The Wanderer

Barbara Katz looked at the blue waters around the “Albatross.” Hardly one wave in ten was even white-crested. The sun was rising over a coast of broken and bedraggled palms barely two miles away. Hester sat in the hatchway, holding the baby.

“Benjy,” Barbara said, “There’s a spare room below, and the blankets, at any rate, if there isn’t canvas. Do you think you could rig up a little mast and sail and—”

“Yes, Miss Barbara, I’m sure I could,” he told her. He stretched and yawned widely, pushing his chest at the sun. “But this time I’m going to take a rest first”

Sally Harris said to Jake Lesher: “Oh, Christ, now the excitement’s all over.”

“Jesus, Sal, don’t you ever want to sleep?” Jake protested.

“Who could sleep now?” she demanded. “Let’s start signaling people. Or better yet, now we got all the material, let’s really work on the play!”

Pierre Rambouillet-Lacepede regretfully pushed aside his three-body calculations, which could never now be fully verified, and gave ear to Francois Michaud.

The younger astronomer said excitedly: “We have pinned it down beyond the possibility of doubt! The sidereal day has been lengthened by three seconds a year! The intrusive planets have had a measurable effect upon the earth!”

Margo and Hunter stood in the dark arm in arm on the edge of the landing field toward the north end of the plateau of Vandenberg Two.

“Are you bothered about meeting Don and Paul?” he whispered to her. “I shouldn’t ask that, of course, when we’re all keyed up over whether they’ll even make it.”

“No,” she told him, putting her other hand over his. “I’ll just be glad to greet them. I’ve got you.”

Yes, she has, he reflected, not altogether happily. And now he had to fit his life to his conquest. Could he give up Wilma and the boys? Not altogether, he was sure.

Then something else occurred to him.

“And now you’ve got Morton Opperly,” he whispered.

Margo grinned, then asked: “Just what do you mean by that, Ross?”

“Nothing in particular, I think,” he told her.

Around them were gathered the rest of the saucer students. The truck and the Corvette stood just behind them.

To one side were Opperly and a few members of his section. Radio contact with the Baba Yaga had been reported from the tower a few moments ago.

Over their heads the old familiar stars of the northern sky spread between the two constellations of Scorpio and the Dipper, but high in the west there lay among them a spindle-shaped scattering of new stars, some faint, some brighter than Sirius — the glittering remnants of Luna.

“It’s going to be funny, not having a moon any more,” Hixon said.

“A hundred gods sponged out of mythology at one sweep,” Rama Joan remarked.

“I’m more sorry to lose the Wanderer,” Ann piped up. “Oh, I hope they got away.”

“More than the moon gods are gone,” the Ramrod said gloomily.

“Never mind, Charlie,” Wanda told him. “You’ve seen great things come to pass. All your predictions—”

“All my dreams,” he corrected her. He frowned, but pressed her hand.

Hunter said: “We’ll get two gods back for every one we lost. That’s my prediction.”

Pop said grumpily: “I don’t give a damn about the moon going. She never did a thing for me.”

“She never even softened up one pretty girl, Pop?” Margo asked him.

McHeath said, as if he’d just worked it out: “No moon — no tides.”

“Yes, there’ll still be solar tides,” the Little Man corrected. “Small ones, of course, like they have at Tahiti.”

“I wonder what’ll happen to what’s left of the moon?” Margo asked, looking toward the west “Will it just keep going in a ring?”

Opperly heard that and said in explanation: “No, now that its gravitational center has gone with the Wanderer, the fragments will spread out at the velocity they had in orbit-five miles a second, about. Some of them will strike Earth’s atmosphere in approximately ten hours. There’ll be a meteor shower, but not too destructive, I imagine. The ring lay in a plane passing above our North Pole. Most of the fragments should miss us. Many of them will take up long, elliptical orbits around Earth.”

“Gee, ” Wojtowicz remarked rather cheerily, “it’s like having Doc back to explain things.”

“Who’s Doc?” Opperly asked.

The group was silent for a moment Then Rama Joan said: “Oh…a man.”

At that moment a yellow flare shone in the zenith, became a lemon flame pointing and dropping earthward. There was a softly mounting roar, such as comes from a fireplace when all the wood catches. The Baba Yaga touched down, its yellow jets dying, to a perfect landing.