The Wanderer

The east-breeze coming over the mountains at their back was mostly tepid — fortunately for people all bone-weary and all exposed, except for the Hixons and Pop in the cab of the truck.

Save for that of the motors and wheels, the only sound was a faint, rhythmic, hissing roar from ahead.

The Wanderer had risen two hours after sunset and now rode above the same eastward mountains in the cloudless slate-gray sky, its warm winy and golden light creating the illusion that it was the source of the friendly breeze. It was no longer quite spherical, however, but slightly gibbous, like the moon two days after full. A narrow black crescent cut off the rim of the purple half of its yin-yang face as, mimicking the movements of the moon it had destroyed, it moved east around the earth, or rather, around a point between the two planets. Loosely girdling its equator like a filmy diamond-studded scarf, the trophy-ring of moon fragments glittered and gleamed.

The road now mounted gently to a wide saddle, the sides of which rose in smooth earthen slopes to flat, low rock crests. The Corvette reached the top of the saddle, pulled to the right, and stopped with four rapid horn-beeps, dousing its lights. The truck pulled up beside it to the left, and did the same.

Most of the party had at one time or another in their lives had the experience of looking down on a fog or a low cloud layer from a mountainside or an airplane, and seeing the hilltops lifting up through it, and marveling at how flat and far it stretched — a veritable ocean of clouds. Now the same persons had for a second or two or three the illusion that they were witnessing the same sight again, by Wanderer-light.

This illusory, nocturnal cloud-ocean began scarcely fifty yards beyond and no more than a dozen yards below them and it stretched to the western horizon, closely following to either side the contours of the hills. There was only one island, low and flat, but so big it stretched out of sight past the dark hillsides to the north. Red and white lights shone sparsely from this island and the Wanderer-light revealed two clusters of low, pale-walled, pale-roofed buildings. And already in the first moments of watching, there was a faint drone and a tiny red and green pair of lights slanting down from the south, as a small airplane landed on the island. A strait a quarter of a mile wide separated the island from the mainland.

Then the illusion faded and one by one the saucer students realized that it was not cloud-ocean that stretched to the horizon but salt ocean, not mist-water but solid-water sea, its waves breaking rhythmically against the hillside and the descending road fifty yards ahead; that the island was Vandenberg Two; and that the strait between covered among other things the Pacific Coast Highway where it swung inland of the Space Force base, home of the Moon Project — of Morton Opperly and Major Buford Humphreys, of Paul Hagbolt and Donald Merriam, though those last two were elsewhere now.

At the wheel of the Corvette, Hunter felt on his left shoulder fingers that lay lightly at first, but then gripped strongly. He put his right hand on top of the hand there and turned his head and looked at Margo’s face — the yellow hair drawn flat, the long lips, the hungry cheeks, the dark eyes — and she looked back, expressionless, at him.

Without lifting his hand from hers he called up to the truck: “We’ll camp here by the sea. When the tide goes down we’ll enter Vandenberg.”

Don Merriam gazed up the elevator shaft at the circle of sky swirling symphonically with a red-black storm, as if the colors had been chosen to match the fur of his conductor standing silently beside him.

The circle grew slowly, then rapidly, then the elevator stopped, and its floor was once more seamlessly part of the etched silver pavement.

Nothing seemed to have changed. The pillar of hurtling moonrock still towered like a gray pinnacle four times the height of Everest. Beyond the empty pavement the great plastic structures crouched off into the distance like an army of abstract sculptures. The pit yawned with its unsupported silver railings.

Then Don saw that only one saucer — colored with a violet-yellow yin-yang — hovered beside the Baba Yaga. That stained moon ship gleamed as if newly burnished, and instead of the ladder there hung below the hatch a stubby man-wide metal tube that looked telescoped.

Beyond the Baba Yaga, the Russian moon ship gleamed freshly, too, and a similar extensible-looking metal tube projected outside its hatch, which was located near the nose.

The felinoid lightly touched Don’s shoulder and said in his caressingly slurred English: “We are taking you to an Earth friend. Your ship is fueled and serviced, and it goes with us, but you will ride in mine at first There will be a transfer in space. Have no fear.”

Paul Hagbolt woke with a start Tigerishka was snarling at him: “Wake up! Get dressed. We’ve got a visitor!”