Saucer (18 page)

“A bunch of aliens running around the diamond…” the catcher mused as he watched the crowd stampede for the exits. “I don’t think I’m ready for that much diversity.”

• • •

The television cameras at Coors Field caught it all.

Although the game was not being televised live, the saucer was barely out of sight before the networks had the feed on the air nationwide. In the White House the president and his advisers watched in horror as the saucer slipped into the lights and dropped toward second base.

“My God!” the president whispered. “It’s real!”

“Sweet holy Jesus,” said Bombing Joe De Laurio.

They sat mesmerized until the saucer disappeared from the camera’s view.

“They are more advanced than we are,” muttered the secretary of state. “We may have to become their slaves.”

Bombing Joe looked at her in horror. The old biddy’s screws were coming loose.

“People will think that religion is bunk,” said O’Reilly. “Morals, ethics, the philosophical underpinnings of civilization are all in question. The government may collapse.”

“Where in blazes is my UFO team?” Bombing Joe wondered aloud and trotted away to call the Pentagon again.

The president pounded his fist on the arm of his chair. “An off-year election less than three months away,” he said bitterly, “and now this!”

C
HAPTER
E
LEVEN

The night was well along when the saucer settled onto its struts in Egg’s hangar. The last hour and a half of the flight back from Denver were spent at two hundred feet using only the antigravity rings for propulsion, well below the coverage of most air traffic control radars. When the main flight computer indicated they were home, Charley Pine flipped on the landing lights. They were right over Egg’s hangar.

With the saucer inside the hangar and the doors closed, Egg yawned. “Thanks, kids. That was a ride of a lifetime.”

Rip just grinned.

“The sun will be up in a couple hours,” Egg added. “This old man is going to bed.”

“Me too,” echoed Charley and followed him toward the house.

Rip stayed with the saucer. Suffering from jet lag, he was so tired he ached, but he wasn’t sleepy.

• • •

As they walked up the hill toward the house, Egg thanked Charley again for the ride. “That was an experience of a lifetime.”

“Tell me, Mr. Cantrell, who owns the arrowhead collection upstairs? I hope you don’t think I was snooping, but this afternoon I was looking for clothes and found that collection.”

“Those arrowheads are Rip’s. He’s spent every summer here with me since his father died. He hunted arrowheads after people plowed their fields, dug likely places himself.”

“That’s quite a collection.”

“Rip’s got a good mind,” Egg said. “Going to be a good engineer too.”

• • •

Rip Cantrell sat on the couch in the corner of the hangar contemplating the saucer’s ominous curved shape. The dark metallic material that formed the skin seemed to absorb the light from the overhead bulbs. For some reason the reflectivity seemed low just now, in the cool of the dark, humid night.

Finally he had to touch it again. He went over to it, ran his fingertips across the surface.

The saucer was a monument to the immensity of time. A hundred and forty thousand years! More than six thousand generations of humans. Six thousand!

Was Egg right? Did humans build it? Surely not.

And yet, it had to be. The headbands were for human heads, the computer read human thoughts.

So how did the saucer get into that rock?

The secrets this machine could tell, if a man had time to hunt patiently for answers. Professor Soldi intended to look for answers, didn’t he?

Strange that he should think of Soldi just then.

Soldi was right about the saucer, of course. It belonged to all mankind. The technology embodied in it should benefit everyone on earth.

So just what was he going to do with it?

The hatch was hanging open under the machine, so he climbed back inside and made his way to the pilot’s seat. The cockpit was gloomy, dark: the only light came from the bulbs mounted on the roof trusses of the hangar, shining through the canopy.

He pulled the reactor knob out to the first detent. The instrument panel came alive, the computers lit up, the indirect illumination that lit the saucer’s main cabin came on. Like magic!

Magic! Those people who were living on the earth one hundred and forty thousand years ago, when they saw this saucer they must have thought it was magic. Dark, black magic, beyond the ken of mere men. And when the spacemen came out of the hatch…

What?

Rip Cantrell sat transfixed by his own imagination, wondering how it had been.

