The black bulk shouldering into the hourglass from port was the moon, now totally eclipsed by the vast, newly appeared body.
The Wanderer, shouldering into the starry hourglass from starboard, was not entirely black — Don had in view seven pale green glow spots, each looking about 300 miles across, the farther ones being ellipses, the nearest, almost circular. They were featureless, though at times there was the suggestion of a phosphorescent pit or funnel. Of what they signified, Don had no more idea than if they had been pale green spots on the black underbelly of a spider.
In company with the moon, the Baba Yaga was orbiting the Wanderer, but slowly gaining on Luna because the little ship, nearer the Wanderer, had the faster orbit.
He warmed the radar. The return signal from the moon showed a surface more irregular than craters and mountains alone could account for, and even in five minutes the patterns had greatly changed: the tidal shattering of Luna was continuing.
The surprisingly strong signal from the intruding planet showed a spherical, matte surface with no indication at all of the greenish glow spots — as if the Wanderer were smooth as an ivory ball.
Intruding planet! — impossible, but there it was. At the top of his mind Don tried to recall the scraps of speculation he’d read and heard about hyperspace: the notion that a body might be able to travel from there to here without traversing the known continuum between, perhaps by blasting or slipping into some higher-dimensioned continuum of which our universe is only a surface. But where in all the immensity of stars and galaxies might the there of this intruding planet be? Why should the there even be anywhere in our universe? A higher-dimensioned continuum would have an infinity of three-dimensional surfaces, each one a cosmos.
At the bottom of Don’s mind there was only an uneasy voice repeating: “The earth and sun are on the other side of that green-spotted black round to starboard. They set ten minutes ago; they’ll rise in twenty. I have not traveled through hyperspace, only through the moon. I am not in the intergalactic dark, staring at a galaxy shaped like a sheaf or an hourglass, while seven pale green nebulas glow to starboard…”
Don was still in his spacesuit, but now he removed and secured the cracked helmet. There should be a sound one in the locker. “Make and mend,” he muttered, but his throat closed at the sound of his own voice. He unstrapped himself from the pilot’s seat to push as close as he could to the spacescreen. The cabin was chilly and dark, but he turned on neither heat nor light — he even dimmed the control panel. It seemed all-important to see as much as possible.
He was gaining on the moon, all right, with his inside orbit: the sheaf of stars ahead was very slowly widening to port, as the black bulk of the eclipsed moon dropped back.
Suddenly he thought he saw, against the star-studded glow of the Milky Way, wraithlike black threads joining the top of the Wanderer — call it its north pole — to the leading rim or nose of the moon. Looping through space, the black strands were so nearly imperceptible that, like faint stars, he could detect them best by looking a little away from them.
It was as if, having snared and maimed the moon, the Wanderer were spinning a black shroud around it, preparatory to sucking it dry.
He shouldn’t have started to think about spiders.
The voice kept repeating: “The sun and Earth are beyond the green-spotted black bulge to starboard. I am Donald Barnard Merriam, lieutenant, U.S. Space Force…”
Barbara Katz, her back to the other ocean bordering America 3,000 miles east of the saucer students, saw the mandala as a purple-spoked oxcart wheel. The huge wheel seemed to revolve a quarter turn as the planet touched the horizon.
“Gee, Dad, it’s as if the Wanderer were lying down,” she said, all at once feeling agonized and desperate because she wouldn’t be able to see the next face the Wanderer showed, or to see the moon come out from behind it, either.
But it would all be on TV. Or would it? Will there still be TV? she asked herself, looking around incredulously. Everywhere the sky was paling with the dawn that would not reach the Pacific Coast for another three hours.
From beside Barbara, Knolls Kettering III said in a groggy voice she hadn’t heard before: “I’m very tired…Please…”
She grabbed his arm as he swayed and leaned most of his weight on her — which wasn’t a great deal. Inside the white suit his body seemed like the curved, brownish husk of an insect, while his face was as hollow-cheeked and crisscrossed with wrinkles as an Indian great-grandmother’s. Barbara was almost shocked, but then she reminded herself that he was her own private millionaire, to preserve and to cherish. She made her grip more delicate on his shoulder, as if it were a shell she might crush.
The older Negro woman, dressed like the younger, in pearl gray with white collar and cuffs, came fussing up and took hold of him on the other side. This seemed to irritate him awake.
“Hester,” he said, leaning away from her toward Barbara. “I told you and Benjy and Helen to go to bed hours ago.”
“Huh!” she laughed softly. “As if we would leave you playing around with that telescope in the dark! You watch how you put your weight now, Mister K. Plastic in your hip get tired working all night, it break easy.”
“Plastic can’t get tired, Hester,” he argued wearily.
“Huh! it not anywhere as strong as you, Mister K!” she said, putting him off. She looked across him questioningly at Barbara, who nodded firmly. Together they walked him across the thick, weedless carpet of the lawn, up three spotless concrete steps, and through a big cool kitchen with old, nickel-heavy fixtures that seemed to Barbara huge enough for a hotel.
Halfway up a wide stairway, he made them stop. Perhaps the vast, cool, dark living room next to the stairs took him back into the night, for he said: “Miss Katz, every heavenly body that seems to stand erect when it’s high in the sky, appears to lie down when it rises and sets. It’s true of constellations, too. I’ve often thought—”
“Come on now, Mister K, you need your rest,” Hester said, but he fretfully shook the arm she was holding and said insistently: “I have often thought that the answer to the Sphinx’s question of what goes on four legs in the morning, two legs at midday, and three legs at evening was not Man but the constellation Orion walking just ahead of the Dog Star, whose rising signaled the flooding of the Nile.”
His voice wavered on the last words, and his head drooped, and he permitted himself to be led upward again. Barbara, feeling his weight on her arm — more than he was putting on Hester, she was pleased to note — thought: I guess I can see why you’re thinking of three legs at evening, Dad — or four.
They laid him down on a big bed in a dark bedroom bigger than the kitchen. Hester whisked something from the pillow into a drawer, then changed her mind and let Barbara see it.
It was a slim, black-haired fashion doll about ten inches high, dressed in black lace underwear and black stockings and long black gloves.
Knolls Kettering III muttered thickly: “For midday, read midnight”
Hester looked up from the doll to Barbara’s long black foot-gloves and playsuit and black hair, and she grinned.
Barbara couldn’t have stopped herself from grinning back, even if she’d wanted to.
Chapter Fourteen
Paul Hagbolt faced Major Buford Humphreys through the beach gate of Vandenberg Two. Margo stood beside him holding Miaow. The ten saucer students were crowded around them. The edges of all their shadows made purple and golden flecks on the silvery mesh of the gate.