From inside the cab Mrs. Hixon shouted back: “You watch the fireworks for me, Billy boy — I’m driving the truck!” And she honked viciously at the Corvette, which seemed to be stopping.
But Hunter was only slowing a bit. He’d taken a couple of quick glances at the battling planets, and it still seemed to him more important to get this gang into the Space Force base while the excitement lasted and perhaps as it ran interference for them. He had to get that done and the juiceless momentum pistol delivered, too — he had come to share much of Margo’s obsession on the latter point. While she, tramping along to the left of the hood, was obviously still of the same mind and mood.
So Hunter called out: “Come on, everybody! Here we turn right. Don’t walk off the end!” And he swung the car up onto the plateau.
There at last they found personnel — three soldiers who might well have been on guard duty, judging from the three weapons leaned against the wall of the tin hut behind them, but who were now crouching restlessly on their hams to stare up at the interplanetary battle. One of them was snapping his fingers.
As the truck swung up onto the plateau after the Corvette and both cars almost stopped, Margo quickly walked up behind the soldiers.
Overhead three more blue lines and two more violet ones added themselves to the laser barrage, complicating the cat’s cradle.
Margo touched the nearest soldier on the shoulder, and when he didn’t react, shook him by it He turned a wild sweating face up at her.
“Where is Professor Morton Opperly?” she demanded. “Where are the scientists?”
“Christ, I wouldn’t know,” he told her. “The longhairs are over there somewheres.” He waved vaguely toward the interior of the plateau. “Don’t bother me, lady!” He whirled back, his face on the sky again, and pounded one of his buddies on the shoulder.
“Tony!” he yelled. “I got two more bills says Old Goldy beats the bejesus out of Cannonballl”
“You’re faded!”
(Twenty-five hundred miles east, Jake Lesher clutched Sally Harris and gasped: “Oh, Sal, if I could have made book on this!")
Margo walked on. Mrs. Hixon honked again. Hunter drove on slowly, following Margo. He called sharply to the figures close around the two cars: “Keep moving, everybody. Watch and walk.”
Ahead floodlights went on against white walls, silhouetting knots and huddles of men, none of them moving, all of them staring at the sky.
Two more blue beams flashed on, not exactly from the Stranger, but from points a half diameter out from her — huge battleships of space, perhaps. One of the new beams needled through to the Wanderer. There was an incandescent gout at the edge of the north yellow notch of the mandala, and when the dazzling white light faded there was a long ragged black hole there in the Wanderer’s golden and purple skin.
Ann’s voice cut through, shrill with tragedy. “Mommy, they’re hurting the Wanderer! I hate it!”
Pop, stumbling along and shaking his fists once more, snarled gleefully: “Fry ’em, oh, fry ’em! Keep it up! Kill yourselves!”
Suddenly the nine blue beams impinging just short of the Wanderer spread out, generating a pale blue hemispherical shroud half masking the Wanderer — a sort of mist-curtain through which the yellow and violet features of the planet showed dimly. The violet beams vanished.
“They’re drowning them,” Hixon yelled. “It’s the kill!”
“No, I think the Wanderer’s putting up a new kind of defensive screen,” the Little Man contradicted.
Five blinding points of white light sprang out on the steely surface of the Stranger.
“Missiles exploding!” McHeath guessed. “The Wanderer’s fighting back!”
The Ramrod, breathing heavily and leaning against the truck as he strode along with it, now cried out in an agonized appeaclass="underline" “But what must we understand from this? Do hate and death rule the cosmos, even among the most high?”
Rama Joan, her eyes on the sky as she pulled Ann along, called back to him in a swift, bell-like voice: “The gods spend the wealth the universe gathers, they scan the wonders and fling them to nothingness. That’s why they’re the gods! I told you they were devils.”
Ann said accusingly: “Oh, Mommy.”
True to McHeath’s guess, the five white points had swollen to the pale hemispheres of explosion fronts, through which the steely surface of the Stranger showed unbroken.
Hixon said: “I don’t know about devils, but I know now there’ll always be war.” He waved a hand at the zenith. “What more proof could you ask than that?”
Mrs. Hixon shouted cryptically from the cab: “Now you’re talking sense, Bill, and what good is it?”
The Ramrod gasped: “But when the highest…and the wisest…Is there no cure?”
Young Harry McHeath’s imagination took fire from the tragedy of that question, and for a moment he saw himself in an almost all-powerful, one-man spaceship poised midway between the Wanderer and the Stranger, turning back their bolts from each other, somehow healing their sanity.
The Little Man said, not in a loud voice, almost as if to himself: “Maybe the cure always has to come from below. And keep coming from below. Forever.”
But Wojtowicz heard him and without looking away from the sky asked: “How do you mean from below, Doddsy? Not from us?”
The Little Man looked at htm. “Yes, Wojtowicz,” be said with a chuckle at the ridiculousness of it, “from little nothing guys like you and me.”
Wojtowicz shook his head. “Wow,” he laughed. “I’m punch-drunk.”
Moving steadily forward all the time, the cars and the walkers were almost to the floodlit walls. A young man in a sweatshirt rushed by Margo and grabbed a major and yelled in his ear: “Opperly says douse those goddamn floodlights. They’re spoiling our observations!”
Hunter, hearing that, had to think of Archimedes saying to the enemy soldier treading on his sand-diagram: “Don’t spoil my circle!”
The soldier in the legend had killed Archimedes, but this major was violently nodding his head as he turned around. Hunter recognized Buford Humphreys from two nights back. At the same time Humphreys saw him, saw Rama Joan and Ann, saw the whole lot of the “saucer bugs” he had kept out of Vandenberg. He goggled wildly, then with a shrug of incomprehension and a quick glance at the sky, raced off, calling: “Goddamn it, corporal, kill those floods!”
Meanwhile Margo had grabbed the young man by his sweatshirt before he could dart away. “Take us to Professor Opperly!” she ordered. “We’ve got to make a report. Look, I’ve got a note from him.”
“O.K.,” he agreed without glancing at the dirty, crumpled sheet. “Follow me.” He pointed a hand at the cars. “But douse those headlights!”
The Corvette’s and the truck’s beams winked out a moment before the white wall went dark, but Margo held on to the young man. His pale sweatshirt made it easy for Hunter to follow them. Beyond them Hunter saw now the loom of radar screens and the white barrel of a field telescope.
Overhead the blue beams flashed off along their length, and the mist-curtain around the Wanderer faded, to be instantly replaced by a hundred points of white light, stabbingly bright.
But even as McHeath, squinting his eyes, called: “Implosion globe!” it was to be seen that the Wanderer had slipped aside twice her diameter up the sky, with the dizzying feeling of the foundations of the universe shifting. The implosion globe brightened as the white blasts that had been on the other side of the Wanderer shone through and the globe now had a wide ragged neck where the Wanderer had burst out.
“They’ve gone inertialess — the whole planet,” Clarence Dodd cried.
There were a half dozen ragged holes in the Wanderer’s skin now, black but glowing dull red toward their central depths — so many of them that the mandala was barely identifiable.