Colonel Mabel Wallingford, shivering in the electric atmosphere of the buried room, suddenly wondered: What if it’s not a problem? Spike won’t be able to handle it then. I’ll have given him his little victory and I’ll see it taken away!
Margo Gelhorn heard one of the women say: “Don’t try to get up yet, Charlie.” The Ramrod lay back in her arms and watched the Wanderer quite tranquilly, a faint smile playing around his lips.
On an impulse Margo leaned over. So did Rama Joan, mechanically tucking in the trailing end of her green turban.
“Ispan,” the gaunt man said faintly. “Oh, Ispan, how did I not know thee? Guess I must have never thought about this side of you.” Then, more loudly: “Ispan, all purple and gold. Ispan, the Imperial Planet.”
“Ispan-Hispan,” the Little Man said without emotion, continuing to type.
“Charlie Fulby, you old liar,” Rama Joan said almost tenderly, “why do you keep it up? You know you never set foot on another planet in your whole life.”
The woman glared but the Ramrod looked up at the green-turbaned one holding him without rancor. “Not in the body, no, that’s quite true, Rama,” he said. “But I’ve visited them for years in my thoughts. I’m as sure of their reality as Plato was of universals or Euclid of infinity. Ispan and Arietta and Brima have to exist, just like God. I know. But to make people understand in this materialistic age, I had to pretend I’d visited them in the flesh.”
“Why do you drop the pretence now?” Rama Joan pressed lightly, as if she already knew the answer.
“Now no one needs to pretend anything,” the Ramrod said quietly. “Ispan is here.”
The Little Man spun the sheet out of his typewriter, stuck it in a clipboard, stepped onto the platform, and rapped on the table for attention.
Reading from the sheet, he said: “After the place, date, hour and minute I’ve got: WE THE UNDERSIGNED SAW A CIRCULAR OBJECT IN THE SKY NEAR THE MOON. ITS APPARENT DIAMETER WAS FOUR TIMES THAT OF THE MOON. ITS TWO HALVES WERE PURPLE AND YELLOW AND RESEMBLED A YIN-YANG OR THE MIRROR IMAGE OF A SOLID SIXTY-NINE. IT GAVE ENOUGH LIGHT TO READ NEWSPRINT BY AND IT MAINTAINED THE SAME APPEARANCE FOR AT LEAST 20 MINUTES. Any emendations? Very well, I’ll circulate this for signatures as read. I’ll want your addresses, too.”
Somebody groaned but Doc called from his post in the sand: “That’s right, Doddsy, nail it down!” The Little Man presented his clipboard to the two women nearest him. One giggled hysterically, the other grabbed his pen and signed…
Paul called down to Doc: “Are you getting any movement yet?”
“Not anything I can be sure of,” the latter said, standing up carefully so as not to disturb the deep-thrust umbrella. “It’s certainly not anything in a nearby orbit.” He climbed back on the platform. “Anybody here got a telescope or binoculars?” he asked loudly but not very hopefully. “Opera glasses?” He waited a moment longer, then shrugged. “That’s typical,” he said to Paul, removing his glasses to polish them and to massage around his eyes. “What a bunch of greenhorns!”
Hunter’s bearded face brightened. “Anybody here got a radio?” he called out.
“I have,” said the thin woman sitting on the floor with the Ramrod.
“Good, then get us a news station,” Hunter told her.
She said, “I’ll get KFAC — that’s got classical music with regular traffic bulletins and news flashes.”
He commented, “If they’re seeing it in New York or Buenos Aires, say, we’ll know it has to be high.”
Margo was studying the Wanderer again when someone jogged her elbow, the one away from the cat. The Little Man said to her pleasantly: “My name is Clarence Dodd. You are…?”
“Margo Gelhorn,” she told him. “Is that huge beast your dog, Mr. Dodd?”
“Yes, he is,” he said quickly, with a bright smile. “May I have your signature on this document?”
“Oh, please!” she said sourly, looking up again at the Wanderer overhead.
“You’ll be sorry,” the Little Man assured her peaceably. “The one time I saw a plausible saucer I omitted to get signed statements from the four people in the car with me. A week later they were all saying it was something else.”
Margo shrugged, then went to the edge of the platform and said: “Paul, I think the purple half is getting smaller and there’s a purple streak down the outside edge of the yellow half that wasn’t there before.”
“She’s right,” several people said. Doc fumbled at his slipping glasses, but before he could get a word out Hunter said: “It’s rotating. It must be a sphere!”
Suddenly the Wanderer, which Paul had been seeing as flat, rounded itself out. There was something unspeakably strange about the hidden and utterly unknown other side crawling into view.
Doc raised a hand. “It’s rotating toward the east,” he asserted. “That is, this side of it is — which means that it is rotating retrograde to Earth and most of the other planets of our solar system.”
“My God, Bill, now we get astronomy lessons,” the woman in pale gray carped in a low, sardonic voice to the man beside her.
The thin woman’s portable radio came on, quite weakly except for the static. The music, what there was of it, had a galloping, surging rhythm. After a moment Paul recognized Wagner’s “The Ride of the Valkyries,” sounding, out here in the great open, as if it were being played by an orchestra of mice.
Don Merriam was almost halfway back to the Hut, his boots kicking up dust as he hurried with care across the lightening plain, when Johannsen’s voice sounded crisply by his ear. He stopped.
Johannsen said: “Get this, Don. You are not to re-enter the Hut. You are to board Ship One and prepare for solo take-off.”
Don suppressed the impulse to say: “But Yo—”
The other chuckled approvingly at his silence and continued: “I know we’ve never flown them solo except in practice on the mock-up, but this is orders from the top. Dufresne’s suited up. He’ll join you in Ship Two. I’ll be in Baba Yaga Three to relay back to Gompert at base, who’ll relay to HQ Earth. On order you and Dufresne will take off. You will reconnoiter the northern half, and he, the southern, of the object behind Luna that’s making the yellow and purple light. It’s hard to believe, but HQ Earth says it’s a—”
The voice was lost in a ponderous, almost subsonic, grinding roar coming through Don’s boots and up his legs. The moon moved sideways a foot or more under Don’s feet, throwing him down. In the two seconds he was falling his only active thought was to lift his arms bent-elbowed to make a cage around his helmet, but he could see the gray dust rippling and lifting a little here and there like a thick rug with wind under it, as inertia held it back while the solid moon moved beneath it.
He crashed hollowly on his back. The roaring multiplied, coming in everywhere through the underside of his suit. Gouts of dust skimmed off around him in low parabolas. His helmet hadn’t cracked.
The roaring faded. He said: “Yo!” and “Yo!” again, and then with his tongue he triggered the Hut whistle.
The purple-and-yellow highlight glared down at him from the western edge of the Atlantic, touching Florida.
There was no answer from the Hut.