Most of the party had at one time or another in their lives had the experience of looking down on a fog or a low cloud layer from a mountainside or an airplane, and seeing the hilltops lifting up through it, and marveling at how flat and far it stretched — a veritable ocean of clouds. Now the same persons had for a second or two or three the illusion that they were witnessing the same sight again, by Wanderer-light.
This illusory, nocturnal cloud-ocean began scarcely fifty yards beyond and no more than a dozen yards below them and it stretched to the western horizon, closely following to either side the contours of the hills. There was only one island, low and flat, but so big it stretched out of sight past the dark hillsides to the north. Red and white lights shone sparsely from this island and the Wanderer-light revealed two clusters of low, pale-walled, pale-roofed buildings. And already in the first moments of watching, there was a faint drone and a tiny red and green pair of lights slanting down from the south, as a small airplane landed on the island. A strait a quarter of a mile wide separated the island from the mainland.
Then the illusion faded and one by one the saucer students realized that it was not cloud-ocean that stretched to the horizon but salt ocean, not mist-water but solid-water sea, its waves breaking rhythmically against the hillside and the descending road fifty yards ahead; that the island was Vandenberg Two; and that the strait between covered among other things the Pacific Coast Highway where it swung inland of the Space Force base, home of the Moon Project — of Morton Opperly and Major Buford Humphreys, of Paul Hagbolt and Donald Merriam, though those last two were elsewhere now.
At the wheel of the Corvette, Hunter felt on his left shoulder fingers that lay lightly at first, but then gripped strongly. He put his right hand on top of the hand there and turned his head and looked at Margo’s face — the yellow hair drawn flat, the long lips, the hungry cheeks, the dark eyes — and she looked back, expressionless, at him.
Without lifting his hand from hers he called up to the truck: “We’ll camp here by the sea. When the tide goes down we’ll enter Vandenberg.”
Don Merriam gazed up the elevator shaft at the circle of sky swirling symphonically with a red-black storm, as if the colors had been chosen to match the fur of his conductor standing silently beside him.
The circle grew slowly, then rapidly, then the elevator stopped, and its floor was once more seamlessly part of the etched silver pavement.
Nothing seemed to have changed. The pillar of hurtling moonrock still towered like a gray pinnacle four times the height of Everest. Beyond the empty pavement the great plastic structures crouched off into the distance like an army of abstract sculptures. The pit yawned with its unsupported silver railings.
Then Don saw that only one saucer — colored with a violet-yellow yin-yang — hovered beside the Baba Yaga. That stained moon ship gleamed as if newly burnished, and instead of the ladder there hung below the hatch a stubby man-wide metal tube that looked telescoped.
Beyond the Baba Yaga, the Russian moon ship gleamed freshly, too, and a similar extensible-looking metal tube projected outside its hatch, which was located near the nose.
The felinoid lightly touched Don’s shoulder and said in his caressingly slurred English: “We are taking you to an Earth friend. Your ship is fueled and serviced, and it goes with us, but you will ride in mine at first There will be a transfer in space. Have no fear.”
Paul Hagbolt woke with a start Tigerishka was snarling at him: “Wake up! Get dressed. We’ve got a visitor!”
The start carried him a yard away from the window against which he’d been resting, so for the moment all he could do was grope around impotently in null gravity while he tried to get the sleep out of his eyes and mind.
The inner sun had been switched on again, and the windows were solid pink once more, creating with the flowers the effect of a combination conservatory and boudoir.
Tigerishka was jerking some flappy objects out of a door in the Waste Panel. She proceeded to throw them at him.
“Get dressed, monkey!”
One of them got hooked on her claws and she ripped it loose in a fury and hurled it after the others.
Paul, or rather his body, intercepted the objects without difficulty, since they were well aimed. They were his clothes, nicely laundered and smelling freshly of cotton and other fabrics, though there were no creases in the pants. He fumbled at them, saying in a voice still squeaky with sleep: “But, Tigerishka—”
“I’ll help you, you stupid ape!”
She coasted to him quickly and, grabbing the shirt, started to ram his foot into the arm of it.
“What’s happened, Tigerishka?” he demanded, not helping her. “After last night—”
“Don’t ever mention last night to me, monkey!” she snarled. The shirt ripped, and she tried to shove his foot into the next garment she grabbed, which happened to be his coat.
“But you’re acting as if you were angry and ashamed about what happened,” he protested, still ignoring her attempts to dress him.
She stopped what she was doing and grabbed him by the shoulders as they floated there and glared her violet-irised eyes into his.
“Ashamed!” she repeated vibrantly. Then, very coldly: “Paul, have you ever masturbated a lower animal?”
He just stared back at her stupidly, feeling his muscles tighten, especially around the neck.
“Don’t act so shocked!” she commanded irritably. “It happens all the time on your planet. One way or another, you do it to get seed from bulls and stallions for artificial insemination…and so on!”
He said quietly: “You mean that what happened last night wasn’t a real embrace?”
She hissed at that, just like a cat, then said harshly: “A real embrace would have shredded your flimsy anthropoid genitals! I was silly, I was bored, I felt sorry for you. That was all.”
For a moment Paul saw clearly how a superbeast would at its level have neuroses just like those of a talking anthropoid, how it would suffer from attacks of irrealism, do the wrong thing, get bored, fritter away time and feelings. For a moment he realized how lonely and confused he himself would have to be to pretend to love a cat as if it were a girl, to fantasize an erotic passion for Miaow… But just then Tigerishka slapped him with her pads and snarled: “Don’t dream, monkey. Get dressed!”
The fragile bridge of understanding which his intuition had been building crashed, though this was not instantly apparent on the surface, for he continued as quietly as before: “You mean that was the whole experience, that was all that last night meant to you? Just being ‘nice’ to a pet?”
She said firmly: “Last night my feelings were fully ninety per cent pity for you and boredom with myself.”
“And the other ten per cent?** he persisted.
She dropped her great eyes from his. “I don’t know, Paul. I just don’t know,” she said very tautly, grabbing his coat again. Then, “Oh, get dressed yourself,” she hissed exasperatedly and pushed off for the control panel. “But be quick about it. Our visitor’s almost at the door.”
Paul ignored that. A hot maliciousness was flooding up into his cold misery. He slowly pulled his coat sleeve off his foot. He said evenly: “It seems to me that last night began with me treating you like a pet, scratching you under the neck and stroking your fur, and you were lapping it up, you were responding just like—”
The pink floor jumped up and bumped him, jarred his spine. She called: “I’ve switched on earth-normal gravity so you’ll be able to get dressed! Oh, if you had any idea of what it means to be cooped up this way with a repulsive bald body and with an utterly inferior mind and to have to wear out one’s throat with the nonsense of sound-making…”