Saucer: Savage Planet (22 page)

Solo also informed the captain that Egg Cantrell, Rip and Charley had a saucer and access to another, which was now parked above the lawn of the White House.

I may not be alive when you arrive,
Solo added.
Rip and Egg Cantrell and Charley Pine are people you need to talk to. They are brave, wise and compassionate. In my thirteen centuries on this planet, I have met few who are their equals.

15

Adam Solo lay inside the ancient cliff dwelling watching the sunlit sky through the window, which was just a hole in the stone wall. His wound pained him greatly, yet he was thinking about the people he had known here. It was so long ago … and they were of course long dead. Dead for almost seven hundred years.

There had been a man and his wife, and kids, and the wife’s mother, and several young men from the tribe who had yet to find wives. In this place they had planned their lives, their future, their children’s future. They were safe here from the nomads who would have killed and robbed them. Safe. On this tiny ledge facing this great canyon.

There was food if they worked hard to get it, water was accessible. Survival was the challenge. What more did men need?

Indeed. What does anyone need but people to love and cherish, food, water, clothes and shelter?

The Indians had lived their lives, loved, raised children, passed on what they knew and surrendered to their own mortality eventually, when enough years had passed, leaving another generation to carry on … and a generation after that, and so on.

Solo knew that was the way of life. The way of life wherever it was found in the universe.

So he lay on a sleeping bag trying to ignore the pain, thinking of these things and of those people who had lived here whom he had known. Remembering.

Ah, I have too many memories,
he thought.
Too many people who have gone on before me, leaving me here to struggle and try to survive. And in the end, I was shot by a fool who saw the glimmer of a big reward.
Those Indians who lived here, the Vikings, the Iroquois, the white settlers who tried to wrestle a living from the land and so often failed, what would they have thought of the Internet? Of flying saucers? Of starships?

Most of those people had been happy, like the Indians who had lived in this house overlooking the Grand Canyon. Happy! They had been contented with their lives in a way he had never been.

He had always been searching for a way home. For a way back to the life he had once known. Oh, he had tried. Tried to be as content as the people around him. Tried to be content with a good hunt, a good crop, or with rain when the fields needed it. Tried, but it was never enough.

Now as he lay in pain, trying to ignore it, he thought about being content. Somehow that great gift had escaped him. He had never been content. Never accepted life on its own terms. Always he wanted to escape from this savage planet. Wanted a starship to rescue him.

What a fool he had been! A fool!

He had everything life had to offer for hundreds of years, over a thousand, over half a hundred earth generations, and hadn’t appreciated it.

He could hear Egg and Charley and Rip talking outside. They were worried about
him
!

Adam Solo began weeping.

Soon he drifted off to sleep.

He awoke when Charley Pine tried to gently roll him over to check the wound below his right shoulder blade.

“Sorry,” she muttered and rolled him over anyway. She took the sodden bandage off, left the bit of rag in the exit wound and used one of Rip’s old tee shirts as a body bandage.

When she rolled him back onto his back, her face was drawn, pale. “You’re still bleeding,” she said. “No doubt internally too. You really need a doctor that can pump you full of platelets.”

“Too big a risk,” he muttered.

“Don’t be such a cynic.”

You know as well as I do what might happen if a DNA sample from me fell into the wrong hands. The people of this planet aren’t ready for knowledge like that. They aren’t politically, ethically or morally ready. When they are, they’ll get there by themselves.

“You’re dying. You know that, of course.” It was a flat statement, not a question.

I should have died a hundred times already. I’m ready for what comes next. If anything.

“Christ, you
are
a cynic!”

I’ve seen many people die. It’s as natural as going to sleep. I don’t fear it.

“So what was your closest escape from the grim reaper?”

