Saucer: Savage Planet (3 page)

The spaceship took up so much of the deck that the cockpit canopy was almost even with the bridge windows. As the mate stared into the cockpit, he saw the figure of Adam Solo. He reached for the bridge binoculars. Turned the focus wheel.

Solo’s face appeared, lit by a subdued light source in front of him. The mate assumed that the light came from the instruments—computer presentations—and he was correct. DeVries could see the headband, which looked exactly like the kind the Indians wore in old cowboy movies. Solo’s face was expressionless … no, that wasn’t true, the mate decided. He was concentrating intensely.

Obviously the saucer was more or less intact or it wouldn’t have electrical power. Whoever designed that thing sure knew what he was about. He or she. Or it. Whoever that was, wherever that was …

Finally the mate’s arms tired and he lowered the binoculars.

He snapped the binoculars into their bracket and went back to pacing the bridge. Occasionally he glanced at the saucer’s glowing cockpit. The moon, the clouds racing overhead, the ship pitching and rolling monotonously—it seemed as if he were trapped in this moment in time and this was all there had ever been or ever would be. It was a curious feeling … almost mystical.

Surprised at his own thoughts, DeVries shook his head and tried to concentrate on his duties.

*   *   *

Adam Solo used the onboard computers to examine the state of every system in the saucer. The long-range communications equipment refused to come online or self-test. He opened the access plate under the instrument panel and stuck his head in. He found the modules he wanted … and found himself staring at one bulged box.

An antiproton exploded in there.

He backed out and closed the panel, then slowly climbed back into the pilot’s seat, fighting back his disappointment. Well, there was nothing for it but to play the cards he had.

Thirty minutes later, satisfied that the comm gear and one instrument display were the only casualties, he opened the hatch and dropped to the deck. He closed the hatch behind him, just in case, and went below to his cabin. No one was in the passageways. Nor did he expect to find any of the crew there. He glanced into one of the crew’s berthing spaces. The glow of the tiny red lights revealed that every bunk was full, and every man seemed to be snoring.

In his cabin Solo quickly packed his bag. He stripped the sheets and blankets from his bunk and, carrying the lot, went back up on deck. Careful to stay out of sight of the bridge, he stowed his gear in the saucer. Spreading the blankets on the cockpit floor, he carefully laid the remains of the French fighter pilot on the sheet and wrapped them tight. Using a roll of duct tape, he bound the bundle as tightly as he could and eased it through the open hatch.

Adam Solo unfastened one of the chains that bound the saucer to the deck and wrapped it around the bundle. As he dragged it to the rail, he said, “You probably weren’t the first man to die in that ship, but I hope you’re the last.” With that he pushed the bundle over the side. The mortal remains of Jean-Paul Lalouette disappeared with a tiny splash.

A hose lay coiled near a water faucet, one the crew routinely used to wash mud from cables and chains coming aboard. Solo looked at it, then shook his head. The water intake was on top of the saucer; climbing up there would expose him to the man on the bridge, and would be dangerous besides. He had come so far, had waited so long—now would be a bad time to fall overboard, which would doom him to inevitable drowning.

He removed the tie-down chains and restraining straps one by one, lowering them gently to the deck so the sound wouldn’t reverberate through the steel ship.

Finally, when he had the last one off, he stood beside the saucer, with it between him and the bridge, and studied the position of the crane and hook, the mast and guy wires. Satisfied, Adam Solo stooped and went under the saucer and up through the hatch.

*   *   *

The first mate was checking the GPS position and the recommended course to Sandy Hook when he felt the subtle change in the ship’s motion. An old hand at sea, he noticed it immediately and looked around.

The saucer was there, immediately in front of the bridge—but it was higher, the lighted canopy several feet above where it had previously been. He could see Solo’s head, now seated in the pilot’s chair. The saucer was moving, or seemed to be, rocking back and forth. Actually it was stationary—the ship was moving in the sea way.

DeVries’ first impression was that the ship’s motion had changed because the saucer’s weight was gone, but he was wrong. The antigravity rings in the saucer had pushed it away from the ship, which still supported the entire mass of the machine. The center of gravity was higher, so consequently the ship rolled with more authority.

