The Wanderer (2 page)

Eclipses weren't all that dark, it turned out, and
el presidente's
three jet fighters could chop up this ancient Seabee in seconds, ending the Revolution of the Best, or at least the contribution to it of the self-proclaimed lineal descendant of the original William Walker who had filibustered in Nicaragua in the 1850's.

If he did manage to bail out, they would capture him. He didn't think he could stand an electric bull prod except by turning into a three-year-old.

Too much light, too much light!
"You're a typical lousy bit-player," Don Guillermo shouted up at the brazen moon. "You don't know how to efface yourself!"

Two thousand miles east of Wolf Loner and his cloudbank, Dai Davies, Welsh poet, vigorous and drunk, waved good night from near the dark loom of the Severn Experimental Tidal Power Station to the sooty moon sinking into the cloudless Bristol Channel beyond Portishead Point, while the spreading glow of dawn erased the stars behind him.

"Sleep well, Cinderella," he called. "Wash your face now, but be sure to come back."

Richard Hillary, English novelist, sickish and sober, observed finically, "Dai, you say that as if you were afraid she wouldn't."

"There's a first time for everything, Ricky-bach," Dai told him darkly. "We don't worry enough about the moon."

"You worry about her too much," Richard countered sharply, "reading a veritable vomit of science fiction."

"Ah, science fiction's my food and drink—well, anyhow my food. Vomit, now—you were maybe thinking of the book-vomiting dragon Error in
The Faerie Queene
and fancying her spewing up, after all of Spenser's musty hates, the collected works of H.G.

Wells, Arthur C. Clarke, and Edgar Rice Burroughs?"

Hillary's voice grew astringent. "Science fiction is as trivial as all artistic forms that deal with phenomena rather than people. You should know that, Dai. Aren't the Welsh warmhearted?"

"Cold as fish," the poet replied proudly. "Cold as the moon herself, who is a far greater power in life than you sentimental, sacrilegious, pub-snoozing, humanity-besotted, degenerate Saxo-Normans will ever realize." He indicated the Station with a sweep of his arm. "Power from Mona!"

"David!" the novelist exploded. "You know perfectly well that this tidal power toy is merely a sop to people like myself who are against atomic power because of the weapons aspect. And please don't call the moon Mona—that's folk etymology. Mona's a Welsh island, if you will—Anglesey—but not a Welsh planet!"

Dai shrugged, peering west at the dim, vanishing moon-bump. "Mona sounds right to me and that's all that counts. All culture is but a sop to infant humanity. And in any case," he added with a mocking grin, "there are men on the moon."

"Yes," Hillary agreed coldly, "four Americans and an indeterminate but small number of Soviets. We ought to have cured human poverty and suffering before wasting milliards on space."

"Still, there are men on Mona, on their way to the stars."

"Four Americans. I have more respect for that New Englander Wolf Loner who sailed from Bristol last month in his dory. At least he wasn't staking the world's wealth on his adventurous whim."

Dai grinned, without taking his eyes off the west.

"Be damned to Loner, that Yankee anachronism! He's most likely drowned and feeding the fishes. But the Americans write fine science fiction and make moonships almost as good as the Russkies'. Good night, Mona-bach! Come back dirty-faced or clean, but come back."

Through his mushroom helmet's kingsize view window, still polarized at half max to guard his eyes from solar glare, Lieutenant Don Merriam USSF watched the last curved sliver of solid sun, already blurred by Earth's atmosphere, edge behind the solid bulk of the mother planet.

The last twinges of orange light reproduced with frightening exactitude the winter sun setting through the black tangle of leafless trees a quarter mile west of the Minnesota farmhouse where Don Merriam had spent his childhood.

Twisting his head toward the righthand mini-console, he tongued a key to cut polarization. ("The airless planets will be pioneered by men with long, active tongues,"

Commander Gompert had summed it up. "Frogmen?" Dufresne had suggested.) The stars sprang out in their multitudes—a desert night squared, a night with sequins. The pearly shock of Sol's corona blended with the Milky Way.

Earth was ringed by a ruddy glow—sunlight bent by the planet's thick atmosphere—and would remain so throughout the eclipse. The ring was brightest near the planet's crust, fading out a quarter diameter away, and brightest of all along the lefthand rim behind which the sun had just vanished.

