisades.
“She disappear somehow,” High decided. “Maybe just set.” He laughed. His gaze switched south to Grant’s Tomb. “What you think, General?”
“River look high, Admiral,” Arab adjudged, frowning, as he lit a third reefer for them.
“Sure do,” High agreed. “See it washin’ over that dock!”
“That no dock,” Arab protested scornfully. “That a sunken barge.”
“Just the same, water’s ten feet higher’n when we come.”
“You crazy!”
“I know where she disappear to,” Pepe cried suddenly. “That big purple’n golden thing a amphi-whamf—a balloon-submarine combo! She submerge. That why river high—she bulk it up. She lurkin’ down there, glowin’ in the wet-wet dark.”
As the others quivered at the delicious horror of the thought, Pepe threw up his spread-fingered hands beside his cheeks and cried again, piling it on: “No, wait! She not that. She a frozen atomic blast. They start the blast, then freeze the fireball. She float around like a ball lightning, first over the river, then under. When she unfreeze, city go whish! Look there!”
Red sun was glinting from banks of windows across the river, so low they looked like part of the water. Suddenly the pretended horror became appallingly real to all of them—the sudden fear against which no weed-smoker can wholly ensure himself.
“Come on!” Arab screamed in a whisper.
They turned and ran back toward Harlem.
JAKE LESHER curled his lip at the thinning crowd. With the sinking of the Wanderer and the seeping in of gray morning light, the excitement had drained out of Times Square. The earthquake litter now looked merely untidy and gritty—one more Manhattan demolition project.
Incredulously, as if they were something from a musical extravaganza, he remembered Sal’s song and the stamping crowd under the vast purple-and-amber floodlight. Then his lip relaxed and his eyes widened a little but stopped watching, as he felt brushing against the edges of his imagination the first tendrils of a dream—or of a scheme, for the two were very close in Jake’s universe.
Sally Harris suddenly snaked her arm through his from behind. As she pulled him around, she whispered rapidly in his ear: “Come on, let’s get out of here before those other wolves find me. It’s only four blocks.”
“You shouldn’t startle me that way, Sal,” Jake complained. “I was getting a money-making thought. Where to?”
“You were just saying nothing could startle you any more. Ha! I’m taking us to breakfast at Hugo Hasseltine’s penthouse—me and my little key. After that quake, the higher I get, the safer I’ll feel.”
“You’ll have farther to fall,” Jake pointed out.
“Yeah, but things won’t fall on me. Come on, you’ll scheme better on a full stomach.”
Way up, a little pink was showing in the sky.
Chapter
Sixteen
DOC GRUNTED HAPPILY and said, “I could do with another sandwich.”
“We thought we’d better hold back half,” the thin woman told him apologetically from the other side of the long table.
“It was my idea,” young Harry McHeath said, embarrassed.
“And probably a good one,” Doc allowed. “Straight out of Swiss Family Robinson. Anyone care for a taste of Scotch?” He fished a half-pint bottle out of his lefthand coat pocket. The fat woman humphed.
“Better save that for emergencies, Rudy,” Ross Hunter said quietly.
Doc sighed and tucked it away. “I suppose all second cups of coffee have been interdicted by the Committee of Public Safety, too,” he growled.
Harry McHeath shook his head nervously and hastened to pour one for Doc and then for several of the others.
Rama Joan said: “Rudolf, ages ago you were wondering what makes the colors of the Wanderer.”
She had had Ann stretch out on two chairs beside her, wrapped in the coat someone had left behind, with the girl’s head pillowed on her mother’s thigh. Rama Joan was looking at the Wanderer. The eastern yellow spot now had purple all around it, destroying the illusion of the jaw
s. The two polar yellow spots were shrinking as they rotated out of sight. In fact, the effect was almost that of a purple target with a great yellow bull’s eye. Meanwhile the faintly crack-webbed moon, perceptibly lozenge-shaped, had almost finished a second westward crossing of the Wanderer’s face.
Rama Joan said: “I don’t think it’s natural features at all. I think it’s simply…décor.” She paused. “If beings are able to drive their planet through hyperspace, they’d surely be able to give it an appearance, they considered artistic and distinctive. Cavemen didn’t paint the outside of their homes, but we do.”
“You know, I like that,” Doc said, smacking his lips. “A two-tone planet. Impress the neighbors in the next galaxy.”
Wojtowicz and Harry McHeath laughed uneasily. The Ramrod thought: Unwillingly they grow toward comprehension of Ispan’s glory. Hunter, his voice low but jerky with tension, said: “If you were that advanced, I don’t suppose you’d use natural planets at all. You’d design and build them from scratch. Gosh, this seems crazy!” he finished rapidly.
“Not at all,” Doc assured him. “Be damned efficient to use all of a planet’s volume. You could have storerooms and dormitories and field generators down to the very core. Of course that would require some pretty tremendous beams and bracing—”
“Not if you had antigravity,” said Rama Joan.
“Wow,” Wojtowicz said tonelessly.
“You’re clever, Mommy,” Ann observed sleepily.
Hunter said: “If you cancelled the gravity of a rotating planet, you’d have to have it pretty well tied together, or centrifugal force would tear it apart.”
“Nope,” Doc told him. “Mass and momentum would disappear together.”
Paul cleared his throat. He was sitting beside Margo and he’d taken off his coat and put it around her. He’d meant to put his arm around her too, if only for the practical purpose of getting some of his body-heat back, but somehow he hadn’t yet. He said: “If beings were that advanced, wouldn’t they also be careful not to injure or even disturb any inhabited planets they came near?” He added uncertainly: “I suppose I’m assuming a benign Galactic Federation, or whatever you’d call it…”