The Wanderer

Don Guillermo Walker told himself that the cluster of feeble lights he’d just droned past must be Metapa. But — his celestial navigation being as much boast as his European Shakespearean career — what if they were Zapata or La Libertad? Better, perhaps: in widely missing his target he’d miss the torture. Sweat itched on his chin and cheeks. He should have shaved his beard, he told himself. His captors would say, jiggling the bull prod in the steaming cell, that the beard proved he was a Castro-inspired Communist and his cards of the John Birch Society forgeries or worse. Burn la barba off his face with la electricidad! “Damn you for getting me into this, you whore in black underwear, you nigger-Indian bitch!” Don Guillermo yelled at the sooty orange moon.

The “Prince Charles” and the dory “Endurance” went their diverging ways across the dark Atlantic. Most of the nylon-shod ones had gone to their rendezvous with sleep or each other, but Captain Sithwise was taking a turn on the bridge. He felt strangely uneasy. It was having those Brazilian insurgents aboard, he told himself: this new lot of empire-snatchers did such unaccountably crazy things — as if they lived on ether.

Wolf Loner rocked in the arms of the sea, cushioned by a mile of salt water. The cloudbank under whose eastern verge the “Endurance” had entered was a vast one, trailing veils of fog and stretching to Edmonton and the Great Slave Lake, and from Boston north to Hudson Strait.

Sally Harris granted Jake Lesher another burst of hand-clutching at a dark turn in the House of Horror, but, “Hey, don’t ruck up my skirt — use the auxiliary hip placket,” she admonished.

“Are your pants magnetically hung, too?” Jake demanded.

“No, just Goodyear, but there’s a vanishing gadget. Easy there — and for God’s sake don’t tell me they’re like the big round loaves of good homemade bread Mama Lesher used to bake. That’s enough now, or the Rocket’ll close down before we’ve seen the eclipse.”

“Sal, you were never astronomical like this before and we don’t need that kind of roller-ride. You got the key to Hasseltine’s place, don’t you, and he’s away, isn’t he? — and besides, you’ve never taken me there. If that skyscraper isn’t high enough for you—”

The roller coaster’s my skyscraper tonight,” she told him. That’s enough, I said!”

She twisted away from him and ran off, past an eight-foot-tall gray Saturn-man who reared out of a wall, gripping a yard-long raygun and peppering her with sizzling blue light.

Asa Holcomb, puffing a bit, surmounted the top of the little mesa west of Arizona’s Superstition Mountains. Just at that moment the wall of his aorta tore a little, and blood began to seep into his chest There was no pain, but he felt a weakness and sensed a strangeness, and he quietly lay down on the flat rock, which still had a little heat in it from the day of sun.

He was neither particularly startled nor very afraid. Either the weakness would pass, or it would not. He’d known this little climb to a good spot to watch the eclipse was a dangerous thing. After all, his mother had warned him against climbing by himself in the rocks, seventy years ago. Doubly dangerous, with an aorta paper-thin. But it was always worth everything to get away by himself, climb a bit, and study the heavens.

His eyes had been resting, a little wistfully, on the lights of Mesa, but now he lifted them. This was about the fiftieth time he had seen Luna shrouded, but tonight she seemed more beautiful in her bronze phase than ever before, more like the pomegranate Proserpine plucked in the Garden of the Dead. His weakness wasn’t passing.

Chapter Four

The convertible carrying Paul Hagbolt and Margo Gelhorn and her cat softly jounced along the rutted trail, raw cliff again to the right, beach sand to the left, both now only a yard or so off. Away from the big highway, the night pressed in. The three wayfarers shared more fully the lonely obscurity of the eclipsed moon climbing the starry sky. Even Miaow sat up to peer ahead.

“Among other things, this road probably leads to the back door of Vandenberg Two,” Paul ruminated. “The beach gate, they call it. Of course I’m supposed to use the main gate, but in a pinch…” Then after a bit: “It’s really funny how these saucer maniacs are always holding their meetings next door to missile bases or atomic installations. Hoping a little glamor will leak their way, I guess. Did you know that at one time the Space Force was really suspicious about it?”

The headlights picked up an earth-fall blocking more than half the road. It was as high as the hood of the car, and recent, judging by the damp look of the granulated dirt. Paul let the car stop.

“End of saucer expedition,” he announced cheerfully.

“But the others have gone on,” Margo said, standing up again. “You can see where they’ve gone around the fall.”

“Okay,” Paul said mock-doomfully. “But if we get stuck in the sand, you’re going to have to hunt drift boards to put under the tires.”