“That’s right, Doddsy, we got to keep our heads,” Wojtowicz agreed loudly, almost skipping around in his little circle now, his voice quite gay. “They keep throwing surprises at us, and all we can do is keep taking them. Whee-yoo! It’s like the front line — it’s like sitting out a bombardment.”
As if the word “bombardment” had pulled a trigger, there came a dull roaring from all around them and then a vibration, and then the road under their feet began to rock. The springs of the Corvette and the truck whined and groaned. Ray Hanks whimpered with pain, and McHeath, still standing over him, had to grab at the truck’s side to keep from being pitched out.
To a floating observer, everyone would have seemed to be joining Wojtowicz in his eerie circular dance and making it a staggering one. One of the women screamed, but Mrs. Hixon cursed obscenely, and Ann cried: “Mommy, the rocks are skipping!”
Margo heard that and looked up the slope where she and Hunter had been, and saw boulders descending it in fantastic bounds — among them, she thought, the giant’s coffin on which they’d spread the blanket. Unslowed by the weird gust of guilt that went through her, she pulled the momentum pistol out of her jacket and thrust out with her other hand to steady herself against the Corvette, but there was no steadiness there, only a greater rocking. The boulders came on. Hunter saw what she was doing and sprang to her and shouted: “Is the arrow pointing toward the muzzle?”
She shouted, “Yes!” And as the boulders converged like bounding gray beasts, she pointed the momentum pistol into their midst and, herself fighting to keep on her feet, clamped down her finger on the trigger-button.
As the earthquake shocks themselves lessened and damped out, the boulders coincidentally slowed in their wild, smashing descent, seemed almost to change to great gray pillows, slowly rolled instead of bounding, rolled slower yet, and stopped moving beside the road, almost at Margo’s feet, the giant’s coffin lying where the edge of the truck’s shadow had been.
Hunter pulled her finger off the button and looked at the scale on the grip. There was no more violet.
He looked down the quarter mile of mountain road to the Coast Highway and for a wonder it looked free of new slides and with the water all gone — though it was sloshing wildly in the farther distance. Just across the highway brightly gleamed the mesh fence that guarded the foot of Vandenberg, while across from the mouth of the mountain road loomed the big gate.
Overhead shone the Wanderer and the Stranger, the former trending into the three-spot — the half-hour stage between the serpent-egg and the mandala — the latter as coldly serene as if its gravity had nothing whatever to do with the earthquake just triggered.
In the resounding silence Ida was moaning: “Oh, my ankle.”
Wojtowicz asked in a snickering voice: “What do we do now? What’s next on the show?”
Mrs. Hixon was snarling at him: “There’s nothing to do, you clown! It’s the end!”
Hunter pushed Margo into the Corvette and got in himself, then stood up behind the wheel and honked the horn for attention. He said loudly: “Get into the cars, everybody! Throw our stuff into the back of the truck if anybody wants to, but be quick about it We’re driving into Vandenberg.”
The Stranger gave many who saw it the feeling which Wanda and Mrs. Hixon had voiced — “This is too much. This is the end.” The more scientifically minded of these pessimists noted that the Stranger was near enough to the Wanderer — only about forty thousand miles away if it were the same distance from Earth — so that its gravity would largely augment rather than oppose the great tides the Wanderer had been raising.
But many others were naively delighted by the steely new planet and the exciting rays it shot. For a while, at least, the astronomical spectacle took their minds off their troubles, worries, and even life-or-death problems. In the stormlashed sea somewhere near Florida (horizontally or vertically), Barbara Katz cried out from the cockpit of the “Albatross” to the spirit of old KKK: “Thrilling Wonder Stories! Oh, but it’s beautiful,” and Benjy shouted to her solemnly: “Sure is a wonder, Miss Barbara.”
“Boy, this second act was a long time coming,” Jake Lesher complained to Sally Harris as they sat once more side by side on the patio, each damp-blanket-wrapped and warmed with a “Hunter’s Friend” and wearing patented hand-warmers for skiers that they’d found among Mr. Hasseltine’s things. “If our play doesn’t move faster, it’ll die in Philadelphia.”
In an untoppled astronomical observatory in the Andes, the seventy-year-old French astronomer Pierre Rambouillet-Lacepede rubbed together his ivory-dark fingers with delight and snatched for pencil and paper. At last, a really challenging instance of the Three Body Problem!
Still others on the night side of Earth didn’t see the Stranger at all because of clouds or other hindrances. Some of them had not even yet seen the Wanderer. Wolf Loner spied a faint yellow light through the overcast that had settled into fog. Sailing closer, he saw it was a kerosene lantern set a few feet above the water in a tall stone window with a round top. When the “Endurance” had come closer still, he saw the narrow wall of yellowish stone and the dark steeple rising above it, and he recognized the place because he had climbed to it more than once, but he could not believe his eyes. He swung the tiller and let go the mainsheet, and the “Endurance” gently bumped the narrow roof below the window. The sail flapped idly, there was no current in the water around the stone structure. He took up the mooring line and stepped out on the roof and through the window, carefully setting aside the lantern, and looked around. Then he could no longer doubt: he was in the belfry of the Old North Church. Standing across from him, backed against the wall as if she were trying to disappear into it, was a dark-haired, Italian-looking girl of perhaps twelve who stared at him, her teeth chattering. She did not respond to his questions, even when he phrased them in scraps of Italian and Spanish, except to shake her head, and that might only have been a kind of shivering. So after a time, still holding the mooring line, he went close to her, and although she shrank from him he took her up gently but firmly and carried her out the window, carefully replacing the lantern on the sill, and stepped with her into the “Endurance” and set her down halfway into the narrow cabin and put a blanket around her. He noticed the water was moving a little now in the direction from which the sailing dory had come. So with one thoughtful headshake downward, toward where Copps Burying Ground would be, he brought the “Endurance” about and, taking advantage of the outgoing tide, set sail out of Boston’s North End for the open sea.
With unintended diabolic precision the four insurgent captains atom-steamed the “Prince Charles” into the Pororoca. This tidal bore of the Amazon is normally a mile-long waterfall five yards high, which travels upstream at fifteen miles an hour with a roar that can be heard ten miles away. Now it was a great seething slope half as high as the “Prince Charles” was long and carrying that great city of a ship — a smaller Manhattan Island — canted forward at an angle of twenty degrees, up the mightiest of rivers, now Wanderer-swollen and Stranger-swollen, too. All around, the hurricane roared with the Pororoca and its waves augmented the bore. To the east the storm completely masked the dawn. Ahead to the west was a wilderness of darkness and torn clouds. At this moment Captain Sithwise reached the bridge — a counter-coup having met no opposition whatever in the period of cataclysm — and he took the wheel and began to send orders to the atomic engine rooms. At first he guided the ship by the slant and gleam of the Pororoca, but then — since they hung to starboard brightly and firmly, through the whirling cloud wraiths — he began to depend somewhat on the beacon globes of the Stranger above and the Wanderer below.