The Wanderer Read Online Free PDF

the cars, the cliffs swung sharply to the right and the level beach followed them inland. Paul realized they must be at the mouth of the wash they'd crossed and recrossed back on the highway. Some distance beyond the wash, the ground began to rise again. Still farther off he could see a red light blinking high up and, much lower down, the glint of a mesh fence. He found these evidences of Vandenberg Two obscurely reassuring.
    They headed oceanward past the sea-grass toward the green spark of the fourth lantern, tiny almost as a planet. The crusted sand sang faintly as they scuffed it. Margo took Paul's arm.
    "Do you realize the eclipse is still going on?" she whispered. He nodded. She said,
    "Paul, what if the stars around it should squiggle now?"
    Paul said, "I think I can see a white light beyond the fourth green one. And figures.
    And some sort of low building."
    They kept on. The low building looked as if it had once been someone's large beach house, or else a small beach club. The windows were boarded up. On this side of it was a rather large floor, unsided and unroofed, about two feet above the sand, that could hardly be anything else but an old dance floor. On it had been set about a hundred folding chairs, of which only the front twenty or so were occupied. The chairs faced the sea and a long table, slightly elevated on what had once been the orchestra's platform.
    Behind the table sat three persons with a little white light shining on their faces—the only illumination besides the green lantern at the back of the audience.
    One of the three persons had a beard; another was bald and wore glasses; the third was in evening dress with a white tie and wore a green turban.
    Beardy was speaking, but they weren't yet near enough to hear him distinctly.
    Margo clutched Paul's arm. "The one with the turban is a woman," she whispered loudly.
    A tiny figure got up from the sand near the lantern and approached them. A small white light blinked on, and they saw it was a narrow-faced girl with pale reddish braids.
    She couldn't have been more than ten. She had some sheets of paper in one hand and she held the forefinger of the other across her lips. The white light was that of a small battery lamp hanging against her chest by a cord around her neck. As she came close she lifted the sheets to them, whispering, "We've got to be quiet. It's started. Take a program."
    Her eyes lit up when she saw Miaow. "Oh, you've got a cat," she whispered. "I don't think Ragnarok will mind."
    After Margo and Paul had each taken a sheet, she led them to a central step going up to the floor and gestured that they should sit down in front. When Margo and Paul, smiling but shaking their heads, sat down in the back row instead, she shrugged and started to go away.
    Margo felt Miaow stiffen. The cat was staring at something lying across two end chairs in the front row.
    Ragnarok was a large German police dog.
    The moment of first crisis passed. Miaow relaxed a little, though continuing to stare unblinkingly with ears laid back.
    The little girl came behind them. "I'm Ann," she whispered. "The one with the turban is my mother. We're from New York."
    Then she went back to her vigil beside the green lantern.
     
    General Spike Stevens and three of his staff sat close-crowded in a dimmed room of the Reserve Headquarters of the U.S. Space Force. They were watching two large television screens set side by side. Each screen showed the same area of darkened moon, an area which took in Plato. The image on the righthand screen was relayed from an unmanned communication-and-observation satellite hanging 23,000 miles above Christmas Island, 20 degrees south of Hawaii, while the one on the lefthand screen came from a similar equatorial satellite over a point in the Atlantic off the coast of Brazil where the "Prince Charles" was atom-steaming south.
    The four viewers crossed their eyes with practiced skill, fusing the images which had originated 30,000 miles apart out