At that moment Harrison Douglas came up the ladder, moving carefully with a cup of coffee in his hand.

He saw DeVries staring out the bridge windows, transfixed.

Douglas turned to follow DeVries’ gaze and found himself looking at Adam Solo’s head inside the saucer. Solo was too engrossed in what he was doing to even glance at the bridge. For only a few seconds was the saucer suspended over the deck. As the salvage ship came back to an even keel the saucer moved toward the starboard side, pushing the ship dangerously in that direction. Then the saucer went over the rail and the ship, free of the saucer’s weight, rolled port with authority.

“No!” Douglas roared. “Come back here, Solo! It’s
mine.
Mine, I tell you,
mine
!” He dropped his coffee cup and strode to the door that led to the wing of the bridge. He flung it open and stepped out. The mate was right behind him. Both men grabbed the rail with both hands as the wind and sea spray tore at them.

The lighted canopy was no longer visible. For a few seconds Douglas and DeVries could see a glint of moonlight reflecting off the dark upper surface of the spaceship, then they lost it. The saucer disappeared into the night.

“If that doesn’t take the cake!
The bastard stole it!
” exclaimed Harrison Douglas, and he shook his fist in the direction in which the saucer had disappeared. “I’ll get you, Solo, and I’ll get that ship back. So help me God!”

2

Rip Cantrell, Charley Pine and Rip’s Uncle Egg sat on wooden crates staring dejectedly at the objects arranged on the floor of the warehouse. The stuff looked like junk that had been removed from an abandoned chicken coop. Just what the twisted metal and shattered composite material, if that was what it was, might have been before they were destroyed upon entry to the earth’s atmosphere and eons of submergence in the sea, no one could say.

Egg turned to the other people there, a man and woman from the Australian Archaeological Commission, and an American archaeologist who was there at Egg’s invitation, Deborah Deehring. “It’s hopeless,” he said. “There’s no way to identify the pieces in this condition.”

He nodded toward a schematic that was pinned to a wall. “This is what the computer from the Sahara saucer says the starships looked like then. I don’t know if the design changed or not.” He swept his hand toward the stuff on the warehouse floor. “I can’t identify one piece.”

Rip was an athletic young man of twenty-three years. His life had taken a hard right turn when, as part of a seismic survey crew, he discovered a flying saucer embedded in a sandstone ledge in the Sahara and dug it out.

Charlotte “Charley” Pine, thirty-one years old, had been a civilian member of an air force UFO team that investigated the Sahara saucer, and she was the one who flew it away when armed thugs tried to confiscate it. A graduate of the U.S. Air Force Academy, she had been a fighter pilot, then a test pilot, before resigning from the service. Rip used to refer to her despairingly as “an older woman.” He didn’t do that these days.

Egg Cantrell, Rip’s uncle, was an engineer and inventor. He was fiftyish and spry, with an ovoid shape, hence his nickname, which he didn’t mind. A consummate realist, Egg accepted the world as he found it and tried mightily to understand.

Professor Deborah Deehring was athletic and blond and had huge, intense blue eyes. When she focused those eyes on Egg and smiled, he felt a very curious sensation. He liked the sensation, and Deborah, a lot.

For the past two weeks, Charley, Rip, Uncle Egg and Deborah had stirred through this pile of junk the Australians had found embedded in the Great Barrier Reef. It was, the Australians believed, an ancient starship, perhaps the very one that brought Rip’s saucer to this galaxy 140,000 years ago. They reached this conclusion based on an analysis of the metal removed from the reef, and from the geology of the reef construction, which proved the metal had been there for a long, long time.

However, Egg wasn’t sure that the Australian scientists were right. If this stuff was originally part of a starship, the metal must have been supercooled in space, heated to astronomical temperatures on its trip into the earth’s atmosphere and subjected to a salt bath for over a hundred millennia. Who knows what its original molecular composition might have been? Nor could anyone now recognize the metal. All everyone could agree upon was that it was old and weird. They also agreed that if they were indeed looking at the carcass of a starship, it certainly couldn’t be the one that delivered the Roswell saucer, which crashed in New Mexico in 1947 and had ended up in the Atlantic Ocean.

