Paul looked at Tigerishka.

“Hurry,” she repeated.

Miaow came waltzing up warily. Paul stooped, and when the little cat glanced toward Tigerishka, grabbed it up with a sudden snatch. As he stepped toward the port he smoothed the ruffled gray fur. His hand slowed in the middle of the stroke and he turned around.

“I’m not going,” he said.

“You have to, Paul,” Tigerishka said. “Earth’s your home. Hurry.”

“I give up Earth and my race,” he replied. “I want to stay with you.” Miaow squirmed in his hands, trying to get away, but he tightened his grip.

“Please go at once, Paul,” Tigerishka said, at last looking and moving toward him. Her eyes stared straight at his. “There can never be any further relationship between us.”

“But I’m going to stay with you, do you hear?” His voice was suddenly so loud and angry that Miaow became panicky and clawed at his hands to get loose. He held her firmly and went on: “Even as your pet, if it has to be that way. But I’m staying.”

Tigerishka stood face to face with him. “Not even as my pet,” she said. “There’s not quite enough gap between our minds for that. — Oh, get out, you fool!”

“Tigerishka,” he said harshly, staring into her violet eyes, “ninety per cent of what you felt last night was pity and boredom. What was the other ten per cent?”

She glared at him as if in a frenzy of exasperation. Suddenly, moving with almost blinding speed, she snatched Miaow from him and slapped him hard across the face. The three pale violet claws of that forepaw showed bright red the first half inch as they came away.

“That!” she snarled, her fangs bared.

He took a backward step, then another, then he was in the tube. The artificial gravity above squeezed him down into it in free fall. Looking up, he could see Tigerishka’s snarling mask. Blood streamed from his cheek and hung in red globules against the ridged silver inside the tube. Then the green port closed.

Chapter Forty-two

The saucer students entered Vandenberg Two without hindrance or fanfare and altogether unromantically — like workers on the graveyard shift arriving at their factory.

There was no one at the mesh fence that had so lately been many yards under salt water, no one at the big gate now sagging open — nothing at all of note, in fact, except six inches of stinking mud — so they just drove through, most of them out of the cars to lighten them, and they started up the ramp to the plateau.

Hunter drove the Corvette. Occupying all of the small back seat and overlapping it a bit, lay Wanda, breathing heavily. Not even Wojtowicz had been able to bully her out of this heart attack.

Mrs. Hixon was driving the truck because Bill Hixon wanted to watch the sky, where the Wanderer in mandala face and the Stranger now bracketed the zenith — and because she didn’t give a damn, as she said more than once. She was alone in the cab — Pop had wanted to stay, but she’d told him right out he smelled worse than the mud, and it was Bill’s truck, and she wouldn’t take it.

In the back of the truck were Ray Hanks and Ida, she nursing both his broken leg and her own swollen ankle. She didn’t believe in sleeping pills and was feeding both herself and the feebly protesting Ray large quantities of aspirin.

“Chew them,” she told him. “The bitterness takes your mind off things.”

The rest were walking. Three times already some of them had had to heave at the truck to get it through bad places, and twice the truck had had to nudge the Corvette out of spots in which its tires just spun. Everybody was smeared with mud, their shoes globbed with it; and the truck tires were so muddied that their chains didn’t chink.

There was a blue surge in the almost shadowless, mixed planet-light bathing the mucky landscape. Harry McHeath, by his youth better able than most of them to keep an eye on two things at once, called out: “It’s started again! They’re both doing it!”

Four ruler-straight, string-narrow, bright blue beams stretched across the gray sky from the Stranger to the Wanderer. But now instead of shooting past her they converged. Yet they did not strike the Wanderer, but stopped short of her by just a hair of gray sky, and were thrown back in four faint, semicircular, bluish-white fans.

“They must be hitting a field of some sort,” the Little Man guessed.

“Like the Lensmen battles!” McHeath chimed excitedly.

Similarly three violet beams shot from the Wanderer to the Stranger and were intercepted. Blue and violet beams stretched, criss-crossing, between the two planets, like a long, geometrically drawn cat’s cradle.

“This is it!” Hixon yelled fiercely.

Wojtowicz was watching so singlemindedly that he walked off the ramp. From the corner of his eye, McHeath noted him drop out of sight and raced over.

“I’m O.K., kid, I just slipped down here a little ways — see, I can reach you,” Wojtowicz replied reassuringly to McHeath’s anxious call. “Only give me a hand up, will you, so I don’t have to stop watching?”

Hixon called up to the truck: “You should be out here seeing this, babe — it’s amazing!”

From inside the cab Mrs. Hixon shouted back: “You watch the fireworks for me, Billy boy — I’m driving the truck!” And she honked viciously at the Corvette, which seemed to be stopping.

But Hunter was only slowing a bit. He’d taken a couple of quick glances at the battling planets, and it still seemed to him more important to get this gang into the Space Force base while the excitement lasted and perhaps as it ran interference for them. He had to get that done and the juiceless momentum pistol delivered, too — he had come to share much of Margo’s obsession on the latter point. While she, tramping along to the left of the hood, was obviously still of the same mind and mood.

So Hunter called out: “Come on, everybody! Here we turn right. Don’t walk off the end!” And he swung the car up onto the plateau.

There at last they found personnel — three soldiers who might well have been on guard duty, judging from the three weapons leaned against the wall of the tin hut behind them, but who were now crouching restlessly on their hams to stare up at the interplanetary battle. One of them was snapping his fingers.

As the truck swung up onto the plateau after the Corvette and both cars almost stopped, Margo quickly walked up behind the soldiers.

Overhead three more blue lines and two more violet ones added themselves to the laser barrage, complicating the cat’s cradle.

Margo touched the nearest soldier on the shoulder, and when he didn’t react, shook him by it He turned a wild sweating face up at her.

“Where is Professor Morton Opperly?” she demanded. “Where are the scientists?”

“Christ, I wouldn’t know,” he told her. “The longhairs are over there somewheres.” He waved vaguely toward the interior of the plateau. “Don’t bother me, lady!” He whirled back, his face on the sky again, and pounded one of his buddies on the shoulder.

“Tony!” he yelled. “I got two more bills says Old Goldy beats the bejesus out of Cannonballl”

“You’re faded!”

(Twenty-five hundred miles east, Jake Lesher clutched Sally Harris and gasped: “Oh, Sal, if I could have made book on this!")

Margo walked on. Mrs. Hixon honked again. Hunter drove on slowly, following Margo. He called sharply to the figures close around the two cars: “Keep moving, everybody. Watch and walk.”

Ahead floodlights went on against white walls, silhouetting knots and huddles of men, none of them moving, all of them staring at the sky.

Two more blue beams flashed on, not exactly from the Stranger, but from points a half diameter out from her — huge battleships of space, perhaps. One of the new beams needled through to the Wanderer. There was an incandescent gout at the edge of the north yellow notch of the mandala, and when the dazzling white light faded there was a long ragged black hole there in the Wanderer’s golden and purple skin.