Saucer: Savage Planet (17 page)

“Well,” Charley said patiently, “we are hungry and thirsty and tired, and our ship isn’t designed for many creature comforts. I hope we didn’t frighten you.”

“Well, bless me, you surely did. The cats are inside climbing the walls, and the boys are scared half senseless. If my man was here he’d have fired some shots.”

“I see. We were indeed fortunate to arrive when we did. Now back to our request—”

“You just stay away from this house or I’ll turn the dog loose. I have Jim’s rifle and know how to shoot it. I don’t want my boys kidnapped and flying off God knows where.” She retreated inside and slammed the door.

Egg took a deep breath and scratched his head.

“Obviously our vibes are not good enough,” Charley remarked. “Despite the fact that we are nice, wholesome American spacemen with our little round flying saucer.” She paused, then added, “Along with one thousand-year-old Viking alien with a very checkered past.”

Rip set off for the center of town, such as it was, with Solo trailing along. Egg shrugged at Charley, and she and he followed side by side.

There was a bar, or pub, and it was open. Rip led the way inside. Two men were huddled over pints at a table in the corner. Rip bellied up to the bar. The barman was a skinny, rangy redhead with only one eye. He squinted at them and asked, “What’ll it be, mate?”

“Four pints. Do you have anything to eat?”

“Steaks.”

“Four steaks.”

“I didn’t hear you drive in.”

“We didn’t drive.”

Before the barman could assimilate that comment, a youngster ran in, shouting, “Harry, there’s a
flying saucer
parked out there!”

Dead silence for several seconds, broken when Rip said, “That’s our ride.”

The men at the table stood and whooped. Harry, the bartender, slapped the counter and howled, “You’re
that
bunch? The ones they’re after?”

Assured that was indeed the case, the patrons of this fine establishment pounded the four fugitive travelers on the back, and the barman served overflowing pints of beer. Everyone asked questions at once as more people magically appeared in the room. Over a dozen. Someone turned on the telly, which was hooked up to a satellite dish, and they all shouted and cheered at the video of the saucer hovering on the White House lawn.

“Drinks are on the house, mate. Glad you dropped in.”

Charley Pine watched Solo’s eyes and facial expressions. His eyes flicked from person to person, sizing them up, and he kept a friendly grin plastered in place. Nevertheless, he maneuvered himself into a corner so he could see anyone coming in or going out of the room. When his steak came, he ate it standing at the bar.

Adam Solo, Charley decided, was a careful man.

*   *   *

The saucer parked above the lawn on the White House captured the imagination of the planet’s population. They looked at it on television—a saucer-shaped black presence, menacing, threatening, yet inert—listened to the hot babes and political types pontificate on what it might mean and talked among themselves.

The saucer didn’t move. It simply sat in one place, repelling the earth with power supplied by its nuclear reactor, waiting for a signal it recognized to tell it to do something else. The signal didn’t come. The machine waited with infinite patience. It had enough plutonium in the reactor to sit here for a hundred thousand years. Time meant nothing to the machine.

In Vegas the people partied on with occasional glances at the television picture of the stationary saucer. In churches across America and around the world, people prayed. Teenagers kept screwing, with occasional glances at the hovering saucer’s image on their cell phones. In bars all over America patrons stared at the immobile saucer on the televisions that usually showed sports while they imbibed record amounts of liquor. Bartenders noted that the regulars who normally drank beer and wine were on the hard stuff now.

Meanwhile, a starship approaching earth was decelerating so it could orbit this medium-sized blue planet. Although the sleeping president and the people of earth suspected aliens, voyagers from the stars, were coming, they didn’t really know. They would soon find out.

*   *   *

During the night crowds began to gather on the sidewalks and in the streets surrounding the White House. Due to the position of the saucer, most of the people could see it parked in the sky. From all over the metropolitan area, people took the metro into town, or drove and parked their cars willy-nilly wherever they could find space, and walked closer. In New York and Connecticut and Boston, people packed trains to Washington. When the agents announced the trains were full, they jumped turnstiles and crammed aboard anyway.

