The Wanderer

“I’ve thought about that,” Doc admitted with relish. “One idea I’ve come up with is that the thrust necessary to get a ship into and out of hyperspace might involve the creation of momentary artificial gravitational fields — fields so intense that they would visibly distort the starlight passing through that volume of space. So I’ve suggested to my astronomer friends that they watch for the stars to waver on clear nights of good seeing — and especially from satellite ’scopes — and that they hunt through short-exposure star photographs for evidence of the same thing happening — stars blanking-out briefly or moving twistedly.”

The thin woman in the second row said: “I saw a story in the papers about a man seeing the stars twirl. Would that be evidence?”

Doc chuckled. “I’m afraid not. Wasn’t he drunk? We mustn’t take these silly-season items too seriously.”

Paul simultaneously felt a shiver hug his chest and Margo clutch his arm.

“Paul,” she whispered urgently. “Isn’t Doc describing exactly what you saw in those four photographs?”

“It sounds similar,” he temporized, trying to straighten it out in his own mind. “Very similar.” Then, wonderingly: “He used the word ‘twist’.”

“Well, how about it?” Margo demanded. “Has Doc got something or hasn’t he?”

“Opperly said—” Paul began…and realized that Doc was speaking to him.

“Excuse me, you two in the back row — sorry, I don’t know your names — do you have a contribution to make?”

“Why, no. No, sir,” Paul called rapidly. “We were simply very much impressed by your presentation.”

Doc waved his hand once in a good-natured acknowledgment.

“Liar,” Margo breathed at Paul with a smile. “I’ve half a mind to tell him all about it.”

Paul hadn’t the heart to say no, which was probably a good thing. He was having another guilt attack, unlocalized but acute. Certainly, he told himself, he couldn’t spill inside Project information — to saucerites, to boot. Still, there was something wrong with a setup in which someone like Doc couldn’t know about those photographs.

But then he started thinking about the point at issue, and the shiver returned. Damn it, there was something devilish about the way Doc’s guesswork fitted with those photographs. He looked up urieasily at the dark moon. Margo’s words resounded thinly in his memory: “What if the stars around it should squiggle now?”

The moon-dust cannisters hanging on their thin metal stalks above the dimly glittering film of carbon dioxide snow looked like the weirdly mechanistic fruits of an ice garden. Moving in his helmet’s headlight beam, Don Merriam stepped toward the nearest one as gently as he could, so as to kick up a minimum of contaminating dust. In spite of his caution, some dry-ice crystals arched up in the path of his metal boots and fell back abruptly, as is the way of dust and “snow” on the airless moon. He touched the trigger on the cannister which sealed it hermetically and then he plucked it from its stalk and dropped it in his pouch.

“Highest-paid fruit picker this side of Mars,” he told himself judicially. “And even at that I’m finishing this job too fast to suit Union Czar Gompert, the Slow-Down King.”

He looked back up at the black earth inside the bronze ring. “Ninety-nine and nine-tenths per cent of them,” he told himself, “would agree I’m featherbedding. They think all space exploration is the biggest featherbed since the Pyramids. Or the railroads, anyhow. Air-clams! Troposphere-barnacles!” He grinned. “They’ve heard about space but they still don’t believe in it. They haven’t been out here to see for themselves that there isn’t any giant elephant under the earth, holding it up, and a giant tortoise holding up the elephant. If I say ‘planet’ and ‘spaceship’ to them, they still think “horoscope’ and ‘flying saucer’.”

As he turned toward the next cannister-bearing reed, his boot scuffed the crystal film, and a faint creaky whir traveled up the leg of his suit. It was an echo, from across the years, of his galoshes singing against the crusty Minnesota snow on a zero day.

Barbara Katz said, “Hey, check me, Mr. Kettering — I see a white light flashing near Copernicus.”

Knolls Kettering III, creaking a bit at the joints, took her place at the eyepiece. “You’re right, Miss Katz,” he said. “The Soviets must be testing signal flares, I imagine.”

“Thanks,” she said. “I never trust myself on moon-stuff — I keep seeing the lights of Luna City and Leyport and all the other science-fiction places.”

“Confidentially, Miss Katz, so do I! Now there’s a red flare.”

“Oh, could I see it? — But I hate making you get up and down. I could sit on your lap, if you wouldn’t mind — and if the stool would stand it.”

Knolls Kettering III chuckled regretfully. “I wouldn’t mind, and the stool might stand it, but I’m afraid the bone-plastic splice in my hip mightn’t.”

“Oh, gee, I’m sorry.”

“Forget it, Miss Katz — we’re fellow lensmen. And don’t feel sorry for me.”