The Wanderer

Arab Jones and his weed-brothers walked rapidly, three abreast, along 125th Street away from Lenox, in the direction all the other dark faces were peering: west, where the Wanderer was setting, a great gaudy poker chip — bloated purple X on orange field — that almost covered the pale gold-piece of the moon. Soon the heavenly pair would be hidden by the General Grant Houses, which emphasized with their tall, remote bulking the small-town look of Harlem, the two- and three-story shop-fronted buildings lining 125th.

The three weed-brothers were so loaded that their excitement had only been heightened by the quake, which had brought out onto the street most of those who weren’t already watching the Wanderer.

The east was rosy, where the sun, pausing in the horizon wings for his entrance, had washed out all the stars and brought the morning twilight to Manhattan. But no one looked that way, or gave any sign that it might be time to be off and doing or trying to get some sleep. The spires of lower Manhattan were an unwatched fairy-tale city of castles to the south.

Arab and Pepe and High had long since quit trying to push through the staring, mostly silent crowd on the sidewalks and had taken to the street, where no cars moved and fewer people clustered and where the going was easier. It seemed to Pepe that a power came out of the planet ahead, freezing all motors and most people like some combined paralysis-and-motor-stalling ray out of the comic books. He crossed himself.

High Bundy whispered: “Old moon really going into her this time. He circle in front of her, decide he like her, then whooshl”

Arab said, “Maybe he hiding ’cause he scared. Like we.”

“Scared of what?” asked High.

“The end of the world,” said Pepe Martinez, his voice rising in a soft, high wolf-wail.

Only the rim of the Wanderer showed above the General Grant buildings, which were mounting swiftly up the sky as the weed-brothers approached them.

“Come on!” Arab said suddenly, catching hold of the upper arms of Pepe and High and digging his fingers in. “World gonna end, I gettin’ off. Get away from all these owly-eyed deaders waitin’ for the tromp and the trump. One planet go smash, we take another. Come on, before she get away! — We catch her at the river and climb aboard!”

The three began to run.

Paul and Margo and their new friends were sitting on the sand fifty feet in front of the dark gate when the second quake jolted the beach. It did nothing beyond rocking them, and there was nothing they could do about it, so they just gasped and rocked there. The soldier ran out of the tower with his submachine gun, stopped, and after a minute backed inside again. He did not answer when Doc called cheerily: “Hey, wasn’t that a sockdolager!”

Five minutes later Ann was saying: “Mommy, I’m really getting hungry now.”

“So am I,” said young Harry McHeath.

The Little Man, diligently soothing a very upset Ragnarok, said: “Now, that’s a funny thing. We were going to serve coffee and sandwiches after the eclipse. The coffee was in four big thermos jugs — I know, because I brought it. It’s all still down at the beach.”

Wanda sat up on her cot, despite the thin woman’s protests.

“What’s all that red glow down the coast?” she demanded crossly.

Hunter started to tell her, not without a touch of sarcasm, that it was merely the light of the new planet, when he saw that there really was another light-source — an ugly red furnace-flaring which the other light had masked.

“Could be brush fires,” Wojtowicz suggested somberly.

The thin woman said: “Oh dear, that would have to happen now. As if we didn’t have enough trouble.”

Hunter pressed his lips together. He refused to say: “Or it could be Los Angeles burning.”

The Little Man recalled their attention to the heavens, where the purple-and-yellow intruder now hid the moon completely. He said, “We ought to have a name for the new planet. You know, it’s funny, one minute it’s the most important thing in creation to me, but the next minute it’s just a patch of sky I can cover with my outstretched hand.”

“What’s the word ‘planet’ really mean, Mr. Brecht?” Ann asked.

“ ‘Wanderer,’ dear,” Rama Joan told her.

The Ramrod thought: Ispan is known to man by a thousand names, yet is still Ispan.

Harry McHeath, who’d just discovered Norse mythology and the Eddas, thought: Moon-Eater would be a good name — but too menacing for most people today.

Margo thought: They could call it Don, and she bit her lip and hugged Miaow so that the cat protested, and tears lumped hotly under her lower eyelids.

“Wanderer is the right name for it,” the little Man said.