Saucer: The Conquest (21 page)

“This water is pretty bad,” Rip said nervously. “Lots of mud in it.”

Charley didn’t respond to that comment. She concentrated on the computers, plotting their journey.

When the tank was full of water, Charley lifted the saucer from the river and flew along two hundred feet above the Potomac using the antigravity rings. Several miles downriver she saw a golf course on the east bank and landed on a fairway. Rip dropped through the hatchway to check that the fuel cap had indeed latched shut.

Two golfers drove up in a golf cart and stopped a hundred feet from the saucer. They sat frozen with their jaws hanging open.

“It’s on tight,” Rip reported when he was back inside, with the hatch shut. “But before we go, hadn’t we better check the antiproton beam?”

“Good idea,” Charley admitted. When Egg analyzed the systems aboard the saucer, it took him a while to realize that the power that generated the antigravity force was coupled into some weird-looking heavy-duty electrical conductors that he originally thought were part of the lift/control system. It turned out, though that the power was routed to drive an antiproton beam weapon. Antiprotons are forms of antimatter and are manufactured on earth today only in giant accelerators in particle physics laboratories. The creators of the saucer, however, equipped it with a small accelerator, which generated an antiproton beam.

Charley lifted the saucer ten feet in the air and stabilized in a hover. At her command, crosshairs appeared in front of her on the canopy. She turned the saucer to line it up on a large oak tree on the edge of the fairway. The trunk appeared to be about three feet in diameter.

Rip was right beside her, his head at her shoulder.

Fire!

A smoky beam of fire, almost like lightning, shot from a point on the leading edge of the saucer and reached out for the oak. Some of the antiprotons were striking ordinary protons in the molecules that made up the air, destroying them and releasing gobs of energy, hence the lightning.

The lightning went completely through the oak tree and out the other side, since there was so much space in and between the molecules of the tree that some of the antiprotons could survive their trips through it and emerge out the other side. Pieces began flying from the tree.

“Better stop—” Rip began, just as the tree trunk exploded from the release of energy.

Charley stopped the beam. The stub of the trunk smoked as the top of the tree crashed to the ground and fragments of wood showered down.

“Holy cow,” Rip said, and whistled.

“Let’s get outta here,” Charley Pine muttered, and told the saucer to go.

Two seconds later the rocket engines ignited, blasting the saucer forward over the carcass of the devastated tree. Charley held the nose down as the ship accelerated. When the speed had reached several hundred knots, she commanded the computer to lift the nose and follow that holographic pathway on the display before her.

• • •

The president was on the south lawn of the White House as the saucer shot above the treetops, going almost straight up, on its journey into space. When he saw the saucer fly over the Mall a half hour ago, he suspected it would soon go into orbit, so he ran out here to catch the show. Although he was now at least ten miles from the saucer, the president had to squint against the glare of the white-hot rocket exhaust rising into the sky.

The noise was a loud, deep, bass roar that overwhelmed the senses.

Without realizing he was doing it, the president shouted in frustration. His shout was lost amid the thunder of the saucer.

• • •

Pierre Artois felt that sense of sublime satisfaction that comes to those who dare great things, run tremendous risks and win. A deep calm descended over him. He was standing on a mountain peak with the world at his feet. Actually he was standing on the moon, looking up at the earth, but the folks on earth were looking up at him. All of them.

Indeed, he reflected, he had won. Three spaceplanes were in orbit, one of which carried extra fuel to recharge the orbiting fuel tank; the other two would top off and journey on to the moon. In the unlikely event anything went wrong with the spaceplanes, Newton Chadwick and Egg Cantrell were on their way to the moon with the Roswell saucer, which Chadwick had managed to steal from under the nose of the U.S. Air Force. Most important, the government of France had surrendered, renounced the republic and proclaimed Pierre Artois emperor, pledging loyalty, honor and obedience.

“First France, then Europe, then the world. Fame, fortune and power,” he said to his wife, Julie. “Life doesn’t get better than this.”

“We haven’t won yet,” Julie pointed out. “The British are just across the Channel, their moat, and they can be so tiresome.”

