Saucer: The Conquest (3 page)

The piston engine’s moan dropped to a burble, and the plane began a gentle, descending turn to line up on the runway. With the power at idle, the plane floated into a perfect three-point landing, kissing the grass.

Rip steered his craft to a stop in front of the large wooden hangar beside the runway and cut the engine. He opened the canopy, snapping the safety line into place so it wouldn’t fall off, and unstrapped. Still in the pilot’s seat, he took off the helmet and swabbed the sweat from his face.

One of the men sitting on a bench beside the hangar heaved himself erect and strolled over to the Extra.

“Well, whaddaya think?”

“It’s okay,” Rip said. Lean, tanned by the sun, he was about six feet tall and in his early twenties.

“You sure fly it pretty well,” the guy on the ground said enthusiastically, cocking his head and squinting against the glare of the brilliant sun.

“Save the flattery. I’ll buy it.”

The next question was more practical. “You gonna be able to get insurance?”

“I’m going to pay cash,” Rip said as he stepped to the ground. “Then I don’t have to insure it, do I?”

“Well, no. Guess not. Though I never had anyone buy one of these flying toys that didn’t want to insure it. Lot of money, you know.”

“I’ll walk up to the house and get the checkbook. You figure out precisely what I owe you, taxes and all.”

“Sure.” The airplane salesman headed back to the bench beside the hangar.

Rip walked past the hangar and began climbing the hill toward his uncle’s house. It was one of those rare, perfect Indian summer days, with a blazing sun in a brilliant blue sky, vivid fall foliage, and a warm, gentle breeze decorated with a subtle hint of wood smoke. Rip didn’t notice. He climbed the hill lost in his own thoughts.

His uncle Egg Cantrell was holding a conference at his farm, so the house was full to overflowing. He had invited twenty scientists from around the world to sort through the data on the computer from the saucer Rip had found in the Sahara and donated to the National Air and Space Museum the previous September. Egg had removed a computer from the saucer and kept it. Its memory was a storehouse of fabulous information, which Egg used to patent the saucer’s technology, and even more fabulous data on the scientific, ethical and philosophical knowledge of the civilization that constructed it.

The visiting scientists shared Egg’s primary interest, which was computer technology. He had spent most of the past year trying to learn how the saucer’s computer worked. The Ancient Ones knew that progress lies in true human-computer collaboration. They had promoted computers from dumb tools to full partners capable of combining known information, new data and programs of powerful creativity and logic techniques to generate and test new ideas. In effect, the computer could do original, creative thinking, a thing still beyond the capability of any computer made on earth.

Egg and his guests were having a wonderful time. They spent every waking minute with a dozen PCs containing files Egg had copied from the saucer’s computer or talking with colleagues about what they had learned.

Egg was on the porch in an earnest discussion with two academics from California when he saw Rip coming up the hill with his hands in his pockets, eyes on the ground. He had been like this since his girlfriend, Charlotte “Charley” Pine, took a job with the French lunar expedition. She had been gone for six weeks, and a long six weeks it had been.

Egg excused himself from his guests and intercepted Rip before he could get to the porch. Egg was in his fifties, a rotund individual with little hair left. His body was an almost perfect oval—hence his nickname—but he moved surprisingly quickly for a man of his shape and bulk. He had been almost a surrogate father to Rip after his real dad died eleven years ago.

“Good morning,” Egg said cheerfully. “Heard the plane. Is it any good?”

“It’s okay. The guy is waiting for me to write him a check.”

“He can wait a little longer. What say you and I take a walk?”

Rip shrugged and fell in with Egg, who headed across the slope toward the barn. “It’s been quite a year, hasn’t it?” Egg remarked. Actually more like thirteen months had passed since Rip donated the saucer from the Sahara to the National Air and Space Museum. They had indeed been busy months for Egg as he mined the data on the saucer’s computer, filed patent applications with his, Rip’s and Charley’s names attached and licensed the propulsion technology.

The money from the licenses had been pouring into the bank that handled the accounts. While they were not yet rich enough to buy Connecticut, each of them could probably afford a small county in Mississippi or Arkansas.