By dawn over a hundred thousand people filled every square foot of space for blocks around the White House. The nervous Secret Service officer in charge asked the army for troops to control the crowd, which didn’t need controlling. The people were orderly and quiet. They stood or sat whispering to each other and looking at the saucer and snapping photos with their cell phones or cameras. Thousands of pictures of the saucer were uploaded to Facebook and YouTube. A crowd control specialist with the district government quickly ordered hundreds of porta-potties and asked that they be delivered immediately. Sidewalk vendors, indomitable capitalists, set up shop to irrigate and feed the assembled multitude and sell them souvenirs. The crowd continued to grow. Thanks to the aroma of pot smoke wafting over everyone and to beer and liquor people had brought from home, the crowd was pretty mellow.

Surveying the saucer, which hadn’t moved, and the gathering sea of humanity, P. J. O’Reilly got plenty worried. If the crowd panicked, this mess had the makings of a real disaster. On the other hand, if the army and police tried to move them away, there might be a riot.

O’Reilly went down to the command post and found the White House telephone switchboard was out of service. Too many incoming calls. O’Reilly pulled out his cell phone and tried to log on. No service. No doubt the cell towers were overwhelmed too. He was busy talking to the Secret Service and government cops about crowd control when an aide interrupted to tell him that the saucer that left Hudson’s Bay was no longer in orbit. O’Reilly had more important things on his mind just then.

The chief of staff decided to awaken the president and brief him on the situation in the streets of Washington. He enjoyed telling the Head Dog bad news, so he trotted off to the presidential bedroom with a spring in his step.

*   *   *

Dr. Jim Bob Spicer, the famous evangelist, was on top of his game. He knew an opportunity when he saw one. He managed to rent a construction hydraulic lift and got a permit to park it on a sidewalk from a crooked bureaucrat in the D.C. government. Armed with his piece of paper, he and the rent-a-lift people spent two hours maneuvering it through the packed streets to the head of Pennsylvania Avenue, where he had the crew put it on a sidewalk and elevate it with him and his cameraman as high as the thing would go. It was just high enough to give the camera a good view through the treetops of the stationary saucer and the floodlit White House.

With the camera rolling and the saucer as background, Spicer launched into a fevered prayer for the human race—indeed, for all of the world’s species large and small, from germs and worms and beetles right on up. The camera sent the digital feed to a satellite. From there it was rebroadcast to the studio where Spicer recorded his cable religious shows.

With his prayer finished, Spicer looked straight at the camera and started in. The morning sun illuminated the saucer over his right shoulder.

“Judgment Day is here,” he roared into his handheld mike. “In fulfillment of biblical prophecy, the Anti-Christ is almost here. There”—he gestured grandly at the saucer behind him—“is his chariot! Do you doubt the word of God? Do you doubt the evidence of your own eyes? Repent, you sinners, and be saved. Repent, I say, and God will save us from the Anti-Christ and evildoers who accompany him…” His harangue went on and on while his producer told him via an earphone that he had the largest audience in the history of his ministry. The news gave him new strength.

With the saucer looming ominously behind him, Spicer wrestled with the Lord over the fate of the earth’s sinners, which was everybody, of course.

Ten minutes into his oration, Spicer had a larger audience than Fox, MSNBC and CBS combined. Given the news over his earphone, Spicer had to suppress his glee and keep a somber look on his sour old puss while he ranted on.

Government cops decided to run Spicer off and started making noise; the rapt crowd nearby shouted ugly things, so they backed off.

*   *   *

After listening a while to O’Reilly’s summary of the coming Götterdämmerung, the president got out of bed, pulled the curtains aside and peeked out the window. Yep, that damn black plate was still there. For all he knew, it might remain there until Judgment Day. Hell, the next election was only a year away; then the next president could worry about it.

“The D.C. chief of police estimates the crowd at a quarter million and growing,” P. J. O’Reilly said ominously.

“Tell them to shut down access to the city,” the president said. “Stop the trains. Put up roadblocks. Don’t let anyone else in.”

A look of surprise crossed O’Reilly’s face. Why hadn’t he thought of that? He rushed away to issue the order.

