Saucer: The Conquest (2 page)

They found the entry hatch on the belly of the saucer quickly enough. As the rest of the group fondled the machine and examined the rocket nozzles and tried to see through the canopy into the dark interior, three of them worked on getting the hatch open. Twenty minutes later they were still at it. They would have spent the day staring at the mechanism if one of them had not kept his hand on it for about ten seconds, then tried to manipulate it. Now it opened.

“It is sensitive to heat,” they cried to their colleagues as they gathered on hands and knees under the saucer to examine the mechanism. As they excitedly discussed how this minor miracle might be physically accomplished, Newton Chadwick wriggled between them and slithered up through the hatch.

The interior was dark, lit only by the overhead lights from the interior of the hangar that penetrated the canopy. And it was empty of the creatures, living or dead, who had flown the saucer. A much relieved Newton Chadwick began a hasty inspection.

There were seats equipped with seat belts. Humans, Chadwick concluded. Or humanoids, humanlike creatures. Controls, a pilot’s seat, white panels where the instruments should be… pedals for the pilot, a stick on the right and left. And a headband. Much like an Indian’s headband that he and his friends had worn in play not too many years ago.

He picked up the band and inspected it as closely as he could in the gloom. As he did so, several of his colleagues worked up the courage to join him in the saucer’s interior.

“I see you’re still alive, Chadwick,” the senior man said acidly. Obviously the boy didn’t know his place in the pecking order, but what could you expect from a youth with his credentials?

“He’s our mine canary,” the second man announced. His displeasure was also evident. “If there are horrible bacteria waiting in here to smite us, at least we have five minutes.”

Chadwick couldn’t resist. He coughed, grabbed his throat and made a retching sound. The older scientists scurried back out the hatch.

Newton donned the headband. Well, the saucer people apparently had heads about the same size as his, which was seven and an eighth in baseball caps. Remember to insert that tidbit in the report to Washington, he told himself as he looked around on the panel for something to make the headband do something.

Hmm…

“Are you alive in there, Chadwick?”

“I feel quite feverish, sir.” They liked it when he called them sir. “Vision fading, coming and going.”

“Get a doctor! Quickly.” The call was repeated, which caused the soldiers to scurry about in a frenzied way. Chadwick ignored the commotion: He was too busy pulling and pushing the half dozen knobs and levers on the instrument panel. Surprising that there were so few. He had seen the cockpit of a four-engine airliner, which was stuffed with dials and gauges and dozens of levers…

Aha. The entire panel came to life when he pulled out one of the red knobs.

He stared at the white panels, which changed colors and became almost transparent. Symbols appeared.

And he saw into the heart of the machine.

The headband… My God!

He tried to organize his thoughts, and saw the presentations on the panels before him change as fast as thought.

It was some kind of calculator, like the Univac. He had read of it, a giant machine that filled a building and could be used to make scientific calculations. This was like that, only…

His mind galloped on. How does the saucer work? Where did it come from? Who flew it? He got immediate answers to these questions, although he didn’t fully comprehend the information he saw.

As fast as thought.

“What in hell are you doing in there, Chadwick?”

Now the senior man crawled in. Before he could see the displays, Chadwick pushed the red power button in. The panels turned white and the humming in the compartment behind him died.

“Jesus Christ, you damned fool! Are you running this machine? What in hell do you think you’re doing?”

“Trying to find out what makes it go,” Chadwick answered curtly and, stuffing the headband into his pocket, turned around to study the back wall of the cockpit, which must provide access to the machinery he had heard.

What the senior man would have said we will never know, because he was joined by four of his colleagues, and they were instantly lost in a discussion of the wondrous things they saw about them.

Newton Chadwick, on the other hand, found the latches to the machinery compartment hatch, figured out how they worked and scuttled through. From his pocket he produced a small flashlight. With it on, he closed the hatch behind him. The scientists standing shoulder to shoulder in the cockpit paid no attention.

