The Wanderer

The saucer students had trouble enough coping with the results of the fringe reverberation of the big Los Angeles-Long Beach quake. After the thin woman and two others had been half dug, half pulled out of their light entombment in the edge of the landfall, a hurried count showed three others still missing. There followed a frantic ten minutes of digging, mostly with two bright-bladed shovels that the Little Man had produced from the back of his station wagon, which was solidly buried only as far as the rear wheels and its top dented in only about a foot Then someone remembered the red sedan that had left ahead of the rest; and someone else, that it had been the one in which the three missing people had arrived.

While the diggers caught their breath, Paul, whose convertible was hopelessly buried, explained his connection with the Moon Project and his intention of making with Margo for the beach gate of Vandenberg Two, and he offered to take anyone along with him who wanted to come and to vouch for them to the guards — their obvious distress in any case ensuring admission.

Doc enthusiastically endorsed this suggestion, but it was opposed by a thick-armed man wearing a leather windbreaker and named Rivis, who had a very low opinion of all military forces and the degree of helpfulness to be expected of them — and whose car had only its radiator and front wheels dirt-encumbered. Rivis, who also had four cute kids, a swell little wife, and an hysterical mother-in-law — all of them in Santa Barbara — was for digging out and getting home.

Rivis was seconded by the owners of the microbus and the white pickup truck, both only lightly buried vehicles. The truck’s people, a trimly handsome couple named Hixon wearing matching pale gray slacks and sweaters, were particularly insistent on getting out quickly.

There followed a progressively more embittered argument involving such points as: Would the Pacific Coast Highway be traffic-jammed and/or quake-blocked? Was Paul what he claimed? Would the motors of the buried cars start when dug out? (Rivis proved something by starting his, though his car radio got only the howlingest static.) Was Wanda’s heart attack genuine? Finally, weren’t the panelists and their dubious new friends a bunch of oyster-brained intellectuals scared of getting a few blisters on their hands?

In the end, half the saucer students, most of them with cars rather lightly buried, stuck with Rivis and the Hixons and, in a burst of hard feelings, even refused to promise to care for the fat woman who had had the heart attack until Paul could send a balloon-tired sand jeep from Vandenberg Two to pick her up.

The other half set off for the beach gate.

Don Guillermo Walker knew the Wanderer had to be something like a planet, for it and its glaring image in black Lake Nicaragua below had followed him sixty miles southeast now without shifting position — except that it was nearer the western horizon and maybe nearer the moon. And now there was showing on the thing what looked like a golden cock crowing to wake Simon Bolivar. I once played in Le Coq d’Or, didn’t I? the lonely bomb-raider asked himself. No, it’s an opera, or a ballet.

The general glare had turned pinkish here and there along the western horizon; he didn’t know why. Skirting the long ridgy island of Ometepe, he saw more lights at Alta Gracia than you’d ever expect after midnight. Everybody up and gawking at it and going ape or diving into churches, he supposed.

Suddenly red glare and rocks erupted from beyond the town and for an instant he thought he’d dropped a bomb he didn’t know about. Then he realized it had to be one of Ometepe’s volcanoes letting go. He banked east — get away, get away from the blast! Those pink glares — why, the whole Pacific Coast must be in eruption, from the Gulf of Fonseca to the Gulf of Nicoya.

Don Merriam, a battered and grievously weak-legged beetle, pushed himself up on his arms beside the Hut’s proud magnesium flagpole and saw, where the Hut should be, a raw-walled chasm twenty feet across with little waterfalls of dust trickling down its farther lip.

One of the ships was gone with the Hut, one was lying on its side across the chasm with two of its three shock-absorbing legs sticking up like the legs of a dead chicken, while he’d almost crawled under the third Baba Yaga without seeing it.

They called the little moon-type rocket ships “Baba Yagas” because — Dufresne had first thought of it — they suggested the witch’s hut on legs that figures in a couple of popular bits of classical Russian music and that, in the underlying folklore, runs about by night on those legs. It was rumored that the Soviet moonmen called their ships “Jeeps.”