“My name is Gilbert Dufresne, Lieutenant, United States Space Force. Stationed on the moon, I left it in a one-man ship to scout the alien planet just as the moonquakes began. As far as I know, my three comrades died in the break-up.
“I began to orbit the moon east-west and soon sighted three huge, wheel-shaped spaceships. Tractor beams of some sort, as far as I can judge, took hold of me and my vessel then and drew us inside one of the ships. There I met a variety of alien beings. I was questioned, I think, by some form of mind-scanning, and my physical wants were attended to. Later I was taken to the bridge or control bulge of the ship, where I was permitted to observe its operations.
“It had dropped from the moon and was hovering over the City of London, which was flooded by a high tide. Beams or some sort of force-field from our ship drove the water back. I was asked to enter a small ship with three alien beings. This ship descended and hovered near the top of a building which I recognized as the British Museum. I entered an upper story with one of the beings. There I saw him revive five men I was certain were dead. We re-entered the small ship and after several similar episodes we returned into the huge ship.
“From London we moved south to Portugal, where the city of Lisbon had been thrown down by a severe earthquake. There I saw…”
As Dufresne continued to speak, Paul (who had never met him, though he knew of him) began to have the feeling that, no matter how true the words might be, they were nevertheless pointless, useless — the merest chattering on the margin of great events that were relentlessly moving their own way. The peering ports seemed to leer cynically, or filmed with a cold, reptilian boredom. The grade school principal was listening to the painfully honest story without hearing it.
Apparently this feeling of Paul’s was a valid intuition, for without another shred of warning the whole scene vanished, and was instantly replaced by the small, brightly-lit interior of the familiar saucer, green of floor and ceiling now, and Tigerishka calling from the flower-banked, silvery control paneclass="underline" “It’s no use. Our plea is rejected. Get in your ship and drop to your planet. Hurry! I’ll cut loose from you as soon as you’re in the Baba Yaga. Thanks for your help. Goodbye and good luck, Don Merriam. Goodbye, Paul Hagbolt.”
A circle of green floor lifted. Without a word Don lowered himself headfirst through the port and began to pull himself through the tube.
Paul looked at Tigerishka.
“Hurry,” she repeated.
Miaow came waltzing up warily. Paul stooped, and when the little cat glanced toward Tigerishka, grabbed it up with a sudden snatch. As he stepped toward the port he smoothed the ruffled gray fur. His hand slowed in the middle of the stroke and he turned around.
“I’m not going,” he said.
“You have to, Paul,” Tigerishka said. “Earth’s your home. Hurry.”
“I give up Earth and my race,” he replied. “I want to stay with you.” Miaow squirmed in his hands, trying to get away, but he tightened his grip.
“Please go at once, Paul,” Tigerishka said, at last looking and moving toward him. Her eyes stared straight at his. “There can never be any further relationship between us.”
“But I’m going to stay with you, do you hear?” His voice was suddenly so loud and angry that Miaow became panicky and clawed at his hands to get loose. He held her firmly and went on: “Even as your pet, if it has to be that way. But I’m staying.”
Tigerishka stood face to face with him. “Not even as my pet,” she said. “There’s not quite enough gap between our minds for that. — Oh, get out, you fool!”
“Tigerishka,” he said harshly, staring into her violet eyes, “ninety per cent of what you felt last night was pity and boredom. What was the other ten per cent?”
She glared at him as if in a frenzy of exasperation. Suddenly, moving with almost blinding speed, she snatched Miaow from him and slapped him hard across the face. The three pale violet claws of that forepaw showed bright red the first half inch as they came away.
“That!” she snarled, her fangs bared.
He took a backward step, then another, then he was in the tube. The artificial gravity above squeezed him down into it in free fall. Looking up, he could see Tigerishka’s snarling mask. Blood streamed from his cheek and hung in red globules against the ridged silver inside the tube. Then the green port closed.
Chapter Forty-two
The saucer students entered Vandenberg Two without hindrance or fanfare and altogether unromantically — like workers on the graveyard shift arriving at their factory.
There was no one at the mesh fence that had so lately been many yards under salt water, no one at the big gate now sagging open — nothing at all of note, in fact, except six inches of stinking mud — so they just drove through, most of them out of the cars to lighten them, and they started up the ramp to the plateau.
Hunter drove the Corvette. Occupying all of the small back seat and overlapping it a bit, lay Wanda, breathing heavily. Not even Wojtowicz had been able to bully her out of this heart attack.
Mrs. Hixon was driving the truck because Bill Hixon wanted to watch the sky, where the Wanderer in mandala face and the Stranger now bracketed the zenith — and because she didn’t give a damn, as she said more than once. She was alone in the cab — Pop had wanted to stay, but she’d told him right out he smelled worse than the mud, and it was Bill’s truck, and she wouldn’t take it.
In the back of the truck were Ray Hanks and Ida, she nursing both his broken leg and her own swollen ankle. She didn’t believe in sleeping pills and was feeding both herself and the feebly protesting Ray large quantities of aspirin.
“Chew them,” she told him. “The bitterness takes your mind off things.”
The rest were walking. Three times already some of them had had to heave at the truck to get it through bad places, and twice the truck had had to nudge the Corvette out of spots in which its tires just spun. Everybody was smeared with mud, their shoes globbed with it; and the truck tires were so muddied that their chains didn’t chink.
There was a blue surge in the almost shadowless, mixed planet-light bathing the mucky landscape. Harry McHeath, by his youth better able than most of them to keep an eye on two things at once, called out: “It’s started again! They’re both doing it!”
Four ruler-straight, string-narrow, bright blue beams stretched across the gray sky from the Stranger to the Wanderer. But now instead of shooting past her they converged. Yet they did not strike the Wanderer, but stopped short of her by just a hair of gray sky, and were thrown back in four faint, semicircular, bluish-white fans.
“They must be hitting a field of some sort,” the Little Man guessed.
“Like the Lensmen battles!” McHeath chimed excitedly.
Similarly three violet beams shot from the Wanderer to the Stranger and were intercepted. Blue and violet beams stretched, criss-crossing, between the two planets, like a long, geometrically drawn cat’s cradle.
“This is it!” Hixon yelled fiercely.
Wojtowicz was watching so singlemindedly that he walked off the ramp. From the corner of his eye, McHeath noted him drop out of sight and raced over.
“I’m O.K., kid, I just slipped down here a little ways — see, I can reach you,” Wojtowicz replied reassuringly to McHeath’s anxious call. “Only give me a hand up, will you, so I don’t have to stop watching?”
Hixon called up to the truck: “You should be out here seeing this, babe — it’s amazing!”