Saucer (2 page)

“What the hell is it?” Taggart asked.

“Something man-made from damn good metal before that rock was laid there,” Rip told him.

“And what might that be?”

“I don’t know,” Rip admitted. “Dutch, you been knocking around these deserts for a lot of years. What do you think?”

Haagen took his time before answering. “What’s the weather forecast?”

“Clear and sunny,” Rip replied, “as usual.” He got the weather off the satellite broadcast every morning. “Not a cloud in the forecast.”

“We’re a day or two ahead of schedule. What say we take today off, drive over to the archeology dig, introduce ourselves to our neighbors. Maybe they’ll let us borrow an air compressor and jackhammer, if they got one,”

“Yes!” Rip shouted and tossed the hammer to the sand below, near the Jeep.

“An air compressor,” Bill Taggart mused. “I thought those folks used dental picks and toothbrushes for their excavating.”

“We can ask,” Dutch said and kicked at the metal sticking out of the rock. He frowned at it. It shouldn’t be there, and that fact offended him. Frogs don’t fly and dogs don’t talk and sandstone ledges don’t contain metal.

Bill brightened. “Might get a decent meal over at the dig.”

“Might even see some girls,” Rip said with a laugh. “You two old farts wouldn’t be interested, but I sure am.”

• • •

There weren’t any girls within ten years of Rip’s age at the archeology dig. In fact, the only two females in sight had been on the planet at least half a century and weighed perhaps thirty pounds more than he did. Taggart kidded Rip about it as they walked toward the office tent.

“What are these people digging up?” Rip asked, to divert Taggart from the subject of women.

“Old stuff,” Taggart replied. “The older the better.” The head archaeologist was Dr. Hans Soldi, from a famous Ivy League university. He shook hands all around, then listened with a skeptical expression as Dutch explained why they needed a jackhammer.

“We have one, to do the heavy digging,” Soldi said when Dutch ran out of steam. “Now tell me the real reason you want it.”

“It’s diamonds, Prof,” Rip said. “We found King Solomon’s mine. We’re gonna jackhammer the place, steal everything we can carry, and skedaddle.”

Soldi ignored the young man. “Metal inside rock is an impossibility,” he said to Haagen and Taggart.

“It’s there, sure enough,” Dutch replied quietly. “Whoever put it there didn’t know it was impossible.”

“I will let you borrow the compressor and hammer, if you will swear to me that you are not disturbing an archaeological site.”

“I swear,” Rip said. “Cross my heart.”

“You others?”

Dutch Haagen got out his pipe and slowly tamped the bowl full of tobacco. “I don’t know what we have, Professor. Tell you what—you loan us the equipment and come along. Take a look. We’ll bring you back this evening before dark.”

Soldi didn’t mull it long. He was in his fifties, a healthy, vigorous man wearing a cowboy hat. “Okay, I’ll come. I need to think about something besides stone tools.”

“Stone tools? That’s what you’re digging up?” Rip asked incredulously. “People used to live around here? In this desert?”

“This wasn’t always a desert,” the professor said as he led them to where the compressor was parked. “The climate didn’t become extremely arid until about five thousand years ago. Then the wind carried in most of this sand, which covered up the valleys and low places. What we see protruding from the sand today are the tops of hills and mountains.”

“So the site you are exploring is at least five thousand years old?”

“More like fifteen thousand years old, I suspect. Man lived here during the Ice Age. We are trying to find evidence that these people cultivated grain.”

“By the way,” Rip put in, “do you folks have any food left over from lunch? Maybe I can get a snack to take along. I’m sorta hungry.”

“Sure, son.” The professor pointed toward a tent and gave him the name of the cook.

• • •

Hans Soldi made his examination of the sandstone ledge while the surveyors started the compressor and manhandled the jackhammer into position. Rip waited until Soldi was out of the way, then began hammering.

The heat wasn’t unbearable if one were accustomed to it. Wearing jeans, long-sleeve cotton shirts, and hats with wide brims, the men instinctively spent as much time as possible in the shade and swigged on water.

“I never saw anything like it,” Soldi admitted to Dutch as he watched Rip work the hammer. The scientist had been scrambling around with his video camera, shooting footage from every angle.

“We’ll see what Rip can do.”

Haagen picked up one of the shards of stone kicked out by the hammer and handed it to the archaeologist. “How old is this, anyway?”