Don noted without surprise that the central bulk of Earth was the blackest he had ever seen it. Because of the eclipse, it was no longer brushed with the ghostly glow of moonlight.

He had been half crouched in his suit, leaning back and supporting himself on one arm to get an easy view of Earth, which was halfway to his zenith. Now with a wrist-flick nicely gauged to the moon's dreamy gravitation, he came fully to his feet and looked around him.

Starlight and ring-glow tinged with bronze the dark gray plain of dust, mouse-soft, a mixture of powdered pumice and magnetic iron oxide.

Back when Cromwell's New Model Army ruled England, Hevelius had named this crater the Great Black Lake. But even in bright sunlight Don could not have seen the walls of Plato. That near-mile-high, circular rampart, thirty miles away from him moon-east, north, south, and west, was hidden by the curve of the moon's surface, sharper than the earth's.

The same close horizon cut off the bottom half of the Hut, only three hundred yards away. It was good to see those five little glowing portholes at the margin between the dark plain and the starfield—and near them, silhouetted by starlight, the truncated cones of the base's three rocket ships, each standing high on its three landing legs.

"How's the dark dark?" Johannsen's voice softly asked in his ear. "Roger and over."

"Warm and spicy. Suzie sends love," Don responded. "Roger to you."

"Outside temperature?"

Don glanced down at the magnified fluorescent dials beneath the view window.

"Dropping past 200 Kelvin," he replied, giving the absolute equivalent of a temperature of almost exactly 100 degrees below zero on the Fahrenheit scale still widely used in Earth's English-speaking areas.

"Your SOS working?" Johannsen continued.

Don tongued a key and a faint musical ululation filled his helmet. "Loud and clear, my captain," he said with a flourish.

"I can hear it," Johannsen assured him sourly. Don tongued it off.

"Have you harvested our cans?" Johannsen next asked, referring to the tiny, rod-supported cannisters regularly put out and collected to check on the movements of moon dust and other materials, including radioactively tagged atoms planted at various distances from the Hut.

"I haven't sharpened my scythe yet," Don told him.

"Take your time," Johannsen advised with a knowing snort as he signed off. He and Don were well aware that planting and harvesting the cans was mostly an excuse to get a man suited up and out of the Hut as a safety measure during times of greatest danger from moonquakes—when Earth and Sun were dragging at the moon from the same side, as now, or from opposite sides, as would happen in two weeks. Gravitational traction has been thought to trigger earthquakes, and so, possibly, moonquakes. Moonbase had not yet experienced anything beyond the mildest temblor—the pen of the seismograph keyed to the solid rock below the dust cushioning the Hut had hardly quivered; just the same, Gompert made a point of having a man outside for several hours each fortnight—at "new earth" and "full earth" (or full moon and new moon, if you stayed with the groundster lingo, or simply the spring tides). Thus if the unexpected did occur and the Hut sustained serious damage, Gompert would have one egg outside his basket It was just another of the many fine-drawn precautions Moonbase took for its safety.

Besides, it provided a tough regular check on the efficiency of spacesuits and of personnel working solo.

Don looked up again at the Earth. The ring was glowing less lopsidedly now. He couldn't make out a single feature of the inky circle inside, though he knew the eastern Pacific and the Americas were to the left and the Atlantic and the western tips of Africa and Europe to the right. He thought of dear, slightly hysterical Margo and good old neurotic Paul, and truly even they seemed to him rather trivial at the moment—nice little beetles scuttling under the bark of Earth's atmosphere.

He looked down again, and he was standing on glittering whiteness. Not whiteness literally, yet the effect of a new-fallen Minnesota snow by starlight had been duplicated with devilish precision. Carbon dioxide gas, seeping steadily up through the pumice and oxide of Plato's floor, had suddenly crystallized throughout into dry-ice flakes forming directly on the dust floor or falling onto it almost instantly.

Don smiled, feeling less inhumanly distant from life. The moon had not become a Mother to him yet, not by a long shot, but she was getting to seem just a little like a chilly Older Sister.

