Jake Lesher curled his lip at the thinning crowd. With the sinking of the Wanderer and the seeping in of gray morning light, the excitement had drained out of Times Square. The earthquake litter now looked merely untidy and gritty — one more Manhattan demolition project.

Incredulously, as if they were something from a musical extravaganza, he remembered Sal’s song and the stamping crowd under the vast purple-and-amber floodlight. Then his lip relaxed and his eyes widened a little but stopped watching, as he felt brushing against the edges of his imagination the first tendrils of a dream — or of a scheme, for the two were very close in Jake’s universe.

Sally Harris suddenly snaked her arm through his from behind. As she pulled him around, she whispered rapidly in his ear: “Come on, let’s get out of here before those other wolves find me. It’s only four blocks.”

“You shouldn’t startle me that way, Sal,” Jake complained. “I was getting a money-making thought. Where to?”

“You were just saying nothing could startle you any more. Ha! I’m taking us to breakfast at Hugo Hasseltine’s penthouse — me and my little key. After that quake, the higher I get, the safer I’ll feel.”

“You’ll have farther to fall,” Jake pointed out.

“Yeah, but things won’t fall on me. Come on, you’ll scheme better on a full stomach.”

Way up, a little pink was showing in the sky.

Chapter Sixteen

Doc grunted happily and said, “I could do with another sandwich.”

“We thought we’d better hold back half,” the thin woman told him apologetically from the other side of the long table.

“It was my idea,” young Harry McHeath said, embarrassed.

“And probably a good one,” Doc allowed. “Straight out of Swiss Family Robinson. Anyone care for a taste of Scotch?” He fished a half-pint bottle out of his lefthand coat pocket. The fat woman humphed.

“Better save that for emergencies, Rudy,” Ross Hunter said quietly.

Doc sighed and tucked it away. “I suppose all second cups of coffee have been interdicted by the Committee of Public Safety, too,” he growled.

Harry McHeath shook his head nervously and hastened to pour one for Doc and then for several of the others.

Rama Joan said: “Rudolf, ages ago you were wondering what makes the colors of the Wanderer.”

She had had Ann stretch out on two chairs beside her, wrapped in the coat someone had left behind, with the girl’s head pillowed on her mother’s thigh. Rama Joan was looking at the Wanderer. The eastern yellow spot now had purple all around it, destroying the illusion of the jaws. The two polar yellow spots were shrinking as they rotated out of sight. In fact, the effect was almost that of a purple target with a great yellow bull’s eye. Meanwhile the faintly crack-webbed moon, perceptibly lozenge-shaped, had almost finished a second westward crossing of the Wanderer’s face.

Rama Joan said: “I don’t think it’s natural features at all. I think it’s simply…decor.” She paused. “If beings are able to drive their planet through hyperspace, they’d surely be able to give it an appearance, they considered artistic and distinctive. Cavemen didn’t paint the outside of their homes, but we do.”

“You know, I like that,” Doc said, smacking his lips. “A two-tone planet. Impress the neighbors in the next galaxy.”

Wojtowicz and Harry McHeath laughed uneasily. The Ramrod thought: Unwillingly they grow toward comprehension of Ispan’s glory. Hunter, his voice low but jerky with tension, said: “If you were that advanced, I don’t suppose you’d use natural planets at all. You’d design and build them from scratch. Gosh, this seems crazy!” he finished rapidly.

“Not at all,” Doc assured him. “Be damned efficient to use all of a planet’s volume. You could have storerooms and dormitories and field generators down to the very core. Of course that would require some pretty tremendous beams and bracing—”

“Not if you had antigravity,” said Rama Joan.

“Wow,” Wojtowicz said tonelessly.

“You’re clever, Mommy,” Ann observed sleepily.

Hunter said: “If you cancelled the gravity of a rotating planet, you’d have to have it pretty well tied together, or centrifugal force would tear it apart.”

“Nope,” Doc told him. “Mass and momentum would disappear together.”

Paul cleared his throat. He was sitting beside Margo and he’d taken off his coat and put it around her. He’d meant to put his arm around her too, if only for the practical purpose of getting some of his body-heat back, but somehow he hadn’t yet. He said: “If beings were that advanced, wouldn’t they also be careful not to injure or even disturb any inhabited planets they came near?” He added uncertainly: “I suppose I’m assuming a benign Galactic Federation, or whatever you’d call it…”

“Cosmic Welfare State,” Doc suggested in faintly sardonic tones.

“No, you’re absolutely right, young man,” the fat woman said authoritatively, while the thin woman nodded, her mouth pursed. The first law of the Saucerians is to harm no life, but to nurture and protect all.”

“But is it the first law of General Motors?” Hunter wanted to know. “Or General Mao?”

Rama Joan smiled quizzically and asked Paul: “When you make an automobile trip, what special precautions do you take against running over cats and dogs? Are the anthills all marked in your garden?”

“Still hot on your devil-theory, aren’t you?” Doc observed.

Rama Joan shrugged. “Devils may be nothing but beings intent on their purpose, which now happens to collide with yours.”

“Then evil’s just an auto accident?”

“Perhaps. Remember, there are careless drivers, and even drivers who use a car to express themselves.”

Paul asked: “Even if the car’s a planet?”

Rama Joan nodded.

“Hmm. I just use naked me to express myself,” Doc asserted, chuckling wickedly.

Margo, whose hands were curved around Miaow asleep on her lap, interjected sharply: “When I drive I can see a cat on the sidewalk three blocks ahead. Cats are people. That’s why I could never have gone into Vandenberg, even if they’d been more decent about the rest of it”

“But are people always people?” Hunter asked her with a smile.

“I’m not so sure of that,” she admitted, wrinkling her nose.

The fat woman made a pshaw-sound. Rama Joan said sweetly to Margo: “I hope that when things get…well…rougher, you never regret passing up Vandenberg and throwing in with us. You had your chance, you know.”

Wojtowicz jumped up. “Look at that!” he said.

He was pointing across the sand to where a pair of headlights were bobbing up and down. And now there came plainly to their ears the swelling growl of an engine.

Hunter said: “Paul, looks like Major Humphreys has changed his mind and sent to fetch you.”

Doc said: “It’s coming from the wrong direction.”

Wojtowicz said: “Yeah, it’s from the highway, come around the slide.”

The headlights slewed around, hesitated, then came on bright. Their glare made it hard to see the car, despite the twilight.

Margo said: “They’ll get stuck, whoever they are.”

“Not if they keep up speed they won’t,” said Wojtowicz.

The car came on as if it were going to ram the platform and then careened to a stop fifty feet away and doused its headlights.

“It’s Hixon’s panel truck!” the Little Man said.

“And there’s Mrs. Hixon,” Doc said, as a figure in pak slacks and sweater dropped from the back of the truck and ran toward them.

Wojtowicz, Ross Hunter, and Harry McHeath hurried toward the truck. As Mrs. Hixon passed them, she cried: “Help Bill look after Ray Hanks. Ray’s got a broken leg.” Then she was on the platform.

Earlier in the evening Mrs. Hixon had been a handsome-looking woman, but now her hands, face, slacks, and sweater were smeared with dirt, her hair had come unpinned and hung down in strands, her lips were pulled back from her teeth, and her eyes stared. There was blood on her chin. As soon as she stopped moving she started to shake.