They both shook their heads.
Tiona frowned, “I can’t get a reporter to listen to me if I won’t tell them my name or what the story is about. I’m worried we’re going to have to go ahead and use some of the words we’re afraid the NSA is screening for.”
“Yeah,” Nolan said disgustedly. I was able to get through to Bautista, one of the astronauts who seems to be friends with Abbott and White. But I’m sure I sounded like a total wacko, verbally dancing around what we’ve done and claiming I can’t talk about it because the,” he lifted his hands and made little finger quotes in the air, “government is listening.”
Eisner said, “Bautista? Sophie Bautista?!”
“Yes, why?”
Wide-eyed, Eisner said, “She’s my wife’s niece! The one I said I didn’t think could help us when we were talking about trying to reach NASA!”
Nolan narrowed his eyes at Eisner, “Do you know her well enough that she’d remember you? Or is she one of those distant relatives who’s going to think of you as a stranger?”
“Yes. I’ve met her at quite a few family gatherings. I know for the past several years she’s been in astronaut training and hoping to go up. Of course, I had no idea she knew the astronauts on Kadoma!”
Tiona said, “Well, try to give her a call. You’re our best shot.”
Before Eisner could dial, Nolan said, “Wait, let’s try and think our way through this conversation first. You’re absolutely right that it’s our best shot, we surely don’t want to blow it!”
The three of them spoke quietly for a while in an effort to plan Eisner’s talking points. Finally Eisner had the AI he was working with put through a call to Sophie. “Sophie? This is your uncle Bob Eisner. You know, your Aunt Mary’s husband.”
“Hi Uncle Bob. To what do I owe the pleasure?”
Hey, I’m going to be in Galveston tomorrow night. I’m really hoping you’re not so busy that you couldn’t drive down for a brief visit.”
“Really?” Sophie said evidencing her surprise that an aunt’s husband—uncle though he might be—wanted to visit.
“Yes, I’d really appreciate it.”
“Well… let me look at my calendar…”
They could all hear the reluctance in her voice and feel the high likelihood that she was about to beg off. Eisner said in the most serious tone he could produce, “I truly am very, very sorry to ask you to do this Sophie, but it’s extremely important.”
Sophie said nothing for a moment, as they all held their breath. Then, “Sure, I can make it.” She said, though not very enthusiastically. Where do you want to meet?”
“La Cerveza Roja,” Eisner said, naming a small bar near the port. “Can you get there by seven PM?”
“Yeah, I should be able to make that. If I can’t I’ll just…”
Eisner interrupted, “You won’t be able to call me. My AI fell in the pool and it isn’t working. I’ll wait in that bar all night if I have to. So if you can’t make it at seven, just show up when you can. This is incredibly important.” After a brief pause, he said, “I promise it’ll be worth your time. Really worth it.”
Sophie said, “Are you okay Uncle Bob? Do you need me to call Aunt Mary for you?”
Wincing at the thought that he’d laid it on too thick, Eisner said, “No, don’t call Mary; she doesn’t know what this is about. This is something to do with where my job and yours intersects.”
“That’s pretty cryptic,” Sophie said.
“Sorry, yeah, I know,” Eisner said, wondering how to convince her. “I really can’t tell you more until I see you in person. Will you trust me? Believe it or not, people’s lives actually depend on this meeting.”
“Okay,” Sophie said after a few moments passed. “I’ll be there.” She gave a worried little chuckle, “There isn’t someone sitting there, holding a gun to your head is there?”
“No, that’s not the kind of problem it is. But I really do appreciate your willingness to meet with me.”
***
Major Riker watched uncomfortably as General Harding read the riot act to the NSA group. It had been his turn to absorb the man’s wrath last night. As the man in charge of the radar systems, Riker had done his best to lead the team tracking the saucer. They’d successfully followed it up to where it had seemed to Riker that the saucer was safe. However, Harding had begun working to obtain control of some top secret anti-satellite weaponry.
