Saucer: The Conquest (4 page)

The press conference was a photo op and nothing more. One of the American reporters asked about the fare-paying passenger Artois had agreed to take to the moon, one Joe Bob Hooker, who rumor had it was paying twenty-five million euros for his round-trip ticket. “This is a profit-making venture,” Artois responded. “He paid cash.” He refused to say more about his passenger.

“Your wife has preceded you to the moon, has she not?”

Ah, yes—true love on the moon. No fool, Pierre knew the media would play this story line like a harp. He glanced longingly at the ceiling, then said simply, “We will soon be together. I have missed her very much.” He touched his left breast and added with a straight face, “She is the best part of me.” Charley Pine nearly gagged.

After a few more one-liners for television and a pithy comment or two for the newspapers, Pierre led his crew off the stage.

Soon they began the suiting-up process, some of it filmed by a cameraman with a video camera. Then the crew boarded a bus for the two-mile journey to the spaceplane, which sat on the end of a twelve-thousand-foot runway. The bus had to travel a hundred yards or so on a public highway, one lined with the curious and small knots of protesters with signs. Apparently even the Europeans couldn’t do anything these days without someone complaining, Charley thought.

She found herself beside the American passenger, a stout man in his fifties. “You the American woman?” he asked.

Hooker’s color wasn’t so good.

“That’s right.”

“Glad you’re going. Nice to have somebody to speak American to.”

“Right.”

“’Bout had it up to here with the frogs.”

“They kept you busy, have they?”

“Like a hound dog with fleas. You can really fly this thing?”

“No. I’m a Victoria’s Secret model that Artois hired when he found he couldn’t afford the real Charlotte Pine.”

Hooker gave her a sharp look and said nothing more.

After a glance out the window she concentrated on lowering her own anxiety level. This is just another flight, she told herself, just like all those flights in high-performance airplanes she made in the air force. More precisely, like those saucer rides with Rip Cantrell.

She was thinking of Rip when the spaceplane came into view. Jeanne d’Arc. She had explored every inch of the craft during training and spent several weeks in the simulator, yet the sight of the ship sitting on the concrete under the floodlights, ready to fly, caused a sharp intake of breath.

She was really going to do it.

She was going to the moon!

Yee-haa!

I hope Rip is watching on television!

• • •

He was watching on television, of course. Due to the time difference, it was early evening in America when the live coverage began. A dozen scientists crowded around the television in the living room of the Missouri farmhouse with Egg and Rip.

“It’ll be okay,” Egg muttered to Rip, who didn’t respond. He was intent on the television, listening to the commentator, ignoring everyone around him.

The countdown went smoothly. There were two minor holds, for only a few seconds each, and the commentator didn’t give the reasons for either.

The spaceplane looked weird with the two huge external fuel tanks attached to its side. This particular ship, Jeanne d’Arc, was a proven platform, with three round trips to the moon already in her logbook. Rip thought about that now, reassuring himself that everything would go well, that Charley would come back safe and sound.

Still, better than anyone else in the room, he understood the dangers involved in space flight. Not to mention going back and forth to the moon. The French lunar project was mankind’s biggest leap yet off the planet, akin to tackling the Atlantic in a rowboat.

His heart was pounding and he was covered with a sheen of perspiration when the first glimmer of fire appeared in the nozzles of the spaceplane’s rocket engines. The flame grew steadily until it was as bright as the sun, overpowering the television camera’s ability to adjust for light.

The roar came through the television’s speakers, a mere shadow of the real thing. Still, it filled the living room and drowned out the last of the conversations.

The spaceplane began moving. Faster and faster, accelerating. The nose wheel stayed firmly on the runway as the ship accelerated past a hundred knots, then two hundred. A small number at the bottom of the screen reported its increasing velocity.

At 264 knots the nose rose a few feet off the pavement. At 275, the ship lifted off. Seconds later the landing gear began retracting.

The nose kept rising, up, up, up. The ship was exceeding four hundred knots when the nose reached fifty degrees above the horizon and the autopilot stopped the rotation.

