The Wanderer

But with so many signs of them down below, and evidences of their workmanship everywhere, their science and technology, so near magic, where were they? Why had he been left alone so long?

He turned his back on the pit and peered all around him uneasily, but nowhere on the silver pavement nor about the smooth, windowless, geometric structures rising from it could he see a living figure, or any figure he judged might be living — humanoid, animal, or otherwise.

The two violet-and-yellow, bulge-centered saucers still hung enigmatically a dozen feet above the pavement, just as when he’d last turned his back on them, and the Baba Yaga stood midway between them, exactly as he’d left it. This was what had happened so far: when the voice had called to him in its faintly slurred, oddly thrilling English, he had unsuited obediently, almost eagerly, and quickly climbed down out of the Baba Yaga, but there had been no one there. After waiting for minutes at the foot of the ladder, he had walked over to the pit and been enthralled.

Now he began to wonder if the voice mightn’t have been pure illusion. It was unreasonable to think of an alien being able to speak English without any preliminary parleying. Or was it? Their powers…

He took a deep breath. At least the air seemed real enough.

The silence was profound, except that when he held still and relaxed and closed his eyes and let out his breath softly, he thought he could hear the faintest, muted, deep-throated rumbling. The blood of this strange planet, coursing? Or only his own blood? Or the rumbling might come from the pillar of moon rock hurtling into the other pit, no farther beyond the Baba Yaga and the invisibly suspended saucers than he was standing in front of them.

The gray pillar, occupying a full third of his horizon but tapering swiftly almost to a point at the top of the sky, looked at first glance like a solid mountain, except that he knew it was plunging steadily downward at a speed great enough to make its component particles and fragments individually invisible — presumably the same ten miles a second at which he’d judged it to be moving above the sky-film that roofed the atmosphere.

As he watched the pillar, he began to see slow changes in its contours — bulgings and channelings that formed slowly and held their shape for many seconds and then shifted into other smooth forms. It reminded him of the grotesque bulgings and groovings that a stream from a faucet will hold — sometimes so persistently that the shape seems to be one of solid crystal rather than rushing water.

But how could the thing be moving at such a supersonic velocity — two seconds from the sky to the floor! — through the palpable air — the air he knew had to be there because he was breathing it — without creating a fierce and tumultuous dust storm of eddies in that air, without a roar like that of a dozen first-stage rockets or a score of Niagaras?

They must, somehow, perhaps using an unheard-of field, have created a wall-less vacuum channel, just as surely as they must have created — now he came to think of it — similar wall-less tubular vacua for the Baba Yaga and its escorts to travel through after they burst the sky-film…and, even before that, through the thin plasma and micro-meteorites of space.

He continued to stare up the weirdly foreshortened gray pillar. How long could this monstrous transfer go on? How long would the moon last, even as an ellipsoid of pale gravel spreading into a ring, at this rate of depletion? How long would there be any moon-stuff left outside the Wanderer?

From the sector of his brain schooled in engineering and solid geometry sprang almost at once the first-approximation answer, that it would take eight thousand days for one such rock stream, moving ten miles a second, to transport the moon’s entire substance. He had seen only a dozen of the rock streams.

But they might speed up the streams, and there might be another set at the Wanderer’s south pole, and others being brought into existence. Looking aside from the pillar, he now did see three more in the distance: they looked like great gray waterspouts twisting up toward the sky.

The sky was now all dark blues and greens and browns, slowly swirling in a great edge-blended river, austere and menacing. He looked down toward the paler structures ringing the empty silver pavement except where the pits were; he let his gaze travel around the pillar-broken circle of those smoothly monstrous, multiform, pastel-shaded solidities, and it seemed to him that some of the more distant ones had changed position and shape — and in some cases crept closer — since he’d last studied them.