Their telescopes showed them the astronomic situation clearly enough — the capture and destruction of the moon, the weird surface patterns of the Wanderer — but that was all.
Not only was the Red Recall plainly visible to Tigran, but also its dark red visual echoes from the night side of Earth. He started to note down, “Krasniya molniya—” and then broke off to beat his cheeks with his knuckles in a fury of frustrated curiosity and to think, Red lightning! Mother of Lenin! Blood of Marx! What next? What next?
The saucer students had many questions to ask about the tantalizingly limited conversation with Paul and Don. When Hunter and Margo had finished answering them, the Red Recall had stopped flashing, and the swiftly-sinking tide had uncovered more of the road to Vandenberg, even a stretch of the Pacific Coast Highway.
Hixon summed it up, jerking a thumb at the Wanderer. “So they got saucers, which we knew. And they got energy guns’ll shoot rays that can chop up mountains and puncture planets probably. And they got three-D TV a lot better than ours, which makes sense. But they’re supposed to be in danger, which doesn’t! Why should they be in danger?”
Ann said brightly: “Maybe there’s another planet after them.”
“Anything but that, Annie, please,” Wojtowkz protested comically. “One weird planet is all I can stand.”
At that moment the landscape brightened, and Clarence Dodd, who alone of them was looking east, made a single strangling, clucking noise, as if he’d tried to cry out and choked on the cry, and he hunched away from the east and at the same time pointed his hand in that direction above the mountains.
Hanging there, between the Wanderer and the serrated eastern horizon, was a gibbous shape half again as wide as the Wanderer, all an unvarying, bright steely gray except for one glittering highlight midway between its round rim and its natter rim.
Margo felt, Now the sky’s too heavy — it must fall.
The Ramrod thought, And a voice like a trumpet spoke and the Lamb opened another seal… and another…and another…and another…
Wojtowicz yelled softly: “My God, Ann was right. It is another planet”
“And it’s bigger.” That was Mrs. Hixon.
“But it’s not round,” Hixon protested, almost angrily.
“Yes, it is,” Hunter contradicted, “only it’s partly in shadow, more than the Wanderer is. It’s as much in shadow as the moon would be if it were there.”
“It’s at least seven Wanderer-diameters down the sky from the Wanderer,” the little Man pronounced, so quickly recovered from his original shock that he was already pulling out his notebook. “That’s fifteen degrees. An hour.” He uncapped his pen and studied his wrist watch.
Rama Joan said: “The highlight’s the reflection of the sun. Its surface must be like a dull mirror.”
Ann said, “I dont like the new planet, Mommy. The Wanderer’s our friend, all golden and lovely, but this one’s in armor.”
Rama Joan pressed her daughter’s head against her waist, but kept her eyes on the new planet as she said ringingly: “I think the gods are at war. The stranger devil has come to fight the devil we know.”
The Little Man, already jotting notes, said eagerly: “Let’s call it the Stranger — that’s a good enough name.”
Young Harry McHeath thought, Or you could call it Wolf — no, that might confuse it with the Jaws.
Mrs. Hixon snarled at them: “Oh, for Christ’s sake, spare us the poetry! A new planet means more tides, more quakes, more God knows what.”
Through it all Ray Hanks was calling querulously from the truck: “What is it you’re talking about? I can’t see it from here. Somebody tell me. What is it?” Young Harry McHeath was thinking how glad he was to be here and alive, how wonderful it was to have been born to these sights, how miserable for those who missed them. So it was natural that Ray Hanks’ cry came through to him. He vaulted up on the back of the truck, laid his hand on a mirror, and held it so that Hanks could see the reflection of the Stranger in it.
Wanda and Ida and the Ramrod had been standing together. Now Wanda simply sat down on the ground where she was and put her face in her hands and moaned loudly: “This is too much. I think I’m going to have another heart attack.”
But Ida pounded on the Ramrod’s shoulder, demanding, “What is it, Charlie? What’s its real name? Explain it!”
The Ramrod stared at the Stranger with a tortured expression and finally said, in a voice that, though defeated-sounding, had a strange undertone of relief and of opening doors: “I don’t know, Ida. I just don’t know. The universe is bigger than my mind.”
At that instant two bright lines sprang out from the sides of the Stranger and traveled to the Wanderer, in the tick of a wrist watch, and passed it one in front and one behind, and then went on seemingly more slowly across the gray heavens as straight as if drawn with a ruler and a penful of luminous blue ink. But where the blue line passed in front of the Wanderer there was an eruption of white coruscations almost blindingly bright.
One of the lines came from the dark side of the Stranger, touching faintly the black crescent with blue, revealing its shape and the sphericity of the entire body.
“Jesus, it is war.” Again Wojtowicz was the quickest to respond vocally.
“Lasers,” said the Little Man. “Beams of solid light. But so big — it’s almost incredible.’’
“And we’re just seeing the sides,” Hunter put in awestruck, “the leakage. Suppose you had to look one of those in the face. A million suns!”
“A hundred, anyway,” said the Little Man. “If one of those beams should point even for a moment at Earth…”
Blue and steel touched off an intuition in Hixon’s mind. “I tell you what,” he said excitedly, “the new planet’s police! It’s come to arrest the Wanderer for disturbing us.”
“Bill, you’re nuts,” Mrs. Hixon yelled across at him. “Next you’ll be saying angels.”
“I hope they fight! I hope they kill each other!” Pop yelled shrilly, his whole body trembling as he shook his clenched fists at them. “I hope they burn each other’s guts out!”
“I sure don’t,” Wojtowicz told him, walking around in an odd little circle as he stared at the sky. “What’s to keep us from getting hit, then? You like having a battle fought across your back yard? You like being a sitting duck for stray shots?”
Hunter said rapidly: “I don’t think the near beam’s hitting the Wanderer. I think it’s hitting the moon-ring and disintegrating the fragments it touches.”
“That’s right,” the Little Man said coolly. Those beams bracketing the Wanderer look more to me like a shot over the bows.”
Hixon heard that. “Like I said, arrest,” he pointed out eagerly. “You know — ‘Don’t move or we’ll shoot to kill!’ ”
The bright blue beams were extinguished at their source and died along their length as swiftly as they had first shot out. They left behind two yellow afterimages drawn on the gray sky, but moving with the eyes that saw. Yet the two original blue beams, though rapidly growing shorter and fainter, could still be seen crawling away beyond the Wanderer like straight blue worms into the gray infinity.
Hixon said: “My God, I thought they’d never quit. They must have fired for two minutes.”
“Seventeen seconds,” the Little Man informed him, looking up from his wrist watch. “It’s a proven fact that in a crisis time estimates vary wildly, and witnesses are apt to disagree on almost everything. That’s something we’ve got to watch out for.”