The Wanderer

“I don’t think so,” he told her. “You can hardly see any stars near the moon with the naked eye. Besides, these reports by laymen just don’t mean anything.”

“Well,” she countered, “it certainly does sound as if something were creeping up on the moon. First Pluto, then Jupiter, then Venus, getting closer each time.”

The road curved south and the darkly bronzed moon came swinging out over the Pacific as it rode along with them.

“Now, wait a minute, Margo,” Paul protested, lifting his left hand for a moment from the wheel. “I got the same idea myself, so I asked Van Bruster about it He says it’s completely unlikely that one single field, traveling through space, was responsible for the four twists. He thinks there were four different twist fields involved, not connected in any way — so there can’t be any question of something creeping up on the moon. What’s more, he says he’s not too surprised at the photos. He says astronomers have known the theoretical possibility of such fields for years, and that evidence for them is beginning to show up now, not by chance, but because of the electronically amplified ’scopes and superfast photographic emulsions that have just gone into use this year. The twists show up in star snapshots where they wouldn’t in long exposures.”

“What did Morton Opperly think of the photos?” Margo asked.

“He didn’t…No, wait, he was the one who insisted on plotting the course of the twist fields from Pluto to the moon. Say, we just passed Monica Mountainway! That’s the fancy new road across the mountains to Vandenberg Three where Opperly is right now.”

“Was the Pluto-moon course a straight one?” Margo asked, refusing to be deflected.

“No, the darndest zig-zag imaginable.”

“But did Opperly say anything?” Margo insisted.

Paul hesitated, then said, “Oh, he chuckled, and said something like, ‘Well, if Earth or Moon is their target, they’re getting closer with each shot.’ ”

“You see?” Margo said with satisfaction. “You see? Whatever it is, it’s aiming at planets!”

Barbara Katz, self-styled Girl Adventurer and long-time science-fiction fan, faded back across the lawn, away from the street-globes and the Palm Beach policeman’s flashlight, and slipped behind the thick jagged bole of a cabbage palmetto before the cold bright beam swung her way. She thanked Mentor, her science-fiction god, that the long-hoarded, thirty-inch nylon foot-gloves she was wearing below her black playsuit were black, too — one of the popular pastel shades would have shown up even without the flash. The bag dangling from her shoulder was a black one, of the Black Ball Jetline. She didn’t worry about her face and arms, they were dark enough to melt with the night — and get her mistaken for colored by day. Barbara was willing to do her bit for integration, but just the same she sometimes resented it that she tanned so dark so fast.

Another burden for Jews to bear bravely, her father might have told her, though her father wouldn’t have approved of stouthearted girls hunting millionaires in their home lair in Florida, which they shared with the alligators. Or of such girls carrying bikinis in their swiped shoulder bags, either.

The policeman’s flash was prodding the shrubs across the street now, so she continued across the lawn springy as foam rubber. She decided that this was certainly the house from beside which she’d seen a lens flashing while she’d sneaked her swim at sunset.

It got very dark around her as she advanced. As she rounded another palmetto, she heard the whisper of a tiny electric motor, and she almost overran a white suit that was seated at the eyepiece of a big white telescope supported on a white-legged tripod and directed at the western sky.

The suit got up with a kind of lurch that showed it was helped by a cane, and a voice quavered from atop it “Who’s that?”

“Good evening,” Barbara Katz responded in her warmest, politest voice. “I believe you know me — I’m the girl who was changing into the black-and-yellow striped bikini. May I watch the eclipse with you?”

Chapter Three

Paul Hagbolt looked at the heights ahead, where the Pacific Coast Highway swung inland and began to climb. Beyond this approaching bend, between the road and the sea, loomed the three-hundred-foot plateau on which stood Vandenberg Two, home of the Moon Project and the U.S. Space Force’s newest base and rocket launching and landing area. Gleamingly wire-fenced around its foot and showing only a few dark red lights along its crest which stretched off endlessly, the space base towered mysteriously between the diverging highway and ocean — an ominous baronial stronghold of the future.

The highway hummed more hollowly as the convertible crossed a flat concrete bridge over a wash and Margo Gelhorn sat up sharply beside him. Miaow flinched. The girl’s gaze swung back past Paul. “Hey, wait a minute.”

“What is it?” Paul asked, not slowing down. The highway had begun its climb.