Chapter Nine

Paul and Margo started out after the main body of saucer students heading back to the cars. They couldn’t recall now who had first said: “We’d better be getting out of here,” but once the words had been spoken, agreement and reaction had been swift and almost universal. Doc had wanted to stick with his umbrella-and-table-corner astrolabe, and had tried to browbeat a nucleus of informed observers to stay with him, but he finally had been dissuaded.

“Rudy’s a bachelor,” Hunter explained to Margo as a few of them waited for Doc to gather his things. “He’s willing to stay up all night making observations or chess moves, or trying to make burlesque babes—” he shouted the last back toward Doc — “but the rest of us have got families.”

As soon as the idea of leaving had been proposed, Paul had been in a sweat to get to Moon Project headquarters. He and Margo would swing around direct to Vandenberg Two, he decided; in fact, he had been about to suggest to her that they tramp to the beach gate — it might be quicker — when ha remembered that admission clearance would be delayed there.

Then just as they had been setting out, among the first to leave, Miaow, perhaps encouraged by seeing Ragnarok put on leash, had sprung from Margo’s arms to investigate the under parts of the dance floor. Ann had stayed to witness the recovery of Miaow, and Rama Joan with her daughter. The last two made a queer sight: the calm-eyed little girl with her pale red braids and the mannish woman in her rumpled evening clothes.

When Doc came bustling along, the six of them set out, stepping briskly along to catch up with the others.

Doc jerked a thumb at the bearded man. “Has this character been daggering my reputation?” he demanded of Margo.

“No, Professor Hunter has been building it up,” she told him with a grin. “I gather your name is Rudolf Valentino.”

“No, just Rudolf Brecht,” Doc chortled, “but the Brechts are a sensuous clan, too, heigh-ho!”

“I see you forgot your umbrella,” Hunter told him, instantly clamping a hand on Doc’s elbow. “Not that I’m going to let you go back for it.”

“No, Ross,” Doc told Hunter, “I deliberately left it stuck there — that bumbershoot is already a kind of monument. Incidentally, I want to go on record that we’re all being fools. Now we’ll be fighting traffic the whole night, whereas we could have employed it in fruitful observation at an ideal location — and I’d have treated you all to a big farm breakfast!”

“I’m not at all sure about that ideal location part,” Hunter began somberly, but Doc cut him off by pointing up at the Wanderer as he strode along and demanding: “Hey, granting that thing’s a genuine planet, what do you think the yellow and maroon areas are? I’ll plump for yellow desert and oceans full of purple algae and kelp.”

“Arid flats of sublimated iodine and sulphur,” Hunter hazarded wildly.

“With a border patrol of Maxwell’s demons to keep them separate, I suppose?” Doc challenged amiably.

Paul looked up. The purple margin-band was wider now and the yellow area, moving toward the center, was almost like a fat crescent.

Ann spoke up, “I think it’s oceans of golden water and lands of thick purple forest.”

“No, young lady, you got to stick to the rules of the game,” Doc admonished, leaning down toward her as he still strode on. “Which is that you can’t have anything up there that you don’t know about down here.”

“Is that your formula for approaching the unknown, Mr. Brecht?” Rama Joan asked with a suggestion of laughter. “Would it even work for Russia?”

“Well, I myself think it’s a darn good formula for approaching Russia,” Doc replied. “Hey, young lady,” he continued, speaking to Ann, “what’s the best way of getting on the good side of your mother? I never wooed a Rama yet and the idea intrigues me.”

Ann shrugged, switching her red braids, and Rama Joan answered for her. “Don’t begin by expecting to find only reflections of yourself,” she said tartly. Suddenly she jerked off her turban, releasing a cloud of red-gold hair which at last made her seem plausible as Ann’s mother, though rendering her male evening dress doubly incongruous.

They were catching up with the others now, threading past the sea-grass. Paul was intrigued by the number who were walking with a permanent hunch away from the Wanderer, then realized that he was walking that way, too. They overtook the Ramrod and the two women with him, the thin one of them carrying the radio, which was now playing tinnily the Grieg A minor Concerto, sandwiched between thick static.

“I tried other stations,” the woman told Hunter, “but the static was even worse.”

Abruptly the music broke off. As one, they stopped, and several of the people ahead of them did, too.

The radio said, quite clearly: “This is a Sigalert Bulletin. The Hollywood and Santa Monica Freeways — no, change that — the Hollywood, Santa Monica and Ventura Freeways are closed by congestion. Motorists are requested to use none of the freeways until further notice. Please stay home. The appearance in the sky is not an atomic attack. Repeat: not an atomic attack. We’ve just been talking over the phone with Professor Humason Kirk, noted Tarzana College astronomer, and he tells us that the appearance in the sky is unquestionably — get that, folks, unquestionably — an orbiting cloud of metallic powders reflecting sunlight. He tentatively identifies the powders as gold and roseate bronze. The total weight of the powders can be no more than a few pounds, Professor Kirk assures us, and they can’t hurt—”

“Oh, the stupid ass!” Doc broke in. “Powders! Puffballs!”

Several people shushed him, but by the time they could listen again, there was only the sound of the piano rippling through A minor runs.

Don Merriam figured he had to be within a hundred yards of the Hut when the second big moonquake came, a vertical one this time, but heralded by the same horrible grinding roar, as if Luna were tearing her guts out. His teeth stung and the metal of his suit vibrated fiercely, as if resonating a cosmic piano note.

Solid moon dropped from under his boots, then smashed up against their corrugated soles, then dropped away and smashed again. The dust carpet fell and lifted with him. Here and there bushels of it shot up a dozen feet or more, then fell back, abruptly compared with dust on Earth.

The jolts went on. Don fought to keep his footing as if he were standing on the back of a bucking horse, his hands ready to move to whichever side toward which he should overbalance. The jumping dust made bright vertical scrawls — thick, hairpin brushstrokes — against the starfields. Some solid sunlight was once more bathing Plato’s plain.

The jolts subsided. Don upped the polarization of his helmet window to four-fifths max and scanned for the Hut. He’d quit trying to raise them by suit radio. He couldn’t make out the portholes, but that was always harder in sunlight. He figured the right direction from the stars and started out.He thought he saw the gleam-edged, long-legged trapezoids of two of the Baba Yagas.

A second horizontal moonquake threw him on his face. He got his forearms raised in time to catch the impact. This ground-parallel temblor was protracted. There were a half dozen sideways surges. Plato’s gray dust-lake rippled to the horizon. Dust spray rose and fell. The stuff really did behave more like water (on Earth) than like dust. Rock knobs thrusting up through it made dust wakes. Dust squirts peppered Don’s helmet.

A vertical component added itself to the horizontal quake. The roar dazed him. Don’s suit shook like an empty tin can in a paint-mixer.

He gave up waiting and began to crawl toward the ships like a dust-drenched silver beetle. He wished he had a beetle’s two extra legs.