Saucer s-1

by Stephen Coonts

  'Charley shot those men, boom, boom, boom.'

  'Does that bother you?'

  'Maybe I should have let the bastards have the saucer, got Charley out of there somehow.'

  Egg snorted. 'You can't go through life as a doormat, kid. You did the right thing.'

  'So tell me about what's been happening here.'

  'Rip, I don't even know where to start. The saucer is still a media event. The television only does three or four hours of coverage a day now, the soaps and talk shows are back on, but the whole country is buzzing. The media is hunting desperately for you and Charley. This is your fifteen minutes of fame.'

  'They can have it. I don't do interviews.'

  'You may ultimately have to. You own the saucer.'

  Rip gaped at Egg. 'You mean legally?'

  'Wellstar Petroleum has given you a bill of sale for the saucer in return for an interest in the propulsion technology. Tomorrow morning — no, this morning — your Uncle Olie is filing a lawsuit in federal court in Washington. We're asking the court for a temporary injunction against the federal government, a cease-and-desist order. Of course, there are no guarantees, but Olie thinks we have a good chance.'

  Rip whistled softly.

  'I'd like to take Charley to Washington with me in a few days, whenever they schedule the hearing. She'll make a great witness.'

  'She needs rest.'

  'I understand. I'll take care of her. For the next few weeks you must keep the saucer hidden where no one can find it. And you stay out of sight.'

  After a moment's thought Rip said, I'll go home. The hired men won't tell anyone I'm there. They've worked for us over twenty years, have lived in tenant houses on the place ever since Dad died. They're loyal friends.'

  'Hide the saucer so it can't be found.'

  'I've been thinking about that.'

  Egg stood. 'Can you fly out of here before the sun comes up?'

  'I just talk to the computer, and it does the flying.'

  'We'd better get you on your way. Every minute that ship sits here is another chance for the wrong people to find it.'

  'Thanks, Egg.'

  I'll take care of Charley, Rip. And Olie will take care of the government. You stay hidden.'

  Rip hugged his uncle. 'I love you, Egg.'

  'I love you too, Ripper. Now come on. I'll help you fill up the saucer.'

  'Do you have a pocket knife I can borrow?'

  Egg handed him the one from his pocket.

  'Some fishhooks and matches?'

  'In the hangar. Take what you want.'

  They were standing with hands in their pockets listening to water running into the saucer's tank when Rip asked, 'You said Wellstar retained an interest in the propulsion technology. Does that mean we have to keep the saucer?'

  Egg hesitated before answering. 'Not necessarily. Why do you ask?'

  'I helped kill a man because of the saucer. He got what he deserved and I'm not sorry I did it, but I don't want to have to do it again.'

  'What do you suggest?'

  'I want the saucer, yet I don't want to have to kill people to keep it. I don't want it that much.'

  'You risked your life to get it back from Hedrick.'

  'I risked my life to get Charley back. Okay, okay — and the saucer. But everyone born has to die. Dying is the easy part. Killing — that is something else.'

  Not a hint of the events in Australia at Hedrick's station ever reached the press. Which was, perhaps, a good thing: The press splashed the news of Olie Cantrell's lawsuit naming the president and Bombing Joe De Laurio as defendants on front pages all over the nation.

  In Missouri, Egg enlisted the help of the county sheriff to sneak through the press mob besieging his gate. Charley was X-rayed at a local clinic. The doctor said she had two cracked ribs and a badly bruised shoulder. The feeling in her arm and hand had returned, but the deltoid muscle was so sore she couldn't lift her arm. The doctor prescribed ice packs to combat the swelling and a sling for a few days.

  Egg and Charley didn't return to the farm. They hit the road for Washington.

  Charley found that she liked Egg a lot. As Rip had promised, he was extraordinarily smart, with a wit and personality to match. After her adventures in Australia she found Egg's company pleasant and relaxing. Part of the reason, she suspected, was that Egg liked to talk about Rip. As the pickup rolled through the American countryside, he told her the family history and every anecdote about Rip that he could remember.

