“Into the storm,” Paul finished the thought “The Wanderer was a wreck.”

“Nothing’s a wreck that can boost into hyperspace,” Don assured him quite cheerily. The stars began to crawl across the screen, and he tripped a vernier or two and they steadied.

“Maybe the Wanderer will drift to another cosmos,” Paul muttered thoughtfully. “Maybe that’s the way: don’t try to force it, just drift like a wrecked ship with the hyperspatial currents, surrender to the storm.”

Don glanced at him sharply. “She told you quite a bit, didn’t she? I wonder if she got back aboard in time.”

“Of course,” Paul said shortly. “I think even those little ships can move as fast as light, or faster.”

“That was quite a clawing she gave you,” Don remarked casually, then rapidly added: “Me, I didn’t have any big romances up there.” He rippled the verniers again and frowned at the skin temperature gauge. He continued briskly: “And I don’t think I got any left down below, either. Margo’s really serious about this Hunter character, I’d say.”

Paul shrugged. “What do you care? You always liked loneliness better than you liked people. No offense — liking yourself s the beginning of all love.”

Again Don gave him a quick glance. “I bet you loved Margo more than I did,” he said. “I think I always knew that.”

“Of course I did,” Paul said dully. “She’ll be angry I lost Miaow.”

Don chuckled. “What things that cat’ll see.” Then his voice changed. “You wanted to go with Tigerishka, too, didn’t you? You stayed behind to ask her.”

Paul nodded. “And she wouldn’t have me on any terms. When I asked her what she felt toward me, she gave me this.” He hugged his cheek against the bloody rag.

Don chuckled. “You’re a glutton for punishment, aren’t you?” Then, quite lightly: “I don’t know, Paul, but if I were in love with a cat-lady, that clawing would be the one thing that would convince me she did love me back. Grab hold of the barrel now — here we go over Niagara Falls.”

The saucer students stood in inky darkness roofed with stars. Then, so near at hand it seemed for a moment they were in a room, a small low light went on, showing a cluttered table and behind it a man with the ageless, thin, sharp-featured face of a pharaoh. Margo moved toward him, following the young man in the sweatshirt, and Hunter got out of the car and came up after her.

The man behind the table looked to one side. Someone there said: “The magnetic fields of both planets are gone, Oppie. We’re back to Earth-normal.”

Margo said loudly: “Professor Opperly, we’ve been hunting you for two days. I have here a gun that dropped from a saucer. It puts momentum in things. We thought you should be entrusted with it. Unfortunately we’ve used up all its charge, getting here.”

He glanced quickly into her face, then down at the gray pistol she had taken from her jacket. His lips thinned in a small, quite nasty smile.

“It looks to me a great deal more like something from a dime store toy counter,” he told her briskly. Then, turning again to the man beside him: “How about the radio sky, Denison? Is it clearing, or—”

Margo had quickly turned the arrow on top of the gun away from the muzzle, then pointed it across the table and pressed the trigger button. Both Opperly and the young man in the sweatshirt started to grab her, then stopped. Some papers drifted toward the gun and then along with them three paper clips and a metal pencil that had been holding some of the papers down. For a second they all clung to the gun’s muzzle, then dropped off.

“It must be electrostatic,” the young man in the sweatshirt said curiously, watching the papers as they fluttered down.

“It works on metal objects, too,” the one addressed as Denison pointed out, seeing the paper clips as they fell. “Induction?”

“It pulled my hand! I distinctly felt that,” Opperly himself said, spreading the fingers of the hand he had reached across the table toward the gun. He looked at Margo again. “Did you say it actually fell from a saucer?”

She smiled as she handed it to him.

Hunter said: “We also bring you a message from Lieutenant Donald Merriam of the Space Force. He’ll be landing here—”

Opperly had turned to someone else beside him. “Wasn’t there a Merriam among those lost at Moonbase?”

“He wasn’t lost” Margo cut in. “He got away in one of the moon ships. He was on the new planet. He’ll be trying to land here — maybe he’s already coming in.”

“And he had a special message for you, Professor Opperly,” Hunter added. “The new planet has Earth-radius linear accelerators and an Earth-circumference cyclotron.”

Opperly grinned…"We just had a demonstration of that, didn’t we?”

None of them noticed a star wink belatedly on very close to Mars. An escaping laser beam had struck Deimos, the tiny outer moon of Mars, heating it white hot — to the considerable excitement of Tigran Biryuzov and his comrades.

Opperly put down the gray gun and moved around the desk. “Come with me, please,” he told Margo and Hunter. “We should alert the landing field to this possibility.”

“Wait a minute,” Margo said. “Are you just going to leave the momentum pistol lying there?”

“Oh,” Opperly said apologetically. He reached for it and handed it to Margo. “You’d better look after it for me.”

Richard Hillary and Vera Carlisle tramped along a little road that wended south near the crests of the Malvern Hills. Once more there were other trampers with them, dotting the little road.

They had discovered that not even sex and companionship can still the lemming urge, at least by day. Richard was thinking once more of the Black Mountains. It might be possible to reach them without leaving high ground.

The morning sun was hidden by a gray overcast that had come in from the west just as the Wanderer had been setting at a quarter to its D face. There had been a weird phenomenon then. Just as the Wanderer had vanished in the cloud curtain, it had seemed to be reborn, all silver gray and bigger than itself, an hour above its vanishing spot. They had speculated as to whether this was a mirage of the Wanderer or a second strange planet. Then the mirage or the strange planet had vanished in the overcast.

Vera stopped and turned on her transistor wireless. Richard stopped beside her with a sigh of resignation. Two nearby walkers had stopped too, out of curiosity.

Vera slowly turned the dial. There was no static. She turned up the volume full and turned the dial again. Still only silence.

“Maybe it’s broken, Miss,” one of the people suggested.

“You’ve worn it out,” Richard told her unsympathetically. “And a good thing.”

Then the voice came, tiny and whistling at first, but then, as she tuned it, clear and loud in the gray-roofed silence of the hills:

“Repeat. A report, cabled from Toronto and confirmed by Buenos Aires and New Zealand, definitely states that the two strange planets have vanished as they came. This does not mean an immediate end to tidal reverberations, but…”

They went on listening. From up and down the road people were gathering, gathering…

Bagong Bung decided the waves had gone down enough to make it safe, so he took the stout cloth sack out from under him, where he’d been sitting on it for safety, along with the lashed-down little bags of coin from the “Sumatra Queen,” and he opened it so that he and Cobber-Hume could peer in.

The wild waters, washing again and again across the orange life raft, had carried away all the mud and scoured clean all the tiny objects in the sack. Along with bits of coral and pebble and shell, there was the dark glow of old gold and the small, dark red flames of three — no, four! — rubies.

Wolf Loner stopped feeding soup to the Italian girl, because she had turned away to look at the rim of the rising sun overtopping the gray Atlantic. ” Il sole,” she whispered.