Night of the Saucers

by Eando Binder

  Table of Contents

  Copyright Information

  Dedication

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Copyright Information

  Copyright © 1971 by Otto O. Binder.

  All rights reserved.

  Dedication

  To Ione for labors beyond the call of duty.

  Chapter 1

  “…and in conclusion,” Thane Smith typed, “the analysis of these current reports of alleged flying saucers points out clearly how easily people are misled when they sight something odd in the sky. Genuine UFO’s have yet to be proven to exist and the weight of evidence—or lack of it—indicates they are myths, not machines.”

  Thane sat back, satisfied. A good article. He had pointed out how one sighting could have been merely a high-flying jet in the sunset mists, giving the effect of a wingless craft; how another had most likely been the planet Venus, suddenly appearing in all its brilliant splendor from behind a hill as a man drove along in his car; how others could be due to a high-altitude weather balloon buffeted by winds, a flock of birds glinting in the moonlight, an earth satellite darting through the stars. Anything but the UFO that the excited and untrained observers thought they saw.

  One case had been hard to explain. The observer claimed he had seen a silvery disk spin out of the night sky, perform an impossible right-angle turn, come to a dead halt in midair, then drop with a falling-leaf motion to the ground, only to suddenly shoot away at fantastic speed. All in utter, eerie silence.

  Thane had used weather data for that evening to prove that an inversion—a layer of cold air over warm—existed. Their interface could act as a mirror, reflecting lighted objects on the ground so that they appeared to be suspended in the air. The observer, he had concluded, had seen a motorcyclist’s single headlight as he turned a corner somewhere below, with all other movements being distortions of the rippling inversion-mirror, magnified into breathtaking “maneuvers” in the sky.

  Glancing out of the window into the dusk, Thane saw a silvery disk in the north spin down toward his cabin. It was of the classical saucer or disk shape, glowing in clear-cut detail.

  Calmly, Thane arose and stepped from the door, watching the object perform an amazing ninety-degree turn and come to a dead halt in midair, after which it dropped slowly in a falling-leaf motion and landed near the shed behind his cabin. All in utter, eerie silence.

  Thane lit a cigarette and took a contented drag as he saw the saucer glide underneath the shed’s overhang to disappear within. A moment later a feminine figure emerged from the shed and waved cheerily.

  “Hi, Earthman,” she called.

  “Hi, other-world girl,” Thane returned in the same bantering tone. “What’s the news from outer space?”

  “Nothing much,” she said, walking toward the cabin. “Just the usual emptiness. But the EM-drive works beautifully, Thane, since we fixed it.”

  As she approached, pulling off a cap, red hair tumbled to her shoulders, contrasting with her almost alabaster white skin, which also set off her smoldering indigo eyes.

  “You know, Thane said musingly, “in this light you don’t look like an Earth-girl at all, Miribel. You’re far too beautiful—like a goddess from another world.”

  “What a romantic greeting,” the girl smiled. Reaching Thane, she threw herself into his arms. When they disengaged after a long moment, Thane led her into the cabin by the hand.

  “Did you finish your article?” she asked.

  Thane nodded. “I practically proved that flying saucers like we have,” he said with a straight face, “simply do not exist.”

  “Do tell,” Miribel smiled.

  “And that girls from other planets, like you, are sheer imagination. That only kooks see UFO’s and anyone believing in saucers is a nut. And…”

  “Please,” Miribel laughed. Thane could no longer keep a straight face and joined her.

  “Attention, Special Agent Thane Smith!”

  The booming mental voice broke into their peals of laughter, instantly sobering them.

  “This is Thalkon calling!”

  “Father sounds serious,” Miribel breathed.

  “Special Agent Smith acknowledging,” said Thane aloud, knowing that his thoughts would also be beamed into space by the ingenious psy-unit implanted in his brain.

  Thalkon’s telepathic voice boomed again in their brains. “An emergency has arisen affecting Earth’s fate. A council has been set for one hour from now. Come to the orbiting station. Bring Miribel.”

  “We’ll be there, Thalkon,” Thane said. A faint click signified that their ESP contact was then broken.

  The man of Earth and his star-born wife stared at each other.

  “Something new has come up, apparently,” Thane said soberly. “I hope, anyway.”

  “Itching for action?” Miribel asked shrewdly.

  Thane didn’t try to deny it. He still remembered vividly how he had been swept up by events and had become a key figure in the deadly battle between the Vigilantes and Morlians. It had been exciting, exhilarating beyond any adventure known on Earth. The Morlians had nearly brought about Earth’s doom in a plot covering seventy-five years, and Thane had been instrumental in carving out their defeat.

  Since then, the world had been quiet—in galactic terms. No other menace had arisen. But now Thalkon’s emergency call might mean otherwise.

  Thane bustled at his desk, bundling up the sheets of his article. “We’ll mail this on our way,” he said. “It goes to Everyday magazine. They ordered it as a civic duty, believing it important to help wipe out such superstitions as believing in flying saucers.”

  He smiled briefly, then weighed the package and pasted on the stamps. Through the open door into the bedroom, Thane could see Miribel at her dressing table, applying lipstick, her hair already combed neatly.