The president turned on his television and flipped through the channels with his remote. One of the news shows was now broadcasting Spicer, so the leader of the free world watched almost a minute of the divine’s tortured anguish, then surfed on. The hot women were worried, the experts in a dither, and a dingbat congresswoman from California was demanding action, although of what kind, she didn’t say.

A news ribbon streaming across the bottom of the screen on one network quoted the Russian president as saying the saucer should have come to Red Square in Moscow. Nothing the Americans agreed to with aliens would bind Russia. Paris echoed that sentiment.

Muslim clerics in the Middle East denounced the saucer news as Hollywood fakery designed to tarnish the holy image of the Prophet. Large riots were promised. Just in case it wasn’t fakery, one cleric issued a fatwa for the saucer people.

Frowning, the president flipped off the television. He wondered where Rip, Charley, Egg and Adam Solo were. Wondered what they were up to. In the depths of his devious soul, the president knew those four were somehow responsible for the saucer parked outside the building.
His
building. He was getting almighty peeved at those people.

He cussed a while, put on his slippers and stomped off to the bathroom.

12

Johnny Murk and Harrison Douglas got back to Connecticut eventually. The military dropped them in Duluth, and they rode Johnny Murk’s private jet to Connecticut. They were in a foul mood when they arrived. Solo and the Cantrells had made monkeys of them, not to mention nearly killing them with a near-miss flyby of the saucer.

“The government is after those bastards, and with all their assets, we’ll always get there late,” Johnny Murk said.

The FBO bar was closed and locked, so Johnny had brought a bottle of Scotch from his plane. The two were sitting alone in the lounge drinking it neat from paper cups. Heidi the masseuse was sacked out on one of the couches, dead to the world, with her magnificent breasts pointed straight at heaven. The pink sunrise through the windows was gorgeous. Neither Murk nor Douglas paid any attention to any of these attractions.

“There is just no way we can get to Solo before the Army, Navy, Air Force, Marine Corps, Coast Guard and Boy Scouts.”

Murkowsky’s cell phone buzzed. He pulled it from his pocket, checked to see who the caller was and immediately answered. “Yes.”

He listened for a while, asked no questions and ended the conversation with a curt, “Keep me informed.”

He stood to pocket the phone and looked around as if seeing his surroundings for the first time.

“Well?” Douglas asked.

“My Space Command spy. The saucer is in Western Australia. No doubt about it. The White House has been informed, but nothing is happening in Washington that he knows about.”

“Oh, hell, the prez probably called the Aussie PM and the diggers are on their way right now to bag ’em and tag ’em.”

Johnny Murk turned on the television in the corner of the room, and the two men stood in front of it. Of course, the picture was of the saucer suspended over the White House lawn. Then the video switched to the quarter million or more people gathered in the streets. A sea of people. After three minutes of listening to the delicious female anchor—she never mentioned the Cantrells’ saucer—talk about the rising excitement, the fact that the police had sealed off the city and the media’s demand that the president appear before their cameras to tell the world what was happening, the network began to air man-in-the-street interviews. Everyone interviewed was absolutely certain that aliens would soon arrive. They wanted to be there for this historic occasion. The excitement and anticipation were palpable.

The two pharma moguls looked at each other.

They turned back to the television, which now aired a moment of Jim Bob Spicer praying for salvation for all the earth’s people.

“It’s like they’re waiting for the Second Coming,” Johnny Murk murmured.

“It’s a ten-ring circus,” Douglas proclaimed.

“Bet you that no one in the White House has bothered to tell State to call the Aussies.”

They looked at each other again. Simultaneously they both said, “What are we waiting for?”

Galvanized into action, each man grabbed his cell phone. Douglas called his friends in Philadelphia and promised big money; Murk chartered a Boeing 747-400 to fly a crowd across the Pacific. The plane was huge, carried a zillion gallons of fuel, and with a light load could fly the world’s biggest pond nonstop. The moguls even called their homes and told the maids to pack suitcases with clean underwear and a change of clothes and have the chauffeurs bring them to the airport. Both men’s wives were asleep. Neither man left a message for his spouse.