Hunter said slowly and heavily, pushing out the words, “I think the moon is going into orbit around the new planet…and way inside Roche’s limit.” He added swiftly, “Rudy, do solid satellites break up like liquid ones inside Roche’s limit?”
“I don’t think anybody really knows,” Doc answered.
“They’re going to find out,” the bearded man said.
Rama Joan said: “And we’re going to find out what ants feel like when someone steps on their nest.”
Wojtowicz said: “The moon…breaking up?”
Margo clutched Paul. “Don!” she cried. “Oh my God, Paul, I’d forgotten Don!”
The Wanderer first appeared twenty-five thousand miles away from the moon, ten times closer to Luna than Earth is. Its deforming or tide-producing effects on the moon were therefore one thousand times greater than those the Earth exerts on Luna, since such effects vary inversely with the cube of the distance between bodies. (If they varied inversely only as the square, the massive sun would exert a tidal effect on Earth many times greater than the moon, instead of being outweighed tidewise by that small body eleven to five.)
When Luna went into orbit around the Wanderer at a distance of twenty-five hundred miles, she was a hundred times closer to that planet than she is to Earth. Accordingly, her whole body, crust and core, was being wrenched by a gravitational grip one million times stronger.
The Baba Yaga’s spacescreen was swinging up toward Earth when the gentle bumping of his spacesuit against the walls of the cabin finally awoke Don Merriam, just as he himself was rolling across the inside of the spacescreen. He woke clearheaded and ready for action, refreshed by the extra oxy. Two yanks and a wriggle got him into the pilot’s seat. He strapped down.
White moon, jagged with crater walls and with something else, came into view, visibly swelling in size as the screen swung. Then came a vertical precipice of glittering raw rock stretching down, interminably it seemed, toward the moon’s core. Then a narrow ribbon of black gulf, bisected along its jet length by a gleaming thread that was mostly violet but bright yellow toward one end. Then another glittering and interminable chasm wall shooting down sheer toward Luna’s very center.
His eyes told Don he was no more than fifteen miles above the moon’s surface and hurtling toward it at about a mile a second. There was nowhere near enough time to break fall by swinging ship and main-jetting to cancel the mile-a-second downward velocity.
As those thoughts flashed, Don’s fingers flicked the keys of the vernier jets, halting the Baba Yaga’s slow tumbling so that the spacescreen — and Don — looked straight down the chasm.
There was one hope, based on nothing more than a matching of colors. There had been something violet and yellow glaring with tremendous brilliance behind the moon. Now there was a violet-and-yellow thread gleaming in the blackness of the moon’s core. He might be looking through the moon.
The moon, split like a pebble? Planetary cores should flow, not fracture. But any other theory meant death.
The walls of fresh-riven rock rushed up at him. He was too close to the righthand one. A baby solid-fuel rocket fired on that side set the Baba Yaga drifting away from it — and started a secondary tumbling which another ripple of the verniers neutralized almost before it manifested itself.
When he was a boy, Don Merriam had read The Gods of Mars by Edgar Rice Burroughs. In that romance of science fantasy, John Carter, greatest swordsman of two planets, had escaped with his comrades from the vast, volcanic, subterranean cavern-world of the Black Pirates of Barsoom and their hideous Issus-cult by racing a Martian flyer straight up the miles-long narrow shaft leading to the outer world, instead of rising slowly and cautiously by the buoyancy of the flyer’s ray tanks. The latter had been the normal and only sane course, but John Carter had found salvation for himself and his companions in sheer blinding speed, steering vertically for a star visible at the top of the well-like shaft.
Perhaps the Gods of Mars were the arbiters of all Don Merriam’s actions at this point. At any rate, he suddenly felt around him in the cabin of the Baba Yaga the ghostly presences, in their jeweled harness, of Xodar the Black renegade, Carthoris the mysterious Red Martian, Matai Shang the sinister Father of Holy Therns, and his brave, beautiful, love-struck, infinitely treacherous daughter Phaidor. And it is a fact that as the plummeting Baba Yaga was engulfed between blurs of raw rock touched by sunlight for the first time in billions of years, and as Don fired the G-rich main jet and was pinned by it up against his seat, where he steered by the verniers and the solid-fuel rockets to keep the glitter of the rock walls equal and the violet-and-yellow thread splitting the black ribbon into equal halves, he cried out sharply in the empty cabin: “Hold on for your lives! I am flying straight down the chasm!”
The saucer students felt sand give way to a stretch of adobe-hard earth sloping sharply up to the high mesh fence ringing the base of the plateau of Vandenberg Two. But here — seaward of the point where the blinking red light sat atop its mast a hundred feet behind the fence — and two hundred feet, at least, above it — a broad gully cut through the ridge, gentling the slope. Tire and caterpillar tracks ran up the gully. There was a big gate in the fence where it crossed the road, and beside the gate, built like it into the fence, a two-story guard tower. The gate was closed and the tower was lightless, but the small door in the outside of the tower was open.
The sight cheered Paul considerably. He straightened his shoulders and his necktie. The little cortege halted fifty feet in front of the gate and he, Margo, and Doc walked forward, preceded by their inky, purple-and-yellow-edged shadows.
A brazen mechanical voice came out of the box over the door, saying, “Stop where you are. You are about to trespass on restricted property of the United States Government. You may not pass this gate. Return the way you came. Thank you.”
“Oh, my sainted aunt!” Doc exploded. Since being relieved of cot-lugging by young Harry McHeath, he’d got his bounce back. “Do you think we’re an advance deputation of little green men?” he shouted at the box. “Can’t you see we’re human beings?”
Paul touched Doc’s arm and shook his head, but continued to advance. He called out in a mellow voice: “I am Paul Hagbolt, 929-CW, JR, accredited PR captain-equivalent of Project Moon. I am asking admission for myself and eleven distressed persons known to me, and requesting transport for the latter.”
A soldier stepped from the darkness of the doorway out into the light of the Wanderer. There was no mistaking he was a soldier, for he had boots on his feet and a helmet on his head; a pistol, knife, and two grenades hung from his belt; his right arm cradled a submachine gun, and tightly harnessed to his back — Paul noted incredulously — were jump rockets.
The soldier was pokerfaced and he stood stiffly, but his right knee was jouncing up and down a little, rapidly and steadily, as if he were about to go into a stamping native dance or, more reasonably, as if he were trying to control a tic and not succeeding.
“CW and JR, eh?” he said to Paul, suspiciously but also respectfully. “Let’s see your ID cards…sir.”
There was a faint, acid odor. Miaow, who had been remarkably calm since the landslide, lifted a little in Margo’s arms, looked straight at the soldier, and hissed like a teakettle.
Handing the soldier the cards, which he had ready, Paul caught a sharp tremor.
As the soldier studied the cards, tipping them forward to catch the Wanderer’s light, his face stayed expressionless, but Doc noticed that his eyes kept jumping away from the cards to the Wanderer.