  “The eternal and galactic feminine,” Thane murmured, half-amused.

  “Why should women,” Miribel shot back, “be any different on a faraway world? Human women, that is.” Thane thanked the stars that there were women, as human as any on Earth, out among the stars on at least half the habitable worlds. It would be a pretty unappealing universe if all other planets held only monster-men and Frankenstein women, completely alien to mankind.

  Carefully locking their isolated woodland cabin, Thane turned and strode with Miribel to the shed. There was nothing to be seen in the large space once used to hold cordwood, tools, and animal stalls.

  Thane pressed a knot in a post, concealing a hidden switch. A shimmering violet glow sprang forth, in the outline of a saucer-shaped ship. It solidified in the next moment as the silvery disk Miribel had arrived in.

  The saucer was typical of the many thousands reported all over earth, shaped like two pie plates stuck together. It was twenty feet wide and seven feet high, accommodating only two people. The hatchway was open and, after they stepped in, it swung shut behind them, blending into the wall.

  “I still marvel at your cold welding process,” Thane said staring at the blank wall. “Your doors shut so tightly you can neve
r see where they are.”

  Miribel shrugged. “If the door edges weren’t specially treated to bind with the frame in the wall, we wouldn’t have the completely sealed and leak proof hull around us that we need in space,” she said nonchalantly.

  “Super-technology,” grunted Thane. He had that annoying feeling again that he was a bushman associating with ultra-civilized beings. But he put it out of his mind and sat at the controls.

  “We have time so let me practice my saucer piloting,” he said. And that too was a marvel. A brass ball hung without support within a globe of pulsing energy. He let the saucer glide out of the shed. Then, as his hand grasped the ball and moved it upward slightly, the saucer leaped soundlessly from the ground and shot straight up. It didn’t accelerate, as all earthly vehicles, even rockets, must, the saucer simply shot from zero speed to supersonic speed in one instant.

  “No grip of gravity, no inertia, no air-drag,” said Thane, still impressed after dozens of saucer rides. “No, don’t tell me how it’s done. I wouldn’t understand.” Miribel reached over from her seat to stroke his hair. “Poor backward Earthman,” she soothed in over-sweet tones. “His ego is bruised.” Her voice changed. “But I’ve told you over and over, my Terrific Terran, that the Earth brain has the full potential of ours. You just don’t have the lifetime of development and training we’ve had in advanced science and technology.”

  She squeezed his arm. “And when it comes to being a man, you would be a man’s man even on my world.”

  “But a dumb one,” Thane growled, still caught by inferiority feelings.

  “Ugh, ugh,” Miribel agreed, tapping her chest. “Me Jane, you Tarzan.”

  That got a chuckle out of Thane and broke his mood. “All right, you Vega vixen. So I’m as good as any man in the cosmos, all two quadrillion of them on three million worlds.”

  “You saved your world once, Thane,” Miribel said quietly. “Very few other men in the universe can say that.”

  “Flattery will get you nowhere,” Thane said. But pride welled up through his six-foot-two frame like a tide. Thalkon had said, after all, that without Thane’s special aid, the Morlians might not have been crushed for many more years—if ever.

  World-saver Smith… he broke off the thought wryly before it overwhelmed him with exaggerated importance. He had been the key man at the key time only through destiny’s doings, not his own.

  Chapter 2

  Thane moved the brass ball horizontally, and, obediently, the saucer moved over woodlands below at a slow speed. Speed was controlled by how hard he squeezed the brass ball, nothing more.

  When the outskirts of Tanglewood came into view, Thane reached over and snapped on a separate switch for the anti-visio unit. A violet glow shimmered around them and the saucer turned hazy in their eyes, while their own forms looked ghostly. To anyone below, they were now completely invisible.

  Delicately handling the brass ball control, Thane brought the unseen saucer down to street level. The few passing people and cars took no notice. When the saucer hung directly over a mailbox, a mechanical arm reached out of the bottom and dropped a big envelope into the slot deftly.

  “Little does anyone know,” Thane grinned, “that I just mailed my article to Everyday magazine.”

  Then, gripping the brass ball tightly, he moved it upward. In response, the saucer catapulted skyward at a speed no airplane could ever match. Thane then switched off the anti-visio unit.

  “If anyone sees us now,” he said, “we’ll only be the usual starlike object moving as stars never do. We’ll just be another unbelieved UFO report.” He grimaced. “Your Galactic Vigilante ships have been around earth since the dawn of history, and mankind still hasn’t caught on.”

  “That’s because we’ve made it our business,” Miribel said softly, “to remain ‘legends,’ showing our craft as little as possible and never contacting your people directly.”

  “Do you really think,” Thane wondered, “that if you openly landed on the White House lawn and announced yourself to the world, our civilization would suffer?”

  “It happened several times on other worlds,” Miribel nodded firmly. “That was in the early days of the Galactic Vigilantes, when they didn’t realize the consequences. The moment the native people knew that a race of vastly superior technology existed, a worldwide trauma took place and their society slowly disintegrated.”

  Thane grunted.

