The Wanderer

That much Paul saw as a visual pattern, saw in a flash without analysis. The next moment he had thrown himself to the floor, shoulders hunched and head down, away from the Wanderer. For the first, dominating impression was of something gigantic and flaming overhead, something intimidatingly massive, about to crash to earth and crush him.

Margo, clutching Miaow, was on the floor beside him.

Purely by happenstance, Paul’s eyes were directed at the program he was holding. He automatically read a line: “Our bearded panelist is Ross Hunter, Professor of Sociology, Reed College, Portland, Oregon” — before he realized he was reading easily by the light of the Wanderer.

To Don Guillermo, approaching the hill with its huddle of official buildings, his eyes on “the Palace,” his left hand gripping the cross-stick handle on the bomb-release wire, the Wanderer was a Nicaraguan loyalist jet materialized on his tail and erupting a volcano of silent tracer bullets. He ducked in his seat, squinted his eyes, and tightened his neck and shoulders against the slugs. They didn’t come and they didn’t come — the bastard must be a sadist, prolonging the agony.

He banked left toward the big lake, according to plan, then made himself look up and back. Why, the damn thing was just a big barrage balloon, somehow suddenly illuminated. To think they’d tricked him with a carnival gadget like that into not dropping his egg. He’d swing back and show ’em!

At that moment a dazzling pink volcano erupted from La Loma, and he saw that his left hand gripped the cross-stick mat was now trailing a length of broken wire. The next second, a blast boxed his ears and shuddered the plane. He righted it and automatically kept on toward Lake Nicaragua.

But, he asked himself, how was a balloon like that keeping exact pace with his old crate? And why was the whole landscape glowing, as if the embers had come up in the universal theater?

Bagong Bung, the sun baking his brains as he leaned on the paintless rail of the bridge, but with his brains visualizing a weed-veiled, gold-hearted wreck not twenty leagues away, was utterly unaware and felt not one iota of strangeness as the gravitational front of an unknown body struck upward through him from below, locking onto every atom of him. Since it clutched with proportional force at the “Machan Lumpur,” the Gulf of Tonkin, and the whole planet, the gust of cosmic power did not so much as jostle one of Bagong Bung’s cool green thoughts.

If Bagong hung had been looking at the compass of the “Machan Lumpur,” he would have seen its needle swing wildly and then come tremblingly to rest in a new direction a shade east of north, but the little Malay seldom looked into the binnacle — he knew these shallow seas too well. And he had dealt so long with turncoats and time-servers on both communist and capitalist sides, that even if he had seen the compass veer, he might merely have felt that it was, at last, showing its own natural degree of political unreliability.

Wolf Loner frowned in his chilly sleep as, halfway around the world, the tiny compass of the “Endurance” swung and resettled in an identical manner as the “Machan Lumpur’s,” and as a blue finger of St. Elmo’s fire flickered briefly at the top of the dory’s mast. He stirred and almost woke, then slept again.

General Spike Stevens snapped: “Jimmy, get that big burn out of there before we lose a screen.”

“Yes, sir,” Captain James Kidley responded. “But which screen is it? I keep seeing it in both.”

“It is in both screens,” Colonel Willard Griswold cut in hoarsely. “Uncross your eyes, Spike. It’s out there — as big as the Earth.”

“Excuse me, Spike,” Colonel Mabel Wallingford put in, her blood racing, “but mightn’t it be a problem? HQ One can switch our input-output to test conditions any time they want.”

“Right,” the General said, snatching at the out she’d handed him; and this made her smile fiercely: Spike had been scared. He continued: “If it is a problem — and I think it is — they’ve thrown us a doozie. In five seconds our communications will be jumping with simulated crisis data. O.K., then, everybody, we pretend it’s a problem.”

Forcing himself to squint upward, Paul saw that the Wanderer, so far as he could estimate, was not moving or changing. Helping Margo at the same time, he scrambled to his feet, though still hunched away from the Wanderer, as a man would hunch under a hanging block of concrete or away from a lifted fist.

Apparently the hit-the-dirt reaction had been universal. Chairs were scattered; the people in the front rows and the panelists were out of sight.

Not quite universal, though. The Ramrod was standing up straight and saying in a strangely even, high-pitched voice: “Don’t panic, folks. Can’t you see it’s just a big fire balloon? Manufactured in Japan, I’ll bet from that design.”

A woman brayed from the floor: “I saw it rise up from Vandenberg! Why’s it stopped? It’s still firing! Why doesn’t it keep on going?”