The Wanderer

Like a mouse with a friend, she led him to the kitchen.

Dai Davies listened with wicked amusement to the weird reports of the Wanderer coming over the wireless to the tiny Severn-shore pub near Portishead, where he’d gone after a two-hour snooze to do his late morning drinking. From time to time he embroidered the reports fancifully for the edification and jollification of his unappreciative fellow-topers: “Purple and sickly amber, eh? ’Tis a great star-written American advertisement, lads, for grape juice and denatured beer!” and, “It’s a saintly Soviet super-balloon, boys, set to pop over lawless Chicago and strew the Yankee heartland with begemmed copies of Marx’s holy Manifesto!”

The reports were coming over an Atlantic cable, the derisive announcer said — extraordinary severe magnetic storms had disordered the radio sky to the west. Dai greatly wished that Dick Hillary were still with him — this lovely nonsense was just the thing to make that hater of spaceflight and space fiction squirm; besides, he’d be a better audience for a Welsh poet’s rare wit than these Somerset sobersides.

But when, two mighty drinks later, the wireless reports began to include mention of a cracked and captured moon — the announcer growing still more derisive, yet now with a nervous note in his voice, almost hysterical — Dai’s mood changed abruptly, and there was much more drunken emotion than wit in his cry: “Steal our moon-bach, would they, those damned Yanks! Don’t they know Mona belongs to Wales? And they hurt her, we’ll swim across and gut Manhattan Isle from the Battery to Hellgate, will we not, my hearties?”

This met with, “Shut up, you sot, he’s saying more,” “Wild jabbering Welshman,” “Bolshy, I’d think,” “No more for you, you’re drunk” — this last from the host.

“Cowardly Somersets!” Dai retorted loudly, grabbing up a mug and brandishing it like a knuckleduster. “And you follow me not I’ll fight you myself, all up and down the Mendip Hills!”

The diamond-paned door was thrown open and a white-eyed scarecrow figure in dungarees and wide-brimmed rainhat faced them against the light fog outside.

“Is there aught on the wireless or the telly of the tide?” this apparition called to the host. “Two hours yet till low, and the Channel’s ebbing as I’ve never seen it, even at the equinoctial springs with an east gale blowing. Come, look for yourselves. At this progress a man’ll be able to walk on all the Welsh Grounds by noon and an hour after that the Channel’ll be near dry!”

“Good!” Dai cried loudly, letting the host take away the mug and leaning hunch-shouldered on the bar as the others made a tentative move toward the door. “Then I’ll walk the five miles back to Wales straight across the Severn sands and be shut of you lily-livered Somersets. By God, I will!”

“And good riddance,” someone muttered loudly, while a hairsplitting jokester pointed out: “If that’s your aim you must walk east aslant, using the Grounds and Usk Patch for stepping stones if you like — and more than twice five miles. Straight across here, man, it’s Monmouth, not Wales.”

“Monmouth’s still Welsh to me and be damned to the Union of 1535,” Dai retorted, slumping his chin onto the bar. “Oh, go gawk at this watery prodigy, all of you. It’s my guess the Yanks, having broken and chained the moon, are stealing the ocean, too.”

General Spike Stevens snapped: “Get Christmas Relay, Jimmy! Tell ’em their picture’s starting to swim, too.”

The watchers in the underground room were grouped in front of the righthand screen, ignoring the other, which for more than an hour had been nothing but a churning rectangle of visual static.

The picture from the satellite above Christmas Island showed the Wanderer in her target face with Luna swinging behind her, but both planet and moon were bulging and rippling as electronic distortion invaded the screen.

“I’ve been trying, General, but I can’t raise them,” Captain James Kidley responded. “Radio and shortwave are gone. Ultrashort’s going — every kind of communication that isn’t by buried wire or wave guide. And even those—”

“But we’re a headquarters!”

“I’m sorry, General, but—”

“Get me HQ One!”

“General, they don’t—”

There was a strong vibration from the floor and a sharp crackling sound. The lights flickered, went out, came on again. The buried room rocked. Plaster fell. Once more the lights went out — all except the pale glow of the Christmas Island screen.

Abruptly the wavering astronomic picture on the screen was replaced by the silhouette of a large feline head with pricked ears and grinning jaws. It was as if, out on that unmanned satellite 23,000 miles above the Pacific, a black tiger had peered into the telescope. For a moment the picture held. Then it swam, and the screen blacked out.

“My Christ, what was that?” the General yelled in the dark.

“You saw it, too?” Colonel Mabel Wallingford demanded. A laugh, half hysterical, half exultant, rimmed her question.

“Shut up, you stupid bitch!” the General shrilled. “Jimmy?”