Adam Solo thought about that, sorting through the memories. Finally he told her,
It was a cattle drive, bringing a herd up from Texas. Crossing the Canadian my horse got into quicksand. I threw a rope at something on the bank—I forget what—and missed. The horse struggled and sank and I tried to get off and got trapped. If I had gone down with the horse I would have died. I knew it. My body’s ability to repair itself would have counted for nothing. Then a friend of mine rode up and threw me a rope. He dragged me out. His name was Billy Vance, and he was nineteen, a young nineteen, full of himself.

“So you made it.”

Yeah. Lived to die another day.

“So what happened to Billy Vance?” Her face was serious, pensive, as she tried to understand.

We made it to Dodge; the owner sold the herd and paid us off. I talked Billy into going with me to Colorado to hunt for gold, and he agreed. But on our last night in Dodge he caught a gambler cheating at cards and called him on it. The gambler got a bullet into Billy and two into me. Billy died and I didn’t. A month later, when I recovered, I went to Colorado by myself.

“You’ve buried a lot of friends.”

More than I care to remember.

“What happened to the gambler?” she asked.

He didn’t make it. Billy and I each got a slug into him. Took him a long week to die. They buried him with his marked deck.

“We need to bring the saucer back and get you to a doctor.”

No.

She crawled through the low door and went back out onto the ledge above the kiva. A good woman, he reflected. He hoped Rip realized just how good. Maybe he did. That Rip … he was a lot like Billy Vance. Billy with the wicked smile and crooked teeth and terrific thirst for life. Billy Vance, dead of a gunshot wound to the gut at the age of nineteen, but game all the way.

Solo lay thinking about those days long ago, about the American West and the Indians he loved and longhorns and thunderstorms, blistering hot endless days on horseback, nights of exhausted sleep and the cow towns at the end of the trail. Thinking of the men. Companions for the trail of life. If only he could do it all again, see all those men and women he had known and loved through the centuries one more time, hear their laughter and voices …

He had been so blessed. Adam Solo knew that. That fool who stole the saucer long ago and marooned Solo on this savage planet had done him a great favor. The thought gave him peace.

*   *   *

“We need a panel of experts,” P. J. O’Reilly had told the president. “A panel of experts will give the public the assurance that you are talking to the right people, getting yourself fully informed.”

“Experts in what?” the president had asked skeptically.

“Oh, you know, whatever. Experts are experts, people with degrees from out of town. It’s a PR thing. Keep the Joe Six-Packs calmed down.”

The president groaned inwardly. He was certainly a master of listening to bullshit and making appropriate noises, but he doubted if he would get any light at all from any group O’Reilly could assemble. Another waste of time. Yet he was politician enough to appreciate that O’Reilly had a point. The art of politics is to appear to be leading, even when groping in the dark. Petty Officer Third Class Hennessey from Oklahoma had nodded sagely, so the president had reluctantly agreed to an audience with some “experts.”

Now, as he faced the hastily summoned group, he was tempted to make some excuse to dismiss them, but refrained. The White House photographer was snapping pictures, and the mouthpiece, the press secretary, was standing against the wall, ready to spin the event for the media in the White House Press Room.

O’Reilly introduced the delegation. There was a philosophy professor from Harvard, an astrogeophysicist from the University of Houston, a scientist from NASA and two women from the National Science Foundation who had been looking for intelligent life in the universe for some years now, at government expense, with no results to show for their efforts. The president was tempted to ask if the women had checked in Washington but held his tongue. There was also some guy who wrote bestseller science fiction, none of which the president had ever read. He was famous, though. Even the guy from Harvard smiled warmly at him. All were duly introduced, and all had something to say.

The president listened carefully.

The experts agreed, more or less. The aliens would be more technically advanced than we are and would have high moral and ethical principals. Very high. They would not be eaters of flesh. Would not be here to conquer and enslave. Would be very “progressive,” according to the Harvard philosopher. Since that was a loaded political term here on this little round rock, in this day and age, the presidential eyebrows rose a fraction of a millimeter. The chief executive glanced at Hennessey, whose face was deadpan.

“What about weapons?” the national security adviser asked. O’Reilly had let him attend this soiree, the president thought sourly.

