Fritz Leiber - The Wanderer

“No, I’d be proud,” Doc answered gruffly.

They lugged the cot up, and Doc recovered his umbrella. Then Wojtowicz took a flat-bladed spade from under the edge of the mattress on the cot and began to dig.

The fat woman noticed and called down from the platform: “No wonder I felt something sticking in my side all the way.”

Wojtowicz paused to call out: “You should just be damn thankful you got that free ride when you thought you was having a heart attack.”

Wanda called back angrily: “Look, when I have a heart attack, it’s bad — and there’s no thinking about it! But when my heart attack’s over, it’s over.”

“O.K.,” Wojtowicz told her over his shoulder.

The spade made a faint, clean, rasping thud as he dug. The thin woman and Harry McHeath wiped sand from some cups and set them out. The rest of them watched the moon emerging from behind the Wanderer, which seemed to tip over as it sank toward the Pacific.

Luna looked visibly conical — mashed. And instead of the smooth smudges of “seas” on her face, there was the faintest tracery of shadow-lines, here and there palely flashing the Wanderer’s colors. The effect was horrid, somehow suggesting a sac of spider’s eggs.

A forceps birth, the Ramrod thought The White Virgin, fecundated by Ispan, bears herself in pain — and must birth herself again and again in torture. I had not thought of that.

Margo thought, I’m sorry I called her a bitch. Don …

Rama Joan whispered to Paul: “Her young man was up there, wasn’t he? Then she could be your girl now, Paul.”

Wojtowicz straightened up. “That’s all the deep we can have it,” he told the Little Man huskily. “Any further we’d get water.”

They turned toward the cot. Clarence Dodd unsnapped the leash from the heavy collar and lifted the jacket a little from Ragnarok’s body, looking at Margo, but she shook her head, and he grimaced a smile at her and let the jacket fall again. He and Wojtowicz and Doc let down the shrouded dog into his shallow grave. Miaow lifted in Margo’s arms to watch curiously.

Over the Pacific the Wanderer hung as strangely as if the blind spot had acquired imperial colors, and was as perfectly spherical as the emergent moon was maimed. The western yellow spot had rotated out of sight, so that the face the orb showed had become a Three-Spot; but the most striking impression, with the two thick eastern arms of the purple cross widening above and below the great eastern yellow spot, was of the head of a purple beast with jaws agape.

Fenris Wolf, thought Harry McHeath. And now it looks like it’s really eating the moon, with the moon orbiting around in front between its jaws.

“It looks like a big dog getting ready to snap,” Ann said thoughtfully. “Mommy, do you suppose the gods have put Ragnarok up there, like they used to put Greek heroes and nymphs up in the stars?”

“Yes, I think that’s happened, dear,” Rama Joan told her.

The Little Man pulled out his notebook and pen automatically and then looked dully at the next empty page. Margo gave Miaow to Paul to hold while she took the things out of the Little Man’s hands and sketched the Wanderer for him, imitating his diagrammatic style.

The Serpent gorges on the Egg, thought the Ramrod. Or is it that roads divide?

Wojtowicz swiftly spaded first dry, then wet sand back into the grave. Doc took the leash out of the Little Man’s fingers and wove it tightly around the head of his furled umbrella and fastened it that way. When Wojtowicz had patted the sand flat with his spade and stepped back, Doc thrust the umbrella deep into the center of the grave.

“There, Doddsy,” he said, putting an arm around the Little Man’s shoulder. “He’s got a marker now. A sort of caduceus.”

From the platform the thin woman called: “Come and get it, everybody! The coffee stayed real hot.”

Donald Merriam was in darkness again. The Baba Yaga had once more been eclipsed, this time by the moon as it passed in front of the Wanderer. The tiny moonship fell free between the two bodies. It was continuing to gain on the moon, but had not yet quite out-nosed it.

The cabin had swiftly wanned from the direct sunlight, but before it had become uncomfortably hot, the moon had swung between the Baba Yaga and the sun.

The darkness of this eclipse was not nearly as great as that of the first, being pervaded by sun-reflected violet and yellow from the Wanderer. This Wanderer-light revealed the continuing rock-churning of the moon’s surface, looking like a stormy sea seen from an airplane by brilliant moonlight.

At his altitude above the Wanderer — 1,600 miles now by radar check — Don could see only about a fifth of the planet’s disk. Passing across the face variously named on Earth the X, the Notched Disk, the Wheel, St. Andrew’s Cross, and the Mandala, he saw only the western yellow spot and a rim around it widening ahead — the eastern and two polar yellow spots were out of sight for him around the curve of the Wanderer.

By watching the yellow spot emerge from the Wanderer’s night side across the sunrise line, Don had got confirmation that the Wanderer was rotating and that its top and bottom were indeed its poles, its axis being roughly parallel to that of Earth.

By timing the speed of the spot’s emergence Don had estimated the Wanderer’s period of rotation as six hours — a “day” only one quarter as long as Earth’s. And it was rotating in the same direction as he and the moon were moving in their two-hour orbits — the planet’s surface features following, but falling swiftly behind.

The greenish glow-spots on the Wanderer’s night side did not seem to show up in any way on the day side — perhaps they were some sort of phosphorescence visible only in the dark. Nor, so far as he could recall, had there been any indication of the distinction between violet and yellow areas on the night side — apparently it took sunlight to bring that out.

A good half of the great yellow spot was occupied by the moon’s shadow — inky, and undeniably elliptical and growing more so. Studying it, Don noted a very ghostly pale green round beginning to intrude into its forward edge — apparently the green spots did carry around, though being invisible in sunlight.

The plain weirdness of his situation suddenly hit him — a midge between a black plum and a pink grapefruit, all three careening free.

He fancied himself, a little boy, in the kitchen of the Minnesota farmhouse, with the darkness of early evening pressing on the window, and he, Donnie, saying: “Ma, I found a deep black hole in the woods, and I know it has to go all the way through to the other side of the earth because I saw a star twinkling at the bottom. I got scared and, Ma, I know you won’t believe this, but as I came running home I saw a big yellow and purple planet behind the barn!”

He shook off the pseudomemory. However weird this situation might be, it was a little less so because he had lived a month on the moon and had now driven a spaceship through it.

He turned his attention to the white threads looping up from the nose of the moon. He swung ship to follow with his eyes their curving course against the stars, diverging at first and then beginning to converge again as they vanished north over the violet horizon of the Wanderer.

Well, if the white threads somehow tied the moon and the Wanderer together, it made sense that they should be tied to a pole of the latter. Attached to a spot on the equator of the Wanderer they’d get stretched and broken, or wound around the Wanderer, since the moon was orbiting three times as fast as the planet was rotating.