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Autoa&039;s altitude so as to be able to brake hat little e the Baba Yaga Its space-screen continued to face the planet below And only now did he notice that they were plu down closely parallel to the day side of one of the threads that had become cords, then stalks It looked enor a quarter of the spacescreen

But in fantastic perspective, like soht pillar, thick toward the roof, thin toward the floor, it narrowed alht side very close to the daylight line

And looking at the pillar&039;s surface this close by, he could see that it wasn&039;t all sed chunks - surely thesucked up from the whirlpool-pits in the moon&039;s nose

The chunksjust a little faster along a parallel railway track

But thatdoard at the saa - tenin a tremendous rock-spatter where it hit the Wanderer?

Suddenly the rocks in the pillar began to flash doard past him, then the whole pillar was blurred smooth - as if the train on the next track had become an express

Either the pillar had speeded up, or -

He radar-checked again The altitude of the Baba Yaga and its escorts had shrunk to thirtyat only a uess had hit it: they&039;d slowed up

But they weren&039;t slowing any more than that, the radar showed He used the last twenty seconds in scanning the surface below for detail There wasn&039;t any - no lights on the night side, nothing but le rock-dust pillar kept itsout of seconds as they plunged into the Wanderer&039;s shadow He whipped off his goggles The leading rims of his escorts showed up with the same lemon phosphorescence they&039;d shown behind the planet For an instant he thought he saw them dully reflected in the black surface below He nerved himself for the crash, and extinction

Then all at once the black surface wasn&039;t there, and, as if the Baba Yaga and its escorts had burst hurtlessly through the ceiling of a gigantic la down at another surface far below

It had to be far below, because the down-rushing pillar ofvast to the side, narrowed aled by this fantastic foreshortening frole

One inference seemed clear All the surface of the Wanderer he&039;d seen up to this moment - the surface that had reflected sunlight and radar so truly - the surface that had been yellow and violet on the day side, black with phosphorescent green spots on the night side - was nothing more than a film, a film so thin and insubstantial that a frail spaceship like the Baba Yaga could burst through it at a e, a filht and true life of the Wanderer, a film stretched out everywhere about twenty miles above the true surface of the planet - if what he was gazing down at noas true surface and not some fresh illusion

It was true surface if complexity and every appearance of solidity were criteria Below hihted plain glea with lakes, or at least with smooth turquoise patches of so circular pits a mile or more across, a plain that was otherwise croith all sorts of huge objects of every color and solidly geoinable - cones, cubes, cylinders, coils, heurats, multilobed rondures - not one object of which Don recognized except as an abstraction

Giant buildings, ht have been any or all of those

Several coh his antic scale Science-fiction book covers of the sort that show an endless floor covered with abstract sculptures looking half alive

Then his thoughts went dipping far back into the mixed memories and pseudo taken to visit his grandreat-ceilinged living roo lifted to look at - not to touch - the doors of a whatnot covered hat he had later assuhts, polished rock specimens, flowers in plastic - chaste knickknacks of less thoughto the baby Don Merriaain

Here and there between hiularly shaped, s, as if it were a nest for rainbow eggs, a clutch of great glowing globes which shot upward light of all hues

These clouds began thea, its speed hardly dirandly crowded surface below Similarly, the visible section of the plain iftly shrinking and the beautiful, unidentifiable shapes growing rapidly larger But he felt no fear - hitting the fila and its escorts were aie pits, which lay so close together that at first they seeentially Into one of these pits the rock pillar plunged The other showed the dusky twinkling that seein between the pits acquired a width, became a silvery ribbon One of the escorts see rock pillar, it flew so close to it

The next instant, without the faintest shock or jar and with all the ia came to a dead stop no more than a dozen feet above a dull silver pavement - so close to it, in fact, that Don could see designs etched on its surface: a whirlingly cohtless, he hovered above the spacescreen and goggled down through it, feeling like a fish looking through ain the floor of its aquariuiant hand had grasped it, the Baba Yaga began to upend Don grabbed at the pilot&039;s seat to steady himself

The motion stopped halfway around, when the ship&039;sat the paveravity field took hold of him and the ship He heard three faint thuentle jolts as the three legs of his ship footed therew until, so far as he could judge after a month on the moon, it was as ht stopped growing

But he noted these things with a lower fraction of his mind only, for his ave him of the Wanderer&039;s sky - the underside of the filo

Between him and it, the small dark clouds - darker now since he could no longer see the gleas they nested - sailed steadily past, much as small clouds move across the deserts of the A their rain At no tihth of the sky Nor did the down-rushing rock pillar, now tapering up to a point high as the sky itself, its triangle reversed, obscure hth

That sky was neither pale violet nor yellow, nor dead black anywhere, nor did it show any stars It was instead a sloirling of all dark colors, a dusky rainbow stor patterns It had the harrandeur and menace of a perpetual color-sy endless vital variations Whether its light came mostly frolobes on the clouds, or from some other indirect source, Don could not tell It rese of a fil, "The Starry Night," and even ly past thethat last thought, which seemed to put hi sound which chilled his blood He looked down quickly enough to see the last of the dogs on the hatch ency, showing hi to the eely sweet and cajoling, called to hilish: "Come! Unsuit yourself and come down!"

Australia, Indonesia, the Philippines, Japan, and the eastern parts of China and Siberia had noung into Earth&039;s night side The Wanderer, often first seen as the yin-yang or thein millions of minds And East Asian voices were added to the A the cluster of skeptical old continents to the west - the world&039;s cultural heartland - of what they would see at nightfall