“Offhand, I could only guess. I’ll get it analyzed.”

“More than five thousand years old?”

“Oh, yes. The desert and the ocean came and went through the ages, many times. Time is so…” He flung his arms wide. “We talk blithely of time—as we do death and infinity—but humans have difficulty grasping the enormity of it. Perhaps if we could comprehend the vastness of time we would be able to understand God.”

Soldi put the piece of sandstone into a pocket. He gestured at the cliff. “This is a windblown deposit, I think. You can see how the wind sculpted the sand as it was laid down.”

“I thought those designs were made by wind cutting the rock.”

“I don’t think so,” the professor replied. “The wind made the designs before the sand hardened to stone. After the sand was deposited, it was covered by dirt, probably this red dirt that you see everywhere else. Water and the weight of the dirt transformed the sand into stone. Through the millennia there were repeated periods when the desert encroached. Sooner or later the rains always came again and pushed it back. The desert is winning now, but someday the rains will come again. Everything changes, even climates.”

“Whatever is in that ledge now was there when the sand covered it.”

“So it would seem.”

“Playing it safe?”

“It looks as if the thing is embedded in the stone, but…” Soldi picked up another rock shard and examined it closely. He hefted it thoughtfully as he gazed at the face of the cliff.

“Give me your guess. How old is this rock?”

Soldi took his time before he replied. “Anywhere from a hundred thousand to a million years old,” he said finally and tossed away the rock. He grinned. “Doesn’t make sense, does it?”

“Don’t guess it does.”

• • •

Three hours of vigorous, sweaty work with the jackhammer under the desert sun uncovered a curved expanse of metal fifteen feet long. It protruded from the raw stone at least three feet. The structure seemed to be a part of a perfectly round circle, one with a diameter of about seventy feet.

The four men squatted, touching the metal with their hands, examining it with their eyes.

Amazingly, the surface seemed unmarred. Oh, here and there were a few tiny scratches, but only a few, and very small. The dark metal was reflective yet lacked a patina. The water that had percolated through the stone for ages apparently had affected the metal very little. “Assuming the metal was in the stone,” Dr. Soldi muttered.

“Excalibur,” Rip said as he wiped his face.

Bill Taggart didn’t understand the reference.

“The sword Arthur pulled from the rock… Excalibur was its name.”

“Whatever this is,” Dutch remarked, “it isn’t going to make us kings.”

“It’s going to take us a couple days to hack this thing completely out of the rock,” Bill Taggart said gloomily. “The ledge is thicker back there, so the going will be slower. Maybe we ought to just leave it here. Forget about it.”

“So what the hell is it?” Dutch Haagen wondered.

“That’s obvious, isn’t it?” Rip said. “I thought you three were sitting here like store dummies because you were afraid to say it. The damned thing is a saucer.”

“A saucer?”

“A flying saucer. What else could it be?”

Dr. Soldi closed his eyes and ran his hands across the metal, rubbing it with his fingertips. “Two days. Whatever it is, we’ll have it out of the rock in a couple of days.”

“Are you trying to tell us that this thing we’re sitting in front of is a spaceship?” Bill Taggart demanded.

“Yeah,” Rip Cantrell said with conviction. “Modern man didn’t make this and put it here. Ancient man couldn’t work metal like this. This is a highly engineered product of an advanced civilization. That’s a fact beyond dispute.”

“I don’t believe in flying saucers,” Taggart scoffed. “I’ve seen the shows on TV, watched those freaky people from the trailer parks say they saw UFOs in the night sky while the dogs howled and cats climbed the walls.” He made a rude noise. “I don’t believe a word of it.”

Rip was beside himself. “It’s a saucer, Bill,” he insisted.

“Bet it ain’t. Bet it’s something else.”

“What?” Professor Soldi asked sharply.

• • •

The next day they got to the cockpit. It was in the middle of the thing, at the thickest point. The canopy was made of a dark, transparent material. When they wiped away the sand and chips, they could stare down into the ship. There was a seat and an instrument panel. The seat was raised somewhat, on a pedestal that elevated the pilot so he—or she or it—could see out through the canopy.

“It is a saucer!” Rip Cantrell shouted. He pounded Bill on the back. “See! Now do you believe?”

“It’s something the commies made, I’ll bet,” Taggart insisted. “Some kind of airplane.”

“Sure.”

