The Wanderer

He fancied himself, a little boy, in the kitchen of the Minnesota farmhouse, with the darkness of early evening pressing on the window, and he, Donnie, saying: “Ma, I found a deep black hole in the woods, and I know it has to go all the way through to the other side of the earth because I saw a star twinkling at the bottom. I got scared and, Ma, I know you won’t believe this, but as I came running home I saw a big yellow and purple planet behind the barn!”

He shook off the pseudomemory. However weird this situation might be, it was a little less so because he had lived a month on the moon and had now driven a spaceship through it.

He turned his attention to the white threads looping up from the nose of the moon. He swung ship to follow with his eyes their curving course against the stars, diverging at first and then beginning to converge again as they vanished north over the violet horizon of the Wanderer.

Well, if the white threads somehow tied the moon and the Wanderer together, it made sense that they should be tied to a pole of the latter. Attached to a spot on the equator of the Wanderer they’d get stretched and broken, or wound around the Wanderer, since the moon was orbiting three times as fast as the planet was rotating.

Tied together! Wound wound! Here he was thinking of them as actual threads, as though the Wanderer and the moon were two Christmas tree ornaments.

Still, the white threads had to be something actual.

He followed them back along their course to the nose of the moon. The Baba Yaga was ahead of the moon now, but still in its shadow because they were both starting to swing behind the Wanderer again — its black sunset line that he had first seen through the moon-chasm was already in sight once more, chopping off the violet horizon.

So the nose of the moon was in shadow, its surface bronze-dim and churning. He took from the rack a pair of binoculars with big objective lenses and carefully focused them.

In the churning nose of the moon were a dozen huge, conical pits, their inner surfaces spinning rapidly clockwise, as though they were maelstroms in the fracturing rock.

Each sleek white thread, turning bronze-dark as it entered the moon’s shadow, led to the bottom of one of the whirlpool pits and kept swinging around in a tiny circuit, in pace with its whirling. The threads thickened somewhat down toward their restless roots. They resembled waterspouts or tornado-funnels.

Around each pit were three or four bright violet or lemon dots. He had seen one or two other such dots along the strands. It struck Don that they might be big spaceships, presumably from the Wanderer, and possibly generating gravitational or momentum fields of some kind.

For the inference to be made from the whirlpool pits and the entering strands was clear: Somehow, the substance of the moon, in the form of dust and gravel and perhaps larger rocks, was being sucked out and carried looping through space toward the north pole of the Wanderer.

Arab and Pepe and High stood over the Hudson, sharing a stick, ready to shred it into the pale, oil-filmed water if anyone should come.

But no one did. The city was strangely still, even for six in the morning. So High flipped away the half-inch butt, and Arab lit another reefer, and they passed it around.

Their arrival at the river, after slanting north past the General Grant Houses, and under the Henry Hudson Parkway, had been anticlimatic. There had been simply nothing, over to the west, but pale sky and distant piers and Edgewater and the southern end of the Palisades.

“She disappear somehow,” High decided. “Maybe just set.” He laughed. His gaze switched south to Grant’s Tomb. “What you think, General?”

“River look high, Admiral,” Arab adjudged, frowning, as he lit a third reefer for them.

“Sure do,” High agreed. “See it washin’ over that dock!”

“That no dock,” Arab protested scornfully. “That a sunken barge.”

“Just the same, water’s ten feet higher’n when we come.”

“You crazy!”

“I know where she disappear to,” Pepe cried suddenly. “That big purple’n golden thing a amphi-whamf — a balloon-submarine combo! She submerge. That why river high — she bulk it up. She lurkin’ down there, glowin’ in the wet-wet dark.”

As the others quivered at the delicious horror of the thought, Pepe threw up his spread-fingered hands beside his cheeks and cried again, piling it on: “No, wait! She not that. She a frozen atomic blast. They start the blast, then freeze the fireball. She float around like a ball lightning, first over the river, then under. When she unfreeze, city go whish! Look there!”

Red sun was glinting from banks of windows across the river, so low they looked like part of the water. Suddenly the pretended horror became appallingly real to all of them — the sudden fear against which no weed-smoker can wholly ensure himself.

“Come on!” Arab screamed in a whisper.

They turned and ran back toward Harlem.