The Wanderer

“It pulled my hand! I distinctly felt that,” Opperly himself said, spreading the fingers of the hand he had reached across the table toward the gun. He looked at Margo again. “Did you say it actually fell from a saucer?”

She smiled as she handed it to him.

Hunter said: “We also bring you a message from Lieutenant Donald Merriam of the Space Force. He’ll be landing here—”

Opperly had turned to someone else beside him. “Wasn’t there a Merriam among those lost at Moonbase?”

“He wasn’t lost” Margo cut in. “He got away in one of the moon ships. He was on the new planet. He’ll be trying to land here — maybe he’s already coming in.”

“And he had a special message for you, Professor Opperly,” Hunter added. “The new planet has Earth-radius linear accelerators and an Earth-circumference cyclotron.”

Opperly grinned…"We just had a demonstration of that, didn’t we?”

None of them noticed a star wink belatedly on very close to Mars. An escaping laser beam had struck Deimos, the tiny outer moon of Mars, heating it white hot — to the considerable excitement of Tigran Biryuzov and his comrades.

Opperly put down the gray gun and moved around the desk. “Come with me, please,” he told Margo and Hunter. “We should alert the landing field to this possibility.”

“Wait a minute,” Margo said. “Are you just going to leave the momentum pistol lying there?”

“Oh,” Opperly said apologetically. He reached for it and handed it to Margo. “You’d better look after it for me.”

Richard Hillary and Vera Carlisle tramped along a little road that wended south near the crests of the Malvern Hills. Once more there were other trampers with them, dotting the little road.

They had discovered that not even sex and companionship can still the lemming urge, at least by day. Richard was thinking once more of the Black Mountains. It might be possible to reach them without leaving high ground.

The morning sun was hidden by a gray overcast that had come in from the west just as the Wanderer had been setting at a quarter to its D face. There had been a weird phenomenon then. Just as the Wanderer had vanished in the cloud curtain, it had seemed to be reborn, all silver gray and bigger than itself, an hour above its vanishing spot. They had speculated as to whether this was a mirage of the Wanderer or a second strange planet. Then the mirage or the strange planet had vanished in the overcast.

Vera stopped and turned on her transistor wireless. Richard stopped beside her with a sigh of resignation. Two nearby walkers had stopped too, out of curiosity.

Vera slowly turned the dial. There was no static. She turned up the volume full and turned the dial again. Still only silence.

“Maybe it’s broken, Miss,” one of the people suggested.

“You’ve worn it out,” Richard told her unsympathetically. “And a good thing.”

Then the voice came, tiny and whistling at first, but then, as she tuned it, clear and loud in the gray-roofed silence of the hills:

“Repeat. A report, cabled from Toronto and confirmed by Buenos Aires and New Zealand, definitely states that the two strange planets have vanished as they came. This does not mean an immediate end to tidal reverberations, but…”

They went on listening. From up and down the road people were gathering, gathering…

Bagong Bung decided the waves had gone down enough to make it safe, so he took the stout cloth sack out from under him, where he’d been sitting on it for safety, along with the lashed-down little bags of coin from the “Sumatra Queen,” and he opened it so that he and Cobber-Hume could peer in.

The wild waters, washing again and again across the orange life raft, had carried away all the mud and scoured clean all the tiny objects in the sack. Along with bits of coral and pebble and shell, there was the dark glow of old gold and the small, dark red flames of three — no, four! — rubies.

Wolf Loner stopped feeding soup to the Italian girl, because she had turned away to look at the rim of the rising sun overtopping the gray Atlantic. ” Il sole,” she whispered.

She touched the wood of the “Endurance.” “Una nave.”

She put her hand against the wrist of the hand holding the spoon and looked up into his face. “Noi siamo qui.”

“Yes, we’re here,” he said.

Captain Sithwise looked down from the bridge of the “Prince Charles” at the leagues of mud-filmed green jungle beginning to steam in the low red sunlight.

The purser said: “Extrapolating from the casualties in view, sir, we have eight hundred broken limbs and four hundred fractured skulls to deal with.”

The executive officer said: “Brazil has for herself the core of an atomic jungle city. I fancy that’s the way it might turn out in the end, sir, though it should be quite a case in the international courts!”

Captain Sithwise nodded, but continued to study the strange green sea in which his ship had come to harbor.