Riker had found it hard to believe when the anti-sat weapons were released to Harding’s control. He’d followed developments with a sick stomach as Harding mapped out a plan to shoot what Riker now thought were homegrown geniuses out of the sky.
Harding had met some resistance from the anti-sat people, not on ethical grounds, but on technical grounds. At first, they insisted that the saucer was some kind of artifact of the tracking system because it certainly wasn’t a satellite. It was maintaining a steady altitude directly over Texas which was far too low to be an orbit. After Harding had bellowed sufficiently that they agreed to shoot at it even if it was an artifact, another problem cropped up. “Sir, all our tracking and guidance software is based on firing at something in orbit. As this object is not in an orbit, our AI lacks algorithms to intercept it.”
“Figure out a way!” Harding yelled.
Whether or not the ASAT people could have figured out a way to attack the stationary saucer became moot when the saucer began descending. It appeared to be falling toward the equator off the west coast of South America. Refining their data showed that it might actually hit or land in the Galapagos Islands. Whether it did or not remained uncertain as the Galapagos were below the horizon from all available US radar assets at the time. They were able to get a pass from a radar satellite about an hour after the saucer would have come down. That pass showed a low flying object moving at a high speed on a line from the Galapagos to Costa Rica or Nicaragua. Without continuity to their tracking they couldn’t know for sure whether it was the saucer, but as the NSA hadn’t caught any message traffic reporting the saucer in the Galapagos, it seemed likely. Another pass from a radar satellite an hour later didn’t see any likely returns.
Riker thought the saucer had gone to ground somewhere, but Harding didn’t accept that assessment. Harding had cursed the radar group the same way he was currently reaming the NSA people. Riker had no idea how the general thought they could have avoided losing the saucer when they had no radar assets that could visualize the area, but he did. He also made vague threats of consequences that would eventuate should they not find the saucer soon.
Riker had been rotating his people out for sleep and taking little catnaps himself. Harding occasionally became apoplectic over their lack of results, but with only occasional radar satellite passes they didn’t even have much data to review.
Apparently, the team sent to arrest Gettnor’s parents had been unsuccessful. Eisner’s wife and Marlowe’s parents had been arrested, but appeared to know nothing.
NSA had not intercepted any further message traffic about the saucer. Well, that wasn’t true; they had intercepted large quantities of garbage messages about UFOs here, there and everywhere.
Apparently the report frequency was about on par for those types of messages.
***
When night fell Tiona had the AI lift the saucer out of the trees and fly it north over Nicaragua and Honduras to the Caribbean. They kept a low speed and altitude hoping not to make enough noise to be noticed by the farmers below, yet to stay low enough that they wouldn’t show up on anyone’s radar. They also stayed low once they were out over the Caribbean, traveling at 200 mph like a small plane. On their course—low from Mexico to Texas—they might look like drug runners, but they weren’t going all the way to the coast and they didn’t think anyone would try to interdict them out in mid Caribbean.
Fifty miles off the coast they slowed and dropped into the water, doing the last segment of the trip as a slow-moving submarine. They waited until daylight to actually enter Galv
eston Bay and make their way to the port. That way they could see the ships on the surface of the water and avoid them.
They stopped in the shadows of the docks so it would be hard for someone above to see the saucer under the water. Then they took turns staying awake to make sure no boats ran over them. They considered just submerging deeply, but Tiona worried about how much pressure the saucer could take from the outside.
***
Once darkness had fallen, they brought the saucer back up to the surface in the shadows by the dock. Tiona moved it over to a ladder and lifted it high enough that the deck of the big disk was dry. Nolan and Eisner exited the airlock and started climbing the ladder.
The first order of business was to get some toiletries, changes of clothing, and trash bags. Though it was after six, a small department store that catered to sailors from the nearby docks remained open. They were able to resupply themselves and get clothes that were nominally Tiona’s size as well. Unfortunately, they could only get one of everything—and those the cheapest available—as their cash was running out.
