The Wanderer (48 page)

Yet they did not strike the Wanderer, but stopped short of her by just a hair of gray sky, and were thrown back in four faint, semicircular, bluish-white fans.

"They must be hitting a field of some sort," the Little Man guessed.

"Like the Lensmen battles!" McHeath chimed excitedly.

Similarly three violet beams shot from the Wanderer to the Stranger and were intercepted. Blue and violet beams stretched, crisscrossing, between the two planets, like a long, geometrically drawn cat's cradle.

"This is it!" Hixon yelled fiercely.

Wojtowicz was watching so singlemindedly that he walked off the ramp. From the corner of his eye, McHeath noted him drop out of sight and raced over.

"I'm O.K., kid, I just slipped down here a little ways—see, I can reach you,"

Wojtowicz replied reassuringly to McHeath's anxious call. "Only give me a hand up, will you, so I don't have to stop watching?"

Hixon called up to the truck: "You should be out here seeing this, babe—it's amazing!"

From inside the cab Mrs. Hixon shouted back: "You watch the fireworks for me, Billy boy—I'm driving the truck!" And she honked viciously at the Corvette, which seemed to be stopping.

But Hunter was only slowing a bit. He'd taken a couple of quick glances at the battling planets, and it still seemed to him more important to get this gang into the Space Force base while the excitement lasted and perhaps as it ran interference for them.

He had to get that done and the juiceless momentum pistol delivered, too—he had come to share much of Margo's obsession on the latter point. While she, tramping along to the left of the hood, was obviously still of the same mind and mood.

So Hunter called out: "Come on, everybody! Here we turn right. Don't walk off the end!" And he swung the car up onto the plateau.

There at last they found personnel—three soldiers who might well have been on guard duty, judging from the three weapons leaned against the wall of the tin hut behind them, but who were now crouching restlessly on their hams to stare up at the interplanetary battle. One of them was snapping his fingers.

As the truck swung up onto the plateau after the Corvette and both cars almost stopped, Margo quickly walked up behind the soldiers.

Overhead three more blue lines and two more violet ones added themselves to the laser barrage, complicating the cat's cradle.

Margo touched the nearest soldier on the shoulder, and when he didn't react, shook him by it He turned a wild sweating face up at her.

"Where is Professor Morton Opperly?" she demanded. "Where are the scientists?"

"Christ, I wouldn't know," he told her. "The longhairs are over there somewheres."

He waved vaguely toward the interior of the plateau. "Don't bother me, lady!" He whirled back, his face on the sky again, and pounded one of his buddies on the shoulder.

"Tony!" he yelled. "I got two more bills says Old Goldy beats the bejesus out of Cannonballl"

"You're faded!"

(Twenty-five hundred miles east, Jake Lesher clutched Sally Harris and gasped: "Oh, Sal, if I could have made book on this!")

Margo walked on. Mrs. Hixon honked again. Hunter drove on slowly, following Margo. He called sharply to the figures close around the two cars: "Keep moving, everybody. Watch and walk."

Ahead floodlights went on against white walls, silhouetting knots and huddles of men, none of them moving, all of them staring at the sky.

Two more blue beams flashed on, not exactly from the Stranger, but from points a half diameter out from her—huge battleships of space, perhaps. One of the new beams needled through to the Wanderer. There was an incandescent gout at the edge of the north yellow notch of the mandala, and when the dazzling white light faded there was a long ragged black hole there in the Wanderer's golden and purple skin.

Ann's voice cut through, shrill with tragedy. "Mommy, they're hurting the Wanderer!

I hate it!"

Pop, stumbling along and shaking his fists once more, snarled gleefully: "Fry 'em, oh, fry 'em! Keep it up! Kill yourselves!"

Suddenly the nine blue beams impinging just short of the Wanderer spread out, generating a pale blue hemispherical shroud half masking the Wanderer—a sort of mist-curtain through which the yellow and violet features of the planet showed dimly.

The violet beams vanished.

"They're drowning them," Hixon yelled. "It's the kill!"

"No, I think the Wanderer's putting up a new kind of defensive screen," the Little Man contradicted.

Five blinding points of white light sprang out on the steely surface of the Stranger.

