Saucer s-1 Page 12

  'You say you put some muddy water in this thing?' Egg asked after a bit.

  'Yeah. It was all we had.'

  'Gotta be mud in this separator. Gotta be. Go get my little toolbox on my workbench, please.'

  Rip did as requested.

  Egg soon found that the wrenches didn't quite fit. Neither metric nor American wrenches worked. Worried that he might ruin a nut or two, he had to use adjustable wrenches and pliers.

  'It's good to see you again, Rip. Missed you this summer.'

  'Yeah,' said Rip. 'This old farm… ' Rip had been spending his summers with his Uncle Egg since he was twelve. Ever since his father died. 'The desert was a new adventure,' he told his uncle now as a partial apology.

  'A man needs new adventures,' Egg admitted as he worked on the separator. 'Yes he does. Expands his horizons, lets him learn new things. I still missed you.'

  Rip didn't reply, and Egg didn't expect him to. He knew Rip pretty well.

  'What's the story on the woman?' 'No story. She was the test pilot the Air Force UFO team brought to the desert to look at this thing. She's a civilian, got off active duty two weeks ago. She crawled into the saucer when I was getting ready to fly outta there. People were shooting; I couldn't leave her.' 'Lucky for you she happened by.' 'I could fly this thing, Uncle Egg. Honest.' 'Be sorta messy if you happened to be wrong.' 'Flying's an instinct thing.' 'We have birds in our family tree?' 'I flew your Aeronca. Remember? You taught me how to fly. This saucer is sorta like the Aeronca, I think. Course it's a little faster and has some other complications, but I could figure it out. It'd come to me.'

  Egg changed the subject. 'When I got out of bed this morning I never expected anything like this. A flying saucer! What a day this is! And the gal is something else. Everyone needs a nephew like you, Rip, who just might drop by. Every morning for a lot of years I'll wonder if you're coming by today.'

  'Well, owning this saucer, I just might.' A warm glow suffused Rip as he contemplated the prospect of flying around the country in his own saucer, able to go when and where he chose, anywhere he chose… He rubbed the metal of the bulkhead beside him.

  When he realized Egg was looking at him, Rip grinned.

  'Come any time,' Egg said. 'And bring the woman. I like her.'

  Rip flipped a hand. 'Charley will be gone soon. She isn't a girlfriend or anything like that, Egg.'

  Egg got back to the separator. 'She sure looks healthy,' he said. 'Brainy, cute… '

  'She's pushing thirty. She's too old for me.'

  'She's not too old; you're too young.'

  'Yeah. I really missed you this summer, Egg. All the romantic advice and opinions and trips to town for pizza.'

  'How's your mom?'

  'Oh, so-so, I guess. Haven't had a letter in a while. Maybe I ought to call her while I'm here.'

  'Maybe you should.'

  Egg finished taking the separator apart. He had a knack for things mechanical.

  There was mud in the separator all right. 'There should be a plastic bag and some paper towels on the workbench.'

  When they had the separator as clean as they could get it, Egg muttered, 'Didn't anybody on this planet make this thing.'

  'You sure about that?'

  'Yeah. I've never seen anything like it, and I keep up with all the latest. This thing is built with technology that's so damn up-to-date it hasn't been invented yet.'

  'Who built the saucer, Egg?'

  'People! Obviously. Take a look. This thing is sized for people our size, maybe a few inches smaller. Look at this twist grip I'm holding.' Rip eased into position to see. 'See this? It's designed to be twisted with a human hand. I'd bet money on it.'

  'Tell you what, Egg. You get that separator back together and let me turn on the garden hose, fill this thing with water. We may have to get out of here in a hurry, if Charley is right.'

  'I sorta think she is, Rip-boy. This is some piece of machinery — the Air Force is gonna be looking hard for it.' 'It's mine, Egg. Not theirs.'

  'You told me that before. Go hook up the hose and turn on the water.'

  When Rip got back, Egg was examining the computer that the Australian mechanic had partially disassembled. 'You didn't do this, did you?' Egg grunted. 'Heck no.'

  Egg looked it over. After a few seconds, he whipped out a magnifying glass. 'I think I can get it back together,' he said after a bit. 'The fool was trying to get to the chip, but he didn't know what it looked like. This whole case is the chip.' He picked up the three pieces that formed the case. They were dangling, held only by some wires. 'That's the chip?'

  'Yeah. Probably has billions and billions of transistors. If they are transistors, which I doubt.' Egg scrutinized the inside surface of the case with the glass.

  'Are they even talking about stuff like this at your school?' Egg wanted to know. 'Uh-huh.'

  Egg cradled the three pieces with both hands. 'What's the rule? The number of transistors industry can cram on a chip doubles every eighteen months?' 'That's it,' Rip affirmed. 'If we knew how many transistor like things are in this case, we could calculate how far ahead of us technically these creatures are.'

  'Of course,' Rip said, 'the function may cease to be straightline after a while.'

  'See this screen. It's a quarter inch thick and flexible.' The screen was also hanging by a wire. Egg twisted it in his hands, pulled it and kneaded it. 'Unbelievable.'

  He laid the screen aside and began examining parts. Soon he laughed. 'Look at this headband. This must be the keyboard.'

  'Naw,' Rip said, hunting through the parts for something he might recognize.

  'Yes. My glory, this has gotta be it! This must be the way you talk to the computer.'