  Rip, Rip, Rip, she couldn't hear enough about him. Just the sound of his name brought a smile to her face.

  Oh, it was pleasant driving through America on a hazy late-summer day with the windows down, the corn high, farmers making hay, and road crews laying hot asphalt. Egg and Charley talked and talked as the radio broadcast a ball game and the miles rolled by.

  Two days after they left Missouri, Egg and Charley came to rest in an expensive New York City hotel with an excellent security system. 'We guarantee privacy, Mr. Cantrell,' the manager promised. 'Heads of state pick this hotel for their New York visits for that very reason. The press wouldn't dare.'

  They wound up with a two-bedroom corner suite on the eighteenth floor.

  'Uncle Egg, let's go dutch. I have some money. Hedrick threw some chump change at me.' She extracted a wad of bills from a pocket.

  Egg waved her money away. 'Don't worry. I drive a pickup and live on a Missouri farm because I want to, not because I have to. Now go put some ice on your arm while I make telephone calls. We'll have some clothes brought over, you can choose several outfits. Jeans won't do where we're going. And I'll see if I can make a hair appointment for you here in the hotel.'

  'That would be fantastic,' said Charlotte Pine. I'd like to feel like a woman again.'

  That evening Charley and Egg had an invited guest.

  Charley opened the door on his knock. 'Professor Soldi, please come in.'

  The archaeologist stood there for a second looking at Charley with a furrowed brow. With her new hairdo and new clothes she felt like a new woman and looked like one.

  'Ms. Pine, I despaired of ever seeing you again.'

  She smiled broadly and closed the door behind him.

  After Charley, the professor, and Egg Cantrell had discussed the saucer situation for fifteen minutes or so, Egg said, 'I invited you to meet with us, Professor, because I have been very impressed with your grasp of the importance of the saucer. I certainly haven't been glued to the television, but I've seen several of your interviews. Your theories are well thought out and provocative.'

  Soldi bowed his head a fraction of an inch. 'Thank you.'

  Egg continued, 'I wanted you to be the first to know that your theories about the saucer are absolutely correct in every major detail.'

  The archaeologist sat openmouthed, at a loss for words.

  Egg got out his biggest suitcase and opened it carefully. From it he took a bundle wrapped in bubble wrap. 'This computer was in the saucer. It's the one Hedrick's men partially disassembled in the Sahara.'

  'Oh, yes,' Soldi said.

  Charley looked surprised. 'I had forgotten all about it.'

  'Rip and I removed it from the saucer at my farm in Missouri the first afternoon you were there, before Hedrick arrived. While you were napping we experimented with the computer, learned some extraordinary things, and decided to remove it from the saucer so I could study it at length.'

  Charley shook her head. 'I was too busy to notice that it was no longer in the saucer.'

  'I managed to determine the proper wattage and voltage to run the computer and put together a transformer so that we can power the computer even when it is out of the saucer.' Egg removed the transformer from the suitcase, plugged a power cord into a wall socket, then plugged another cord into the computer. 'I have also incorporated a surge protector to buffer voltage surges.'

  From the suitcase he removed the headband, the wire of which was already attached to the computer.

  'This
past week I devoted three days to this computer.' Egg chose his words with care. 'I believe there is enough information stored on this computer to keep a large research university's faculty fully employed for a century. I haven't even scratched the surface.'

  Soldi pursed his lips thoughtfully as he eyed the machine. He laid fingertips on it.

  'As you will see, Professor, the main pathway offers you a dozen choices. Rip and I chose the first one, which turned out to be a maintenance and operations manual for the saucer.'

  Charley's eyebrows rose. 'Rip never mentioned this computer to me.'

  Egg grinned. 'Rip is discretion personified.'

  'Learned it from you, apparently,' Charley shot back.

  'The second pathway is the one I want you to take this evening, Professor,' Egg said. 'That is the path that fascinated me, that absorbed my every thought for three days. It is my hope that in a few months I will be able to devote the rest of my life to exploring that pathway.'

