The Wanderer

Similarly three violet beams shot from the Wanderer to the Stranger and were intercepted. Blue and violet beams stretched, criss-crossing, between the two planets, like a long, geometrically drawn cat’s cradle.

“This is it!” Hixon yelled fiercely.

Wojtowicz was watching so singlemindedly that he walked off the ramp. From the corner of his eye, McHeath noted him drop out of sight and raced over.

“I’m O.K., kid, I just slipped down here a little ways — see, I can reach you,” Wojtowicz replied reassuringly to McHeath’s anxious call. “Only give me a hand up, will you, so I don’t have to stop watching?”

Hixon called up to the truck: “You should be out here seeing this, babe — it’s amazing!”

From inside the cab Mrs. Hixon shouted back: “You watch the fireworks for me, Billy boy — I’m driving the truck!” And she honked viciously at the Corvette, which seemed to be stopping.

But Hunter was only slowing a bit. He’d taken a couple of quick glances at the battling planets, and it still seemed to him more important to get this gang into the Space Force base while the excitement lasted and perhaps as it ran interference for them. He had to get that done and the juiceless momentum pistol delivered, too — he had come to share much of Margo’s obsession on the latter point. While she, tramping along to the left of the hood, was obviously still of the same mind and mood.

So Hunter called out: “Come on, everybody! Here we turn right. Don’t walk off the end!” And he swung the car up onto the plateau.

There at last they found personnel — three soldiers who might well have been on guard duty, judging from the three weapons leaned against the wall of the tin hut behind them, but who were now crouching restlessly on their hams to stare up at the interplanetary battle. One of them was snapping his fingers.

As the truck swung up onto the plateau after the Corvette and both cars almost stopped, Margo quickly walked up behind the soldiers.

Overhead three more blue lines and two more violet ones added themselves to the laser barrage, complicating the cat’s cradle.

Margo touched the nearest soldier on the shoulder, and when he didn’t react, shook him by it He turned a wild sweating face up at her.

“Where is Professor Morton Opperly?” she demanded. “Where are the scientists?”

“Christ, I wouldn’t know,” he told her. “The longhairs are over there somewheres.” He waved vaguely toward the interior of the plateau. “Don’t bother me, lady!” He whirled back, his face on the sky again, and pounded one of his buddies on the shoulder.

“Tony!” he yelled. “I got two more bills says Old Goldy beats the bejesus out of Cannonballl”

“You’re faded!”

(Twenty-five hundred miles east, Jake Lesher clutched Sally Harris and gasped: “Oh, Sal, if I could have made book on this!")

Margo walked on. Mrs. Hixon honked again. Hunter drove on slowly, following Margo. He called sharply to the figures close around the two cars: “Keep moving, everybody. Watch and walk.”

Ahead floodlights went on against white walls, silhouetting knots and huddles of men, none of them moving, all of them staring at the sky.

Two more blue beams flashed on, not exactly from the Stranger, but from points a half diameter out from her — huge battleships of space, perhaps. One of the new beams needled through to the Wanderer. There was an incandescent gout at the edge of the north yellow notch of the mandala, and when the dazzling white light faded there was a long ragged black hole there in the Wanderer’s golden and purple skin.

Ann’s voice cut through, shrill with tragedy. “Mommy, they’re hurting the Wanderer! I hate it!”

Pop, stumbling along and shaking his fists once more, snarled gleefully: “Fry ’em, oh, fry ’em! Keep it up! Kill yourselves!”

Suddenly the nine blue beams impinging just short of the Wanderer spread out, generating a pale blue hemispherical shroud half masking the Wanderer — a sort of mist-curtain through which the yellow and violet features of the planet showed dimly. The violet beams vanished.

“They’re drowning them,” Hixon yelled. “It’s the kill!”

“No, I think the Wanderer’s putting up a new kind of defensive screen,” the Little Man contradicted.

Five blinding points of white light sprang out on the steely surface of the Stranger.

“Missiles exploding!” McHeath guessed. “The Wanderer’s fighting back!”

The Ramrod, breathing heavily and leaning against the truck as he strode along with it, now cried out in an agonized appeal: “But what must we understand from this? Do hate and death rule the cosmos, even among the most high?”

Rama Joan, her eyes on the sky as she pulled Ann along, called back to him in a swift, bell-like voice: “The gods spend the wealth the universe gathers, they scan the wonders and fling them to nothingness. That’s why they’re the gods! I told you they were devils.”

Ann said accusingly: “Oh, Mommy.”

True to McHeath’s guess, the five white points had swollen to the pale hemispheres of explosion fronts, through which the steely surface of the Stranger showed unbroken.