Soon the fireball from the engines was all that could be seen on the screen.

It gradually became smaller and smaller as the sound faded… until it was merely a bright point of light in the heavens.

The camera followed the light until it was out of sight, then returned to the tarmac. The cameraman focused on the spot where the spaceplane had begun its roll, a spot now empty.

“She’s on her way,” Egg said.

Rip Cantrell took a deep breath and exhaled very carefully. He surreptitiously wiped at the tears that were leaking down his cheeks. “Yeah,” he whispered. “She’s on her way.”

• • •

Inside Jeanne d’Arc Charley Pine monitored the instruments as the ship roared away from the earth. To her left Jean-Paul Lalouette was similarly engaged. Her duties were to bring any anomaly she noticed to his attention. Her eyes swept the panel again, looking for warning lights, errant pressures, a gauge indication that hinted something, anything was not as it should be. Yet all was precisely as it should be, perfect, as if this were a simulator ride and the operator had yet to push a failure button.

Both pilots wore their space suits, complete with helmets, in the event the plane lost pressurization during launch. They planned to take them off after all the systems checks were completed in orbit.

The acceleration Gs felt good, pushing Charley straight back into her seat. The voices of the French controllers passing information about the trajectory and data-link information sounded clear and pleasant in her ears; the background was the low rumble of the rocket engines.

When the external tanks were empty, they were jettisoned explosively. The engines then began burning fuel from the internal tanks as the spaceplane continued to climb and accelerate.

Charley’s eyes flicked to the windscreen, four inches of bulletproof glass. At this nose-up angle the night sky filled the windscreen, full of stars and a sliver of moon. As they climbed through the atmosphere the stars became brighter and ceased their twinkling, and the crescent-moon gleamed more starkly against the background of obsidian black.

She had little time to enjoy the scenery. The next task was rendezvousing with the orbiting fuel tank. She became engrossed in the problem, watching the display that depicted the spaceplane and the orbiting tank and the three-dimensional course to intercept.

When she realized that the join-up was working perfectly and Lalouette had everything under complete control, she glanced again at the moon. For some reason it seemed larger than it did standing on the surface of earth. Now it appeared as what it was, another world.

The obsidian sky full of stars, the weightless feeling, the earth hanging beside the spaceplane with storms over the oceans and snowy mountain peaks twinkling in the sun—Charley Pine had been here before and been forever changed by the experience. Now she was back. She was sooo excited… and just as her personal karma account began overflowing she remembered Rip and felt the tiniest twinge of guilt.

Yeah, so, he wasn’t here! He was only twenty-three, for Christ’s sake. He didn’t earn a seat in a spaceplane’s cockpit; she did! All those years in college, flying, test pilot school—yet she wouldn’t be here if it weren’t for Rip.

Well, she would tell him about it when she returned to earth. That was the best that she could do. She brushed Rip away and returned to the business at hand, controllers and trajectories and systems.

Charley Pine took physical control of Jeanne d’Arc for the first time over the Pacific Ocean to effect the rendezvous with the orbiting fuel cell. With the sound of her breathing rasping in her ears and her heart thudding in her chest, she made tiny control inputs as the spaceplane crossed the distance between the two orbiting bodies. She knew from her military flying experience and the simulator that it was necessary to check the closure rate on the instruments—not to rely on her eyes—since the rate would appear to increase as the bodies closed the distance.

With Lalouette monitoring the instruments and calling out the distance and closure rate, she flew the spaceplane into the rendezvous position and stopped all closure. Only after all relative motion had stopped did she nudge the controls enough to gently bring the spaceplane into the fueling port. The clunk of the hydraulic latches closing, locking the ship firmly to the tank, was the best sound she had heard in years. She breathed a huge sigh of relief.

“Nicely done,” said a male voice, not Lalouette.

She looked around. Pierre Artois was watching. He was suspended in the cabin, floating, maintaining his position by occasionally touching something fixed to the ship. Even though this was his first journey into space, he looked quite comfortable.

“Thank you.”

“If I may ask, mademoiselle, why did you accept my offer to join our expedition?”