  'And the other paths?' Soldi asked.

  'I haven't had the time to journey down them. For all I know they are even more compelling than the second one. still, tonight I ask you to take the second pathway. It proved to me that your theories were correct. I wanted you to personally experience this… moment?

  'I will do as you ask,' Soldi promised.

  Egg looked at the headband. 'This headband is the way you communicate with the computer. Merely move along the pathway you choose, approach any selection that interests you.'

  Soldi nodded.

  'I found that it helps if I make myself comfortable and relax. You will not go to sleep.'

  Soldi nodded again, with just a hint of impatience.

  Egg adjusted the headband over the archaeologist's head.

  Soldi leaned his head against the back of the couch. His eyes remained open but unfocused.

  After about a half minute, Charley rose from her chair and went to stand by the window, where she could look out at the lights of Manhattan. Egg joined her.

  'What is on the second pathway?' she asked.

  'An encyclopedia. I suspect that it covers everything the makers of the saucer knew about the universe.'

  'Are the saucer people our ancestors?'

  'At this point the evidence is circumstantial. In all probability… yes.'

  After she had thought about that for a moment, Charley said, 'My father had a flip comment that comes to mind. He said that the world is full of idiots, an indisputable scientific fact that proves that evolution is bunk.'

  Egg chuckled. 'It isn't bunk, but it's an extremely complex process, and it takes place over enormous stretches of time. The human mind just cannot fathom time in the quantities available to Mother Nature.'

  Charley turned to check Soldi. His eyes were closed now.

  'Did the saucer people discover the Grand Unified Theory, the theory of everything?'

  'Yes. They knew how all of the forces in the universe are related, which is why they could design and build the antigravity system on the saucer. It is a practical application of that knowledge.'

  Charley Pine turned back to the window glass and rested her forehead against it.

  After two hours, Egg removed the computer headband from Soldi's head. The archaeologist blinked repeatedly and scrutinized his surroundings. He reached for the coffee table before him, caressed it with his hands, apparently reassuring himself of the solidity of the real world. Then he touched the saucer's computer, ran his fingertips across it, laid both hands upon it.

  'I must think about this,' he murmured finally.

  As he prepared to leave, the archaeologist paused, felt the pocket of his sports coat. 'Just a moment,' he said. 'In the excitement I almost forgot. This afternoon I received a report from my university lab on some material Rip and I found in the equipment bay of the saucer. The material was the decomposing remains of a collection of personal items, something like a wallet, if you will. I want to share one of the items with you.'

  He removed several envelopes from his pocket, examined them, and selected one. Out of it he took a sheet of paper, unfolded it carefully, and laid it upon the coffee table. Charley and Egg bent over to look.

  On the paper was a picture of a woman. Obviously a woman, with a woman's facial features and throat. She was smiling, happy. Her race, however, was difficult to determine.

  'What we are seeing,' the professor said, 'is a computer reconstruction of a piece of the decomposed material that I gave them. I hesitate to call the material a photograph — it was an image on some kind of paperlike substance. They are still trying to determine exactly what.'

  'It's a portrait of Eve,' Charley Pine said.

  'Something like that, I suppose,' the professor said. He carefully folded the paper and returned it to the envelope.

  At the door he seized Egg's hand and pumped it repeatedly. 'Thank you, sir. Thank you from the bottom of my heart.'

  'Come back in the morning, Professor. We will talk then. Good night.'

  Before she went to her room, Charley Pine asked, 'How will the universe end, Uncle Egg?'

  'It will be reborn,' Egg Cantrell told her, 'again and again and again… '

  Chapter Twenty

  When he left Missouri the sun was within an hour of rising, so Rip Cantrell flew the saucer north into Canada. He parked it on a sandbar beside a wide river that ran north to the Arctic. That afternoon he fished with Egg's tackle and managed to catch a couple of good ones. They looked somewhat like trout, but Rip doubted that they were.

