Saucer: The Conquest

by Coonts, Stephen

  THE DISCUSSION THAT EVENING IN THE MESS HALL was curiously antiseptic, Newton thought. During dinner the scientists had been animated, filled to overflowing with wonder and awe at the things they had seen that day. They chattered loudly, rudely interrupted each other and talked when no one was listening. When the mess trays were cleared away and mugs of coffee distributed by soldiers in aprons, the senior man pulled out a message pad and pencil and laid them on the table before him. The conversation died there.

  “What should we tell Washington?” he asked, all business.

  His colleagues were tongue-tied. None was ready to commit his ideas to paper and be held accountable by his professional peers into all eternity. “We don’t know enough,” Fred muttered. He was the unofficial spokesman, it seemed to young Newton, who sat in one corner watching and listening.

  Chadwick had said nothing during dinner. As a young man he had learned the truth of the old adage that learning occurs when one’s mouth is shut. He had listened carefully to all the comments, dismissing most, and collected the wisdom of those who had a bit to offer.

  He had no intention of opening his mouth, so he was startled when the senior man said sharply, “Chadwick, you were scurrying around inside that saucer today like a starving mouse. What do you think?”

  Young Newton pondered his answer. Finally he said cautiously, “I don’t think the Germans made it.”

  “Well, fiddlesticks! I think we can all agree on that.” The senior man surveyed the faces around the table over the top of his glasses. “Can’t we?”

  “Maybe the swastika burned off when it entered the atmosphere,” some spoilsport suggested.

  They wrangled all evening. At ten o’clock the senior man left, thoroughly disgusted, and trekked through the Nevada night to the radio tent. There he wrote the report to Washington. He read it through, crossed out a sentence in the middle and corrected the grammar. Finally he signed the form and handed it to the radio clerk to encode. He took solace from the fact that the message was classified and would never, ever, be read by his faculty colleagues at the university. He paused to light his pipe as the clerk read his composition.

  “Can you make that out?” he asked gruffly.

  The clerk looked at him with wide eyes. “Seems clear enough, sir.”

  The senior scientist left the tent in a cloud of tobacco smoke.

  This is the message the encryption clerk read:

  “Team spent day examining the flying saucer, which appears to be a spaceship manufactured upon another planet, undoubtedly in another solar system, by a highly advanced civilization using industrial processes unknown on earth. Appears to be powered by some form of atomic energy. No weapons found. Recommend that extensive, thorough examination continue on a semipermanent basis. Knowledge to be gained will revolutionize every scientific field.”

  The encryption clerk whistled in amazement and went to work with the code book.

  IN THE DARKNESS OUTSIDE THE SLEEPING TENT, NEWTON Chadwick sat in the sand and fingered the headband he had “borrowed” from the saucer. The magic wasn’t in the headband, which was merely a fabric that contained thousands of tiny wires, each thinner than a human hair. This headband, Newton believed, was the way the pilot of the saucer communicated with the electronic brain of the machine. That electronic brain was the heart of the saucer. True, there was a nuclear reactor that used heat in a strange electrolysis process to crack water into its constituent parts. The hydrogen was then burned in the rockets. And there was a huge ring around the bottom of the ship that Newton suspected was used to modulate the planet’s gravitational field in some manner.

  Yet the crown jewel of the saucer was the artificial brain that talked to his brain through this headband. This headband proved that the crew of the saucer had brains very similar to ours. And there was more: Inside that device, Newton suspected, was some record of the scientific and technical knowledge that the saucer’s makers had used to build it. This record was the library housing the accumulated knowledge of an advanced civilization, and it was there for the man with the wit and brains to mine it.

  These older men, scientists and engineers—he had listened carefully to their comments all evening. They still didn’t understand the significance of the electronic brain, nor the headband. One reason was that they had not powered up the saucer. The other was that Newton had pocketed every headband he found, all four of them.

  Given enough time, they would get a glimmer of the truth. They certainly weren’t fools, even if they were conventional thinkers.

  Actually there were at least three electronic brains that Newton had found. He thought about them now, wondering how so much information could be packaged into such small devices. Amazingly, they weighed about eight pounds each and were no larger than a shoe box.

