Saucer: The Conquest (37 page)

“You two go up to the house, get baths and something to eat. I’ll take care of it.”

Charley reached for Rip’s hand, looking into his face.

“Okay,” Rip said slowly, and nodded.

He and Charley took one last look at the dark shape of the saucer, then walked around the corner of the hangar and took the path for the house.

Egg Cantrell crawled under the saucer and climbed up through the open hatchway. Inside he found blankets, food, a makeshift zero-gravity potty, rifles, ammo and the inflatable water tanks that had been installed at Andrews. He carried armload after armload to the hatch and dropped it through. There was still a half case of bottled water—that went too. When the interior of the saucer was free of foreign objects, he got out and began transferring the pile to a spot near the hangar. His sore arm was almost well now and didn’t bother him much. Still, the task took a while and about wore him out. Finally he climbed back into the saucer, pulled the hatch shut and latched it.

The pilot’s seat felt familiar, like an old friend. He donned the headband and said hello to the computer. First he asked for a fuel check. The ship was nearly empty of water—apparently Rip and Charley had burned it all getting here—but the saucer automatically captured enough hydrogen to power the control jets, even after it refused to give the pilot additional hydrogen for the rocket engines. There was a store of oxygen aboard, and Egg had the computer vent it to the atmosphere. The vent, he knew, was through one of the rocket engine nozzles.

Satisfied, Egg pulled the power knob completely out and waited for the reactor to come up to operating temperature.

Only then did he ask the computer to lift the saucer from the ground. He didn’t touch the controls, merely asked the computer to maneuver the ship.

Staying below the trees, he took the tractor path toward his south forty. The trees were merely dark shapes under a layer of clouds in this rain, seen through a wet canopy. Fortunately he knew the ground perfectly, knew every tree and stone and bush.

Finally Egg set the saucer down. He pushed the power knob in to the first detent to ensure the antigravity rings were off. He climbed from the pilot’s seat, took a last look around, touched this and that, then opened the hatch and lowered himself carefully through the opening. After closing the hatch, he crawled from under the ship on his hands and knees, soaking his trousers.

When he was standing in front of the ship, he looked around carefully. On the other side of his line fence was a huge high-tension tower, one that carried at least 150,000 volts. He found the tower, looked up and tried to see the wires. No. Well, they were up there and they were wet.

Egg turned to the saucer. The rain seemed to be falling harder now. He could feel rivulets coursing down his neck, feel the dampness in his shirt and jacket.

Power up!

He waited for ten seconds, then told the computer, Lift off.

The ancient saucer rose slowly and majestically into the air.

He flew it up above the wires, then brought it in over them. A little lower. A little more.

A continuous bolt of energy arced from one wire to the saucer, ran through it and went back into the adjoining wire. The arc was brilliant, like a huge floodlight. Egg squinted so that he could see.

After a few seconds there was a giant flash. The saucer seemed to shrink instantly to half its former size. Still the electricity arced from the wires and ran through it.

Three seconds, four—Egg was counting—and there was another huge flash. The saucer instantly shrank again.

After two more quantum jolts, Egg lifted the saucer off the wires. The juice stopped flowing. He flew the saucer over to the field and let it touch down on its extended landing gear.

It was now just less than four feet in diameter. In the dim light, after the brilliance of the electrical arc, he had difficulty discerning details. The ship was small—that was enough.

He ordered the ship to lift off, then turned and began walking along the tractor path, headed for the hangar. He looked back and ensured the saucer was following. It floated along like a metal cloud, six feet in the air.

The darkness was beginning to dissolve into dawn when Egg reached the hangar. He walked over to the old stone outcropping between the hangar and the control tower. Yes, it was solid enough. So solid that the Army Air Corps didn’t bother blasting it out when they built this old base during World War II.

Egg set the saucer on the stone. He didn’t like its first location, so he moved it to another. Then he decided to turn it slightly so that the rocket exhaust nozzles faced the forest.

Finally satisfied, he secured all power to the saucer.