When he finished with his video camera, Professor Soldi eased himself off the ship, climbed down the ledge, and found a shady spot beside the Jeep where he could sit and look at the thing.

He sat contemplating the curved metal embedded in stone. After a bit the other three men joined him in the shade and helped themselves to water from the cooler.

“There hasn’t been a discovery like this since the Rosetta Stone,” Soldi said softly. “This will revolutionize archeology. Everything we know about man’s origins is wrong.”

“You’re going to be famous, Professor,” Bill Taggart said as he helped himself to the water. Soldi gave him a hard look, but it was apparent that Bill meant the words kindly.

“Shouldn’t we be taking more pictures or something?” Rip asked Soldi. “Something that will prove we found it buried in the rock?”

“We have the videotape,” Bill reminded them.

“If it is a spaceship, then it must have been manufactured on another planet,” Soldi mused. “Once we examine it, there should be no doubt of that. Where and how it was found will be of little importance.” He held his hands to his head. “I can’t believe I said that, me—a professor of archeology. Yet it’s true. For fifty years we’ve been inundated with UFO photos, most of them faked. The thing must speak for itself or all the photos in the world won’t matter.”

“So what should we do?” Dutch asked.

“Do?” Soldi looked puzzled.

Rip gestured toward the saucer. “Should we keep hammering? Uncover it?”

“Oh, my, yes. Before we tell the world about this, let’s see what we have. Is it intact? Is it damaged?”

“What I want to know,” Rip said, “is there a way in?”

“I’m not a nut,” Bill Taggart announced, “and I still don’t believe in flying saucers.”

“A spaceship,” Soldi muttered. “No one is going to believe this. Not a soul.” He couldn’t have been more wrong about that, but he didn’t know it then. He sighed. “When this hits the papers, the faculty is going to laugh me out of the university.”

“Perhaps we should keep this under our hats,” Rip Cantrell suggested. “When we do go public we don’t want anyone laughing.”

“I hear you,” Dutch murmured.

Rip looked toward the sun, gauging its height above the horizon. “We have three or four hours of daylight left, but it’s almighty hot and we have only a gallon or two of gasoline for the compressor. I think we have ten gallons at camp.”

“I want to go back to my dig,” the professor said. “Get some clothing and a toothbrush. We have four five-gallon cans of gasoline, I think. At the rate we’re going, my guess is that it will take us another two days to completely uncover this thing.”

“I’ll drive the professor over to his camp and bring him back,” Rip said eagerly, “if it’s all right with you, Dutch?”

“Sure, kid. Sure.”

“Bring back some food, kid,” Bill called mournfully. “And don’t eat all of it on the way.”

“What’s he talking about?” Soldi asked.

“He’s a big ladder,” Rip replied curtly.

• • •

Rip took Dutch and Bill back to their camp, then drove away with the professor.

“Twenty-two years old, and Rip’s a take-charge kind of guy,” Dutch said as he watched the Jeep’s dust plume tail away on the hot wind.

“Got a lot of his mother in him, I suspect,” Bill said. “The kid told me his father was a farmer in Minnesota and died when Rip was twelve. His mother has run the farm ever since. She must be quite a woman.”

“He gets on your nerves, doesn’t he?” Dutch remarked.

“A little, I guess.” Taggart shrugged.

Dutch slapped Bill on the shoulder. “We’re going to be famous too, you know. Finding a flying saucer sounds like a new career to me. Maybe they’ll stick us on the cover of Time magazine.”

“We’ll have to shave, then, I reckon.”

“We’ll put the saucer in a parking lot in Jersey City and charge five bucks a head to go through it. We’ll make millions. Our ship has come in, Bill.”

C
HAPTER
T
WO

“So whaddaya think, Professor?” Rip asked as they bounced along in the Jeep at thirty miles per hour, at least ten miles per hour too fast for the ancient caravan trail that he was generally following.

“The thing in the rock?”

“The saucer. Yeah.”

“It’s too soon to say. I don’t recognize the metal, if it is metal. I don’t yet have explanations for anything.”

Hans Soldi weighed his words. “I feel overwhelmed. This discovery is unexpected. If it is what it seems to be, the scientific benefits are going to be extraordinary. Think of the spillover from the American space program of the sixties and seventies—this could be many times that big. Ultimately the life of everyone on this planet could be affected.” He released his death grip on the side of the Jeep momentarily to wipe his forehead with his sleeve. “I just don’t know what to think, where to start.”