The Wanderer

But now the walking-hut comparison was getting altogether too close, for the continuing vertical moonquake, which Don hardly noticed any more, was making the last Baba Yaga step about on its plate-shod legs as it rocked this way and that. One of the shoes was only a yard from the chasm and as Don watched, it tramped six inches closer.

Don carefully pushed himself into a wide-based crouch. He told himself Dufresne might have taken off in the missing rocket, though he’d seen no jet flare. And Yo might be alive or dead in the ship across the chasm. Gompert…

The Baba Yaga took another step toward the gulf. Don took a couple of quick ones himself across the jolting surface and then straightened and grabbed the last rung of the ladder that hung down from the body of the ship midway between the three legs.

He chinned himself and climbed toward the hatch, set ominously between the five trumpetlike tubes of the jet. The Baba Yaga rocked. Don told himself that his weight lowered its center of gravity a little, making its steps a little shorter.

Chapter Ten

Sally Harris and Jake Lesher were on one of the subway trains to be halted and emptied at 42nd Street. The traffic jams had been hopeless and Jake’s car was parked in Flatbush. Police helped the guards clear the subway cars and hurry the passengers topside.

“Buy why, but why?” Jake was demanding. “It looks bad.”

“No, good,” Sally told him. “Bombs, and they’d be herding us down. Besides, here we’re near Hugo’s penthouse. This is exciting, Jake!”

Emerging, they found Times Square more packed than they’d ever known it to be at three a.m.

Looking west on 42nd Street, they could see the Wanderer still quite high in the sky, with the moon so close they almost touched. On the south side of the street the shadow edge made a swath of motionless yellow people and on their side a swath of purple ones. The electric ads were all going full blast, but paled way down by the supermoon-light.

The Square was quieter than they’d ever known, too, except that just now a man emerged from behind them crying: “Extra! Read all about it! Read all about the new planet!”

Jake traded two bits for a Daily Orbit. Its tabloid front page was a pic of the Wanderer in wet, acrid red and yellow inks and six lines of information anyone could have got by looking at the sky and his watch. The headline was: STRANGE ORB BAFFLES MAN.

“Doesn’t baffle me,” Sally said in the highest spirits and then, grinning at Jake, “I created it. I put it up there.”

“Don’t be blasphemous, young woman,” a lantern-jawed man admonished her sourly.

“Ha, you think I didn’t do it, huh?” she demanded. “I’ll show you!” She cleared a place around her with her elbows and tossed Jake her jacket. Then, stabbing a finger successively at Lantern Jaw and at the Wanderer, and next snapping her fingers as she swayed provocatively, she began to sing, in an electrifying contralto and a melody borrowed half-and-half from “Green Door” and “Strange Fruit":

Strange orb!…in the western sky… Strange light!…streaming from on high…

Don Merriam had ignited the Baba Yaga’s jet before he’d strapped down and when the aniline and nitric pumps had barely started to spin. The reason was simple enough: he’d felt the jouncing ship step off the edge.

He’d done everything he could to cut time. He’d blown the ship, letting its air escape in a great puff to clear a direct entry for himself, rather than waiting for the airlock between the fuel and oxidizer tanks to empty and fill. He’d barely dogged the hatches behind him and made only the most perfunctory swipe at the oxygen release lever although he knew his suit oxy was running out — and he’d been almost too late at that.

The cold jet fired strongly, however. Lemon-hot molecules streamed out of the Baba Yaga’s tail at almost two miles a second, and after a sticky moment she lifted, but sideways rather than up — like an old airplane taking off.

Perhaps Don’s mistake was in trying to correct at all — his present vector would likely have got him into some sort of orbit, perhaps quite efficiently. But he was flying by eye and he didn’t like the way white moon crossed by cracks kept bulking so large in the spacescreen, and he knew that the sooner you corrected the less power it took, and he wasn’t sure how much fuel and oxidizer he had — in fact, he still wasn’t quite sure which of the three sister ships he was in — and, besides all that, he was probably already quite giddy and illogical from oxygen-lack.

So, careless of the gravity and a half dragging at him, he reached out sideways — it was quite a reach: normally it would have been a robot’s or copilot’s job — and slapped the keys to fire three solid-fuel rockets on the side of the ship toward the moon.