There was a low, grinding sound like steel clockwork being wound. Miaow stiffened in Margo’s arms, and the short hairs rose along her spine. Ragnarok had growled.
Rama Joan continued: “Among the stars, out there, there may be Hindus who won’t kill a cow and even Jains who whisk off whatever they sit on for fear of crushing an ant and who wear gauze over their lips to keep from swallowing a gnat, but those will be at most the rare exceptions. The rest will not strain at gnats. To us, they will be devils.”
Weirdness engulfed Paul. Everything around him seemed much too real, yet on the verge of dissolution — frozen, phantasmal. He looked toward the stars and the moon for support, telling himself that the heavens were the one thing that hadn’t changed through all history, but then a demon voice deep in his mind said: “But what if the stars should move? They moved, in the photographs.”
Sally Harris led Jake Lesher across the worn wood platform to the fifth and last car of the Rocket train. The only other passengers this trip were a rather timid-looking Puerto Rican couple, sitting in the first car and already gripping the safety bar with all four hands.
“My God, Sal, the waits I put up with,” Jake said. “And the sidetracks I go down — I mean up! — to humor you. Hasseltine’s penthouse—”
“Shh, this ain’t no sidetrack, lover boy,” she whispered as the launcher hurried past, making the last quick check. “Now listen hard: as soon as we start to climb, slide forward about a foot and grab onto the back of the seat for all you’re worth with your left hand, because with your other arm you’re going to be holding me.”
“But that’s the arm away from you, Sal.”
“Now it is,” she told him and touched him intimately.
He goggled at her, then smirked incredulously.
“Just you follow directions,” she told him. With a creak and a clicking the train started its steep climb. A dozen yards from the top, she stood up lightly, swung her leg in a gleaming arc and straddled his waist. One hand gripped his neck, the other swiftly fitted things.
“Jesus, Sal,” he gasped, “I bet we make the earth move like in For Whom the Bell.”
“Earth, hell!” she told him, grinning bare-fanged down at him like a Valkyrie, as the train poised for its swoop and the tow let go. “I’ll make the stars move!”
Rama Joan said: “Oh, the star people would be awesomely beautiful to us, I imagine, and as endlessly fascinating as a hunter is to a wild animal that hasn’t yet been shot at. I’m dreadfully interested in speculating about them myself — but to us they would still be as cruel and distant as ninety-nine per cent of our own gods. And what are man’s gods except his imaginings of a more advanced race? Take the testimony of ten thousand years, if you won’t take mine, and you will realize that out there…up there…there are devils.”
Ragnarok growled again. Miaow flattened herself against Margo’s shoulder, digging in with her claws.
The Little Man said: “End of totality.”
Doc said: “Really, Rama Joan, you surprise me.”
Margo said: “Miaow, it’s all right.”
Paul looked up and saw the eastern rim of the moon lighten, and it was like a reprieve from prison. He suddenly knew that his incomprehensible fears would lift with the ending of the eclipse.
A half-dozen moon-diameters east of the moon, a squad of stars spun in tight little curlicues, like ghostly white fireworks erupting, squibs and pinwheels…and then blacked out.
From his lonely mesa, Asa Holcomb saw the stars near the moon shake, as if a fanfare were being blown through the cosmos. Then a great golden and purple gateway four times as wide as the moon opened in the heavens there, pushing the blackness aside; and Asa strained eagerly toward it, and his heart swelled with the wonder and majesty of it, and his aorta tore all the way, and he died.
Sally Harris saw the stars squiggle just as she and Jake, momentarily shedding thirty pounds of weight apiece, started to come atop the sixth summit of the Ten-Stage Rocket at Coney Island. In the blind egoistic world of sexual fulfillment that lies exactly on the boundary between the conscious and unconscious regions of the mind, she knew that the stars were a provincial district of herself — the Marches of Sally Harris — and so she merely chortled throatily: “I did it, Christ! I said I’d do it and I did it!”
And even when atop the next summit, after a choking, pulsing plunge to the nadir and back up, she saw the squiggling stars replaced by a yellow and purplish disk twenty times the size of the moon and bright enough to show up the pinstripe in the shoulders of Jake’s suit as his face pressed between her breasts, she leaned back, like a Valkyrie, the safety bar cold across her rump, and cried triumphantly to the heavens: “Jesus, a bonus!”
High Bundy said: “Oh, what a kick! Listen, Pepe, there’s this crazy old Chinarqan, bigger than King Kong, on the other side of the world kicking his legs up at us, and he’s painting golden plates with grenadine so they look like two raindrops making love, and he’s skimming them off to the moon with a reverse twist as he finishes them, and one of them sticks there.”
“Reet-reet,” Pepe cooed. “It’s lighting all New York. Plate lightning.”
“I’m getting it, too,” Arab said, floating up behind them. “Man, what great tea!”
Knolls Kettering III, eye glued to the eyepiece in the Palm Beach dark, was saying a bit stuffily: “The noun “planet’, Miss Katz, is derived from the Greek verb planasthai, to wander. Originally it meant simply ‘Wanderer’: a body that roves here and there amongst the fixed stars.” His voice tightened. “Hello, the moon is lightening, and not just along the limb coming out of eclipse. Yes, definitely. And there are colors.”
A hand curved over his shoulder protectively, and just about the littlest voice he’d ever heard — it was as if Barbara Katz had turned into a grasshopper — said, “Dad, please don’t look away from the eyepiece now. You’ve got to prepare yourself for a big shock.”
“A shock? What is it, Miss Katz?” he asked nervously, though following instructions.
“I’m not quite sure,” the microscopic voice continued. “It looks like an old Amazing cover. Dad, I think your Wanderer’s roved this way — only the Greeks didn’t grow ’em this big. I think it’s a planet.”
Paul, flinching, had shut his eyes for at most two seconds.
When he opened them, the Wanderer was there, streaming with bloody and golden light east of the moon in the sky, sixteen times the moon’s area, wavily split by one ragged, reverse-S curve into golden and maroon halves, looking softer than velvet yet with a clear-cut, unhazed rim.
That much Paul saw as a visual pattern, saw in a flash without analysis. The next moment he had thrown himself to the floor, shoulders hunched and head down, away from the Wanderer. For the first, dominating impression was of something gigantic and flaming overhead, something intimidatingly massive, about to crash to earth and crush him.
Margo, clutching Miaow, was on the floor beside him.
Purely by happenstance, Paul’s eyes were directed at the program he was holding. He automatically read a line: “Our bearded panelist is Ross Hunter, Professor of Sociology, Reed College, Portland, Oregon” — before he realized he was reading easily by the light of the Wanderer.
To Don Guillermo, approaching the hill with its huddle of official buildings, his eyes on “the Palace,” his left hand gripping the cross-stick handle on the bomb-release wire, the Wanderer was a Nicaraguan loyalist jet materialized on his tail and erupting a volcano of silent tracer bullets. He ducked in his seat, squinted his eyes, and tightened his neck and shoulders against the slugs. They didn’t come and they didn’t come — the bastard must be a sadist, prolonging the agony.