Balmy air sluiced the convertible carrying Paul Hagbolt and Margo Gelhorn and the cat Miaow along the Pacific Coast Highway. At almost regular intervals a weathered yellow roadsign would grow until it plainly said slide area or falling rock zone, and then it would duck out of the headlight beam. The highway traveled a generally narrow strip between the beach and an almost vertical, hundred-foot cliff of geologically infantile material—packed silt, sand, gravel, and other sediments, though here and there larger rocks thrust through.

Margo, her hair streaming, sat half switched around with her knees on the seat between her and Paul, so she could watch the smokingly bronzed moon. She had her jacket spread on her lap. On it was Miaow, curled up in a gray doughnut and fast asleep, or giving a good imitation.

"We're getting near Vandenberg Two," Paul said. "We could look at the moon through one of the Project 'scopes."

"Will Morton Opperly be there?" Margo asked.

"No," Paul replied, smiling faintly. "He's over in the Valley these days, at Vandenberg Three, playing master sorceror to all the other theory boys."

Margo shrugged and looked sideways up. "Doesn't the moon ever black out?" she wondered. "It's still sooty copper."

Paul explained to her about the ring-glow.

"How long does the eclipse last, anyway?" she asked, and when he said, "Two hours," she objected: "I thought eclipses were over in seconds, with everybody getting excited and dropping their cameras."

"Those are the eclipses of the sun—the totality part."

Margo smiled and leaned back. "Now tell me about the star photographs," she said.

"You can't possibly be overheard in a moving car. And I'm not so worked up about them now. I've stopped worrying about Don—the eclipse is just a bronze blanket for him."

Paul hesitated.

She smiled again. "I promise not to rev my mind at all. I'd just like to understand them."

Paul said: "I can't promise you any understanding. Even the astro big-wigs only made profound noises. Including Opperly."

"Well?"

Paul wove the tires around a tiny scatter of gravel. Then he began. "Well, ordinarily, star photos don't get seen around for years, if ever, but the astro boys on the Project have a standing request out with their pals at the observatories to be shown anything unusual. We've even had star pix the day after they were taken."

Margo laughed. "Late Sports Final of the Stellar Atlas?"

"Exactly! Well, the first photo came in a week ago. It showed a starfield with the planet Pluto in it. But something had happened during the exposure so that the stars around Pluto had blanked out or shifted position. I got to look at it myself—there were three very faint squiggles where the brightest stars near Pluto had shifted.

Black-on-white squiggles—in real astronomy you just look at the negatives."

"Inside stuff," Margo said solemnly. Then, "Paul!" she cried. "There was a newspaper story this morning about a man who claimed to have seen some stars twirl! I remember the headline:
STARS MOVED, SAYS WRONG-WAY DRIVER.
"

"I saw it too," Paul said a bit sourly. "He was driving an open-top car at the time, and had an accident—because he was so fascinated by the stars, he said. Turned out he'd been drinking."

"Yes, but the people with him in the car backed him up. And later there were phone calls to the planetarium, reporting the same thing."

"I know, we had some at the Moon Project," Paul said. "Just the usual business of mass suggestion. Look, Margo, the photo I was telling you about was taken a week ago, and it was of something only a powerful telescope could see. Let's not get it mixed up with flying saucer-type nonsense. I'm saying, we got a photo of Pluto showing three faint star-squiggles. But get this—Pluto hadn't shifted at all! Its image was a black dot"

"What's so astonishing about that?"

"Ordinarily you don't get startled at starlight or even star images wavering. Earth's atmosphere does it, same as it makes hills waver on a hot day—in fact, that's what makes the stars twinkle. But in this case, whatever was twisting the starlight had to be out beyond Pluto. This side of the stars, but beyond Pluto."

"How far away is Pluto?"

"Almost forty times as far as the sun."

"What would twist starlight way out in space?"

"That's what puzzles the big boys. Some special sort of electric or magnetic field, maybe, though it would have to be very strong."

"How about the other photos?" Margo prompted.

Paul paused while he pulled around a deep-growling truck. "The second, taken four nights ago by our astro satellite and TV'ed down, was the same story, except that the planet involved was Jupiter, and the area of the twist was larger."

"So that whatever made the twist must have been nearer?" Margo suggested.

"Perhaps. Incidentally, Jupiter's moons hadn't wavered either. The third photo, which I saw day before yesterday, showed a still larger area of twist with Venus in it Only this time Venus had made a squiggle too—a big one."