The Wanderer

Eclipses weren’t all that dark, it turned out, and el presidente’s three jet fighters could chop up this ancient Seabee in seconds, ending the Revolution of the Best, or at least the contribution to it of the self-proclaimed lineal descendant of the original William Walker who had filibustered in Nicaragua in the 1850’s.

If he did manage to bail out, they would capture him. He didn’t think he could stand an electric bull prod except by turning into a three-year-old.

Too much light, too much light! “You’re a typical lousy bit-player,” Don Guillermo shouted up at the brazen moon. “You don’t know how to efface yourself!”

Two thousand miles east of Wolf Loner and his cloudbank, Dai Davies, Welsh poet, vigorous and drunk, waved good night from near the dark loom of the Severn Experimental Tidal Power Station to the sooty moon sinking into the cloudless Bristol Channel beyond Portishead Point, while the spreading glow of dawn erased the stars behind him.

“Sleep well, Cinderella,” he called. “Wash your face now, but be sure to come back.”

Richard Hillary, English novelist, sickish and sober, observed finically, “Dai, you say that as if you were afraid she wouldn’t.”

“There’s a first time for everything, Ricky-bach,” Dai told him darkly. “We don’t worry enough about the moon.”

“You worry about her too much,” Richard countered sharply, “reading a veritable vomit of science fiction.”

“Ah, science fiction’s my food and drink — well, anyhow my food. Vomit, now — you were maybe thinking of the book-vomiting dragon Error in The Faerie Queene and fancying her spewing up, after all of Spenser’s musty hates, the collected works of H.G. Wells, Arthur C. Clarke, and Edgar Rice Burroughs?”

Hillary’s voice grew astringent. “Science fiction is as trivial as all artistic forms that deal with phenomena rather than people. You should know that, Dai. Aren’t the Welsh warmhearted?”

“Cold as fish,” the poet replied proudly. “Cold as the moon herself, who is a far greater power in life than you sentimental, sacrilegious, pub-snoozing, humanity-besotted, degenerate Saxo-Normans will ever realize.” He indicated the Station with a sweep of his arm. “Power from Mona!”

“David!” the novelist exploded. “You know perfectly well that this tidal power toy is merely a sop to people like myself who are against atomic power because of the weapons aspect. And please don’t call the moon Mona — that’s folk etymology. Mona’s a Welsh island, if you will — Anglesey — but not a Welsh planet!”

Dai shrugged, peering west at the dim, vanishing moon-bump. “Mona sounds right to me and that’s all that counts. All culture is but a sop to infant humanity. And in any case,” he added with a mocking grin, “there are men on the moon.”

“Yes,” Hillary agreed coldly, “four Americans and an indeterminate but small number of Soviets. We ought to have cured human poverty and suffering before wasting milliards on space.”

“Still, there are men on Mona, on their way to the stars.”

“Four Americans. I have more respect for that New Englander Wolf Loner who sailed from Bristol last month in his dory. At least he wasn’t staking the world’s wealth on his adventurous whim.”

Dai grinned, without taking his eyes off the west.

“Be damned to Loner, that Yankee anachronism! He’s most likely drowned and feeding the fishes. But the Americans write fine science fiction and make moon-ships almost as good as the Russkies’. Good night, Mona-bach! Come back dirty-faced or clean, but come back.”

Chapter Two

Through his mushroom helmet’s kingsize view window, still polarized at half max to guard his eyes from solar glare, Lieutenant Don Merriam USSF watched the last curved sliver of solid sun, already blurred by Earth’s atmosphere, edge behind the solid bulk of the mother planet.

The last twinges of orange light reproduced with frightening exactitude the winter sun setting through the black tangle of leafless trees a quarter mile west of the Minnesota farmhouse where Don Merriam had spent his childhood.

Twisting his head toward the righthand mini-console, he tongued a key to cut polarization. ("The airless planets will be pioneered by men with long, active tongues,” Commander Gompert had summed it up. “Frogmen?” Dufresne had suggested.)

The stars sprang out in their multitudes — a desert night squared, a night with sequins. The pearly shock of Sol’s corona blended with the Milky Way.

Earth was ringed by a ruddy glow — sunlight bent by the planet’s thick atmosphere — and would remain so throughout the eclipse. The ring was brightest near the planet’s crust, fading out a quarter diameter away, and brightest of all along the lefthand rim behind which the sun had just vanished.

Don noted without surprise that the central bulk of Earth was the blackest he had ever seen it. Because of the eclipse, it was no longer brushed with the ghostly glow of moonlight.