The Wanderer

“Just you follow directions,” she told him. With a creak and a clicking the train started its steep climb. A dozen yards from the top, she stood up lightly, swung her leg in a gleaming arc and straddled his waist. One hand gripped his neck, the other swiftly fitted things.

“Jesus, Sal,” he gasped, “I bet we make the earth move like in For Whom the Bell.”

“Earth, hell!” she told him, grinning bare-fanged down at him like a Valkyrie, as the train poised for its swoop and the tow let go. “I’ll make the stars move!”

Rama Joan said: “Oh, the star people would be awesomely beautiful to us, I imagine, and as endlessly fascinating as a hunter is to a wild animal that hasn’t yet been shot at. I’m dreadfully interested in speculating about them myself — but to us they would still be as cruel and distant as ninety-nine per cent of our own gods. And what are man’s gods except his imaginings of a more advanced race? Take the testimony of ten thousand years, if you won’t take mine, and you will realize that out there…up there…there are devils.”

Ragnarok growled again. Miaow flattened herself against Margo’s shoulder, digging in with her claws.

The Little Man said: “End of totality.”

Doc said: “Really, Rama Joan, you surprise me.”

Margo said: “Miaow, it’s all right.”

Paul looked up and saw the eastern rim of the moon lighten, and it was like a reprieve from prison. He suddenly knew that his incomprehensible fears would lift with the ending of the eclipse.

A half-dozen moon-diameters east of the moon, a squad of stars spun in tight little curlicues, like ghostly white fireworks erupting, squibs and pinwheels…and then blacked out.

From his lonely mesa, Asa Holcomb saw the stars near the moon shake, as if a fanfare were being blown through the cosmos. Then a great golden and purple gateway four times as wide as the moon opened in the heavens there, pushing the blackness aside; and Asa strained eagerly toward it, and his heart swelled with the wonder and majesty of it, and his aorta tore all the way, and he died.

Sally Harris saw the stars squiggle just as she and Jake, momentarily shedding thirty pounds of weight apiece, started to come atop the sixth summit of the Ten-Stage Rocket at Coney Island. In the blind egoistic world of sexual fulfillment that lies exactly on the boundary between the conscious and unconscious regions of the mind, she knew that the stars were a provincial district of herself — the Marches of Sally Harris — and so she merely chortled throatily: “I did it, Christ! I said I’d do it and I did it!”

And even when atop the next summit, after a choking, pulsing plunge to the nadir and back up, she saw the squiggling stars replaced by a yellow and purplish disk twenty times the size of the moon and bright enough to show up the pinstripe in the shoulders of Jake’s suit as his face pressed between her breasts, she leaned back, like a Valkyrie, the safety bar cold across her rump, and cried triumphantly to the heavens: “Jesus, a bonus!”

High Bundy said: “Oh, what a kick! Listen, Pepe, there’s this crazy old Chinarqan, bigger than King Kong, on the other side of the world kicking his legs up at us, and he’s painting golden plates with grenadine so they look like two raindrops making love, and he’s skimming them off to the moon with a reverse twist as he finishes them, and one of them sticks there.”

“Reet-reet,” Pepe cooed. “It’s lighting all New York. Plate lightning.”

“I’m getting it, too,” Arab said, floating up behind them. “Man, what great tea!”

Knolls Kettering III, eye glued to the eyepiece in the Palm Beach dark, was saying a bit stuffily: “The noun “planet’, Miss Katz, is derived from the Greek verb planasthai, to wander. Originally it meant simply ‘Wanderer’: a body that roves here and there amongst the fixed stars.” His voice tightened. “Hello, the moon is lightening, and not just along the limb coming out of eclipse. Yes, definitely. And there are colors.”

A hand curved over his shoulder protectively, and just about the littlest voice he’d ever heard — it was as if Barbara Katz had turned into a grasshopper — said, “Dad, please don’t look away from the eyepiece now. You’ve got to prepare yourself for a big shock.”

“A shock? What is it, Miss Katz?” he asked nervously, though following instructions.

“I’m not quite sure,” the microscopic voice continued. “It looks like an old Amazing cover. Dad, I think your Wanderer’s roved this way — only the Greeks didn’t grow ’em this big. I think it’s a planet.”

Paul, flinching, had shut his eyes for at most two seconds.

When he opened them, the Wanderer was there, streaming with bloody and golden light east of the moon in the sky, sixteen times the moon’s area, wavily split by one ragged, reverse-S curve into golden and maroon halves, looking softer than velvet yet with a clear-cut, unhazed rim.