  He was sitting there speculating about how they might work when a soldier drove up in a jeep and rushed into the tent. In a few moments he heard the senior man swear a foul oath.

  “Damnation!” he exclaimed to his colleagues. “Washington refuses to allow further access to the saucer. They want it sealed immediately. We are to return to Florida tomorrow.”

  Newton Chadwick leaped to his feet. He stuffed the headband into a pocket as he considered.

  Inside the tent Fred declared, “They’ve lost their nerve. I was afraid of that.”

  There was a jeep parked next to the one the soldier had just driven up, one that had been provided for the use of the senior man. Chadwick walked over and looked in the ignition. The key was there. He hopped in, started the engine, popped the clutch and fed gas.

  IT WASN’T UNTIL AFTER BREAKFAST, AS THE SCIENTISTS packed, that anyone missed young Chadwick. A search was mounted, and by midmorning it was learned that he visited the saucer about two that morning. He had displayed his badge and was admitted by the sentries, who had not been told to deny entry to badge-holders. Chadwick was inside for only thirty minutes, then drove away in an army jeep.

  Despite the protests of the senior scientist, the army officer in charge sealed the saucer and refused to allow further entry, so no one knew what Chadwick had done inside it, if anything. Neither Chadwick nor the jeep could be found. Not that anyone looked very hard. The very existence of the saucer was a tightly held military secret, and the circle of persons with access to that information was very small.

  Back in Florida the scientists who had visited the saucer were debriefed by FBI agents. They would be prosecuted, they were told, if they ever discussed the existence of the saucer or anything they had learned about it with any person not authorized to have access to that information. When the senior man asked who had access, he was told, “No one.”

  It was all extremely frustrating. The senior man retired two years after he saw the saucer. He wrote a treatise about it that his daughter thought was fiction. After his death from a heart attack, she tossed the manuscript into the trash.

  The other scientists who had gone inside the saucer that day in the desert were also forced to get on with their lives while living with the memory of what they had seen. The Age of the Saucer that they had hoped for didn’t arrive. Like the senior man, they too aged and died one by one, bitter and frustrated.

  As the seasons came and went and the years slipped past, the saucer they had seen in the Nevada desert sat undisturbed in its sealed hangar.

  1

  OCTOBER 2004, MISSOURI

  THE SLEEK LITTLE PLANE ZIPPED IN LOW AND FAST, dropping below the treetops as it flew along the runway just a few feet above the ground; then the nose pointed skyward and the plane rolled swiftly around its horizontal axis once … twice … three times.

  Rip Cantrell was the pilot. The alternating sunny blue sky and colorful earth were almost a blur as the plane whipped around. He centered the stick and the plane stopped whirling.

  Up he went higher and higher into the sky, then gently lowered the nose and let the bird accelerate. The plane was an Extra 300L, a two-place aerobatic plane with two seats arranged in
tandem. The pilot sat in the rear seat; today the front one was empty.

  With the airspeed rapidly building, Rip brought the stick back smoothly. The increasing Gs mashed him down into the seat. Fighting the increased weight of his helmet and visor, he steadied at four Gs as the nose climbed toward the zenith. Throwing his head back, he could see the ground come into view as the plane became inverted at the top of the loop. He backed off on the G to keep the loop oval. The engine was pulling nicely, the ground beginning to fill the windscreen, so as the airspeed increased, he eased the G back on. The nose dropped until the Extra was plunging straight down.

  Here Rip pushed the stick forward, eased back on the throttle and slammed the stick sideways. The plane rolled vigorously as it accelerated straight down in a wild corkscrew motion. The controls are incredibly sensitive, he thought, marveling at the plane’s responsiveness to the slightest displacement of stick or rudder.

  A glance at the altimeter, center the stick and pull some more, lifting that nose toward the horizon. The Gs were intense now; he was pulling almost six. He fought to keep his head up and blinked mightily to keep the sweat running down his forehead from blinding him. In seconds the plane was level. Rip eased off on the G and pulled the throttle back to idle.

  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!

  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.