• • •

The discussion that evening in the mess hall was curiously antiseptic, Newton thought. During dinner the scientists had been animated, filled to overflowing with wonder and awe at the things they had seen that day. They chattered loudly, rudely interrupted each other and talked when no one was listening. When the mess trays were cleared away and mugs of coffee distributed by soldiers in aprons, the senior man pulled out a message pad and pencil and laid them on the table before him. The conversation died there.

“What should we tell Washington?” he asked, all business.

His colleagues were tongue-tied. None was ready to commit his ideas to paper and be held accountable by his professional peers into all eternity. “We don’t know enough,” Fred muttered. He was the unofficial spokesman, it seemed to young Newton, who sat in one corner watching and listening.

Chadwick had said nothing during dinner. As a young man he had learned the truth of the old adage that learning occurs when one’s mouth is shut. He had listened carefully to all the comments, dismissing most, and collected the wisdom of those who had a bit to offer.

He had no intention of opening his mouth, so he was startled when the senior man said sharply, “Chadwick, you were scurrying around inside that saucer today like a starving mouse. What do you think?”

Young Newton pondered his answer. Finally he said cautiously, “I don’t think the Germans made it.”

“Well, fiddlesticks! I think we can all agree on that.” The senior man surveyed the faces around the table over the top of his glasses. “Can’t we?”

“Maybe the swastika burned off when it entered the atmosphere,” some spoilsport suggested.

They wrangled all evening. At ten o’clock the senior man left, thoroughly disgusted, and trekked through the Nevada night to the radio tent. There he wrote the report to Washington. He read it through, crossed out a sentence in the middle and corrected the grammar. Finally he signed the form and handed it to the radio clerk to encode. He took solace from the fact that the message was classified and would never, ever, be read by his faculty colleagues at the university. He paused to light his pipe as the clerk read his composition.

“Can you make that out?” he asked gruffly.

The clerk looked at him with wide eyes. “Seems clear enough, sir.”

The senior scientist left the tent in a cloud of tobacco smoke.

This is the message the encryption clerk read:

“Team spent day examining the flying saucer, which appears to be a spaceship manufactured upon another planet, undoubtedly in another solar system, by a highly advanced civilization using industrial processes unknown on earth. Appears to be powered by some form of atomic energy. No weapons found. Recommend that extensive, thorough examination continue on a semipermanent basis. Knowledge to be gained will revolutionize every scientific field.”

The encryption clerk whistled in amazement and went to work with the code book.

• • •

In the darkness outside the sleeping tent, Newton Chadwick sat in the sand and fingered the headband he had “borrowed” from the saucer. The magic wasn’t in the headband, which was merely a fabric that contained thousands of tiny wires, each thinner than a human hair. This headband, Newton believed, was the way the pilot of the saucer communicated with the electronic brain of the machine. That electronic brain was the heart of the saucer. True, there was a nuclear reactor that used heat in a strange electrolysis process to crack water into its constituent parts. The hydrogen was then burned in the rockets. And there was a huge ring around the bottom of the ship that Newton suspected was used to modulate the planet’s gravitational field in some manner.

Yet the crown jewel of the saucer was the artificial brain that talked to his brain through this headband. This headband proved that the crew of the saucer had brains very similar to ours. And there was more: Inside that device, Newton suspected, was some record of the scientific and technical knowledge that the saucer’s makers had used to build it. This record was the library housing the accumulated knowledge of an advanced civilization, and it was there for the man with the wit and brains to mine it.

These older men, scientists and engineers—he had listened carefully to their comments all evening. They still didn’t understand the significance of the electronic brain, nor the headband. One reason was that they had not powered up the saucer. The other was that Newton had pocketed every headband he found, all four of them.

Given enough time, they would get a glimmer of the truth. They certainly weren’t fools, even if they were conventional thinkers.

Actually there were at least three electronic brains that Newton had found. He thought about them now, wondering how so much information could be packaged into such small devices. Amazingly, they weighed about eight pounds each and were no larger than a shoe box.