  “The Vigilantes tried, of course,” Miribel went on, “to uplift the primitive worlds they had visited, by giving them scientific know-how a thousand years ahead. That didn’t work either. Their economic systems went into a turmoil and collapsed.”

  “I can see that,” Thane mused. “If you come down to Earth and gave us the blueprint for the miraculous electromagnetic drive of your saucers, the whole aircraft industry would blow up overnight.”

  “Also all current science research on Earth,” Miribel added, “would come to a halt. Scientists would fumble haltingly, trying to understand principles a thousand years ahead, with no conception of the intervening step-by-step research that led to such principles.

  “On one world,” Miribel reflected, a sad look in her eyes, “the natives had been in the steam era, such as on eighteenth century Earth. When the Vigilantes helped them build flying saucer factories, many of the delighted people jumped in them and flew out into space—never to return. You see, they didn’t know the least thing about astronautics and couldn’t even make a landing on any other planet or moon. Or back on their home planet. They simply kept on sailing out into space, forever.”

  Thane shuddered. “You win. Each world must painstakingly make haste slowly. Learn by its own mistakes. Reach its goals through experience.”

  “There is no short-cut,” Miribel emphasized. “And that is why it is now a strict galactic rule that no advanced world must ever interfere in a more primitive world’s affairs, no matter how fine their motives are. Only disaster can result.” She smiled, “Lecture over, Thane dear.”

  “Okay, teacher,” Thane said wincingly. At times it was not easy to have a wife who had more scientific know-how in the lower right corner of her cerebrum than he had in his whole brain. He shook off his momentary depression and turned back to piloting.

  High above earth, in the black vault of space, Thane saw a tiny star blink into being and grow larger: the Vigilante space station. To swing eastward and match its orbital velocity, Thane moved the brass ball in that direction. Smoothly, unerringly, the saucer slid into the groove, zooming up to the speed of five miles per second without the slightest wrench or wavering.

  Thane matched the speed of the space station when it enlarged into a visible structure an incredible two miles wide, hovering 1000 miles above unsuspecting Earth.

  Here had been the headquarters of the Earth contingent of the Galactic Vigilantes for countless centuries. From here had sped forth the scout saucers, the domed-disk warships, the cigar-shaped recon craft, that had given rise to all the UFO reports. These craft had warded off danger for Earth from predator worlds. Earth, defenseless prey to maverick worlds who knew no cosmic morals, had been protected from a variety of conquests and dooms a horrifying two hundred times in the past two million years of mankind’s rise on earth. Once every five hundred years on the average. Brain-rocking, incredible. But a plain fact of galactic life.

  Like a flea approaching an elephant, their tiny saucer angled in toward the immensity of the vigilante space station. But no hatchway or entrance of any kind opened up, as Thane arrowed down toward its apex.

  “Ready for vibro-penetration,” Thane said. “On mark zero of the countdown. Five… four… three… two… one… ZERO.”

  Miribel was ready and pulled a lever. Thane felt only a peculiar effect as if all his muscles were loosening up. A faint hum rose rapidly out of his hearing range into a silent whine. Meet
ing the hull of the space station, their saucer simply went through like a ghost walking through walls.

  “Hard on the nerves,” Thane mumbled, “this way of ‘oozing’ through solid steel. Our saucer’s molecular vibrational rate was changed to extreme high-frequency and we went through like a burst of X-rays, or like sand through a sieve.” He repeated what Miribel had told him many times. “That’s good enough for me.”

  Miribel kept silent but Thane could see by her expression how woefully inadequate this oversimplified explanation was. But Thane did not attempt, for his own peace of mind, to fully understand any of the fantastically advanced scientific laws by which Vigilante technology worked. Call it magic and let it go at that. That way he could sleep nights.

  Inside the cyclopean space station, their saucer landed lightly on a wide area where many other craft were parked. Then a small flying platform wafted down to them, and they stepped onto it. At a psy-command from Miribel, the platform floated away and down into a roofless room.

  A tall uniformed man with long yellow hair and a face lined by the burdens of responsibility arose from his desk. Thalkon, supreme chief of all Galactic Vigilante forces of the Earth sector.

  Thalkon’s grip was warm as he shook Thane’s hand. “Welcome, Special Agent Smith. It has been too long since we last met up here to celebrate the downfall of Morlian power.”

  Thalkon turned to embrace his daughter tenderly. “Is the Earthman still beating you as you reported?”

  Thane caught a twinkle in his father-in-law’s eye. “Yes,” Miribel said solemnly. “I hate him for it. He’s been beating me in analogue chess regularly. And I taught him the game.”

  “A good mind,” Thalkon nodded. “One we are glad to have on our side—especially now.” His face turned grim. “The conference is about to convene.”

  A door slid open silently, and a dozen uniformed men stepped in, each with the same grim look. They positioned themselves around a conference table with Thalkon at the head, Thane and Miribel at either side. “Fellow Vigilantes,” Thalkon began slowly. “For some seventy-five Earth-years, we battled the Morlians and finally defeated their merciless plot to ‘steal’ all Earth-minds and suction them, as disembodied entities, into a fantastic bio-computer that would have given them rule of the universe.”