Having a lot of money was both a curse and a blessing, as Rip and Charley discovered. They didn’t need regular jobs, which meant that they had a lot of free time. Charley taught Rip to fly, and after he got his private license they had flown all over the country, leisurely traveled the world and finally returned to Missouri in midsummer.

After a few more weeks of aimless loafing, Charley jumped at a job offered by Pierre Artois, who was heading the French effort to build a space station on the moon. One morning she shook Egg’s hand, hugged him, gave him a kiss and left. Her departure hadn’t come as a surprise. He had known she was bored, even if Rip hadn’t figured it out.

“I sorta miss Charley,” Egg said now to Rip, who didn’t respond.

Inside the barn Egg seated himself on a hay bale in the sun. Rip stood scuffing dirt with a toe, then finally seated himself on the edge of a feed-way.

“What are you going to do with your life, Rip?”

“I don’t know.”

“Buying toys won’t help.”

“The Extra is quite a plane.”

“Everybody needs one.”

“I reckon.”

“Toys won’t help what’s ailing you.”

Rip sighed.

“You could help me with this conference, if you wished,” Egg continued, his voice strong and cheerful. “They keep asking questions about the saucer—you know as much about it as I do, maybe more.”

“Don’t want to answer questions about the saucer,” Rip responded. “Talked about it enough. Time to move on to something else.”

“What?” Egg asked flatly.

“I don’t know,” Rip said with heat. “If I knew, I’d be doing it.”

“You aren’t the first man who ever had woman troubles. Sitting around moping about Charley isn’t going to help.”

That comment earned a glare from Rip.

“The launch is going to be on television this evening,” Egg continued blandly. A French spaceplane had been launched every two weeks for the last six months, shuttling people and equipment to the new French base on the moon. Charley Pine was scheduled to be the copilot on the next flight. Since an American was going to be a crew member, the American networks had decided to air the launch in real time. “Are you going to watch?”

“She’s going to the moon and you want me to watch it on television. How should I answer that?”

Egg sat on his bale for another moment, decided he didn’t have anything else to say and levered his bulk upright.

“Sorry, Unc,” Rip told the older man. “My life is in the pits these days.”

“Maybe you ought to work on that,” Egg said, then walked on out of the barn.

“Well, it is a mess,” Rip told the barn cat, who came over to get her ears scratched. “After you’ve owned and flown a flying saucer, been everywhere and done everything with the hottest woman alive, where do you go next?”

The galling thing was that he knew the answer to that question. To the moon, of course! And he was sitting here in central Missouri twiddling his thumbs watching television while Charley did it for real.

Terrific! Just flat terrific!

C
HAPTER
2

Charley Pine had just lived through the busiest six weeks of her life. From dawn to midnight seven days a week, the French had trained her to be a copilot in their new spaceships.

Unwilling to bet lives on just one ship, the French had built four of them. Two generations beyond the American space shuttles, the French ships were reusable spaceplanes, launched from a long runway in the south of France. They carried two large fuel tanks, one on either side, which they jettisoned after they had used the fuel. They then flew on into orbit, where they rendezvoused with a fuel tank, refilled their internal tanks and continued on to the moon. After delivering their cargo, the spaceplanes returned to earth orbit and reentered the atmosphere. They landed in France on the runway they had departed from and were readied for another voyage to the moon.

Bored with doing nothing, unable to interest Rip in anything other than sitting around, Charley had instantly accepted Pierre Artois’ job offer. She didn’t tell Rip until the following morning. Then she broke the news at breakfast and was gone fifteen minutes later.

Sure, leaving Rip had been hard, but she was unwilling to retire at the ripe old age of thirty. Sooner or later, Rip was going to have to figure out life. When he did, then she would see. If he did.

Pierre Artois believed in maximum publicity. The French government was spending billions on the lunar mission, so he didn’t miss many chances to get all the good press he could. This evening, six hours before launch, he and his lunar crew stood in front of a bank of television cameras to answer questions.