"Missiles exploding!" McHeath guessed. "The Wanderer's fighting back!"

The Ramrod, breathing heavily and leaning against the truck as he strode along with it, now cried out in an agonized appeal: "But what must we understand from this? Do hate and death rule the cosmos, even among the most high?"

Rama Joan, her eyes on the sky as she pulled Ann along, called back to him in a swift, bell-like voice: "The gods spend the wealth the universe gathers, they scan the wonders and fling them to nothingness. That's why they're the gods! I told you they were devils."

Ann said accusingly: "Oh, Mommy."

True to McHeath's guess, the five white points had swollen to the pale hemispheres of explosion fronts, through which the steely surface of the Stranger showed unbroken.

Hixon said: "I don't know about devils, but I know now there'll always be war." He waved a hand at the zenith. "What more proof could you ask than
that?"

Mrs. Hixon shouted cryptically from the cab: "Now you're talking sense, Bill, and what good is it?"

The Ramrod gasped: "But when the highest…and the wisest…
Is there no cure?"

Young Harry McHeath's imagination took fire from the tragedy of that question, and for a moment he saw himself in an almost all-powerful, one-man spaceship poised midway between the Wanderer and the Stranger, turning back their bolts from each other, somehow healing their sanity.

The Little Man said, not in a loud voice, almost as if to himself: "Maybe the cure always has to come from below. And keep coming from below. Forever."

But Wojtowicz heard him and without looking away from the sky asked: "How do you mean from below, Doddsy? Not from
us?"

The Little Man looked at htm. "Yes, Wojtowicz," be said with a chuckle at the ridiculousness of it, "from little nothing guys like you and me."

Wojtowicz shook his head. "Wow," he laughed. "I'm punch-drunk."

Moving steadily forward all the time, the cars and the walkers were almost to the floodlit walls. A young man in a sweatshirt rushed by Margo and grabbed a major and yelled in his ear: "Opperly says douse those goddamn floodlights. They're spoiling our observations!"

Hunter, hearing that, had to think of Archimedes saying to the enemy soldier treading on his sand-diagram: "Don't spoil my circle!"

The soldier in the legend had killed Archimedes, but this major was violently nodding his head as he turned around. Hunter recognized Buford Humphreys from two nights back. At the same time Humphreys saw him, saw Rama Joan and Ann, saw the whole lot of the "saucer bugs" he had kept out of Vandenberg. He goggled wildly, then with a shrug of incomprehension and a quick glance at the sky, raced off, calling:

"Goddamn it, corporal, kill those floods!"

Meanwhile Margo had grabbed the young man by his sweatshirt before he could dart away. "Take us to Professor Opperly!" she ordered. "We've got to make a report.

Look, I've got a note from him."

"O.K.," he agreed without glancing at the dirty, crumpled sheet. "Follow me." He pointed a hand at the cars. "But douse those headlights!"

The Corvette's and the truck's beams winked out a moment before the white wall went dark, but Margo held on to the young man. His pale sweatshirt made it easy for Hunter to follow them. Beyond them Hunter saw now the loom of radar screens and the white barrel of a field telescope.

Overhead the blue beams flashed off along their length, and the mist-curtain around the Wanderer faded, to be instantly replaced by a hundred points of white light, stabbingly bright.

But even as McHeath, squinting his eyes, called: "Implosion globe!" it was to be seen that the Wanderer had slipped aside twice her diameter up the sky, with the dizzying feeling of the foundations of the universe shifting. The implosion globe brightened as the white blasts that had been on the other side of the Wanderer shone through and the globe now had a wide ragged neck where the Wanderer had burst out.

"They've gone inertialess—the whole planet," Clarence Dodd cried.

There were a half dozen ragged holes in the Wanderer's skin now, black but glowing dull red toward their central depths—so many of them that the mandala was barely identifiable.

Tangentially from the ravaged planet's side there shot out toward the Stranger a violet beam thicker and many times brighter than any of the earlier ones.

But before it was halfway to the Stranger, the bigger planet moved as swiftly as one of its beams—a rhinoceros rush across the sky, destroying all feelings of stability—to a position alongside the Wanderer. There was not a moon's width between them.

The Wanderer vanished.

A blue broadside burst from the Stranger and laced through the space where the Wanderer had been.