“That little ditch won’t save them this time,” Pierre said confidently. “We can handle the British.”

“Then there are the Americans. The U.S. president is a Neanderthal—I don’t know why they elect such men.”

“Probably couldn’t find any better,” Pierre said, and made a gesture of dismissal. He didn’t want to fret about the Americans today. He felt like music, a banquet, champagne and, afterward, Julie in a large, soft bed. He eyed her speculatively.

“Forget it,” Julie told the emperor of France. “We don’t have time.”

• • •

Aboard the Roswell saucer, coasting toward the moon, Newton Chadwick and his two French friends were nearly as ecstatic as Pierre Artois. The news of the French government’s surrender came to them via a battery-powered radio that Chadwick had brought aboard. Egg sat listening, saying nothing.

Later Chadwick locked himself in the saucer’s head. He wore a small fanny pack at all times, and it contained, Egg suspected, his antiaging drug. Egg wondered if the drug took the form of a pill, a liquid that must be injected or some kind of cream. Egg also wondered about how much of the drug Chadwick had with him. Hmmm…

When he tired of plumbing the depths of the Roswell saucer’s memory, Egg Cantrell amused himself by frequency surfing on the saucer’s radio; he listened to taxi drivers in Rio, police calls from Moscow, ships at sea, soldiers on maneuver and air traffic controllers talking to airplanes. And he caught part of the great debate over the demands made by Pierre Artois. Amid the babble he could hear a steady, hard drumbeat of voices insisting that while Pierre’s promises were very nice, the ability to vote out unpopular governments—the freedom to choose—was more important. Egg paid particular attention to American news reports. Charley Pine was in America; he concluded that the spaceplane she stole from the moon was probably also there. The three spaceplanes in France had taken off, presumably on their way to the moon. Finally, someone had stolen the saucer from the National Air and Space Museum in Washington and flown it into space.

Chadwick and his friends were asleep when Egg heard the flash about the other saucer, and still asleep when the reporters figured out that apparently Rip Cantrell and Charley Pine were the guilty parties.

So the equation had changed, Egg mused. He had agreed to fly the saucer for Chadwick because he feared for Rip and Charley’s safety, and his own. Chadwick and his thugs certainly weren’t above using force if he failed to obey Chadwick’s demands. Yet if they disabled or killed Egg, Chadwick would have to fly the saucer—if he could. If he couldn’t, he and his two pals would also die in this thing.

Egg wasn’t ready to die just yet. He enjoyed life and wanted more of it.

And now wasn’t the time to play the hero. The best way to get back to earth was to continue on this trajectory, which would slingshot the saucer around the moon and start it back for earth unless he fired the engines to slow it and put it into lunar orbit.

He turned the saucer so that earth filled the canopy. He searched the jeweled darkness around the planet, trying to spot the twinkle of rocket exhaust that would indicate the presence of a saucer or spaceplane. A saucer or spaceplane accelerating for a journey to the moon. He saw nothing of the kind, of course. The distances were too vast, the exhaust plumes far too small.

Egg grinned widely. Rip and Charley, a real pair of aces.

He loosened the safety belt that held him in the pilot’s seat, leaned back and drifted off to sleep thinking about his nephew Rip and the beautiful Charley Pine.

• • •

The ride into space was even more exciting than Rip remembered it. He wanted to sing, but managed to stifle himself.

Charley Pine was all business. When the rocket engines stopped, signaling that the saucer had achieved orbit, she began tuning the radio that she remembered from her previous adventure in this ship. Like the one Egg was listening to in the Roswell saucer, this radio was also capable of receiving and transmitting on an extraordinarily wide band of frequencies.

She knew the one she wanted: the spaceplane’s orbital refueling freq. She had to play a while with the radio, then finally found it.

The spaceplanes were already in orbit and were now rendezvousing with the fuel tank. The problem was that she didn’t know where the tank was. Oh, she knew it was orbiting the earth at a height of about a hundred miles, more or less, but where above the earth was it?

