The gray pillar, occupying a full third of his horizon but tapering swiftly almost to a point at the top of the sky, looked at first glance like a solid mountain, except that he knew it was plunging steadily downward at a speed great enough to make its component particles and fragments individually invisible — presumably the same ten miles a second at which he’d judged it to be moving above the sky-film that roofed the atmosphere.
As he watched the pillar, he began to see slow changes in its contours — bulgings and channelings that formed slowly and held their shape for many seconds and then shifted into other smooth forms. It reminded him of the grotesque bulgings and groovings that a stream from a faucet will hold — sometimes so persistently that the shape seems to be one of solid crystal rather than rushing water.
But how could the thing be moving at such a supersonic velocity — two seconds from the sky to the floor! — through the palpable air — the air he knew had to be there because he was breathing it — without creating a fierce and tumultuous dust storm of eddies in that air, without a roar like that of a dozen first-stage rockets or a score of Niagaras?
They must, somehow, perhaps using an unheard-of field, have created a wall-less vacuum channel, just as surely as they must have created — now he came to think of it — similar wall-less tubular vacua for the Baba Yaga and its escorts to travel through after they burst the sky-film…and, even before that, through the thin plasma and micro-meteorites of space.
He continued to stare up the weirdly foreshortened gray pillar. How long could this monstrous transfer go on? How long would the moon last, even as an ellipsoid of pale gravel spreading into a ring, at this rate of depletion? How long would there be any moon-stuff left outside the Wanderer?
From the sector of his brain schooled in engineering and solid geometry sprang almost at once the first-approximation answer, that it would take eight thousand days for one such rock stream, moving ten miles a second, to transport the moon’s entire substance. He had seen only a dozen of the rock streams.
But they might speed up the streams, and there might be another set at the Wanderer’s south pole, and others being brought into existence. Looking aside from the pillar, he now did see three more in the distance: they looked like great gray waterspouts twisting up toward the sky.
The sky was now all dark blues and greens and browns, slowly swirling in a great edge-blended river, austere and menacing. He looked down toward the paler structures ringing the empty silver pavement except where the pits were; he let his gaze travel around the pillar-broken circle of those smoothly monstrous, multiform, pastel-shaded solidities, and it seemed to him that some of the more distant ones had changed position and shape — and in some cases crept closer — since he’d last studied them.
The idea of great buildings — or whatever they were — moving about when there were no other signs of life disturbed him greatly and he turned back to the silver-railed pit behind him to scan its topmost levels, almost desperately, for indications of some smaller-scale activity. He tried to look at the top floors immediately below him, or close to either side, but the silver lip on which he was standing overlapped the pit itself for several yards like a roof and cut off his view. So he peered across at the topmost windows and balconies, and after a while he began to think he could see small figures moving in them, but at a mile or even a half mile it wasn’t easy to be sure of that, and anyway his eyes were beginning to swim and prickle. He was wondering whether he dared return to the cabin for the binoculars — when a voice, sweet-toned yet commanding, spoke from behind him. “Come!”
Don turned around very slowly. Standing a little taller than himself, not twenty feet away, with the erect grace and pride of a matador, was a lean, silky, red-splotched black biped of shape midway between feline and anthropoid. It looked like a high-foreheaded cheetah a little bigger than a mountain lion and standing as a man stands, or like a slim, black-furred, red-pied tiger wearing a black turban and a narrow red mask — the turban being the unfeline frontal and temporal bulge. Its tail rose like a red spear behind its back. Its ears were pointed. Its serene eyes were large, with something flowerlike about the pupils.
Hardly shifting its close-set, narrow feet, yet with movements like those of a dancer, it extended a four-fingered arm in a gesture of invitation, and opened the thin lips in the black lower mask, showing the needle-tips of white fangs, and softly repeated: “Come.”
Slowly, as if in a dream, Don moved toward the being. When he had come close, it nodded, and then the section of pavement on which they were both standing — a circular silver section about eight feet across — began very slowly to sink into the body of the Wanderer. The being moved its extended arm until it rested lightly across Don’s shoulders. Don thought of Faust and Mephistopheles descending to Hell. Faust had wanted all knowledge. With his magic mirrors Mephistopheles had given Faust a glimpse of everything. But what magic device can give understanding?
They had sunk barely knee-deep in the pavement when there was a flash in the sky. Suddenly beyond the Baba Yaga there hung a third saucer, and a ship so like the Baba Yaga that Don’s throat tightened, and he thought of Dufresne. But then he saw the small differences in structure and the red Soviet star on it.
His view of it was cut off by the silver curve of the pavement as the platform continued to descend.
Chapter Twenty-one
While a very few human beings made thrilling and terrifying direct contact with the Wanderer and its denizens, and while a number more studied it with the magnifying and mensurating eyes of science, most of mankind knew the newcomer planet only by its naked-eye visage and by the destruction it did. The first installment of destruction was volcanic and diastrophic. The tides, or tidal strains, set up in Earth’s solid crust delivered their effects more swiftly than those in the ocean layer.
Within six hours after the Wanderer’s appearance, there had been major activity all along the great earthquake belts circumscribing the Pacific Ocean and stretching along the northern shore of the Mediterranean into the heart of Asia. Land was riven; cities were shaken and shattered. Volcanoes glowed, spouted, and gushed redly. A few exploded. Shocks originated as far apart as Alaska and the Antarctic, many of them occurring undersea. Great tsunami ranged across the oceans, monstrous long swells turning to giant, watery fists on reaching the shallows. Hundreds of thousands died.
Nevertheless there were many areas, even near the sea, where all this wrecking and reaving was only a rumor or a newspaper headline, or perhaps a voice on the radio during those hours of grace before the Wanderer peered over the horizon and poisoned the radio sky.
Richard Hillary had dozed through much of Berks, with no memory of Reading at all, and was only now beginning slowly to wake as the bus first crossed the Thames a little beyond Maidenhead. He told himself it wasn’t so much last night’s walking that had tired him — he was a great walker — as Dai Davies’ literary ranting.
Now it was about noon, and the bus was approaching the tideway of the Thames and the dark, smoky loom of London. Richard drew up the shade at last and began a melancholy but not unpleasant rumination about the curses of industrialism, overpopulation, and overconstruction.