Eisner went ahead to La Cerveza Roja while Nolan returned to the saucer with their bags of supplies. He tossed three rocks off the dock into the water over the saucer; then started climbing down the ladder. The stones drifted down through the water to clank onto the saucer, notifying Tiona of Nolan’s presence. As hoped, by the time he got down, Tiona had lifted the saucer back out of the water.
Nolan arrived at La Cerveza Roja to find Sophie already there. She was sitting across from Eisner in a booth, so Nolan sat down next to him.
Sophie frowned at Nolan, “Who’re you?” She still sounded concerned that her uncle might be under coercion.
Nolan kept his hands in plain view while Eisner said, “This is Nolan Marlowe. He’s one of my grad students.”
Sophie put out her hand, and Nolan shook it. Then she glanced back and forth from Eisner to Nolan and back. “So what? Should we order some dinner?” She glanced around, “This doesn’t strike me as a fine eating establishment.”
Nolan and Eisner winced; they were so short of cash that they could hardly afford to eat at La Cerveza Roja, or anywhere else. Eisner said, “What I’d like to do… is to take you to see something.”
Sophie frowned, “See what?” She said a suspicious tone in her voice.
“If I told you, you wouldn’t believe it. I’d really like to take you to it so you could see it before you started telling me I’m crazy.”
“Oh come on, Uncle Bob,” she said tilting her head disbelievingly, “I’m getting pretty uncomfortable with all this cloak and dagger stuff. I mean, you’re my uncle and all, but you’re acting pretty weird.”
“Okay,” Eisner said slowly. His eyes roamed the bar for a moment looking like he was trying to come up with some other way to do this. “We have a spacecraft, built on the results of some research from our lab.”
Sophie stared at him, looking for all the world like someone waiting for a punchline. Then she said slowly, “You can’t be serious!” Then, suspiciously, “This is the second time today I’ve heard something like this!”
Nolan lifted his hand, “That first time would’ve been me.”
Sophie’s eyes shifted incredulously back and forth from one to the other of the two men.
Eisner said, “I know it’s hard to believe. Can we tell you the story starting from the beginning? Then you’ll understand why we’re coming to you.”
Sophie chewed her lip, then said “Okay, but over dinner. I’m starving.”
Eisner lifted his hands, palms up, “We’d love to have dinner, but we don’t have enough money to pay for it.”
Sophie barked a laugh, “So you built a spaceship and then you ran out of money?! Now you need what? Me to buy you fuel?”
Eisner sighed, “We’ve got food back on the sau… spacecraft. Order yourself some dinner, and while you’re eating it we’ll tell you the story.”
Sophie stared at them for another minute, then said, “What the hell, I’ll buy you guys dinner. The entertainment value of this story should be worth a dinner at least, right?” She paused and got a distant look in her eye, “First though, I’m gonna call Aunt Mary. I’d like to hear from a blood relative that you haven’t gone off your rocker, okay?”
Eisner frowned, “I’d like it if you called her, but I’m afraid you won’t get through.”
“Why not?”
“It’s in the story.”
“Okaay,” Sophie said slowly. “We’re having dinner. Then I’m calling Aunt Mary. Then I’m deciding if I’ll go with you to see… whatever it is that you’ve got.”
While they were ordering dinner, Sophie studied her uncle and the handsome young man with him. She appreciated the fact that they both ordered cheap hamburgers. She’d feared that they would order something expensive with the cost on her tab.
Neither of them looked crazy, but a homemade spaceship?! She’d liked Uncle Bob when she’d met him at family gatherings in the past, but now she was realizing that she didn’t actually know him very well. Just because he was a relative didn’t mean he wasn’t psycho. Not even a blood relative, who knew what craziness might be in his family tree?
Sophie frowned at his grad student. It seemed to her that the likelihood that they were both crazy had to be much lower than the chance that only one of them was out of touch. On the other hand, history was filled with charismatic psychos who pulled other people into their web and made believers out of them.
Soon all of their orders had been placed. While they waited for their meals, Sophie listened with a mixture of fascination, disbelief, and apprehension to a story of a bizarre finding in the physics lab. They claimed that the young lady who’d actually made the finding wasn’t with them, but was somewhere else, waiting with their “spacecraft!”