He was sitting there speculating about how they might work when a soldier drove up in a jeep and rushed into the tent. In a few moments he heard the senior man swear a foul oath.

“Damnation!” he exclaimed to his colleagues. “Washington refuses to allow further access to the saucer. They want it sealed immediately. We are to return to Florida tomorrow.”

Newton Chadwick leaped to his feet. He stuffed the headband into a pocket as he considered.

Inside the tent Fred declared, “They’ve lost their nerve. I was afraid of that.”

There was a jeep parked next to the one the soldier had just driven up, one that had been provided for the use of the senior man. Chadwick walked over and looked in the ignition. The key was there. He hopped in, started the engine, popped the clutch and fed gas.

• • •

It wasn’t until after breakfast, as the scientists packed, that anyone missed young Chadwick. A search was mounted, and by midmorning it was learned that he visited the saucer about two that morning. He had displayed his badge and was admitted by the sentries, who had not been told to deny entry to badge-holders. Chadwick was inside for only thirty minutes, then drove away in an army jeep.

Despite the protests of the senior scientist, the army officer in charge sealed the saucer and refused to allow further entry, so no one knew what Chadwick had done inside it, if anything. Neither Chadwick nor the jeep could be found. Not that anyone looked very hard. The very existence of the saucer was a tightly held military secret, and the circle of persons with access to that information was very small.

Back in Florida the scientists who had visited the saucer were debriefed by FBI agents. They would be prosecuted, they were told, if they ever discussed the existence of the saucer or anything they had learned about it with any person not authorized to have access to that information. When the senior man asked who had access, he was told, “No one.”

It was all extremely frustrating. The senior man retired two years after he saw the saucer. He wrote a treatise about it that his daughter thought was fiction. After his death from a heart attack, she tossed the manuscript into the trash.

The other scientists who had gone inside the saucer that day in the desert were also forced to get on with their lives while living with the memory of what they had seen. The Age of the Saucer that they had hoped for didn’t arrive. Like the senior man, they too aged and died one by one, bitter and frustrated.

As the seasons came and went and the years slipped past, the saucer they had seen in the Nevada desert sat undisturbed in its sealed hangar.

C
HAPTER
1

O
CTOBER
2004, M
ISSOURI

The sleek little plane zipped in low and fast, dropping below the treetops as it flew along the runway just a few feet above the ground; then the nose pointed skyward and the plane rolled swiftly around its horizontal axis once… twice… three times.

Rip Cantrell was the pilot. The alternating sunny blue sky and colorful earth were almost a blur as the plane whipped around. He centered the stick and the plane stopped whirling.

Up he went higher and higher into the sky, then gently lowered the nose and let the bird accelerate. The plane was an Extra 300L, a two-place aerobatic plane with two seats arranged in tandem. The pilot sat in the rear seat; today the front one was empty.

With the airspeed rapidly building, Rip brought the stick back smoothly. The increasing Gs mashed him down into the seat. Fighting the increased weight of his helmet and visor, he steadied at four Gs as the nose climbed toward the zenith. Throwing his head back, he could see the ground come into view as the plane became inverted at the top of the loop. He backed off on the G to keep the loop oval. The engine was pulling nicely, the ground beginning to fill the windscreen, so as the airspeed increased, he eased the G back on. The nose dropped until the Extra was plunging straight down.

Here Rip pushed the stick forward, eased back on the throttle and slammed the stick sideways. The plane rolled vigorously as it accelerated straight down in a wild corkscrew motion. The controls are incredibly sensitive, he thought, marveling at the plane’s responsiveness to the slightest displacement of stick or rudder.

A glance at the altimeter, center the stick and pull some more, lifting that nose toward the horizon. The Gs were intense now; he was pulling almost six. He fought to keep his head up and blinked mightily to keep the sweat running down his forehead from blinding him. In seconds the plane was level. Rip eased off on the G and pulled the throttle back to idle.