Don was running out of seconds as they plunged into the Wanderer’s shadow. He whipped off his goggles. The leading rims of his escorts showed up with the same lemon phosphorescence they’d shown behind the planet. For an instant he thought he saw them dully reflected in the black surface below. He nerved himself for the crash, and extinction.

Then all at once the black surface wasn’t there, and, as if the Baba Yaga and its escorts had burst hurtlessly through the ceiling of a gigantic lamplit room, he was staring down at another surface far below.

It had to be far below, because the down-rushing pillar of moon rock, still bulking vast to the side, narrowed almost to a point where it touched it and was changed by this fantastic foreshortening from a pillar to a moon-rock triangle.

One inference seemed clear. All the surface of the Wanderer he’d seen up to this moment — the surface that had reflected sunlight and radar so truly — the surface that had been yellow and violet on the day side, black with phosphorescent green spots on the night side — was nothing more than a film, a film so thin and insubstantial that a frail spaceship like the Baba Yaga could burst through it at a mile a second without suffering the least shock or damage, a film roofing and concealing all the artificial daylight and true life of the Wanderer, a film stretched out everywhere about twenty miles above the true surface of the planet — if what he was gazing down at now was true surface and not some fresh illusion.

It was true surface if complexity and every appearance of solidity were criteria. Below him, filling the spacescreen, stretched a vast, softly-lighted plain gleaming with lakes, or at least with smooth turquoise patches of some sort, a plain dotted with dusky, deep-twinkling circular pits a mile or more across, a plain that was otherwise crowded with all sorts of huge objects of every color and solidly geometric shape imaginable — cones, cubes, cylinders, coils, hemispheres, ziggurats, multilobed rondures — not one object of which Don recognized except as an abstraction.

Giant buildings, machines, vehicles, pure artistic forms? They might have been any or all of those.

Several comparisons flashed through his mind. The Japanese art of rock arrangement on a gigantic scale. Science-fiction book covers of the sort that show an endless floor covered with abstract sculptures looking half alive.

Then his thoughts went dipping far back into the mixed memories and pseudomemories of very early childhood, and he remembered being taken to visit his grandmother in Minneapolis, and the sour, dry smell of her great-ceilinged living room, and being lifted to look at — not to touch — the doors of a whatnot covered with what he had later assumed must have been cowrie shells, Chinese coins, paperweights, polished rock specimens, flowers in plastic — chaste knickknacks of many sorts, which had been utterly strange and meaningless though most fascinating to the baby Don Merriam.

Now he was a baby again.

Here and there between him and the plain, though not directly below, floated irregularly shaped, small dark clouds, each holding, as if it were a nest for rainbow eggs, a clutch of great glowing globes which shot upward light of all hues.

These clouds began themselves to shoot up past him, reminding him that the Baba Yaga, its speed hardly diminished, was nearing the grandly crowded surface below. Similarly, the visible section of the plain was swiftly shrinking and the beautiful, unidentifiable shapes growing rapidly larger. But he felt no fear — hitting the film had exhausted all that.

The Baba Yaga and its escorts were aimed at a point midway between two of the large pits, which lay so close together that at first they seemed to touch tangentially. Into one of these pits the rock pillar plunged. The other showed the dusky twinkling that seemed characteristic of all the open pits.

At last the margin between the pits acquired a width, became a silvery ribbon. One of the escorts seemed to settle into the hurtling rock pillar, it flew so close to it.

The next instant, without the faintest shock or jar and with all the impossible feel of dream flying, the Baba Yaga came to a dead stop no more than a dozen feet above a dull silver pavement — so close to it, in fact, that Don could see designs etched on its surface: a whirlingly complex arabesque with bands of hieroglyphics.

Still weightless, he hovered above the spacescreen and goggled down through it, feeling like a fish looking through a window in the floor of its aquarium.

Then, as if a couple of verniers had been fired or a giant hand had grasped it, the Baba Yaga began to upend. Don grabbed at the pilot’s seat to steady himself.

The motion stopped halfway around, when the ship’s main jet would be pointing at the pavement below. Gradually then a gravity field took hold of him and the ship. He heard three faint thumps and simultaneously felt three gentle jolts as the three legs of his ship footed themselves. He clutched the seat tighter as his weight grew until, so far as he could judge after a month on the moon, it was as much or almost as much as it had been on Earth. Then his weight stopped growing.

But he noted these things with a lower fraction of his mind only, for his main attention was absorbed by the view the spacescreen now gave him of the Wanderer’s sky — the underside of the film through which he had broken some forty seconds ago.

Between him and it, the small dark clouds — darker now since he could no longer see the gleaming eggs they nested — sailed steadily past, much as small clouds move across the deserts of the American Southwest before a steady west wind, withholding their rain. At no time did they obscure more than an eighth of the sky. Nor did the down-rushing rock pillar, now tapering up to a point high as the sky itself, its triangle reversed, obscure more than another eighth.

That sky was neither pale violet nor yellow, nor dead black anywhere, nor did it show any stars. It was instead a slow swirling of all dark colors, a dusky rainbow storm sky sweeping along in ever-changing hues and curving patterns. It had the harmony and grandeur and menace of a perpetual color-symphony, yet it seemed natural, promising endless vital variations. Whether its light came mostly from itself, or from that thrown upward by the now-concealed globes on the clouds, or from some other indirect source, Don could not tell. It resembled somewhat the marbling of a film of oil on water, and somewhat Van Gogh’s wild painting, “The Starry Night,” and even more the deep, glinting hues that flow churningly past the mind’s eye in the dark.

Just as he was thinking that last thought, which seemed to put him on the inside of some vast mind, he heard a tiny grating sound which chilled his blood. He looked down quickly enough to see the last of the dogs on the hatch move aside by itself and the hatch lift without visible agency, showing him the empty ladder moving down out of its housing to the empty silver pavement below.

Then a voice, strangely sweet and cajoling, called to him in only slightly slurred English: “Come! Unsuit yourself and come down!”

Australia, Indonesia, the Philippines, Japan, and the eastern parts of China and Siberia had now swung into Earth’s night side. The Wanderer, often first seen as the yin-yang or the mandala, set religious and mystical strings vibrating in millions of minds. And East Asian voices were added to the American ones warning the cluster of skeptical old continents to the west — the world’s cultural heartland — of what they would see at nightfall.