Before the press zeroed in on Artois and the French space minister, one of the reporters asked a question of Charley, who was wearing a sky blue flight suit that showed off her trim, athletic figure. Her long hair was pulled back in a pony-tail. The reporter was an American, who naturally asked his question in English.

In addition to all the technical information she was trying to absorb, Charley was also taking a crash course in French. Her four semesters of French way back when allowed her to buy a glass of wine, find a restroom and ask for a kiss, but that was about it. She gave up trying to learn the names of all the people shoving information at her, and called everyone amigo. That froze a few smiles, but Pierre Artois said she was one of his pilots, so frozen smiles didn’t matter. She was actually grateful the first question was in English, until she heard it.

“Ms. Pine, some American pundits have said that hiring you to fly to the moon is just a publicity stunt by Monsieur Artois. Would you care to comment upon that?”

“Not really,” she said lightly, trying to be cool. “I’ve been in space before.” Actually her flying credentials were as good as anyone’s. A graduate of the Air Force Academy and the air force’s test pilot program, a veteran fighter pilot and the pilot of the flying saucer that had made such a splash last year, she believed she deserved this job, so the sneering hurt. It also immunized her against second thoughts about Rip. She was going to do this or die trying.

The chief pilot on the first mission was a man, Jean-Paul Lalouette. He was five or six years older than Charley and seemed to share the condescending opinion of the American newspaper pundits, but he was too wise to let it show—very much. Charley picked up on it, though. She glanced at him now and saw he was wearing the slightest trace of a smile.

Lalouette and his male colleagues thought she should be very impressed with them. The fact that she wasn’t didn’t help their egos. “T. S.,” Charley Pine muttered, which was American for “C’est la guerre.”

After a couple of puff questions that allowed Charley to say nice, inane things about the French people and the lunar base project, the press zeroed in on Pierre Artois, to Charley’s intense relief. She took several steps backward and tried to hide among the technicians she and Lalouette were flying to the moon.

Pierre obviously enjoyed the glare of television lights. A slight, fit man whose physical resemblance to Napoleon had occurred to so many people that no one remarked on it anymore, he looked happy as a man could be. And well he should, since he was making his first trip to the moon on this flight. His journey to the lunar base after years of promoting, cajoling, managing and partially financing—from his own pocket—the research and industrial effort made this appearance before the press a triumph.

Charley Pine didn’t quite know what to make of Pierre, whom she had met on only three occasions. She had watched him in action on television for several years, though. The scion of a clan of Belgian brewers and grandson of the legendary Stella Artois, Pierre struck Charley as a man who desperately wanted to be somebody. An endless supply of beautiful women, a river of money and an exalted social position weren’t enough—he had larger ambitions.

Charley had devoted ten seconds of thought to the question of what made Pierre tick, and concluded that the answer was beer. Every French farmer who ever squished a grape had more panache than Pierre did. France was all about wine, and Pierre was beer. This tragedy fairly cried out for psychoanalysis by a top-notch woman—or even a man— but unfortunately Pierre hadn’t bothered; like Napoleon, he had looked for a world to conquer. The French lunar expedition was his, lock, stock and barrel, and he was going to make it a success… or else.

Despite Artois’ love of the spotlight, Charley Pine admired him. Pierre Artois was a man who dreamed large. He dreamed of a French space program, with a base on the moon as a stepping-stone to Mars, which he defined as a challenge worthy of all that France had been and could be in the future. He had fought with all the will and might of Charlemagne to make it happen. His vision, optimism and refusal to take no for an answer had triumphed in the end.

The real reason for the French space program, or indeed any space program, was that the challenge was there. The moon was there; Mars was there; the stars beckoned every night. Charley Pine believed that people needed dreams, the larger the better. Our dreams define us, she once told Rip.

What a contrast the dreamer Pierre Artois was, Charley mused, to the modern Americans. Somewhere along the way they had lost the space dream. Space costs too much, they said. NASA had morphed into a petrified bureaucracy as innovative as the postal service. These days Americans fretted about foreign competition and how to save Medicare—and who was going to foot the bill. Rip once remarked that the current crop of penny-pinching, politically correct politicians would have refused to finance Columbus. Watching Artois, Charley knew that Rip was right.