The Wanderer

Barbara Katz, her back to the other ocean bordering America 3,000 miles east of the saucer students, saw the mandala as a purple-spoked oxcart wheel. The huge wheel seemed to revolve a quarter turn as the planet touched the horizon.

“Gee, Dad, it’s as if the Wanderer were lying down,” she said, all at once feeling agonized and desperate because she wouldn’t be able to see the next face the Wanderer showed, or to see the moon come out from behind it, either.

But it would all be on TV. Or would it? Will there still be TV? she asked herself, looking around incredulously. Everywhere the sky was paling with the dawn that would not reach the Pacific Coast for another three hours.

From beside Barbara, Knolls Kettering III said in a groggy voice she hadn’t heard before: “I’m very tired…Please…”

She grabbed his arm as he swayed and leaned most of his weight on her — which wasn’t a great deal. Inside the white suit his body seemed like the curved, brownish husk of an insect, while his face was as hollow-cheeked and crisscrossed with wrinkles as an Indian great-grandmother’s. Barbara was almost shocked, but then she reminded herself that he was her own private millionaire, to preserve and to cherish. She made her grip more delicate on his shoulder, as if it were a shell she might crush.

The older Negro woman, dressed like the younger, in pearl gray with white collar and cuffs, came fussing up and took hold of him on the other side. This seemed to irritate him awake.

“Hester,” he said, leaning away from her toward Barbara. “I told you and Benjy and Helen to go to bed hours ago.”

“Huh!” she laughed softly. “As if we would leave you playing around with that telescope in the dark! You watch how you put your weight now, Mister K. Plastic in your hip get tired working all night, it break easy.”

“Plastic can’t get tired, Hester,” he argued wearily.

“Huh! it not anywhere as strong as you, Mister K!” she said, putting him off. She looked across him questioningly at Barbara, who nodded firmly. Together they walked him across the thick, weedless carpet of the lawn, up three spotless concrete steps, and through a big cool kitchen with old, nickel-heavy fixtures that seemed to Barbara huge enough for a hotel.

Halfway up a wide stairway, he made them stop. Perhaps the vast, cool, dark living room next to the stairs took him back into the night, for he said: “Miss Katz, every heavenly body that seems to stand erect when it’s high in the sky, appears to lie down when it rises and sets. It’s true of constellations, too. I’ve often thought—”

“Come on now, Mister K, you need your rest,” Hester said, but he fretfully shook the arm she was holding and said insistently: “I have often thought that the answer to the Sphinx’s question of what goes on four legs in the morning, two legs at midday, and three legs at evening was not Man but the constellation Orion walking just ahead of the Dog Star, whose rising signaled the flooding of the Nile.”

His voice wavered on the last words, and his head drooped, and he permitted himself to be led upward again. Barbara, feeling his weight on her arm — more than he was putting on Hester, she was pleased to note — thought: I guess I can see why you’re thinking of three legs at evening, Dad — or four.

They laid him down on a big bed in a dark bedroom bigger than the kitchen. Hester whisked something from the pillow into a drawer, then changed her mind and let Barbara see it.

It was a slim, black-haired fashion doll about ten inches high, dressed in black lace underwear and black stockings and long black gloves.

Knolls Kettering III muttered thickly: “For midday, read midnight”

Hester looked up from the doll to Barbara’s long black foot-gloves and playsuit and black hair, and she grinned.

Barbara couldn’t have stopped herself from grinning back, even if she’d wanted to.

Chapter Fourteen

Paul Hagbolt faced Major Buford Humphreys through the beach gate of Vandenberg Two. Margo stood beside him holding Miaow. The ten saucer students were crowded around them. The edges of all their shadows made purple and golden flecks on the silvery mesh of the gate.

There were gold and purple flecks in the Pacific behind them as well, where the Wanderer, still rather high in the sky, had begun a coasting descent toward the placid ocean. It still showed the face Rama Joan had called the mandala, though now the western yellow spot was growing and the eastern one shrinking as the orb rotated. It cast a strong twilight across the scrubby coastal landscape and turned the sky a slate gray through which only five or six stars showed.