“There, Doddsy,” he said, putting an arm around the Little Man’s shoulder. “He’s got a marker now. A sort of caduceus.”

From the platform the thin woman called: “Come and get it, everybody! The coffee stayed real hot.”

Donald Merriam was in darkness again. The Baba Yaga had once more been eclipsed, this time by the moon as it passed in front of the Wanderer. The tiny moonship fell free between the two bodies. It was continuing to gain on the moon, but had not yet quite out-nosed it.

The cabin had swiftly wanned from the direct sunlight, but before it had become uncomfortably hot, the moon had swung between the Baba Yaga and the sun.

The darkness of this eclipse was not nearly as great as that of the first, being pervaded by sun-reflected violet and yellow from the Wanderer. This Wanderer-light revealed the continuing rock-churning of the moon’s surface, looking like a stormy sea seen from an airplane by brilliant moonlight.

At his altitude above the Wanderer — 1,600 miles now by radar check — Don could see only about a fifth of the planet’s disk. Passing across the face variously named on Earth the X, the Notched Disk, the Wheel, St. Andrew’s Cross, and the Mandala, he saw only the western yellow spot and a rim around it widening ahead — the eastern and two polar yellow spots were out of sight for him around the curve of the Wanderer.

By watching the yellow spot emerge from the Wanderer’s night side across the sunrise line, Don had got confirmation that the Wanderer was rotating and that its top and bottom were indeed its poles, its axis being roughly parallel to that of Earth.

By timing the speed of the spot’s emergence Don had estimated the Wanderer’s period of rotation as six hours — a “day” only one quarter as long as Earth’s. And it was rotating in the same direction as he and the moon were moving in their two-hour orbits — the planet’s surface features following, but falling swiftly behind.

The greenish glow-spots on the Wanderer’s night side did not seem to show up in any way on the day side — perhaps they were some sort of phosphorescence visible only in the dark. Nor, so far as he could recall, had there been any indication of the distinction between violet and yellow areas on the night side — apparently it took sunlight to bring that out.

A good half of the great yellow spot was occupied by the moon’s shadow — inky, and undeniably elliptical and growing more so. Studying it, Don noted a very ghostly pale green round beginning to intrude into its forward edge — apparently the green spots did carry around, though being invisible in sunlight.

The plain weirdness of his situation suddenly hit him — a midge between a black plum and a pink grapefruit, all three careening free.

He fancied himself, a little boy, in the kitchen of the Minnesota farmhouse, with the darkness of early evening pressing on the window, and he, Donnie, saying: “Ma, I found a deep black hole in the woods, and I know it has to go all the way through to the other side of the earth because I saw a star twinkling at the bottom. I got scared and, Ma, I know you won’t believe this, but as I came running home I saw a big yellow and purple planet behind the barn!”

He shook off the pseudomemory. However weird this situation might be, it was a little less so because he had lived a month on the moon and had now driven a spaceship through it.

He turned his attention to the white threads looping up from the nose of the moon. He swung ship to follow with his eyes their curving course against the stars, diverging at first and then beginning to converge again as they vanished north over the violet horizon of the Wanderer.

Well, if the white threads somehow tied the moon and the Wanderer together, it made sense that they should be tied to a pole of the latter. Attached to a spot on the equator of the Wanderer they’d get stretched and broken, or wound around the Wanderer, since the moon was orbiting three times as fast as the planet was rotating.

Tied together! Wound wound! Here he was thinking of them as actual threads, as though the Wanderer and the moon were two Christmas tree ornaments.

Still, the white threads had to be something actual.

He followed them back along their course to the nose of the moon. The Baba Yaga was ahead of the moon now, but still in its shadow because they were both starting to swing behind the Wanderer again — its black sunset line that he had first seen through the moon-chasm was already in sight once more, chopping off the violet horizon.

So the nose of the moon was in shadow, its surface bronze-dim and churning. He took from the rack a pair of binoculars with big objective lenses and carefully focused them.

In the churning nose of the moon were a dozen huge, conical pits, their inner surfaces spinning rapidly clockwise, as though they were maelstroms in the fracturing rock.

Each sleek white thread, turning bronze-dark as it entered the moon’s shadow, led to the bottom of one of the whirlpool pits and kept swinging around in a tiny circuit, in pace with its whirling. The threads thickened somewhat down toward their restless roots. They resembled waterspouts or tornado-funnels.

Around each pit were three or four bright violet or lemon dots. He had seen one or two other such dots along the strands. It struck Don that they might be big spaceships, presumably from the Wanderer, and possibly generating gravitational or momentum fields of some kind.

For the inference to be made from the whirlpool pits and the entering strands was clear: Somehow, the substance of the moon, in the form of dust and gravel and perhaps larger rocks, was being sucked out and carried looping through space toward the north pole of the Wanderer.

Arab and Pepe and High stood over the Hudson, sharing a stick, ready to shred it into the pale, oil-filmed water if anyone should come.

But no one did. The city was strangely still, even for six in the morning. So High flipped away the half-inch butt, and Arab lit another reefer, and they passed it around.

Their arrival at the river, after slanting north past the General Grant Houses, and under the Henry Hudson Parkway, had been anticlimatic. There had been simply nothing, over to the west, but pale sky and distant piers and Edgewater and the southern end of the Palisades.

“She disappear somehow,” High decided. “Maybe just set.” He laughed. His gaze switched south to Grant’s Tomb. “What you think, General?”

“River look high, Admiral,” Arab adjudged, frowning, as he lit a third reefer for them.

“Sure do,” High agreed. “See it washin’ over that dock!”

“That no dock,” Arab protested scornfully. “That a sunken barge.”

“Just the same, water’s ten feet higher’n when we come.”

“You crazy!”

“I know where she disappear to,” Pepe cried suddenly. “That big purple’n golden thing a amphi-whamf — a balloon-submarine combo! She submerge. That why river high — she bulk it up. She lurkin’ down there, glowin’ in the wet-wet dark.”

As the others quivered at the delicious horror of the thought, Pepe threw up his spread-fingered hands beside his cheeks and cried again, piling it on: “No, wait! She not that. She a frozen atomic blast. They start the blast, then freeze the fireball. She float around like a ball lightning, first over the river, then under. When she unfreeze, city go whish! Look there!”

Red sun was glinting from banks of windows across the river, so low they looked like part of the water. Suddenly the pretended horror became appallingly real to all of them — the sudden fear against which no weed-smoker can wholly ensure himself.

“Come on!” Arab screamed in a whisper.

They turned and ran back toward Harlem.