Well, of course the aliens had weapons. The Sahara saucer and the Roswell saucer both had antimatter weapons; technological progress being what it is, no doubt the coming alien delegation had death rays of some sort to protect themselves from monsters and predators and dragons on whatever planet they happened to visit.

“Dragons?” said the national security adviser.

The president glanced at Petty Officer Hennessey, who had one eyebrow raised. The president had always admired people who could do that. He had tried for years but couldn’t.

“Who knows what forms of life other planets in the universe might contain?” the science-fiction writer asked rhetorically, warming to his subject. “They must be prepared. We must assume they are; ergo, superior weaponry.”

The universal nods of affirmation from all the experts silenced the national security adviser.

Ergo, indeed!

When O’Reilly finally ushered the experts out, the president asked the petty officer what he thought.

“These aliens are just sailors. Kind of like Christopher Columbus’ guys. They fly starships because it pays fairly well, but the brains are back on the home planet, wherever that is. These guys didn’t design and build the starship or figure out how to fly it. They will be just a bunch of average Joes. You’ll see.”

The president felt reassured. With Amanda there at the great event, he didn’t want anything to go wrong. His wife and daughter would never forgive him. Of course, there was the future of the human species to consider too: Aliens, First Contact, and all that.

The experts had agreed unanimously: The future of the humanity, indeed, the future of the whole planet and every species on it, hinged on how he, the president, handled this first meeting with the representatives of an advanced civilization with unknown but extraordinary capabilities. After all, voyaging between the stars … “Not to put any pressure on you, Mr. President, but facts are facts.”

Back in his office the president remarked to Hennessey, “Damn, this will be historic,” and glanced at the television, which was still showing that saucer sitting over the South Lawn with no visible means of support.

“Yes, sir,” the navy said.

Just a bunch of sailors driving a starship. Yeah.
Hey, how are you? Did you have a nice trip?

Amanda wouldn’t be here for a few hours, so the president asked Petty Officer Third Class Hennessey, “Want another drink?”

“One more wouldn’t hurt,” the sailor admitted and held out his glass.

*   *   *

P. J. O’Reilly was shook after the experts left. He went to his office and had a snort from a Scotch bottle he kept in his desk. This time His Arrogance wasn’t up to the challenges that lay before him, O’Reilly thought. He looked kinda pasty and had that sailor with him all the time now. O’Reilly had caught those glances at Hennessey when some expert had said something rather startling, something almost profound but not quite.

None of them had anything profound to say, O’Reilly thought. Rather humdrum, actually. No doubt the experts were pontificating on the networks just now—telling the boobs watching worldwide what they had told the president—and this weekend, if the aliens hadn’t destroyed Washington and the planet, they would have op-ed pieces in all the big newspapers. An expert’s reputation must be constantly polished.

O’Reilly put his face in his hands and sat that way for a long moment. If this went bad, he was going to be dead sooner rather than later. The aliens might decide that all humans were equivalent to stink bugs and just step on them. Or they might want some humans to take aboard their ship as protein. Protein must be hard to come by on a starship. How many cows or hogs or chickens could one of those things carry, anyway?

Hollywood movies from the past sprang to mind. He remembered the one in which a gruesome alien sprang from someone’s stomach. It had taken a really sick mind to think of that! And the aliens as zombies! Then there was the Arnold Schwarzenegger movie
Predator:
invisible ten-foot-tall sport hunters who crossed interstellar space to kill for the thrill of it.

Oh, baby …

He put the bottle away and tried to arrange his thoughts.

What if some horror along those lines was really what First Contact was going to be like? The president and that kid sailor didn’t seem worried, but the old man always did lack imagination. The kid from Oklahoma … well, who knew? Two dimwits had found each other.

P. J. O’Reilly looked again at the TV in the corner with its permanent display of the hovering saucer just outside the building. What to make of that? What kind of twisted intelligence would park a saucer
there,
of all places?