As she listened to the French pilots chat back and forth between themselves and their controller on the ground, she tried to reason her way through the problem. When she and LaFollette had launched in Jeanne d’Arc, the launch was timed so that when the spaceplane reached orbiting velocity, it would be in the vicinity of the fuel tank. She suspected the French had done the same thing this time. Indeed, if they hadn’t, the spaceplanes would waste prodigious quantities of fuel and time maneuvering for a rendezvous.

She and Rip hadn’t timed their launch, of course. They had to find and rendezvous upon the spaceplanes before they successfully refueled and began their lunar orbit insertion burn. Once they did, she and Rip would never catch them in the saucer; it didn’t have enough fuel.

She examined the radar display, running it out to what she hoped was maximum range. The only way to determine what that range was would be to find a target and let the computer figure a course and burn to intercept. She could make an estimate based on that.

Which was beside the point, because the display was empty.

If the radar was working.

But why wouldn’t it be working? Everything in the saucer had worked as it was supposed to from the day Rip and his friends hammered it from a sandstone ledge in the Sahara. Assume that it is working, Charley told herself.

“How are you going to find these dudes?” Rip asked. He was watching over her shoulder.

“I don’t know that we can.” She gestured toward the radio. “They’re already rendezvousing with the fuel tank. We don’t know when they launched, so they could be anywhere above the planet.”

“Let’s ask for help.”

She looked at him. “Who from?”

“How about Space Command? Bet they know where that tank is.” Space Command was a branch of the U.S. Air Force charged with monitoring the position of satellites, among other things.

Charley Pine thought about it. “The duty officer will refer the request to Washington, and they’ll have to staff it, which could take a day or two. We have a few hours, at best. And if the U.S. government helps us, Pierre will be most unhappy with them. They will suspect that.”

“Life’s full of trade-offs,” Rip remarked. “If Pierre gets those spaceplanes, he’ll be sitting in the catbird seat. Most Americans must be very unhappy with him right now. The worst that Space Command can do is say no.”

“And make a lot of threats.”

“I don’t figure we’re winning any Citizen of the Year Award points now. Oh, I know, I don’t have any more faith in politicians than you do, but at some point you have to throw the ball in their direction and see if they can catch it.”

Charley began tuning the radio. She certainly didn’t know what frequencies she might use to contact Space Command, but no doubt the U.S. air traffic controllers did. Charley tuned to that portion of the VHF band where she thought air traffic controllers might be, and sure enough, there they were, working airliners into and out of… Miami.

She waited until there was a moment of silence, then said, “Miami Approach, this is Saucer One with a request, over.”

The controller didn’t miss a beat. He must get calls from flying saucers every day. “Saucer One, Miami, you have a flight plan on file?”

“That’s a negative. We have a request, though. We need a frequency that we can call Space Command on. Can you recommend one?”

“Where are you, Saucer One?”

“In orbit.”

“Stand by.”

The controller’s supervisor soon appeared at his shoulder. Trying to keep his voice as dry and matter-of-fact as possible, the controller said, “Saucer One says she’s in orbit and wants a freq for Space Command.”

The supervisor had just returned from her break, where she had been watching news coverage of the saucer’s theft from the Air and Space Museum, a story that had been sandwiched between the latest bulletins from Paris and the moon.

“Just another day at the office,” she said, and picked up the military hotline telephone.

A moment after she was given the Space Command frequency by Miami Approach, Charley Pine lost radio contact with North America. She figured out the conversion and dialed in the frequency. Even the ancients had classified frequencies by the number of cycles in a given time span. Although they didn’t use seconds, Egg had figured out the conversion formula long ago, and both Charley and Rip remembered it.

As they rode over the Sahara and the Red Sea, Rip and Charley sat in silence, each lost in his own thoughts. Over the Indian Ocean Charley finally spoke.

“You know that they’re going to want us to destroy those spaceplanes.”

“If we pop the refueling tank, we don’t need to destroy them. They can’t get to the moon without more fuel than they can carry aloft. It’ll take a while to get extra fuel into orbit.”

“It’s already in orbit.”

“Okay, we pop the cow.”

“Rip, I know these people. I trained with them in France. Blowing up the tank will kill some of them.”