“We just don’t know how often earth has been visited by extraterrestrials,” Egg said dejectedly. “For all we know, that metal is a million years old. We have no idea how fast saltwater would corrode it.”

The Aussie in charge was a woman, Dr. Helen Colt. She was a no-nonsense salt-and-pepper woman who was rarely seen without her clipboard. The assistant, ten years younger than Colt, was a man named Billy Reese. He was smallish in stature, also a PhD, a thoughtful type given to stroking his jaw and saying little.

Just now he eyed the computer on Egg’s lap, then scrutinized Rip’s and Charley’s faces thoughtfully.

“Your opinion, Dr. Reese?” Colt said abruptly.

“I am defeated,” he replied. “We have found no shells of computers or reactors or advanced devices of any kind, nothing anyone could point to as evidence that we are looking at an artifact of an advanced civilization. Perhaps it is precisely what it appears to be, a twisted, misshapen structural framework someone built and threw into the sea.”

“When?” said Charley Pine. She was a tall, intelligent young woman who looked as if she could handle anything likely to come her way. Today she wore an old air force flight suit and boots, which did nothing to hide her good figure.

“Since we can’t identify the metallurgy, we don’t know,” Reese said slowly, eyeing Charley.

“We really don’t know anything,” Egg said gruffly. He had spent the last few minutes packing the computer into its travel bag, and now he stood, computer case in one hand and headband in the other. “Glad you invited us Down Under to take a look,” he said and tucked the headband under his left armpit so he could shake hands with the two Aussies.

Rip, Charley and Deborah also pumped hands and followed Egg out of the warehouse. Dr. Reese trailed the three of them. He cleared his throat while he was behind Egg, who paused and turned toward him.

“Mr. Cantrell, I can’t help noticing that magnificent computer you have,” Reese said heartily. “I assume it is from your nephew’s saucer?”

“It is,” Egg admitted. Actually he had removed it from the Sahara saucer when Rip first brought the saucer to Missouri. That had been a happy accident. Egg mined the computer for technology; the propulsion technology and some of the other major systems were patented and licensed, and much of the rest of the technology that Egg was willing to share—certainly not all—was placed in the public domain. The results were astounding: Industries throughout the world were investing capital in new plants, processes and equipment, and hiring. The world was entering a new era of prosperity.

“It would be a great service to the cause of science if you would allow me and my commission colleagues to examine it for a few weeks,” said Dr. Reese. “We can promise to return it to you in an undamaged state.”

“Dr. Reese,” Egg began, clutching the computer case in his arms, “I am not ready to allow unsupervised access to this computer.” In the months after he acquired it he had indeed allowed almost unlimited access to academics, but that was before he fully appreciated the information its memory contained. When he finally realized the implications of extraordinary knowledge in unlearned, unethical hands, he had refused access to all but a trusted few.

Colt had joined them, and now she eyed Egg skeptically. “Knowledge that can be verified should be shared with all mankind,” she said. “The only valid ethical position is that scientific knowledge enhances the survival of our species, so the more the better.”

“Perhaps,” Egg readily agreed, still clutching the computer to his chest, with both arms wrapped around it. “Yet perhaps there is such a thing as too much knowledge, knowledge that the human mind—or the public mind, the humanity of which is debatable—is not yet ready to accept for the simple reason that we don’t know enough to give it context.”

“How much of the information on that computer is of that variety?” Colt asked, intent on his answer.

“There is much there that baffles me,” Egg confessed. “I cannot understand much of it. Better brains than mine might, but I doubt it. I think most of the gold that we can use has already been mined.”

Colt and Reese surrendered gracefully. Colt said her good-byes, shook hands and let the Americans retreat. Dr. Reese accompanied them as far as the door; then he too said good-bye.

When the Australians were out of earshot, as they walked toward their rented car, Deborah said to Egg, “You don’t really believe that, do you?”

“What?”

“That there are facts we shouldn’t know?”

Egg eyed Deborah as Charley unlocked the car. “I could have stated it better. There are things on this computer that our society is not prepared to deal with now. You know some of the stuff I’m talking about.”