  He cooked them that evening over a fire built of debris he gathered along the riverbank, wood that had apparently been washed north with the melt each spring, hundreds of miles from the forests to the south, until it ended up in tangles on this sandbar.

  At these latitudes at this time of year, twilight lasted until late in the evening. The stars came out one by one as a slice of moon crept over the horizon. Finally, as the fire was dying, the black velvet night was ablaze with stars flung like sand against the sky.

  Which one was the one? From which one did the saucer makers come?

  He sat by the fire hoping to see the aurora borealis until the stars began to fade with the coming of the new day, but it never appeared. At peace with the universe, Rip Cantrell crawled into the saucer and went to sleep.

  After two days he decided he had been there long enough. Reconnaissance satellites had undoubtedly located the saucer; it was just a matter of time before someone came to steal it. He wanted to be gone before that someone arrived.

  That night after a fish supper, he put out the fire, strapped himself into the pilot's seat, and took off heading south.

  Staying low and slow, less than a thousand feet and below three hundred knots, he thought that he would be able to fly under the coverage of most radars. He experimented with hand-flying the machine. It was almost too responsive for a novice: He found himself overcontrolling. Remembering Charley's advice, which she had given him in an odd moment, he released the controls, waited while the saucer settled down, then grasped them gingerly again.

  The whole gig was a rare hoot. Here he was, a farm kid from Minnesota at the helm of a real flying saucer. He laughed, at himself and the situation and the whole darn mess.

  Rip got to his destination just before dawn. He hid the saucer and walked the six miles home as the sky grew light and the sun peeped over the rim of the earth.

  The swing on the front porch looked inviting. He settled into it to wait for his mother to awaken and come downstairs to the kitchen.

  The farm looked clean and verdant at the end of summer. He could hear cattle lowing for their breakfast, and he could smell them. He had grown up with that smell, which he rarely noticed unless he was just returning after an absence of several days.

  The swing rocked back and forth, the chains squeaking on their hooks, just as they always had.

  Rip was dozing when he heard his mother in the kitchen. He stood, stretched, and yawned, then went inside.

  'H
i, Mom.'

  'Oh, my God! You scared me, Rip.' She reached for him and gave him a mighty hug.

  'Where on earth have you been, boy? When those men came, I didn't know what to say.' She searched his face. Tears welled in her eyes. 'I was scared, Rip. For you. And me.'

  'It's okay, Mom. You didn't have any choice. You had to answer their questions. I know that.'

  She tried to talk and couldn't. Rip held her tightly. When she seemed to have calmed down, Rip relaxed his grip. His mother grinned nervously and wiped the tears from her eyes.

  'They talk about you on television every day. You're the most famous man on earth.'

  'It'll pass, Mom. It'll pass. Next year no one will remember my name. They'll talk about ol' what's-his-name, the saucer guy.'

  'How about breakfast? Ham and eggs and potatoes?'

  'You fix it, I'll eat it.'

  She paused for a good look at his face, then got busy. 'All I know is what the television said, so tell me all about it.'

  He seated himself at the kitchen table and began with the desert, hot and dirty and empty under a brassy sky, with a gleam of sunlight reflecting off something far away, on a distant ridge.

  He finished the story as he finished his breakfast. The part about Rigby he left out. His mother was leaning back against the sink sipping a cup of coffee.

  'So where is the saucer now?'

  'Hidden.'

  'You aren't going to tell me?'

  'No. Those men might come back.'

  He saw panic in her eyes.

  'I doubt if they will, Mom, but if they do, answer any question they ask.'

  She nodded, repeatedly. 'Okay,' she said. She turned back to the sink. 'So where do you go from here? When this is over?'

  'I don't know. I haven't even had time to think about it.'

  'Classes at the university started three days ago.'

  'Maybe I ought to sit out a semester. I could work here on the farm.'

  'Until this saucer flap is over, the only place you could get work would be in the state pen making license plates.'

  'I suppose.'

  'You could help out some on the farm, I guess. I'd be lying if I told you we needed you desperately. The boys get the chores done every day.'