Don Merriam had given Paul Hagbolt a brief account of his experiences in space and aboard the Wanderer. It seemed to confirm the background of much that Tigerishka had told Paul and it revived in him something of the mood that she had induced in him by her story, though he was still shaken and hurt by the subsequent change in her feelings. Now he was telling Don what had happened to him and Margo on the night of the Wanderer’s appearance — at the flying saucer symposium and by the gate of Vandenberg and in the earthquake waves — when Tigerishka interrupted sharply.
“Stop chattering, please! I have some questions for you.”
She was standing at the pinkly embowered control panel — had presumably been in silent contact with her superiors. Paul and Don were sitting on the pink floor, across which Miaow made periodic scampering sorties from the flower banks — evidently much intrigued or at least stimulated by the simulated terrestrial gravity.
“Have you two beings been well treated here and during your contacts with my people? Donald Merriam?”
He stared at her, thinking how much she resembled, except for the coloring of her fur, the felinoid he had seen catch a great topaz bird and drink its blood with the air of a ballerina nibbling at an after-theater snack.
He said: “After I escaped from the moon — wholly by my own efforts as far as I know — I was picked up by two of your ships, escorted to the Wanderer, kept in a comfortable room there for two days, apparently, then brought here. Nobody talked to me much. I think my mind was turned inside out and inspected. In a dreamlike vision I was shown many things. That’s about it.”
“Thank you. Now you, Paul Hagbolt, have you been well treated?”
“Well…” he began, smiling at her questioningly.
“A simple yes or no will do!” she snapped.
“Then — yes.”
“Thank you. Question two: Have you seen evidence of your Earth people being given aid in their tidal troubles?”
Paul said: There were those things you showed me over Los Angeles and San Francisco and Leningrad: fires put out by rain, tides being driven back by some sort of repulsion field.”
Don said: “I think I saw television pictures of the same sort of thing in one huge room of the Wanderer during my vision or dream.”
“It was a true vision,” she assured him. “Question—”
“Tigerishka,” Paul interrupted, “does all this have something to do with the two star photographs that don’t match the Wanderer’s false exits from hyperspace? Are you people afraid the pursuit will catch up with you, and are you preparing a defense of your actions here?”
Don looked at him in surprise — Paul had as yet told him nothing of Tigerishka’s story — but she said simply, “Stop chattering, monkey — I mean, being. Yes, that is possible. But question three: So far as you know, have your companions suffered by reason of the Wanderer?”
Don said harshly: “My three companions at Moonbase were killed when Luna broke up.”
She nodded curtly and said: “One of them may have survived — it’s being checked. Paul Hagbolt?”
He said, “I was just telling Don about that, Tigerishka. Margo and the saucer people were O.K. when I last saw them — I mean at least they were alive, though in the wash of some earthquake waves which you’d done something to make smaller. But that was two days ago.”
“They’re still alive,” Tigerishka asserted. Her violet eyes twinkled and she shaped her lips in a thin, humanoid smile as she added: “I’ve been keeping an eye on them — you mortals never realize how much the gods worry about you: all you see are the floods and the earthquakes. However I won’t ask either of you to accept my word for that, I’ll show you! Stand up, please, both of you. I am going to send you down to Earth to see for yourselves.”
“You mean in the Baba Yaga?” Don asked as they complied. “As I’m sure you know, it’s linked to this saucer now by a space tube and I was given the idea that I — I mean that we now, Paul and myself — would be able to use it to return to Earth. Which the Baba Yaga can manage, I think, if we are released above the atmosphere with no orbital speed to—”
“No, no, no,” she interrupted. “Later you’ll do that — in an hour or two, say, and at your Vandenberg Two space field — which is just five hundred miles below us now, by the way — but now I send you there a much quicker way. Face the control panel! Stand close together!”
Don commented with a somewhat grim chuckle, “It’s as if you were going to take a snapshot of us.”
Tigerishka said, “That’s just about what I am going to do.”
The sunlight in the saucer began to dim. Miaow, as if scenting excitement, came scampering out of the flowers and rubbed around their ankles. On a sudden impulse Paul scooped up the little cat.
Margo and Hunter had dressed and folded the blankets and started down the hillside arm in arm, at one with each other and the cosmos in the afterglow of their lovemaking, when they heard a voice calling faintly: “Margo! Margo!”
Below them at the foot of the slope lay the camp around the two cars. No one was stirring. The Wanderer-light streaming down from the serpent-egg face showed only wrapped, recumbent figures. The pool of shadow by the truck had grown smaller as the Wanderer mounted the sky, yet it was still there.
But the voice did not seem to come from the camp, but from the air.
They looked toward the sea and it had sunk ten yards or more, leaving a wide band of hillside darkly stained where the high tide had been. What water now lay between them and Vandenberg Two was more like a wide river, with islets showing in it here and there. Their gaze mounted from the point, and against the dark gray sky they saw two faintly luminous figures of men descending the air, erect yet with unmoving feet. The figures descended at a slant, floating swiftly and weightlessly, and vanished into the hillside midway between them and the camp.
Hunter and Margo held each other tight, their skin chilling and prickling, for both remembered the figure they had seen in the shadow of the truck, and both had the thought that one of the weightless figures was Doc — and the whole sight another, though bolder, ghostly manifestation, or a continuation of the first.
When nothing more happened they went a few steps farther down the hill, and then Margo looked down and gasped with horror and retreated a sudden two steps as if from a snake, dragging him back with her.