The Wanderer

Hixon said: “I don’t know about devils, but I know now there’ll always be war.” He waved a hand at the zenith. “What more proof could you ask than that?”

Mrs. Hixon shouted cryptically from the cab: “Now you’re talking sense, Bill, and what good is it?”

The Ramrod gasped: “But when the highest…and the wisest…Is there no cure?”

Young Harry McHeath’s imagination took fire from the tragedy of that question, and for a moment he saw himself in an almost all-powerful, one-man spaceship poised midway between the Wanderer and the Stranger, turning back their bolts from each other, somehow healing their sanity.

The Little Man said, not in a loud voice, almost as if to himself: “Maybe the cure always has to come from below. And keep coming from below. Forever.”

But Wojtowicz heard him and without looking away from the sky asked: “How do you mean from below, Doddsy? Not from us?”

The Little Man looked at htm. “Yes, Wojtowicz,” be said with a chuckle at the ridiculousness of it, “from little nothing guys like you and me.”

Wojtowicz shook his head. “Wow,” he laughed. “I’m punch-drunk.”

Moving steadily forward all the time, the cars and the walkers were almost to the floodlit walls. A young man in a sweatshirt rushed by Margo and grabbed a major and yelled in his ear: “Opperly says douse those goddamn floodlights. They’re spoiling our observations!”

Hunter, hearing that, had to think of Archimedes saying to the enemy soldier treading on his sand-diagram: “Don’t spoil my circle!”

The soldier in the legend had killed Archimedes, but this major was violently nodding his head as he turned around. Hunter recognized Buford Humphreys from two nights back. At the same time Humphreys saw him, saw Rama Joan and Ann, saw the whole lot of the “saucer bugs” he had kept out of Vandenberg. He goggled wildly, then with a shrug of incomprehension and a quick glance at the sky, raced off, calling: “Goddamn it, corporal, kill those floods!”

Meanwhile Margo had grabbed the young man by his sweatshirt before he could dart away. “Take us to Professor Opperly!” she ordered. “We’ve got to make a report. Look, I’ve got a note from him.”

“O.K.,” he agreed without glancing at the dirty, crumpled sheet. “Follow me.” He pointed a hand at the cars. “But douse those headlights!”

The Corvette’s and the truck’s beams winked out a moment before the white wall went dark, but Margo held on to the young man. His pale sweatshirt made it easy for Hunter to follow them. Beyond them Hunter saw now the loom of radar screens and the white barrel of a field telescope.

Overhead the blue beams flashed off along their length, and the mist-curtain around the Wanderer faded, to be instantly replaced by a hundred points of white light, stabbingly bright.

But even as McHeath, squinting his eyes, called: “Implosion globe!” it was to be seen that the Wanderer had slipped aside twice her diameter up the sky, with the dizzying feeling of the foundations of the universe shifting. The implosion globe brightened as the white blasts that had been on the other side of the Wanderer shone through and the globe now had a wide ragged neck where the Wanderer had burst out.

“They’ve gone inertialess — the whole planet,” Clarence Dodd cried.

There were a half dozen ragged holes in the Wanderer’s skin now, black but glowing dull red toward their central depths — so many of them that the mandala was barely identifiable.

Tangentially from the ravaged planet’s side there shot out toward the Stranger a violet beam thicker and many times brighter than any of the earlier ones.

But before it was halfway to the Stranger, the bigger planet moved as swiftly as one of its beams — a rhinoceros rush across the sky, destroying all feelings of stability — to a position alongside the Wanderer. There was not a moon’s width between them.

The Wanderer vanished.

A blue broadside burst from the Stranger and laced through the space where the Wanderer had been.

“Goddamn, they blew her to bits!” Pop screamed ecstatically.

“No, she disappeared a fraction of a second earlier,” the Little Man contradicted. “You’ve got to observe!”

The Stranger, her steely surface unholed, though streaked with brown and greenish scars, hung there three, four, five seconds, then she vanished too — like a big dim electric globe, the solar highlight its filament, switched off.

The sheaf of blue laser beams and the single thicker violet one crawled away from each other, dimming and shortening but ruler-straight, into the astronomic distance, while the pearlike implosion globe from which the Wanderer had first burst grew momently paler, bigger, and ghostlier.

“The Wanderer escaped into hyperspace,” McHeath said.

“Maybe, but she was a goner,” Hixon said. “She’d have knocked to bits, and the Stranger’s gone in after her. She’s done.”

“But we can’t be sure,” Hunter said. “She might go on escaping forever.” In his thoughts he added, Like the Flying Dutchman.