The Wanderer

He stood up from his desk and walked over to the sleekly streamlined, room-long tide-predicting machine. Inside the machine a wire ran through many movable precision pulleys, each pulley representing a factor influencing the tide at the point on Earth’s hydrosphere for which the machine was set; at the end of the wire a pen drew on a graph-papered drum a curve giving the exact tides at that point, hour by hour.

At Delft they had a machine that did it all electronically, but those were the feckless Hollanders!

Fritz Scher said dramatically: “The moon in orbit around a planet from nowhere? Hah!” He tapped the shell of the machine beside him significantly. “Here we have the moon nailed down!”

The “Machan Lumpur,” her rusty prow aimed a little south of the sun sinking over North Vietnam, crossed the bar guarding the tiny inlet south of Do-Son. Bagong hung noted, by a familiar configuration of mangrove roots and by an old gray piling that was practically a member of his family, that the high tide was perhaps a hand’s breadth higher than he’d ever encountered it here. A good omen! Tiny ripples shivered across the inlet mysteriously. A sea hawk screamed.

Richard Hillary watched the sunbeams slowly straighten up as the big air-suspended bus whipped smoothly on toward London. Bath was far behind and they were passing Silbury Hill.

He listened idly to the solemn speculations around him about the nonsensical news items that had been coming over the wireless concerning a flying saucer big as a planet sighted by thousands over the United States. Really, science fiction was corrupting people everywhere.

A coarsely attractive girl from Devizes in slacks, snood, and a sweater, who had transferred aboard at Beckhampton, now dropped into the seat ahead of him and instantly fell into small talk with the woman beside her. She was expatiating, with exactly equal enthusiasm, on the saucer reports — and the little earthquake that had nervously twitched parts of Scotland — and on the egg she’d had for breakfast and the sausage-and-mashed she was going to have for lunch. In honor of Edward Lear, Richard offhandedly shaped a limerick about her:

There was a Young Girl of Devizes Whose thoughts came in two standard sizes: While most fitted a spoon, Some were big as the moon; That spacestruck Young Girl of Devizes.

Thinking of it kept him amused all the way to Savernake Forest, where he fell into a doze.

Chapter Thirteen

Times Square at five a.m. was still as packed as it had been on the nights of the moon landing and of the False War With Russia. Traffic had long stopped. The streets were full of people. The Wanderer, now masking half the moon, was still visible down the crosstown streets, including 42nd, but low in the sky, its yellow mellower and its purple turning red.

The advertisements were a bit brighter by contrast, especially the new sixty-foot genie bafflingly juggling the three oranges big as bushel baskets.

But the streets were no longer still. While some people just stood there and stared west, the majority were rhythmically swaying: not a few had joined hands and were snaking about with a compulsive stamp, while here and there young couples danced savagely. And most of them were humming or singing or shouting a song that had several versions, but the newest of these was being sung at the source, where Sally Harris still danced, though now she had acquired a supporting team of half a dozen sharp, aggressive young men besides Jake Lesher. And the song as she sang it now, her contralto more vibrant for its hoarseness, went:

Strange orb!…in the western sky… Strange light!…streaming from on high… It’s a terrifying sight But we’re gonna live tonight, Live with a neo-bop beatl

Golden!…like treasure ships… Crimson!…as sinful lips… But there’ll be no more June ’Cause there ain’t no more moon — Just a Planet!…on Forty-second Street! All of a sudden the singing and dancing stopped everywhere at once — because the dance floor had begun to tremble. There was a brief shaking. A few tiles, not many, and other trifles of masonry fell, cracking sharply against the sidewalks. There were screams — not many of those, either. But when the little earthquake was over, it could be seen that the sixty-foot genie had lost his three oranges, though he still kept going through the motions of juggling.