“Wait a minute!” Sophie said as they described their thrust discs. “You’re not going to try to tell me you have some kind of ‘reactionless drive,’ are you?! No competent physicist would believe that one!” She only remembered after making this statement that Uncle Eisner had a PhD in physics.
Her uncle put up his hands to fend off her vehemence. “We don’t believe that it’s reactionless, no. Our working theory is that it acts on dark matter, pulling it in one side and ejecting it on the other, kind of like a jet engine.”
Sophie rolled her eyes, “Nothing interacts with dark matter! That little fact alone makes this theory pretty hard to swallow!”
Eisner looked at her with sad puppy-dog eyes, “I would have reacted the same way before I saw it happen. This is why we wanted to take you to see it before we tried to convince you with an oral presentation. The fact of the matter is that these discs do produce thrust somehow.” He shrugged, “Maybe it has nothing to do with dark matter, but they do produce thrust!”
Sophie studied him. He seemed levelheaded and completely serious. Nothing wild eyed about him. “This is all pretty damned hard to believe…” she said, shaking her head. “You’ve ruled out magnetic and electrical field interactions?”
“Sophie,” he said in a frustrated tone, “we’ve been to space! We’d like to take you to space!” He paused for a second, “Yes we’ve ruled out magnetic and electric field interactions, but even if we hadn’t, whatever this is has provided us enough thrust to get far beyond the Kármán line!”
Sophie stared at them for a moment, eyes flickering back and forth from one to the other. “You haven’t just,” she made finger quotes, “built a spaceship? You’ve actually taken it up to orbit?!”
Nolan said, “Not an orbit. Stationary over Texas at 200 kilometers of altitude.”
Sophie snorted, “You’re right, that’s not an orbit. You’d fall right out of the sky!”
“Not if you have thrusters holding you up,” Nolan said, as if stating the obvious.
Sophie rolled her eyes, “Okay, let’s grant that you have this incredible technology. What do you need me for?”
Her uncle launched into a story about how,
on their first ride in the spaceship, helicopters surrounded them. The story continued with them being forced to the ground and being told that they had to allow boarders. There were vague threats about national security, people who thought they had alien technology, and implications that the technology would be taken away from them and suppressed for military use only!
Even more unbelievably, they claimed to have escaped this situation by launching their craft into space. Oh, and of course some passing fighter jets fired air to air missiles at them!
Then, the big baddies in some stealthy, obscure part of the government started intercepting all of their communications and arresting their relatives. They couldn’t access their financial accounts for fear of giving away their locations. They had fled to Central America and contacted her on an anonymous rental AI that they paid for with actual cash! The entire story was simply beyond belief! Sophie threw up her hands, “Why me?!”
“We need publicity so they won’t sweep this under the rug.”
“So?! Land it at the Super Bowl.”
“The saucer’s not impervious to being shot out of the sky if it looks like it’s about to commit a terrorist act. Trying to land at the Super Bowl would likely get us that kind of attention.”
Sophie’s eyes bugged out, “Saucer?!You’re not going to try to tell me you built a ‘flying saucer,’ are you?”
Eisner said patiently, “The thrust effect works best when the membranes are disk shaped, remember? So yes, it looks like a saucer.”
She rolled her eyes, then shrugged, “So, land your saucer somewhere else very public. Like say, Central Park in New York?”
“Or,” Eisner said, then paused. He continued, “We take it to Kadoma and rescue your friends Abbott and White.”
Sophie’s eyes widened, could that really be possible?! No! It’s just wishful thinking! She closed her eyes. NASA was making hopeful noises, but she knew that they had written her two friends off. If, for some reason, Bellerphon’s engines didn’t crap out it might make it back to earth. But, Bellerphon’s engines were similar enough to the big motor that had been trying to change Kadoma’s orbit that none of the engineers actually thought there was any chance that Bellerphon’s engines wouldn’t fail.
Tiona_a sequel to Vaz Page 24