Arab and Pepe and High had long since quit trying to push through the staring, mostly silent crowd on the sidewalks and had taken to the street, where no cars moved and fewer people clustered and where the going was easier. It seemed to Pepe that a power came out of the planet ahead, freezing all motors and most people like some combined paralysis-and-motor-stalling ray out of the comic books. He crossed himself.

High Bundy whispered: “Old moon really going into her this time. He circle in front of her, decide he like her, then whooshl”

Arab said, “Maybe he hiding ’cause he scared. Like we.”

“Scared of what?” asked High.

“The end of the world,” said Pepe Martinez, his voice rising in a soft, high wolf-wail.

Only the rim of the Wanderer showed above the General Grant buildings, which were mounting swiftly up the sky as the weed-brothers approached them.

“Come on!” Arab said suddenly, catching hold of the upper arms of Pepe and High and digging his fingers in. “World gonna end, I gettin’ off. Get away from all these owly-eyed deaders waitin’ for the tromp and the trump. One planet go smash, we take another. Come on, before she get away! — We catch her at the river and climb aboard!”

The three began to run.

Paul and Margo and their new friends were sitting on the sand fifty feet in front of the dark gate when the second quake jolted the beach. It did nothing beyond rocking them, and there was nothing they could do about it, so they just gasped and rocked there. The soldier ran out of the tower with his submachine gun, stopped, and after a minute backed inside again. He did not answer when Doc called cheerily: “Hey, wasn’t that a sockdolager!”

Five minutes later Ann was saying: “Mommy, I’m really getting hungry now.”

“So am I,” said young Harry McHeath.

The Little Man, diligently soothing a very upset Ragnarok, said: “Now, that’s a funny thing. We were going to serve coffee and sandwiches after the eclipse. The coffee was in four big thermos jugs — I know, because I brought it. It’s all still down at the beach.”

Wanda sat up on her cot, despite the thin woman’s protests.

“What’s all that red glow down the coast?” she demanded crossly.

Hunter started to tell her, not without a touch of sarcasm, that it was merely the light of the new planet, when he saw that there really was another light-source — an ugly red furnace-flaring which the other light had masked.

“Could be brush fires,” Wojtowicz suggested somberly.

The thin woman said: “Oh dear, that would have to happen now. As if we didn’t have enough trouble.”

Hunter pressed his lips together. He refused to say: “Or it could be Los Angeles burning.”

The Little Man recalled their attention to the heavens, where the purple-and-yellow intruder now hid the moon completely. He said, “We ought to have a name for the new planet. You know, it’s funny, one minute it’s the most important thing in creation to me, but the next minute it’s just a patch of sky I can cover with my outstretched hand.”

“What’s the word ‘planet’ really mean, Mr. Brecht?” Ann asked.

“ ‘Wanderer,’ dear,” Rama Joan told her.

The Ramrod thought: Ispan is known to man by a thousand names, yet is still Ispan.

Harry McHeath, who’d just discovered Norse mythology and the Eddas, thought: Moon-Eater would be a good name — but too menacing for most people today.

Margo thought: They could call it Don, and she bit her lip and hugged Miaow so that the cat protested, and tears lumped hotly under her lower eyelids.

“Wanderer is the right name for it,” the little Man said.

The yellow marking that was the Broken Egg to the Ramrod and the Needle-Eye to Ann now touched the lefthand rim of the Wanderer as they viewed it. The yellow polar patches remained and a new central yellow spot was crawling into view on the righthand rim. In all, four yellow rim-spots: north, south, east and west.

The Little Man got out his notebook and began to sketch it.

“The purple makes a big X,” Wojtowicz said.

“The tilted cross,” the Ramrod said, speaking aloud at last “The notched disk. The circle split in four.”

“It’s a mandala,” said Rama Joan.

“Oh yeah,” Wojtowicz said. “Professor, you was telling us about those,” he addressed himself to Hunter. “Symbols of psychic something-or-other.”

“Psychic unity,” the bearded man said.

“Psychic unity,” Wojtowicz repeated. “That’s good,” he said matter-of-factly. “We’re going to need it.”

“For these we are grateful,” Rama Joan murmured.

Two big yellow eyes peered over the hump of the big gully in Vandenberg Two. There was a growling roar. Then the jeep was careening down toward the gate, its headlights swinging wildly over brush and rutted dry earth.

“Everybody on your feet,” Paul said. “Now we’ll get some action.”

Don Merriam could see a thick-waisted, asymmetric hourglass of stars in the spacescreen of the Baba Yaga. Some of the stars were slightly blurred by the dust-blasting the screen had suffered during his trip through the center of the moon.

The black bulk shouldering into the hourglass from port was the moon, now totally eclipsed by the vast, newly appeared body.

The Wanderer, shouldering into the starry hourglass from starboard, was not entirely black — Don had in view seven pale green glow spots, each looking about 300 miles across, the farther ones being ellipses, the nearest, almost circular. They were featureless, though at times there was the suggestion of a phosphorescent pit or funnel. Of what they signified, Don had no more idea than if they had been pale green spots on the black underbelly of a spider.

In company with the moon, the Baba Yaga was orbiting the Wanderer, but slowly gaining on Luna because the little ship, nearer the Wanderer, had the faster orbit.

He warmed the radar. The return signal from the moon showed a surface more irregular than craters and mountains alone could account for, and even in five minutes the patterns had greatly changed: the tidal shattering of Luna was continuing.

The surprisingly strong signal from the intruding planet showed a spherical, matte surface with no indication at all of the greenish glow spots — as if the Wanderer were smooth as an ivory ball.

Intruding planet! — impossible, but there it was. At the top of his mind Don tried to recall the scraps of speculation he’d read and heard about hyperspace: the notion that a body might be able to travel from there to here without traversing the known continuum between, perhaps by blasting or slipping into some higher-dimensioned continuum of which our universe is only a surface. But where in all the immensity of stars and galaxies might the there of this intruding planet be? Why should the there even be anywhere in our universe? A higher-dimensioned continuum would have an infinity of three-dimensional surfaces, each one a cosmos.

At the bottom of Don’s mind there was only an uneasy voice repeating: “The earth and sun are on the other side of that green-spotted black round to starboard. They set ten minutes ago; they’ll rise in twenty. I have not traveled through hyperspace, only through the moon. I am not in the intergalactic dark, staring at a galaxy shaped like a sheaf or an hourglass, while seven pale green nebulas glow to starboard…”

Don was still in his spacesuit, but now he removed and secured the cracked helmet. There should be a sound one in the locker. “Make and mend,” he muttered, but his throat closed at the sound of his own voice. He unstrapped himself from the pilot’s seat to push as close as he could to the spacescreen. The cabin was chilly and dark, but he turned on neither heat nor light — he even dimmed the control panel. It seemed all-important to see as much as possible.