Solid moon dropped from under his boots, then smashed up against their corrugated soles, then dropped away and smashed again. The dust carpet fell and lifted with him. Here and there bushels of it shot up a dozen feet or more, then fell back, abruptly compared with dust on Earth.
The jolts went on. Don fought to keep his footing as if he were standing on the back of a bucking horse, his hands ready to move to whichever side toward which he should overbalance. The jumping dust made bright vertical scrawls — thick, hairpin brushstrokes — against the starfields. Some solid sunlight was once more bathing Plato’s plain.
The jolts subsided. Don upped the polarization of his helmet window to four-fifths max and scanned for the Hut. He’d quit trying to raise them by suit radio. He couldn’t make out the portholes, but that was always harder in sunlight. He figured the right direction from the stars and started out.He thought he saw the gleam-edged, long-legged trapezoids of two of the Baba Yagas.
A second horizontal moonquake threw him on his face. He got his forearms raised in time to catch the impact. This ground-parallel temblor was protracted. There were a half dozen sideways surges. Plato’s gray dust-lake rippled to the horizon. Dust spray rose and fell. The stuff really did behave more like water (on Earth) than like dust. Rock knobs thrusting up through it made dust wakes. Dust squirts peppered Don’s helmet.
A vertical component added itself to the horizontal quake. The roar dazed him. Don’s suit shook like an empty tin can in a paint-mixer.
He gave up waiting and began to crawl toward the ships like a dust-drenched silver beetle. He wished he had a beetle’s two extra legs.
The saucer students were sorting themselves out as they headed for their cars, which showed up colorfully at the base of the brown cliffs. The general effect of the Wanderer’s light, mixing complementary yellow and violet, was yellowish white, except where mirror surfaces such as water reflected the entire orb, or in the edges of shadows where one color was cut off.
Hunter said to Paul, a shade enviously, “I suppose you Moon Project people already have this thing a lot more thoroughly comprehended than we do. More data, for one thing. Satellite ’scopes, radar, all the rest.”
“I’m not so sure of that, Ross,” Paul replied. “On the Project you develop a kind of tunnel vision.”
The Little Man came back toward them with Ragnarok on short leash and his clipboard in the other hand.
“Remember me? — I’m Clarence Dodd. Mayn’t I have your signature now, Miss Gelhorn?” he said winningly, holding out the clipboard to Margo. “Tomorrow a lot of people are going to be saying: ‘Why didn’t we sign it?’ But then it’ll be too late.”
Margo, struggling to contain Miaow, snarled: “Oh, get away, you idiot!”
“I’ll sign it for you, Doddsy,” Doc called cheerfully. “Only, come on over here and quit trying to provoke felino-doggy war.”
Ann giggled. “I like Mr. Brecht, Mommy.” The red-haired woman in evening clothes smiled down at her faintly.
“That’s what I like to hear,” Doc called. “Keep on propagandizing your mother.”
Paul took Margo’s elbow to guide her to his car, but then something made him stop and look up at the Wanderer. The purple-bordered yellow figure had rotated completely into view now and stood out sharply, thick at the base, thinner and sharply bent at the top. It teased Paul’s imagination.
Clarence Dodd — or the Little Man, as Paul still called him in his mind — gave Ragnarok’s leash to Doc and made another quick simplified sketch, using criss-cross lines to show the purple. He labeled it “After One Hour.”
One of the cars, a red sedan, backed and took off, far ahead of any of the others.
From ahead the thin woman called: “Please help us, someone. I think Wanda’s having a heart attack.”
Ragnarok whimpered. Miaow hissed.
Suddenly Paul realized what the yellow figure reminded him of: a dinosaur. A long-jawed dinosaur rearing on its great thick hind legs. His skin prickled. Then he was trembling and there was a faint low roaring in his body.
When Paul was a little boy, he had liked to stand on the middle of the porch swing, a cushioned, solid seat for three hanging from the ceiling by chains at the four corners. It had seemed at the time a daring feat of equilibrium. Now, all at once, he was standing on that swing again, for the ground under his feet moved, gently but solidly with a ponderous muffled thud, a few inches back, a few inches forward, and then back again, and he was swaying his body to keep balanced, just as he’d used to do on the swing.
Over inarticulate exclamations and calls, Hunter shouted with strident anxiety: “Come away from the cars!”
Margo clung to Paul. Miaow, squeezed between them, squeaked.
People were whirling and running. The brown cliff appeared to swell; cracks opened in it all over; and then it sank, slowly, it looked, but with shuddering sledge strokes at the end. Gravel pattered. A grain stung Paul’s cheek. There was a puff of gritty air. Suddenly the smell of raw earth was very strong.
“Come on!” Hunter yelled. “Some of them were caught!”
But Paul first looked upward again at the uprearing yellow figure on the purple orb now perceptibly nearer the moon.
Tyrannosaurus Rex!
Pershino Square is a block of little fountains and neatly manicured greenery roofing a municipal garage and atomic shelter in the heart of old Los Angeles, where the signs read “Su credito es bueno” more often than “Your credit is good.”
Tonight the winos and weirdies and anonymous wayfarers who, next to the furred squirrels and feathered pigeons, are the Square’s most persistent inhabitants, had something more exciting to observe than the beards of Second Coming preachers and the manic gesticulations of threadbare lecturers.
Tonight the inhabitants of Pershing Square spilled into Olive Street at the corner of Fifth, where a bronze statue of Beethoven broodingly faces the Biltmore Hotel, Bunker Hill, and the Baptist Auditorium which serves as one of the city’s chief theaters. Their lifted faces were bright with Wanderer-light as they silently stared south at the monstrous sign in the heavens, but Beethoven’s visage remained introspectively in the shadow of its great brow and hair-mop as he peered down at his half-buttoned vest whitened with pigeon droppings.
There was a momentary intensification of the awed silence, then a faint distant roaring. A woman screamed, and the watchers dropped their gaze. For a long moment it looked to them as if black ocean were coming toward them up Olive in great waves crested with yellow and violet foam — great black waves that had traveled all the twenty miles north from San Pedro along the Harbor and Long Beach Freeways.
Then they saw that the waves were not black water but cold black asphalt, that the street itself was surging as great earthquake shocks traveled north along it. In the next instant the roaring became that of a hundred jets, and the asphalt waves tossed the watchers and broke up the walls of the buildings around them in a stone and concrete surf.
For a second an infinitely sinister violet light flashed from the deep eyesockets of the giant metal Beethoven, as he slowly toppled over backwards.
The saucer students had trouble enough coping with the results of the fringe reverberation of the big Los Angeles-Long Beach quake. After the thin woman and two others had been half dug, half pulled out of their light entombment in the edge of the landfall, a hurried count showed three others still missing. There followed a frantic ten minutes of digging, mostly with two bright-bladed shovels that the Little Man had produced from the back of his station wagon, which was solidly buried only as far as the rear wheels and its top dented in only about a foot Then someone remembered the red sedan that had left ahead of the rest; and someone else, that it had been the one in which the three missing people had arrived.