Charley glanced at Lalouette, a working pilot who had beaten out hundreds of other applicants for one of the four first-pilot positions, and saw him glance curiously at her.

“I was looking for a flying job,” Charley replied, “and you made an offer.” She shrugged. Gallicly, she hoped.

Artois wasn’t satisfied. “I have heard that you are a part owner of the patents on the flying saucer propulsion technology that was recently licensed by Monsieur Cantrell. If true, you must be a very wealthy woman.”

Lalouette’s eyes widened when he heard that remark. To the best of Charley’s knowledge, her ownership of a portion of the proceeds from the saucer propulsion licensing deals had not been publicly reported. Apparently Artois had done his homework before he hired her.

“That comment is going to do wonderful things for my social life,” Charley shot back. “Listen, Mr. Artois. I’m a professional aviator. Flying is what I do. I’ll fly anything you people own, including spaceships, as long as the paychecks cash. Bounce one and I’m outta here.”

“Sounds fair enough,” Artois said dryly, and shoved off.

Charley Pine shrugged at Lalouette, one of those what-can-you-do? shrugs that are popular in New York, and together the two of them began the process of readying Jeanne d’Arc to receive fuel as the coast of California slid under them.

C
HAPTER
3

It was after midnight in Missouri when Egg Cantrell went looking for Rip. The assorted scientists were fast asleep in every bed in the house, on the couches and on cots in a large tent a rental firm had erected on the lawn.

In the hangar, Egg called Rip’s name, got a muffled answer and followed the sound. He found two feet sticking out from under his old pickup, the 1957 Dodge.

“What are you doing under there?”

“I’m about finished. Two more minutes.”

Egg’s hangar was built during World War II for the Army Air Corps; it and the nearby air traffic control tower where. Rip was sleeping these days were the only structures still remaining from the military past. Egg had jackhammered the concrete runways years ago and reseeded them in grass. Today the hangar contained an Aeronca Champ airplane, several old farm tractors, an Indian Chief motorcycle, a Model A Ford and an assortment of antique furniture and farm machinery he had acquired at estate sales, plus numerous items he just found interesting, such as an old printing press and Linotype he purchased when the county newspaper went digital.

This old Dodge wasn’t his everyday pickup, of course. He had paid two hundred dollars for it way back when, and amazingly, it still ran.

Rip crawled out from under the engine compartment, wiped his hands on a rag and said, “Okay. I’m ready to try it.”

“Try what?”

There was a piece of plywood in the bed of the truck. Rip picked up a corner and let Egg see the automobile batteries underneath arranged in rows. He put the plywood back in place, flashed a grin at his uncle and got into the pickup. The engine started right up.

“The problem is power,” he explained to his uncle as he revved the engine. His eyes gleamed. Egg hadn’t seen him this excited since Charley left, forty-four days ago. Egg had been counting. “The engine in the pickup doesn’t make enough of it,” Rip continued. “I use the generator to charge the batteries, then use the batteries to power the system.”

“What system?”

“Stand back a little and I’ll show you.”

Egg took several hesitant steps backward, and as he did the pickup lifted off the dirt floor of the hangar and rose several feet in the air, where it stopped. The nose was at least a foot higher than the rear corner of the truck, which was barely clear of the ground.

“Antigravity,” Rip said, laughing. “I built a small system like the one in the saucer. What do you think?”

“Seems as if you have a bit more work to do.”

“I haven’t got the lift lines in the right places. Turns out it’s a bit more difficult than I figured, but that’s the way it goes. Life is tougher than it looks, isn’t it? I’ll iron out the glitches.” He turned off the engine of the pickup, which had no effect on the vehicle’s position in the air. “Stand back and watch me move this thing around.”

Egg took several more steps backward, bumped into a tractor, and decided to take cover behind it. As he did so the truck silently moved aft toward the center of the hangar, still suspended at an odd angle above the dirt floor.

Rip tried to make the truck turn—and succeeded in slewing the nose around dangerously, almost hitting Egg’s Aeronca. He got it stopped just in time. Dust from the hangar floor swirled around.