Egg Cantrell’s clothes were about drenched from the rain, but he didn’t notice. The saucer looks pretty neat sitting there, he thought. He reached for it, pushed against it, tried to move it. Nothing doing. Its mass was still precisely the same as it was before he shrank it; the electrons in the atoms were simply running closer together.

Egg patted the saucer, then went into the hangar for several garbage bags so he could clean up the mess of items from the saucer. The day had completely arrived, a soggy rainy day, when he finished. He walked past the hangar and took the path to the house.

• • •

Three days later, on a sunny fall morning as the frost burned off the grass, Rip, Charley and Egg, bundled up in coats and blankets, sat on the porch sipping steaming hot coffee. Since they had arrived Charley and Rip had avoided talking about their adventures. The television was still chewing on the Artois story and replaying video clips of the great saucer battle over Washington and New York. Egg watched in the privacy of his bedroom, yet when Rip and Charley turned the television on, they immediately turned it off again as soon as the commercial was over and the talking hosts resumed chewing the rag. They didn’t want to think about it.

But now, out on the porch, Charley tentatively broached the subject. “I can’t get Jean-Paul Lalouette out of my mind,” she said. “I want him to go away but he won’t.”

“You just gotta let it go,” Rip advised.

“When he slowed down and flew under the bridges, I was really worried he was going to fly his ship into something, end it all in a spectacular crash. I had visions of 9/11 all over again.”

She paused, sipped coffee and thought about that moment. “I guess it was his slowing down that worried me. That meant that he was flying the saucer, either with the controls or by telling the computer what to do and when to do it. As you know, if you are physically manipulating the controls or telling the ship what to do, you can take the ship outside its performance envelope. Once you’re out there, if you can’t get back in you’ve bought the farm. On the other hand, if you tell the computer to fly the ship—in effect tell it merely where to go—it will use the radar and other sensors to learn what’s ahead, then adjust your flight path and speed and so on to get you where you want to go safely, staying within the performance envelope. These two modes of operation sound similar, but they’re as different as night and day. When he slowed down, I knew Lalouette was flying the saucer, not the computer.”

“Why?” Egg prompted, to keep her talking.

“Because if he merely told the saucer to fly under the bridges, it could have done so at Mach Two. It would have come down sooner, kept the speed up, zipped under the bridges—the Brooklyn and Manhattan bridges are nearly side by side—then pulled up to avoid the next one or a ship or a turn in the river. But the saucer slowed down. That meant Lalouette was flying.”

“And if he judged anything wrong, he would crash?”

“Precisely. At the time, I thought he might intend to crash. I wasn’t sure. Especially when he flew around the island and dropped down onto the avenues. He was still flying his ship then. That was the scariest moment of my life. I thought he was going to kill a zillion people. Either intentionally or unintentionally. Whichever, they would still be dead.”

“He must have been dying,” Rip mused. “He stopped flying the saucer on that irrational climbout.”

“I think he died right after he pulled up over Central Park and lit the engines,” Charley said. “The ship tilting to the east must have been his last conscious thought. From that moment his saucer merely flew along until it exhausted its fuel.”

“And you killed him,” Egg said, eyeing her face.

Charley Pine hid behind her coffee mug. “Something like that, I guess.”

“Was he a nice guy?”

“Just a guy,” she said softly.

To change the subject, Egg asked, “How did you keep the saucer from sinking to the bottom when you put it in the ocean?”

Charley explained, “When we came out of the Chesapeake I found that the ship would plane under water if you used the antigravity rings for propulsion. When the fighters jumped us, we were about out of fuel and didn’t want to shoot them down, so we hid in the ocean. Went under and began motoring southeast. Later we heard ships going over, probably headed to our splash location to look for wreckage. I’ll bet ten bucks those fighter jocks reported that they shot us down.”

“Indeed,” Egg murmured. “That’s precisely what they did. And they never found the wreckage.” He had been watching television.

“Aren’t looking in the right place,” Rip said, and laughed. He stretched hugely—man oh man, it was good to be alive.