They were men, Egg said. This ship was crafted by the hand of man, to fit the hand of man, to fit the head of man…

He picked up the headband for the computer and settled it around the thickest part of his head.

He had to grab for the arms of the pilot’s seat. His vision expanded, he was hunting through possible flight options, thinking rapidly about possibilities.

Possibilities.

The thoughts were in graphic form, almost symbolic. If something appealed to him, he pursued the thought to see where it would lead. Faster and faster, through options and possibilities…

Back to possibilities.

Tonight Charley flew the saucer without touching the controls. She just thought about it. How did she do that?

His mind raced along corridors of possibilities. In seconds he came to one that looked like it might be an answer.

Even as he examined it, the saucer lifted ever so gently from the earth. The hangar doors were closed, and the saucer was inside, but it slowly rose until it was suspended about twenty inches above the dark earth floor.

Rip tore off the headband and rushed to the open hatch.

The dark packed earth that formed the floor of the old hangar was now at least six feet below him.

He turned and looked back at the instrument panel, all lit up.

Magic!

Oh, yes yes yes.

He would tell the computer to set the saucer onto the ground. Even as that thought formed in his mind and he stepped toward the panel to reach for the headband, he felt a slight jolt as the saucer again came to rest on its retractable legs.

Startled, he turned back to the open hatchway, to verify the thing with his own eyes. He stuck his head down. Yes, the saucer was back on the ground.

Hanging out of the thing, looking at the most forward landing stilt, he asked the saucer for a climb of a few inches. It rocked ever so gently, then lifted. Dust swirled from the hangar floor.

Down. Sit down, boy!

And the saucer again came to rest.

Rip slithered out of the hatch headfirst, catching himself on the ground with his hands. He crawled from under the machine and sat again on the couch under the old Coca-Cola sign.

Up. And it lifted.

Down.

He opened one of the hangar doors and walked fifty feet or so across the grass. He turned to look through the open door at the saucer under the lights.

Up. Down.

The thing stunned him. He fell to his knees, rocked back on his heels, stared unbelievingly at the ancient machine.

He picked up a handful of dirt, felt the moistness, the cool, tangible, puttylike consistency.

Finally he lay down, rolled over on his back.

The clouds were completely gone. He could see stars, thousands of stars, a sky full of stars.

After a while Rip went back inside. He asked the saucer to turn off the reactor, and it did so.

He lay down on the couch. He was so filled with marvels, yet so tired…

• • •

The president and his minions got no sleep this night. Huddled in the White House, they raged against the hurricane that was racing down upon them while the television stations played the footage from Coors Field over and over, endlessly. The lights of Washington were visible through the windows, but they knew that beyond the lights was chaos.

“It’s as if we are being assaulted by a whole squadron of saucers,” someone said after spending another mesmerizing minute staring at the idiot box.

The chief of staff, P. J. O’Reilly, held one finger aloft as he faced Bombing Joe De Laurio. “Our first priority,” he said, “is to find out how many saucers there are. Can the Air Force figure that out?”

Bombing Joe seethed like a volcano about to erupt, a towering, molten pillar of fury barely under control. He hadn’t been patronized like this since he was a doolie at the Air Force Academy, way back when. Still, now didn’t seem to be the right time to squash O’Reilly, the president’s geek. So Bombing Joe tried to straighten his twisted lips in his beet-red face and marched away to make more telephone calls.

• • •

Despite the lateness of the hour, the telephones were already ringing. Some of the callers were too important for the president to ignore. He took a call from Willard Critenden, a political consultant who had been with him all the way until he was recently disgraced in a sex scandal and banished. Now the president did his consulting with Willard via long distance.

After the pleasantries, which were dispensed with in the first three seconds of the conversation, Willard got down to it:

“You have to do something about these saucers. The Bible-thumpers were freaking out yesterday. They are gonna go nuts when the sun comes up and they turn on their televisions. Already some of the evangelicals say we have arrived at the end of the world. In Revelation—”

“All right, all right,” the president said hastily, cutting Willard off. He hated it when people quoted the Bible. It reminded him of those horrible mornings in Sunday school, back when the world was young. “We’re doing everything we can.”

