The Wanderer

The walls of fresh-riven rock rushed up at him. He was too close to the righthand one. A baby solid-fuel rocket fired on that side set the Baba Yaga drifting away from it — and started a secondary tumbling which another ripple of the verniers neutralized almost before it manifested itself.

When he was a boy, Don Merriam had read The Gods of Mars by Edgar Rice Burroughs. In that romance of science fantasy, John Carter, greatest swordsman of two planets, had escaped with his comrades from the vast, volcanic, subterranean cavern-world of the Black Pirates of Barsoom and their hideous Issus-cult by racing a Martian flyer straight up the miles-long narrow shaft leading to the outer world, instead of rising slowly and cautiously by the buoyancy of the flyer’s ray tanks. The latter had been the normal and only sane course, but John Carter had found salvation for himself and his companions in sheer blinding speed, steering vertically for a star visible at the top of the well-like shaft.

Perhaps the Gods of Mars were the arbiters of all Don Merriam’s actions at this point. At any rate, he suddenly felt around him in the cabin of the Baba Yaga the ghostly presences, in their jeweled harness, of Xodar the Black renegade, Carthoris the mysterious Red Martian, Matai Shang the sinister Father of Holy Therns, and his brave, beautiful, love-struck, infinitely treacherous daughter Phaidor. And it is a fact that as the plummeting Baba Yaga was engulfed between blurs of raw rock touched by sunlight for the first time in billions of years, and as Don fired the G-rich main jet and was pinned by it up against his seat, where he steered by the verniers and the solid-fuel rockets to keep the glitter of the rock walls equal and the violet-and-yellow thread splitting the black ribbon into equal halves, he cried out sharply in the empty cabin: “Hold on for your lives! I am flying straight down the chasm!”

The saucer students felt sand give way to a stretch of adobe-hard earth sloping sharply up to the high mesh fence ringing the base of the plateau of Vandenberg Two. But here — seaward of the point where the blinking red light sat atop its mast a hundred feet behind the fence — and two hundred feet, at least, above it — a broad gully cut through the ridge, gentling the slope. Tire and caterpillar tracks ran up the gully. There was a big gate in the fence where it crossed the road, and beside the gate, built like it into the fence, a two-story guard tower. The gate was closed and the tower was lightless, but the small door in the outside of the tower was open.

The sight cheered Paul considerably. He straightened his shoulders and his necktie. The little cortege halted fifty feet in front of the gate and he, Margo, and Doc walked forward, preceded by their inky, purple-and-yellow-edged shadows.

A brazen mechanical voice came out of the box over the door, saying, “Stop where you are. You are about to trespass on restricted property of the United States Government. You may not pass this gate. Return the way you came. Thank you.”

“Oh, my sainted aunt!” Doc exploded. Since being relieved of cot-lugging by young Harry McHeath, he’d got his bounce back. “Do you think we’re an advance deputation of little green men?” he shouted at the box. “Can’t you see we’re human beings?”

Paul touched Doc’s arm and shook his head, but continued to advance. He called out in a mellow voice: “I am Paul Hagbolt, 929-CW, JR, accredited PR captain-equivalent of Project Moon. I am asking admission for myself and eleven distressed persons known to me, and requesting transport for the latter.”

A soldier stepped from the darkness of the doorway out into the light of the Wanderer. There was no mistaking he was a soldier, for he had boots on his feet and a helmet on his head; a pistol, knife, and two grenades hung from his belt; his right arm cradled a submachine gun, and tightly harnessed to his back — Paul noted incredulously — were jump rockets.

The soldier was pokerfaced and he stood stiffly, but his right knee was jouncing up and down a little, rapidly and steadily, as if he were about to go into a stamping native dance or, more reasonably, as if he were trying to control a tic and not succeeding.

“CW and JR, eh?” he said to Paul, suspiciously but also respectfully. “Let’s see your ID cards…sir.”

There was a faint, acid odor. Miaow, who had been remarkably calm since the landslide, lifted a little in Margo’s arms, looked straight at the soldier, and hissed like a teakettle.

Handing the soldier the cards, which he had ready, Paul caught a sharp tremor.

As the soldier studied the cards, tipping them forward to catch the Wanderer’s light, his face stayed expressionless, but Doc noticed that his eyes kept jumping away from the cards to the Wanderer.

Doc asked conversationally, “Heard anything about that?”

The soldier looked Doc straight in the eye and barked: “Yes, we know all about that and we’re not intimidated! But we’re not releasing any information, see?”