From the ground in front of them rose two heads of men, their figures earth-encumbered to the shoulders. The features of the heads were blurred, though one misty face seemed namelessly familiar to Hunter. Necks and shoulders identified one as a uniformed spaceman, one — the familiar one — as a civilian. The thought flashed through Hunter’s mind of how much this was like Ulysses’ encounter with the spirits of the dead in the Underworld, these two spirits summoned not by the hot shed blood of the bull, but by the pounding blood of his and Margo’s lovemaking.
Then the two figures rose out of the ground, not by their own efforts, for they moved neither hand nor foot, but drawn up by a power outside them until their feet touched the surface of the ground, yet not quite as if they stood but rather floated there, facing Hunter and Margo six feet away. Then what was blurred came into focus and Margo gasped: “Don! Paul!” although she clutched more tightly at Hunter as she did so, and as he, too, recognized the second figure.
The Paul-figure smiled and opened its lips, and a voice which synchronized perfectly with the lip movements yet did not come from the throat said: “Hello, Margo and Professor…Excuse my poor memory. We’re not ghosts. This is merely an advanced form of communication.”
In similar fashion the Don-figure said: “Paul and I are talking to you from a small saucer out in space, between you and the Wanderer, but nearer the earth. It’s wonderful to see you, Margo, dear.”
“That’s right,” Paul chimed in. “I mean about being in the saucer. It’s the same one that picked me up. See—” he lifted something in his hands. “Here’s Miaow!”
The little cat rested quietly for a moment, then its lips writhed back, there was a synchronized spitting hiss and it vanished into the darkness in a whirl of its own little limbs.
The Paul-figure scowled and momentarily raised a hand to his lips and sucked at it, then explained: “She got excited. It’s all a little too weird for her.”
Margo let go of Hunter and put his arms away from her and stepped forward, reaching a hand toward Paul but raising the other to Don’s cheek and lifting her face to kiss him.
The hand went through the cheek, however, and with a little nervous gasp — not so much of fear as of exasperation at her own nervousness — Margo retreated back to Hunter.
“We’re only three-dimensional images,” Paul explained with a quirking smile.
“Touch doesn’t transmit on this system. We’re seeing your two images up here in the saucer, except they aren’t always together in the saucer, especially when they were moving into focus. It’s really pretty weird, if you’ll excuse my saying so, Professor…”
“My name’s Ross Hunter,” he said, at last managing to speak.
Don said to Margo: “I’m sorry I’m too insubstantial to kiss, dear. I’ll make up for that when I really see you. Incidentally, I’ve actually been on the Wanderer.”
“And I’ve been talking to one of their beings,” Paul put in. “She’s quite a person — you’d have to see her. She wants us to—”
Hunter interrupted, “You’ve been on the Wanderer, you’ve talked with them — Who are they? What are they doing? What do they want?”
Paul said: “We haven’t time to try to answer any questions like that. As I was about to say, our…well, captress…wants us to assure ourselves that you survived the tidal waves and that you’re all safe. That’s half the reason for this…call.”
“We’re safe,” Margo said faintly, “as far as anyone on Earth is.”
“Our whole party’s survived so far,” Beardy amplified, “except for Rudolph Brecht, who was killed in a mountain accident.”
“Brecht?” Paul questioned him doubtfully, frowning.
“You remember; we called him Doc,” Margo explained.
“Of course,” Paul said, “and we called that funny old crackpot the Ramrod and Professor Hunter Beardy. Excuse me. Professor.”
“Of course,” Hunter said impatiently. “What’s the other reason for the call?”
Don said: “To let you know that if everything works out right, we’ll be landing at Vandenberg Two in a few hours, probably in my moon ship.”
“At least Don will,” Paul added. “We have to stay up here in space now. The Wanderer may be in danger, there’s an emergency developing.”
“The Wanderer, in danger?” Margo repeated incredulously, almost sardonically. “Emergency developing? What do you call what’s been happening the last two days?”
Hunter said to Don: “We’re in sight of Vandenberg Two, as you know, and we’re planning to go there as soon as we can.”
“We’re trying to find Morton Opperly,** Margo put in automatically.
Don said to Hunter: “That’s good. If you bring them the news about me, it’ll be easier for you to get in. Tell Oppie the Wanderer has linear accelerators eight thousand miles long and a cyclotron of that diameter. That should convince him of something! It’ll help me if they’re informed ahead of time about my intended landing.” He looked toward Margo. “Then I’ll be able to kiss you properly, dear.”
Margo looked back at him and said: “And I’ll kiss you, Don. But I want you to know that things have changed. I’ve changed,” and she pressed more closely to Hunter to show what she meant.
Hunter frowned and pressed his lips against his teeth, but then he tightened his arm around her and nodded and said curtly: “That’s right.”
Before Don could say anything, if he’d been going to, the ground suddenly turned bright red, faded, turned red again. The same thing was happening to the whole landscape: it was lightening redly, then darkening, then reddening again, as if from soundless red lightning flashes coming in a steady rhythm. Hunter and Margo looked up and instantly flinched their eyes away from the blinding red pinpoint flares winking on and off at the north and south poles of the Wanderer, rhythmically reddening its own polar caps as well as the Earth’s whole sky. Never in their whole lives had they seen anything like such bright sources of monochromatic light.
“The emergency’s arrived,” said the Paul-image, the red light striking weirdly through it, making it doubly unreal. “We’re going to have to cut this short.”
The Don-image said: “The Wanderer is recalling its ships.”
Hunter said strongly: “We’ll tell them at Vandenberg. We’ll see you there. Oppie: eight-thousand-mile linear accelerators and a cyclotron of that diameter. Good luck!”
But in that instant the two images were gone. They didn’t fade or drift, just winked out.
Hunter and Margo looked down the red-lit hillside. Even the surf was red, the foaming of a lava sea. The camp was astir; there were small figures moving about, clustering, pointing.
But one was nearer. From behind a boulder not twenty feet away the Ramrod stared at them wonderingly, enviously, in his eyes an unappeasable hunger as the red light rhythmically bathed his face.
Chapter Forty-one
Fifty million miles starward of Earth, spacemen Tigran Biryuzov could see the Red Recall plainly as he and his five comrades orbited Mars in the three ships of the First Soviet People’s Expedition. For Tigran, Earth and the Wanderer were two bright planets about as far apart as adjoining stars in the Pleiades. Even in airless space, their crescent shapes were not quite apparent to the Communist spaceman’s unaided eye.
Radio communications from home had stopped with the Wanderer’s appearance, and for two days the six men had been in a frenzy of wonder about what was going on in the next orbit sunward. The projected surface landing on Mars, scheduled for ten hours ago, had been postponed.