The Wanderer

“That’s right,” the Little Man said coolly. Those beams bracketing the Wanderer look more to me like a shot over the bows.”

Hixon heard that. “Like I said, arrest,” he pointed out eagerly. “You know — ‘Don’t move or we’ll shoot to kill!’ ”

The bright blue beams were extinguished at their source and died along their length as swiftly as they had first shot out. They left behind two yellow afterimages drawn on the gray sky, but moving with the eyes that saw. Yet the two original blue beams, though rapidly growing shorter and fainter, could still be seen crawling away beyond the Wanderer like straight blue worms into the gray infinity.

Hixon said: “My God, I thought they’d never quit. They must have fired for two minutes.”

“Seventeen seconds,” the Little Man informed him, looking up from his wrist watch. “It’s a proven fact that in a crisis time estimates vary wildly, and witnesses are apt to disagree on almost everything. That’s something we’ve got to watch out for.”

“That’s right, Doddsy, we got to keep our heads,” Wojtowicz agreed loudly, almost skipping around in his little circle now, his voice quite gay. “They keep throwing surprises at us, and all we can do is keep taking them. Whee-yoo! It’s like the front line — it’s like sitting out a bombardment.”

As if the word “bombardment” had pulled a trigger, there came a dull roaring from all around them and then a vibration, and then the road under their feet began to rock. The springs of the Corvette and the truck whined and groaned. Ray Hanks whimpered with pain, and McHeath, still standing over him, had to grab at the truck’s side to keep from being pitched out.

To a floating observer, everyone would have seemed to be joining Wojtowicz in his eerie circular dance and making it a staggering one. One of the women screamed, but Mrs. Hixon cursed obscenely, and Ann cried: “Mommy, the rocks are skipping!”

Margo heard that and looked up the slope where she and Hunter had been, and saw boulders descending it in fantastic bounds — among them, she thought, the giant’s coffin on which they’d spread the blanket. Unslowed by the weird gust of guilt that went through her, she pulled the momentum pistol out of her jacket and thrust out with her other hand to steady herself against the Corvette, but there was no steadiness there, only a greater rocking. The boulders came on. Hunter saw what she was doing and sprang to her and shouted: “Is the arrow pointing toward the muzzle?”

She shouted, “Yes!” And as the boulders converged like bounding gray beasts, she pointed the momentum pistol into their midst and, herself fighting to keep on her feet, clamped down her finger on the trigger-button.

As the earthquake shocks themselves lessened and damped out, the boulders coincidentally slowed in their wild, smashing descent, seemed almost to change to great gray pillows, slowly rolled instead of bounding, rolled slower yet, and stopped moving beside the road, almost at Margo’s feet, the giant’s coffin lying where the edge of the truck’s shadow had been.

Hunter pulled her finger off the button and looked at the scale on the grip. There was no more violet.

He looked down the quarter mile of mountain road to the Coast Highway and for a wonder it looked free of new slides and with the water all gone — though it was sloshing wildly in the farther distance. Just across the highway brightly gleamed the mesh fence that guarded the foot of Vandenberg, while across from the mouth of the mountain road loomed the big gate.

Overhead shone the Wanderer and the Stranger, the former trending into the three-spot — the half-hour stage between the serpent-egg and the mandala — the latter as coldly serene as if its gravity had nothing whatever to do with the earthquake just triggered.

In the resounding silence Ida was moaning: “Oh, my ankle.”

Wojtowicz asked in a snickering voice: “What do we do now? What’s next on the show?”

Mrs. Hixon was snarling at him: “There’s nothing to do, you clown! It’s the end!”

Hunter pushed Margo into the Corvette and got in himself, then stood up behind the wheel and honked the horn for attention. He said loudly: “Get into the cars, everybody! Throw our stuff into the back of the truck if anybody wants to, but be quick about it We’re driving into Vandenberg.”

The Stranger gave many who saw it the feeling which Wanda and Mrs. Hixon had voiced — “This is too much. This is the end.” The more scientifically minded of these pessimists noted that the Stranger was near enough to the Wanderer — only about forty thousand miles away if it were the same distance from Earth — so that its gravity would largely augment rather than oppose the great tides the Wanderer had been raising.