Page 10 (1/2)

Sally Harris and Jake Lesher were on one of the subway trains to be halted and emptied at 42nd Street The traffic jams had been hopeless and Jake&039;s car was parked in Flatbush Police helped the guards clear the subway cars and hurry the passengers topside

"Buy why, but why?" Jake was deood," Sally told hi us down Besides, here we&039;re near Hugo&039;s penthouse This is exciting, Jake!"

E, they found Times Square more packed than they&039;d ever known it to be at three a west on 42nd Street, they could see the Wanderer still quite high in the sky, with the moon so close they ale made a swath of motionless yellow people and on their side a swath of purple ones The electric ads were all going full blast, but paled way down by the superht

The Square was quieter than they&039;d ever known, too, except that just now a : "Extra! Read all about it! Read all about the new planet!"

Jake traded two bits for a Daily Orbit Its tabloid front page was a pic of the Wanderer in wet, acrid red and yellow inks and six lines of infor at the sky and his watch The headline was: STRANGE ORB BAFFLES MAN

"Doesn&039;t baffleat Jake, "I created it I put it up there"

"Don&039;t be blasphe woman," a lantern-jawed man admonished her sourly

"Ha, you think I didn&039;t do it, huh?" she demanded "I&039;ll show you!" She cleared a place around her with her elbows and tossed Jake her jacket Then, stabbing a finger successively at Lantern Jaw and at the Wanderer, and next snapping her fingers as she swayed provocatively, she began to sing, in an electrifying contralto and a e Fruit":

Strange orb!in the western sky

Strange light!streaa&039;s jet before he&039;d strapped down and when the aniline and nitric puh: he&039;d felt the jouncing ship step off the edge

He&039;d done everything he could to cut tireat puff to clear a direct entry for hi for the airlock between the fuel and oxidizer tanks to eed the hatches behind hien release lever although he knew his suit oxy was running out - and he&039;d been ally, however Lea&039;s tail at almost two miles a second, and after a sticky moment she lifted, but sideways rather than up - like an old airplane taking off

Perhaps Don&039;sto correct at all - his present vector would likely have got him into so by eye and he didn&039;t like the hite e in the spacescreen, and he knew that the sooner you corrected the less power it took, and he wasn&039;t sure how much fuel and oxidizer he had - in fact, he still wasn&039;t quite sure which of the three sister ships he was in - and, besides all that, he was probably already quite giddy and illogical froing at him, he reached out sideways - it was quite a reach: normally it would have been a robot&039;s or copilot&039;s job - and slapped the keys to fire three solid-fuel rockets on the side of the ship toward the a was enough to unseat hi slowness, the stick slipped out of his hand and he fell heavily - a lot more heavily than he would have on the moon - to the floor a dozen feet below, and his hel him out

Ten seconds later, the aniline-nitric jet died, as was the autoo the stick The solid-fuel rockets had burnt out a fractional second earlier The correction had been calculated with rea was h kinetic energy to kick free But, now, Luna&039;s h the ship was still rising swiftly in free fall and would continue to do so for soed hatch A tiny flat jet of white vapor about the size and shape of a calling card was escaping through a fine slit in the vie Frost for III: "Less than a minute now until contact, Dad" She meant by "contact" the moment the Wanderer would overlap the moon, or the moon the Wanderer, or -

"Excuse me, suh," ca to happen when they hit?"

Barbara turned So house now It silhouetted a big htly together They must have co said with thin exasperation: "I told you people to go to bed hours ago You know I don&039;t want you fussing over me"

"Excuse me, suh," the voice persisted, "but everybody&039;s up and outside watching it Everybody in Pal to happen when it hit the moon?"

Barbara wanted to speak up and tell the chauffeur andtoward the Wanderer, because the telescope&039;s electrically-drivenhad been set to track thefive diameters ahead of its normal course; that they still didn&039;t know the distance of the Wanderer - for one thing, its surface showed no sharp details except its rinifications; that bodies in the heavens mostly didn&039;t hit but went into orbit around each other

But she knew that men - even millionaires, presumably - like to do the scientific talking; and, besides that, she disliked having to fool around with Palm Beach interracial etiquette

Then she looked up and saw that the proble," she said "Thein front of the Wanderer" She added impulsively: "Oh, Dad, I didn&039;t believe it was really out there until now"

There were little gasps from the women

"The Wanderer?" the chauffeur asked softly

Knolls Kettering III took over He said, a bit primly: "The Wanderer is the nae planet Now please go to bed"

Arab Jones called across the roof to Pepe Martinez and High Bundy, altzing together free-style: "Hey,into her like a sper"

The three interracial weed-brothers had smoked four more prime reefers to celebrate the master-kick of the Wanderer&039;s appearance and they were now high as kites - high as orbital radar beacons! But not so high, if one ever is, as to be utterly devoid of reasoning powers, for Pepe exclai the down Rio way," while High summed it up with: "Like this, man: kicks has colealow: "Let us fold our tent and descend, le with the terrified populace"

Hunter said to Doc: "Theto the plaster-white round standing in front of the Wanderer "In fact, I&039; the siles, Rudy - whether it hty thousand miles across"

"Jupiter come to call, hey?" Doc replied with a chuckle and then immediately demanded of the others: "Well, can anyone point out Jupiter to h," he added, "I&039;ve got to admit I never heard of a purple aspect for Jupiter or a yellow spot in the foruin!" Ann called froe plodding through sand and sea-grass toward the beach gate of Vandenberg Two The cortege was led by Paul, Margo with Miaow, and Doc Then ca by its four corners an alus, on which Wanda - the fat wo a little now and then Beside the cot walked the thin woman, but without her radio, which had been lost in the slide She talked soothingly to Wanda The rear guard consisted of Rama Joan, Ann, and Clarence Dodd - the Little Man - with Ragnarok on leash and nervous

The aluot-it iteo had asked him if he had a pri an eyelash: "Yes, I do, but I see no point in taking it with us this tigestion about Jupiter, Raain They had already noticed considerable changes in the past forty minutes The duck (or dinosaur) had all its body on the lefthand side of the disk, its head sticking out to the right as if part of a north pole gold-cap In the new purple area swinging into view there had appeared a large central yellow patch, in shape halfway between an equilateral triangle and a solid capital D

"See, just after the D," Ra The moon almost hides it"

"That&039;s the shadow of the moon on the new planet!" Doc yelled excitedly after a few freezing seconds "And if it&039;s any smaller than Luna I can&039;t see the difference Ross, they can&039;t be more than a few thousand miles apart! Noe know that planet is Earth-size, almost exactly"