The Wanderer

The yellow marking that was the Broken Egg to the Ramrod and the Needle-Eye to Ann now touched the lefthand rim of the Wanderer as they viewed it. The yellow polar patches remained and a new central yellow spot was crawling into view on the righthand rim. In all, four yellow rim-spots: north, south, east and west.

The Little Man got out his notebook and began to sketch it.

“The purple makes a big X,” Wojtowicz said.

“The tilted cross,” the Ramrod said, speaking aloud at last “The notched disk. The circle split in four.”

“It’s a mandala,” said Rama Joan.

“Oh yeah,” Wojtowicz said. “Professor, you was telling us about those,” he addressed himself to Hunter. “Symbols of psychic something-or-other.”

“Psychic unity,” the bearded man said.

“Psychic unity,” Wojtowicz repeated. “That’s good,” he said matter-of-factly. “We’re going to need it.”

“For these we are grateful,” Rama Joan murmured.

Two big yellow eyes peered over the hump of the big gully in Vandenberg Two. There was a growling roar. Then the jeep was careening down toward the gate, its headlights swinging wildly over brush and rutted dry earth.

“Everybody on your feet,” Paul said. “Now we’ll get some action.”

Don Merriam could see a thick-waisted, asymmetric hourglass of stars in the spacescreen of the Baba Yaga. Some of the stars were slightly blurred by the dust-blasting the screen had suffered during his trip through the center of the moon.

The black bulk shouldering into the hourglass from port was the moon, now totally eclipsed by the vast, newly appeared body.

The Wanderer, shouldering into the starry hourglass from starboard, was not entirely black — Don had in view seven pale green glow spots, each looking about 300 miles across, the farther ones being ellipses, the nearest, almost circular. They were featureless, though at times there was the suggestion of a phosphorescent pit or funnel. Of what they signified, Don had no more idea than if they had been pale green spots on the black underbelly of a spider.

In company with the moon, the Baba Yaga was orbiting the Wanderer, but slowly gaining on Luna because the little ship, nearer the Wanderer, had the faster orbit.

He warmed the radar. The return signal from the moon showed a surface more irregular than craters and mountains alone could account for, and even in five minutes the patterns had greatly changed: the tidal shattering of Luna was continuing.

The surprisingly strong signal from the intruding planet showed a spherical, matte surface with no indication at all of the greenish glow spots — as if the Wanderer were smooth as an ivory ball.

Intruding planet! — impossible, but there it was. At the top of his mind Don tried to recall the scraps of speculation he’d read and heard about hyperspace: the notion that a body might be able to travel from there to here without traversing the known continuum between, perhaps by blasting or slipping into some higher-dimensioned continuum of which our universe is only a surface. But where in all the immensity of stars and galaxies might the there of this intruding planet be? Why should the there even be anywhere in our universe? A higher-dimensioned continuum would have an infinity of three-dimensional surfaces, each one a cosmos.

At the bottom of Don’s mind there was only an uneasy voice repeating: “The earth and sun are on the other side of that green-spotted black round to starboard. They set ten minutes ago; they’ll rise in twenty. I have not traveled through hyperspace, only through the moon. I am not in the intergalactic dark, staring at a galaxy shaped like a sheaf or an hourglass, while seven pale green nebulas glow to starboard…”

Don was still in his spacesuit, but now he removed and secured the cracked helmet. There should be a sound one in the locker. “Make and mend,” he muttered, but his throat closed at the sound of his own voice. He unstrapped himself from the pilot’s seat to push as close as he could to the spacescreen. The cabin was chilly and dark, but he turned on neither heat nor light — he even dimmed the control panel. It seemed all-important to see as much as possible.

He was gaining on the moon, all right, with his inside orbit: the sheaf of stars ahead was very slowly widening to port, as the black bulk of the eclipsed moon dropped back.

Suddenly he thought he saw, against the star-studded glow of the Milky Way, wraithlike black threads joining the top of the Wanderer — call it its north pole — to the leading rim or nose of the moon. Looping through space, the black strands were so nearly imperceptible that, like faint stars, he could detect them best by looking a little away from them.

It was as if, having snared and maimed the moon, the Wanderer were spinning a black shroud around it, preparatory to sucking it dry.

He shouldn’t have started to think about spiders.

The voice kept repeating: “The sun and Earth are beyond the green-spotted black bulge to starboard. I am Donald Barnard Merriam, lieutenant, U.S. Space Force…”