The Wanderer

High stepped harder. The sound of the sirens should have cut down for a couple of seconds while there were buildings between the cab and the police cars. But it didn’t. It got louder.

There was an old jalopy abandoned smack in the middle of the next intersection. High aimed to pass it to the right A Black Maria and a fire chief’s car hurtled out of Seventh Avenue from the south and swerved around the jalopy to either side. High stepped to the floor and held his course, just missing their tails, and got across Seventh feet ahead of a big, end-swinging firetruck following the other two cars by hardly a length. Pepe glimpsed the great red hood and the wide-eyed face of the driver and clapped his hands to his eyes, it was so close.

The cab wasn’t halfway down the next block when the intersection ahead filled with more red and black cars, racing north on Lenox. The sound of the sirens from behind and ahead was brain-shaking.

If the weed-brothers hadn’t been loaded on pot, they might have realized that this stampede of police cars and firetrucks from lower Manhattan had nothing to do with them personally and that the ferocious vehicles weren’t converging into 125th Street, but continuing their mad dash north.

But the weed-brothers were loaded, and the master fear-kick of pursuit by police was upon them. Pepe believed they were to be scapegoats for an attempt to destroy Manhattan by suitcase bombs — they’d be frisked for fireballs and convicted on the evidence of a Zippo lighter.

Arab knew it was the purpose of the police to frogmarch them to the nearest roof and tie them down among the grinning wax mummies.

High simply thought they’d been spotted smoking weed back at the river — probably by telepathy. He braked the cab to a stop just short of Lenox. They piled out.

The subway entrance yawned with the dark invitation of a cave or den, promising the security all terrified animals crave. There was a white sawhorse half blocking it, but they darted past and clattered down the stairs.

The token booth was empty. They scrambled over the turnstiles. There was a lighted train waiting, its doors open. But there wasn’t anybody in it.

The station was lit, but they couldn’t see any people anywhere, on this platform or the one across.

The empty train was purring softly and insistently, but after the sirens faded there wasn’t another sound.

Chapter Eighteen

Despite Doc’s snoring for morale purposes, no one except Rama Joan tried to follow his example, and after a half hour or so Doc himself lifted his head, propping it up on his doubled arm, so as to get into an argument Hunter and Paul were having about the paths in space Earth and the Wanderer would take with respect to each other.

“I’ve figured it all out in my head — roughly, of course,” Doc told them. “Granting they’re of equal mass, they’ll revolve around a point midway between them in a month lasting about nineteen days.”

“Shorter than that, surely,” Paul objected. “Why, we can see with our own eyes how fast the Wanderer’s moving.” He pointed to where the strange planet, maroon and light orange now, was dipping atilt toward the ocean, the blunt yellow spearhead of the moon striking across its front almost from below.

Doc chuckled. “That movement’s just the Earth turning — same thing as makes the sun rise.” Then, as Paul grimaced in exasperation at his own stupidity, Doc added: “Natural enough mistake — I keep making it in my own mind, which I inherited from my cavemen ancestors along with my tail bones! Say, look how far the sea’s gone out! Ross, I’m afraid the tidal effects are showing up faster than we hoped.”

Paul, trying to get back into the swing of the discussion, made himself visualize how tides eighty times higher would mean tides eighty times lower too — at six-hour intervals, at most places.

“Incidentally,” Doc added, “we’ll be about ten days getting into that nineteen-day orbit, since Earth’s acceleration is only about five-hundredths of an inch a second. That of the moon, also in respect to the Wanderer, must have been about four feet a second, cumulative, of course.”

A chilly land-breeze came sneaking around Paul’s neck. He pulled his coat tighter — he’d got it back from Margo when the Little Man had given her one of the leather jackets. In spite of that she had Miaow inside the jacket to make her warmer as she stared out across the long, flat beach.

“Look how the light glistens on the wet gravel,” she said to Paul. “Like amethysts and topazes shoveled out of trucks.”

“Ssh,” said the fat woman, beside her. “He’s getting messages.”

Just the other side of Wanda, the Ramrod was gazing at the Wanderer as though hypnotized by it, his chin on his fist, rather in the attitude of “The Thinker.”

“The Emperor says, ‘No harm to Terra’,” the Ramrod droned just then in a trancelike voice. “ ‘Her turbulent waters shall be stilled, her oceans withdrawn from her shores’.”

“A planetful of King Canutes,” Doc murmured softly.