The Wanderer

He struck his chest and cried: “Yo soy un hombre!” One of the Araiza brothers, squinting against the rising sun, nodded and said: “Si,” but rather unenthusiastically, as if being a man were not quite that grand a matter.

Chapter Fifteen

Paul Hagbolt had to admit to himself that walking through sand does get tiring, even when you’re with new friends and under a sky bright with a new planet. The exhilaration of defying Colonel Humphreys and the Moon Project had worn off very quickly, and this backbreaking trudge across the beach seemed peculiarly purposeless and depressing.

“It gets lonely, doesn’t it?” Rama Joan said softly, “when you cut yourself off from the big protector and throw in your lot — and your girl friend’s — with a bunch of nuts, just to attend a dog’s funeral.”

They were walking at the tail end of the procession, well behind the cot borne between Clarence Dodd and Wojtowicz.

Paul had to chuckle. “You’re frank about it,” he said. “Margo’s not my girl friend, though — I mean the feeling’s all on my side. We’re really just friends.”

Rama Joan looked at him shrewdly. “So? A man can waste his life on friendship, Paul.”

Paul nodded unhappily. “Margo’s told me that herself,” he said. “She claims I get my satisfaction out of mother henning her around and trying to keep other men away from her. Except for Don, of course — and she thinks my interest in him is more than brotherly, even if I don’t know it.”

Rama Joan shrugged. “Could be, I suppose. The set-up of you and Margo and Don does seem unnatural.”

“No, it’s perfectly natural in its way,” he assured her with a kind of gloomy satisfaction. “The three of us went to high school and college together. We were interested in science and things. We meshed. Then Don went on to become an engineer and a spaceman, while I took the turn into journalism and PR work, and Margo into art.

But we were determined to stick together, so when Don got into the Moon Project, we managed to, too, or at least I did. By that time Margo had decided she liked him a little better than she did me — or loved him, whatever that means — and they got engaged. So that was settled — maybe simply because our society frowns on triangular living arrangements. Then Don went to the moon. We stayed on Earth. That’s all there is to it, until this evening, when I seem to have thrown in with you people.”

“Maybe because you had an explosion overdue. Well, I can tell you why I’m here,” the red-blonde woman continued. “I could be safe in Manhattan, an advertising executive’s wife: Ann going to a fancy school, myself fitting in an occasional lecture on mysticism to a women’s club. Instead, I’m divorced, eking out a tiny inherited income with lecture fees, and dressing up the mysticism with all sorts of carnival hokum.” She indicated her white tie and tails with a disparaging laugh. ” ‘Masculine protest’, my friends said. ‘No, just human protest’, I told them. I wanted to be able to say things I really meant and say them to the hilt — things that were mine alone. I wanted Ann to have a real mother, not just a well-dressed statistic.”

“But do you really mean the things you say?” Paul asked. “Buddhism, I gather — that sort of thing?”

“I don’t believe them as much as I’d like to, but I do believe them as much as I can,” she told him. “Certainty’s a luxury. If you say things with gusto and color, at least you’re an individual. And even if you fake it a bit, it’s still you, and if you keep trying you may some day come out with a bit of the truth — like Charlie Fulby did, when he told us he knew about his wild planets not by flying-saucer trips, as he’d always claimed, but by pure intuition.”

“He’s paranoid,” Paul muttered, gazing ahead at the Ramrod where he marched behind the cot, with Wanda to his right and the thin woman to his left. “Are those two women his disciples, or patrons, or what?”

“I’m sure he is somewhat paranoid,” Rama Joan said, “but you surely don’t believe, do you, Paul, that sane people have a monopoly of the truth? No, I think they’re his wives — he grew up in a complex-marriage sect. Oh, Paul, you do find us alarming, don’t you?”

“Not really,” he protested. “Though there’s something reassuring about moving with the majority.”

“And with the money and the power,” Rama Joan agreed. “Well, cheer up — the majority and the nuts spend most of their time the same way: satisfying basic needs. We’re all going back to the pavilion on the beach simply because we think there’ll be coffee and sandwiches.”

At the head of the procession, Hunter was telling Margo Gelhorn very much the same sort of thing. “I started going to flying-saucer meetings as a sociological project,” he confessed to her. “I went to all kinds: the way-out contactees like Charlie Fulby, the sober-minded ones, and the in-between-ers and freewheelers, like this group. I wanted to analyze a social syndrome and write a few papers on it. But after a while I had to admit I was keeping on going because I was hooked.”