The Wanderer

Only then did Don realize that this wasn’t some sort of surface appearance on the Wanderer, but a material something — or two things — headed straight at the Baba Yaga. He flinched and blinked his eyes, and the next instant, without any gradual deceleration that he could note, the two yellow spindles had come to a dead stop to either side of the Baba Yaga and so close that the frame of the spacescreen chopped off the outer dagger-end of each spindle.

They looked to him now like two saucer-shaped spacecraft between thirty and fifty feet across and three or four yards thick. At least, he rather hoped they were spacecraft — and not, well, animals.

His estimate of their shape was confirmed when, without any visible flash of vernier jets, they tilted toward him and became two yellow circles, one with a violet triangle inscribed in it, the other with a violet V, the legs of which stretched from center to rim.

Then he felt his spacesuited body pushed gently backward as the Baba Yaga was drawn forward between its escorts — that was how he began to think of them — until only the forward edges of their rims showed in the spacescreen. They held position very precisely thereafter, as if they had locked onto his little moonship — and somehow onto his body too, a very strange sensation.

The next thing he noticed was that the pale green spots were crawling down the Wanderer’s black rotundity as if they were so many phosphorescent sow-bugs!

Then he saw that the sheaf of stars was widening as the black ellipsoid of the moon dropped away.

From all indications the Baba Yaga was being drawn upward by its escorts at about one hundred miles a second. Yet he had not felt an atom of the G-forces that ought to have been crushing him against his ship’s wall — or smashing him through it!

At no time in the past few hours, not even during his passage through the moon, had Don thought, This must be an hallucination. He thought it now. Acceleration and the price you paid for it in fuel and G-strains were the core of his professional knowledge. What was happening to his body and to the Baba Yaga now was not merely a monstrous intrusion of the unknown, it flatly contradicted everything he knew about spaceflight and its iron limitations. From five miles a second, Wanderer-relative, to one hundred at right angles to the first course, yet without feeling it, without even the hint of the firing of some main jet hotter than a blue star — that was not merely weird, it was impossible!

Yet the green spots continued to scuttle out of sight below and the star-sheaf to widen above, and suddenly the Baba Yaga burst into sunlight above the Wanderer. Reflected glare stabbed at his eyes from the lefthand side of the spacescreen frame and the yellow rim of his port escort. He squeezed his eyelids together, fumbled for the polarizing goggles, got them on, then opened his eyes and looked.

The Baba Yaga, locked to its escorts, was still mounting up around the Wanderer at a fantastic velocity. The space-screen swung a little to the right and, looking over the top of the planet, Don could see Earth, mostly Pacific Ocean now, and the glaring white sun which could sting his eyes even through the goggles.

The planetary surface below him was night side, then a crescent of the day side, mostly yellow but with the far edge violet.

Looping over and around him against star-speckled space were the white threads that came from the moon’s nose. Two of them were thicker now — not threads, cords.

Ahead they converged and curved down toward the Wanderer’s north pole. There, close together but still separate, they seemed simply to join the planet’s velvet surface, some on the day side, some on the night side, a dozen or so of them in all. They looked now like weird, leafless vines sprouting from the top of the Wanderer. The Baba Yaga and its escorts were cannoning across the same spot.

Then, just as it seemed that in the next second they must flash past the thickening stalks or crash into them, Don’s strongest convictions about spaceflight were once again battered as the Baba Yaga and its escorts lost most of their velocity in a tranquil instant and simultaneously headed straight down toward the black-and-yellow rooting place of the stalks.

Either his escorts had the inertia-less drive at which everyone but science-fiction writers scoffed, and were carrying the Baba Yaga in their null-G field, or he was hallucinating, or -

He turned to the control panel and tried for a radar fix on the surface below. Rather to his surprise he got an instant echo.

They were 320 miles above the surface and closing with it at ten miles a second.

Automatically, he chorded the verniers to reverse the Baba Yaga’s altitude so as to be able to brake with what little main-jet fuel he had left.