The Wanderer

“I can take over again,” eagerly volunteered the one who had had Doc’s corner earlier — a thin-faced high school student who had ridden to the symposium from Oxnard with Wojtowicz.

“Better we all have a breather, Harry,” the latter said. “Professor—” He addressed himself to Hunter. “It looks to me the moon’s slowed down again. Like back to normal.”

All of them except the fat woman studied the situation in the western sky. Even Doc raised his head while continuing to gasp. Unquestionably the black isthmus between the Wanderer and the moon hadn’t widened during the last short march.

“I think the moon’s getting smaller,*’ Ann said.

“So do I,” the Little Man agreed. He squatted on his hams with an arm around Ragnarok and soothingly kneaded the huge dog’s black-and-brown throat while he squinted upward. “And — I know this is utterly fantastic — but it looks to me as if the moon were becoming oblate, flattening a little from top to bottom, widening from side to side. Maybe it’s just eyestrain, but I’ll swear the moon’s becoming egg-shaped, with one end of the egg pointing at the new planet.”

“Yes,” Ann told him shrilly. “And now I can see…oh, just the teensiest line going from the top of the moon to the bottom.”

“Line?” the Little Man asked.

“Yes, like a crack,” Ann told him.

The Broken Egg and the Dire Batching, the Ramrod thought. It comes to pass as I foretold. Ispan-Serpent fecundates and the White Virgin gives birth.

“I must confess I don’t see that,” the Little Man said.

“You’ve got to look very close,” Ann told him.

“I’ll take your word for it,” Wojtowicz said. “Kids got sharp eyes.”

Doc gasped excitedly, “If there’s a crack up there that any of us can see, it must be miles across.”

Hunter said slowly and heavily, pushing out the words, “I think the moon is going into orbit around the new planet…and way inside Roche’s limit.” He added swiftly, “Rudy, do solid satellites break up like liquid ones inside Roche’s limit?”

“I don’t think anybody really knows,” Doc answered.

“They’re going to find out,” the bearded man said.

Rama Joan said: “And we’re going to find out what ants feel like when someone steps on their nest.”

Wojtowicz said: “The moon…breaking up?”

Margo clutched Paul. “Don!” she cried. “Oh my God, Paul, I’d forgotten Don!”

The Wanderer first appeared twenty-five thousand miles away from the moon, ten times closer to Luna than Earth is. Its deforming or tide-producing effects on the moon were therefore one thousand times greater than those the Earth exerts on Luna, since such effects vary inversely with the cube of the distance between bodies. (If they varied inversely only as the square, the massive sun would exert a tidal effect on Earth many times greater than the moon, instead of being outweighed tidewise by that small body eleven to five.)

When Luna went into orbit around the Wanderer at a distance of twenty-five hundred miles, she was a hundred times closer to that planet than she is to Earth. Accordingly, her whole body, crust and core, was being wrenched by a gravitational grip one million times stronger.

The Baba Yaga’s spacescreen was swinging up toward Earth when the gentle bumping of his spacesuit against the walls of the cabin finally awoke Don Merriam, just as he himself was rolling across the inside of the spacescreen. He woke clearheaded and ready for action, refreshed by the extra oxy. Two yanks and a wriggle got him into the pilot’s seat. He strapped down.

White moon, jagged with crater walls and with something else, came into view, visibly swelling in size as the screen swung. Then came a vertical precipice of glittering raw rock stretching down, interminably it seemed, toward the moon’s core. Then a narrow ribbon of black gulf, bisected along its jet length by a gleaming thread that was mostly violet but bright yellow toward one end. Then another glittering and interminable chasm wall shooting down sheer toward Luna’s very center.

His eyes told Don he was no more than fifteen miles above the moon’s surface and hurtling toward it at about a mile a second. There was nowhere near enough time to break fall by swinging ship and main-jetting to cancel the mile-a-second downward velocity.

As those thoughts flashed, Don’s fingers flicked the keys of the vernier jets, halting the Baba Yaga’s slow tumbling so that the spacescreen — and Don — looked straight down the chasm.

There was one hope, based on nothing more than a matching of colors. There had been something violet and yellow glaring with tremendous brilliance behind the moon. Now there was a violet-and-yellow thread gleaming in the blackness of the moon’s core. He might be looking through the moon.

The moon, split like a pebble? Planetary cores should flow, not fracture. But any other theory meant death.