If Bagong hung had been looking at the compass of the “Machan Lumpur,” he would have seen its needle swing wildly and then come tremblingly to rest in a new direction a shade east of north, but the little Malay seldom looked into the binnacle — he knew these shallow seas too well. And he had dealt so long with turncoats and time-servers on both communist and capitalist sides, that even if he had seen the compass veer, he might merely have felt that it was, at last, showing its own natural degree of political unreliability.
Wolf Loner frowned in his chilly sleep as, halfway around the world, the tiny compass of the “Endurance” swung and resettled in an identical manner as the “Machan Lumpur’s,” and as a blue finger of St. Elmo’s fire flickered briefly at the top of the dory’s mast. He stirred and almost woke, then slept again.
General Spike Stevens snapped: “Jimmy, get that big burn out of there before we lose a screen.”
“Yes, sir,” Captain James Kidley responded. “But which screen is it? I keep seeing it in both.”
“It is in both screens,” Colonel Willard Griswold cut in hoarsely. “Uncross your eyes, Spike. It’s out there — as big as the Earth.”
“Excuse me, Spike,” Colonel Mabel Wallingford put in, her blood racing, “but mightn’t it be a problem? HQ One can switch our input-output to test conditions any time they want.”
“Right,” the General said, snatching at the out she’d handed him; and this made her smile fiercely: Spike had been scared. He continued: “If it is a problem — and I think it is — they’ve thrown us a doozie. In five seconds our communications will be jumping with simulated crisis data. O.K., then, everybody, we pretend it’s a problem.”
Forcing himself to squint upward, Paul saw that the Wanderer, so far as he could estimate, was not moving or changing. Helping Margo at the same time, he scrambled to his feet, though still hunched away from the Wanderer, as a man would hunch under a hanging block of concrete or away from a lifted fist.
Apparently the hit-the-dirt reaction had been universal. Chairs were scattered; the people in the front rows and the panelists were out of sight.
Not quite universal, though. The Ramrod was standing up straight and saying in a strangely even, high-pitched voice: “Don’t panic, folks. Can’t you see it’s just a big fire balloon? Manufactured in Japan, I’ll bet from that design.”
A woman brayed from the floor: “I saw it rise up from Vandenberg! Why’s it stopped? It’s still firing! Why doesn’t it keep on going?”
From under the table came a still louder bellow from Doc. “Stay down, you fools! Don’t you know the atomic fireball’s a sphere in outer space?” Then, not quite as loudly: “Find my glasses, Rama Joan.”
Ragnarok, tail between his legs, came circling back to almost the exact center of the floor, stopped there among the empty chairs, lifted his muzzle toward the Wanderer and began to howl. Paul and Margo, moving forward toward the others, veered around him.
Ann came up behind them. “Why’s everybody scared?” she asked Paul, gaily. “That must be the biggest saucer ever.” She switched off her chest lamp. “I won’t need this.”
The Ramrod took up again in an emotionless, squeaky monotone. “The Jap fire balloon is moving very slowly, folks. It’s passing close overhead, but don’t worry, it’s going to miss us.”
The Little Man walked over to the Ramrod, reached up and shook his arm.
“Would a fire balloon dim the stars down to a half dozen?” he demanded. “Would it show up the colors of our cars over there? Would it turn Vandenberg green and light up the Pacific out to the Santa Barbara Islands? God damn it, answer me, Charley Fulby!”
The Ramrod looked around. Then the pupils of his eyes rolled up out of sight, he slowly crumpled against a chair and slid limply to the floor. The Little Man looked down at him thoughtfully, and said: “Whatever it is, it’s not Arietta.”
Simultaneously, Doc’s shining dome and gleaming glasses and the shaggy face of Hunter — the Reed College professor they’d thought of as Beardy — rose from behind the table. For a moment the impression was of two stalwart dwarfs. Then, “That’s no atomic fireball,” he announced, “or it would keep on expanding. And it would have been one hell of a lot brighter to start with.” He helped Rama Joan to her feet. A green edge dangled loose from her turban. Her white shirt was crumpled.
Hunter stood up too.
Ann reached up and touched Miaow. “Your cat’s purring and she’s looking at the big saucer,” the little red-headed girl told Margo. “I think she wants to stroke it.”
The Wanderer continued to hang in the heavens, velvet soft yet sharply defined, incontrovertible, its maroon and golden markings raggedly approximating the yin-yang symbol of bright and dark, male and female, good and evil.
While the others stared and imagined, the Little Man took a small notebook from his breast pocket and made a neat diagrammatic sketch on one of the unruled pages, smoothing the ragged boundary line on the new heavenly body and indicating the purple with a shading of parallel lines.
Don Merriam harvested the last cannister and started back to the Hut. He looked up at the eclipse. The ring was very bright to the right now. In a matter of seconds the sun’s disk would begin to emerge, bringing hot day back to the moon and softening Earth’s inky disk with moon-reflected sunlight.
Then he stopped in his tracks. The sun’s disk still hadn’t showed, but earth’s disk, inky a second ago, was now glowing twenty times more brightly than he’d ever seen it by moonlight. He could readily make out both Americas, and upon the righthand rim the tiny soft gleam of the Greenland icecap.
“Look at Earth, Don.” Johannsen’s voice was crisp in his ear.
“I’m doing that, Yo. What is it?”
“We don’t know. One guess: there’s a terrific burst somewhere else on the moon. Total flame-out at Soviet base — all their rocket fuel going.”
“Wouldn’t make that much light, Yo. Still, maybe Ambartsumian has invented a twenty-moon-power flare.”
“Atomic limelight?” Johannsen laughed bleakly. “Dufresne’s just made Guess Three: All the stars back of us have novaed.”
“That might do it,” Don agreed. “But, Yo, what’s that spot in the Atlantic?”
The spot he referred to was a bright yellow and purple highlight on the pallid waters.
Richard Hillary pulled the shade beside his seat against the low, stabbing morning sun and settled back comfortably as the London clipper gathered speed on the way to Bath. It was a pleasant contrast to the ratty little bus that had carried him from Portishead to Bristol. At last he felt his sickishness begin to moderate, as though his guts, madly convulsed an hour ago, were settling into a smooth coil.
And see what only one night with a beery Welsh poet does to one’s mental images, he thought wryly. Snakes in my belly indeed! No more of that for a long while now.
Dai Davies had been particularly boisterous at parting, loudly chanting fragments of a “Farewell to Mona” he’d been alcoholically extemporizing. The fragments had been full of horrid neologisms such as “moondark” and “manshine,” and, to cap that, “girl glow"; and Richard’s relief at getting rid of Dai was genuine and profound. It didn’t even bother him, at least for the moment, that the bus driver had the wireless turned on softly, inflicting the half dozen passengers with American neojazz, pretentious as the Republican Party.
He gave a silent but heartfelt sigh. Yes, no more Dai for a while now, no more science fiction, no more moon. Yes, particularly no more moon.