The Wanderer

The artificial gravity field was still on, so they were sprawled on the floor of the saucer. This was transparent also. Through it they could see, by sunlight reflected from the two planets that had erupted from hyperspace, the dark expanse of Southern California, here and there invaded by the dim silver of the sea, and for the other half of the floor-picture the relatively bright expanse of the Pacific itself, though both sea and land were somewhat blurred by the layers of Earth’s atmosphere.

There was one obstruction in this lower picture. From the now-invisible port in the center of the transparent floor, the thick worm of the space tube stretched off to the side, where presumably the Baba Yaga hung out of view. The reflected light from the Stranger and the Wanderer, striking through the two rigid transparencies, gleamed on the ridged metal of the tube outside and in, showing the first two of the inner handholds by which a being in free fall could pull himself through the tube.

Both Paul and Don avoided looking down. The artificial gravity field, although Tigerishka had assured them it extended only inside the saucer, made the depths below distinctly uncomfortable.

They had the same view as did those approaching Vandenberg of the Stranger and the Wanderer, except that for Paul and Don the two planets were much brighter, and were backgrounded not by slate-gray sky but by the star-spangled black of space.

The sight was weird, arresting, even “glorious,” yet because of their knowledge of the underlying situation, however partial and fragmentary, Paul and Don felt chiefly an ever-mounting tension. There above them hung the Pursued and the Pursuer, Rebellion and Authority, Adventure and Restraint — hung in the stasis of an uncertain truce, while the two orbs watched and measured each other.

The bulge-sided yellow triangle in the purple needle-eye face of the Wanderer and the bright solar highlight in the vaster, gibbous, gunmetal round of the Stranger were two great eyes staring each other down.

The tension was deadly, shriveling. It made Don and Paul, despite the support of each other’s presence, want to shrink out of sight, want to sink down, down, down through the layers of Earth’s atmosphere and rocky, maternal flesh to some lightless womb. Even the eagerness of any eye to watch such wonders hardly balanced in them with this urge.

Paul asked in an almost childish voice: “Tigerishka, why haven’t you gone back to the Wanderer? It’s been a long while since the Red Recall flashed. All the other ships must have gone.”

From the embowering darkness by the control panel, where not a ray of Wanderer-light or Stranger-light touched her, Tigerishka replied: “It’s not time yet.”

In nearly querulous tones, Don said: “Hadn’t Paul and I better get aboard the Baba Yaga? I can manage the braking drop through the atmosphere, since there’s no orbital speed to kill, but it’ll be tricky, and if we have to wait much longer—”

“Not time yet for that, either!” Tigerishka called. “There is something I must demand of you first. You were saved from space and the waves. You owe a debt to the Wanderer.”

She leaned forward out of the dark so that her violet and green muzzle and breast, vertically shadowed at eye and cheek and neck, showed in the planet’s light.

“In the same way I sent you to Earth,” she began softly yet piercingly, “I am now sending you to the Stranger to testify in behalf of the Wanderer. Stand in the center side by side and face me.”

“You mean you want us to plead for you?” Paul asked as he and Don complied almost automatically. “Say that your ships did everything possible to save humans and their homes? Remember, I’ve seen a lot of catastrophes that weren’t averted, too — more than I’ve seen of rescues, in fact.”

“You will simply tell your stories — the truth as you know it,” Tigerishka said, throwing back her head so that her violet eyes gleamed. “Grip hands now and don’t move. I am blacking out the saucer entirely. The beams that scan you will be black. This will be a realer trip for you than the one to Earth. Your bodies won’t leave the saucer, but they will seem to. Hold still!”

The stars darkened, the Earth went black, the twin violet sparks of Tigerishka’s eyes winked out. Then it was as if a whirlwind ripped a great doorway in the dark, and Don and Paul were whirled across space almost swift as thought — one second, two — then they were standing hand-in-hand in the center of a vast, seemingly limitless plain, flat as the salt desert by Great Salt Lake, only all glaringly silver gray and torrid with a heat they could not feel.

“I’d thought it would seem rounded,” Paul said, telling himself he still stood inside the saucer, but not believing it.