The day was warming nicely and Charley and the Cantrells were still on the porch chatting when four stretch limos pulled into the parking area by the old control tower. Men in suits piled out of the two front vehicles and the rear one and deployed around the cars. Several of these men carried visible weapons, small submachine guns. They also talked into their lapels.

“Oh, damn,” Egg Cantrell said flatly.

The man in the right front seat of the third limo now hopped out and opened the rear door. As Egg suspected, the president of the United States climbed out of the back of the third limo, followed by another man Egg didn’t recognize. The two of them crossed the lawn on the sidewalk and stopped on the porch steps.

“Mr. Cantrell?”

“Yes.”

“Sorry to barge in on you like this, but I need to have a little talk with Ms. Pine and young Mr. Cantrell. Hope you don’t mind.”

“Please, come up and be seated. Would you like some coffee?”

“That would be very nice, thank you. I like mine with a spot of milk, and Mr. O’Reilly takes his black. Folks, this is P.J. O’Reilly, my chief of staff.”

The president dropped beside Rip on the porch swing and O’Reilly pulled a chair around while Egg went to make another pot of Java.

“Good to see you folks again,” the president began.

“Likewise,” Rip replied. He could bullshit with the best of them.

“Now, I know you folks are probably a little put out that the military tried to shoot you down, but things got mighty confusing and mistakes were made. These things happen, yet no harm was done.”

“Umm,” Rip said.

“Uh-huh,” Charley agreed.

“So, anyway, figuring there could be some hard feelings, I thought maybe I should jump on a plane and zip out here to see you. The FBI checked and said you were here.”

“You could have determined that with a telephone call,” Charley said.

“God bless the FBI,” Rip muttered.

The president ignored them both. “One of the reasons I came is the saucer. We want it back.”

“We?”

“The government. Your government.”

“You made a long trip for nothing,” Rip said smoothly, without inflection.

“Now, son, you signed that flying saucer-thing over to the Air and Space Museum. You swiped it without permission, and they could sue you to get it back. Those facts are indisputable. Unless you turn it over PDQ with a smile on your face, I can pretty much guarantee you that they will sue.”

Rip kept his cool. “One of the conditions of the gift was that the museum folks had to remove the reactor from the saucer, which they failed to do. Arguably they forfeited the gift by failing to abide by one of the essential conditions. I’m keeping it.”

The president smiled the smile that the secretary of state found so loathsome. “Where is it?”

“I’ve heard about this Fifth Amendment thing,” Rip said with his face deadpan, “and thought I’d give it a whirl and try to ride it. Seems like everyone ought to give that one a short ride every once in a while, don’t you think?”

The president’s grin faded. “Apparently they can’t take the reactor out of the saucer and transport or store it because the design is unapproved. The regs are quite specific.”

“Sorta seems like the prez oughta be able to cut through that kind of knot.”

“Seems like, but he can’t. Some federal judge would drop an injunction on me and that would be that. But we can’t let that saucer just sit around. You stole it from the museum; anyone could. Surely you see the problem?”

“I’ll hang on to it.” Rip thought about that statement, and added, “If I have it.”

Egg brought out a tray with five cups of coffee, sugar in a little bowl and milk in a small pitcher. The cups weren’t china, but mugs bearing logos from the state university, the St. Louis arch and numerous other public attractions. Egg handed the president one from Dollywood.

The president slurped coffee without glancing at the mug, then addressed himself to Egg. “Mr. Cantrell, your nephew is refusing to return the saucer to the government. What do you think of that?”

“His mom told me he was difficult to potty train.”

“Ms. Pine?”

“It’s not my saucer,” Charley said curtly.

After spending most of his adult life in politics, the president knew when to drop a subject and go on to something else. From a pocket he produced an envelope. He extracted three sheets of paper from it and handed one each to Egg, Rip and Charley. As they read he took three medals from another pocket. He handed them each one in turn. “From a grateful nation. Little bits of enameled metal and ribbon aren’t much, I know, but you people saved a lot of lives and property. On behalf of the nation, I thank you.”

Charley recognized the medal. “The Distinguished Flying Cross,” she told Rip and Egg.