“Right. Which is nothing.”

“Willard, for God’s sake! What in hell can I do? Get out on the south lawn with a flashlight and wait for the saucer leader to drop in?”

“All I do is advise. My advice is to go to DEFCON ONE. People will feel better if the army, navy, and air force are ready to kill somebody. You gotta appear strong, resolute, capable. If you look like a frightened rabbit, the country will panic. And believe me, if the country panics, you and your party can kiss November good-bye.”

“No one’s going to panic. I can handle that end of it,” the president said, reasonably confident. He had discovered long ago that ninety percent of what elected people do is posture before cameras. He was reasonably photogenic, knew how to discreetly use makeup, and for years had practiced setting his jaw just so in front of his bedroom mirror.

Of course that kind of savoir faire went only so far.

“Unless they land. What if they land?” the president asked Willard now.

“What do you mean?”

“I mean, what if a goddamn saucer lands on the south lawn and some slimy thing crawls out and says, ‘Take me to your leader.’ What then?”

“Act presidential. That is critical. Don’t pee your pants, don’t freeze, don’t give away the country.”

“Uh-huh,” the president said. He never, ever forgot that Willard was a political genius.

“Remind the press that you’ve always been a champion of multiculturalism.”

“Willard, I really appreciate your taking the time to call.”

“I’m pulling for you, pal,” Willard said and broke the connection.

• • •

The sun was peeping over the horizon in Washington when Bombing Joe De Laurio was summoned to a secure telephone. His repeated calls to the Pentagon demanding to know the whereabouts of the UFO team that had been dispatched to the Sahara had borne fruit.

“Sir, the CIA has confirmed that the members of the UFO team are prisoners of the Libyans.”

“They’re sure?”

“Positive. CIA says they are being held incommunicado in Tripoli while Qaddafi decides what to do with them. CIA also says there are some other people with them, some Australians and two employees of an oil exploration company.”

“What is State doing to get them out of there?”

“Uh, nothing right now, I imagine. The agency has their troubles in Libya. They’ve moved heaven and earth for us on this one. They just haven’t yet passed it on to State.”

“The secretary is over here now. I’ll tell her, see if I can light a fire under her.”

“Sir, if I may make a recommendation. Perhaps we can get someone from the embassy to go see these people. They went to look for a flying saucer and we seem to have a bunch of them flying around…”

“Yeah. Thanks.”

Bombing Joe hung up and went to find the secretary of state.

• • •

The sun was streaming through the open hangar door when Rip awakened. Something was prodding him. He opened one eye.

“Well, hallo, mate. Welcome to the world.”

“Who are you?”

“Name’s Rigby. Like Eleanor in the song.”

The man grinned crookedly and used his pistol to tilt back the bill of his cap. Then he pointed the pistol in Rip’s general direction and wiggled it. “C’mon, mate. Up. Time’s awastin’. Let’s go.”

“You’re Australian.”

“God, you’re quick,” Rigby said. “I don’t want to get physically violent with you, kid, but if you don’t roll your sorry ass off that couch and get yourself erect, I’ll have to do something we’ll both regret.”

Rip got up. That’s when he saw that there were three more men. They were over near the saucer, touching it, looking up into the open hatch, apparently paying no attention to Rigby.

“Let’s go,” Rigby said, waggling the gun and nodding at the door with his head.

“Where?”

“Up to the house, mate. Let’s wake them up.”

Rip went. Behind him Rigby said to his friends, “Come with me, people. You can gawk later.”

“How did you find us?”

“Took a little doing. Your mother thought you might be here, and lo, here you were.”

Rip whirled. “If you hurt my—”

Rigby slapped him. Hard. A casual backhand across the face.

“I’ve tried this nice, laddie buck. Now I’m telling you. Up to the house and no more running your mouth.”

The slap stung fiercely. Tears came to Rip’s eyes. He turned away so Rigby wouldn’t see them.