"Goddamn, they blew her to bits!" Pop screamed ecstatically.

"No, she disappeared a fraction of a second earlier," the Little Man contradicted.

"You've got to
observe!"

The Stranger, her steely surface unholed, though streaked with brown and greenish scars, hung there three, four, five seconds, then she vanished too—like a big dim electric globe, the solar highlight its filament, switched off.

The sheaf of blue laser beams and the single thicker violet one crawled away from each other, dimming and shortening but ruler-straight, into the astronomic distance, while the pearlike implosion globe from which the Wanderer had first burst grew momently paler, bigger, and ghostlier.

"The Wanderer escaped into hyperspace," McHeath said.

"Maybe, but she was a goner," Hixon said. "She'd have knocked to bits, and the Stranger's gone in after her. She's done."

"But we can't be sure," Hunter said. "She might go on escaping forever." In his thoughts he added,
Like the Flying Dutchman.

"We can't even be sure they're really gone," Wojtowicz said with a nervous guffaw.

"They might of just jumped to the other side of the earth."

"That's true," the Little Man said, "but we didn't see them even start to move…they just vanished. And I've got a feeling…"

Only then, as the bright yellow and orange afterimages faded from their retinas, did the saucer students begin to realize, one by one, that they were all standing quite still in inky darkness. Hunter had switched off the Corvette's ignition. Behind him he heard the truck's motor die. By twos and threes the stars began to wink on in the black heavens—the old familiar stars that the slate sky had masked for three nights.

Don and Paul gazed up through the spacescreen of the Baba Yaga at the empty starflelds and the blue and violet laser beams straight-lining off toward infinity.

They were both strapped down. Paul held a reddened handkerchief to his cheek.

Don kept an eye on the skin temperature gauge and on the green-glowing aft radar picture of Southern California and the Pacific below. Although all but a trace of Earth's atmosphere was still under them, he'd already braked once, mostly to assure himself that the main jet would fire.

"Well, they're gone," Don said.

"Into the storm," Paul finished the thought "The Wanderer was a wreck."

"Nothing's a wreck that can boost into hyperspace," Don assured him quite cheerily.

The stars began to crawl across the screen, and he tripped a vernier or two and they steadied.

"Maybe the Wanderer will
drift
to another cosmos," Paul muttered thoughtfully.

"Maybe that's the way: don't try to force it, just drift like a wrecked ship with the hyperspatial currents, surrender to the storm."

Don glanced at him sharply. "She told you quite a bit, didn't she? I wonder if she got back aboard in time."

"Of course," Paul said shortly. "I think even those little ships can move as fast as light, or faster."

"That was quite a clawing she gave you," Don remarked casually, then rapidly added: "Me, I didn't have any big romances up there." He rippled the verniers again and frowned at the skin temperature gauge. He continued briskly: "And I don't think I got any left down below, either. Margo's really serious about this Hunter character, I'd say."

Paul shrugged. "What do you care? You always liked loneliness better than you liked people. No offense—liking yourself s the beginning of all love."

Again Don gave him a quick glance. "I bet you loved Margo more than I did," he said. "I think I always knew that."

"Of course I did," Paul said dully. "She'll be angry I lost Miaow."

Don chuckled. "What things that cat'll see." Then his voice changed. "You wanted to go with Tigerishka, too, didn't you? You stayed behind to ask her."

Paul nodded. "And she wouldn't have me on any terms. When I asked her what she felt toward me, she gave me this." He hugged his cheek against the bloody rag.

Don chuckled. "You're a glutton for punishment, aren't you?" Then, quite lightly: "I don't know, Paul, but if I were in love with a cat-lady, that clawing would be the one thing that would convince me she did love me back. Grab hold of the barrel now—here we go over Niagara Falls."

The saucer students stood in inky darkness roofed with stars. Then, so near at hand it seemed for a moment they were in a room, a small low light went on, showing a cluttered table and behind it a man with the ageless, thin, sharp-featured face of a pharaoh. Margo moved toward him, following the young man in the sweatshirt, and Hunter got out of the car and came up after her.

The man behind the table looked to one side. Someone there said: "The magnetic fields of both planets are gone, Oppie. We're back to Earth-normal."