  The headband was a collection of very fine wires, thousands of them, fashioned into a complete loop. The wires seemed to be held together with some flexible material, plastic perhaps.

  It took Egg only about five minutes to reassemble the computer. 'Turn on the power.'

  Rip pulled out the master power knob to the first detent, which fired off the reactor. Then he passed Egg the headband. Egg carefully placed it over his head.

  'This isn't the smartest thing you ever did, Unc.'

  'We're engaged in a scientific inquiry. If I freak out, get this thing off me.'

  'What if — ?'

  But Egg had already closed his eyes. He sat impassively.

  Rip waited.

  He could hear the water running into the fuel tank. The water was from a well, and the hose delivered only three or four gallons a minute, so it was going to take a while.

  Now Egg was grinning. Widely. His eyes were open, his hands moving, reaching… Now they were still.

  A variety of emotions registered on Egg's face: amazement, happiness, joy.

  What was in that computer?

  Rip moved his hand back and forth in front of Egg's face. His open eyes didn't track or blink.

  Egg's breathing seemed okay. Rip sat watching Egg and listening to the running water and the silence. The silence was exquisite. Rain was pounding on the hangar's tin roof, but the interior of the saucer was quiet as a tomb.

  If Professor Soldi was correct, the interior of the saucer had known no sound for a hundred and forty thousand years. God, that was a long, long time! Man became man, the African diaspora spread man all over the planet, the ice sheets came and went, people walked across the land bridge to America, the pyramids rose, Moses led his people from Egypt, Greece flourished, then Rome… The entire human story happened while this machine sat, just like this, silent under the sand. Rip shivered.

  Egg's eyes came open. He took off the headband. His grin got wider and wider. 'Yes, yes, yes! This is the cat's nuts, man. Oh, Rip, it's fantastic1.' 'What is?'

  Egg offered the headband. 'Put it on. Follow the picture of the saucer. It's the maintenance manual for this ship… some sort of three-dimensional holograph. You can see everything: how the ship works, how each component functions, how to take it apart, how to repair
it. It's so real you'll want to reach out and touch. I never in my life saw anything like it.'

  He leaped from the seat and tossed the headband onto it. In seconds he was on his knees working on the compartment's forward bulkhead. A panel opened. Egg reached in and withdrew a package encased in a soft material. He held it out toward Rip.

  'Look at this! It's a tool kit. Take a look! It's the tools to fix the machinery on this ship. And here are some more headbands — you wear one to access the computers.'

  Rip placed the headband on his head. It was a tad small, but there was some give to it, so it was not uncomfortable.

  The saucer was one of three objects before him. He approached them, looking… They were real'!

  He jerked the headband off.

  Egg broke into laughter. 'I told you! I told you!' He bent down, his face inches from his nephew. 'Try it again, Rip.'

  Rip went toward the saucer, merely desired to go closer, and it moved toward him or he toward it — it was hard to say which. The saucer was whole, yet it wasn't. From several feet away the ship was transparent, allowing him to see every piece, every fastener, wire, valve, pipe, etc. And it was real, a three dimensional object with perspective and shadows and a tangible reality. Like Egg, he tried to touch.

  The reactor, the water cracker, the antigravity system… Rip leaned closer to examine a computer. The closer he looked, the more he could see. He dove deeper and deeper into the chip in the main computer in front of the pilot, deeper and deeper until he could see the microscopic circuits.

  When Rip Cantrell finally took off the headset, he was drained. It took him several seconds to reestablish where he was, whom he was with.

  His Uncle Egg was sitting across from him, a smile playing over his lips. 'Amazing, eh?'

  'Oh, Egg, I never dreamed… '

  'Now you know how the Indians felt when they went aboard Columbus's ship.'

  Rip sat stunned, replaying the experience in his mind.

  'One thing,' Egg mused. 'One thing we know: Humans built this saucer.'

  'But… We — I and the two men I work with — dug it out of sandstone, Egg. I breathed the dirt and dust and dug it out with these two hands. There's no way that was fake rock. That stone had been there for one hundred and forty thousand years, the archaeologist said.'

  'This computer, the headband… ' Egg pointed. 'That machine reads our thoughts, tells us what we want to know. The machine is designed to communicate with our brains. With human brains. I can't explain it, but there it is.'

  The president and his advisers were serious men (and one serious woman), engaged every day in the serious business of politics, i.e., dividing the pie in such a way as to create maximum advantage for themselves. They didn't smile much; on those rare occasions when they did it was at an enemy's discomfiture. They had a goodly number of enemies. Friends were blindly and intensely loyal to the president and his administration, enemies were everyone else. The great saucer scare left these serious people at a loss over what to do. Nothing in their experience quite fit this situation.

  The saucer hullabaloo was perfect for television, a made-to-order media event that glued an extraordinary percentage of the populace to the tube, where they could be sold everything from automobiles to Zantac, brokerage services to suppositories. One of the things television wanted were ten-second sound bites from the serious people. Television reporters and camera crews lay in wait anywhere that an ambush of a serious person was even a remote possibility.

  Yet even if the serious people were uncooperative, the insatiable appetite of the medium had to be filled somehow. Enterprising producers sent their minions after the God squad.

  'How dare the networks air this trash,' one prominent divine raved on camera. 'This talk of flying saucers and aliens is all right for the movies, but it has no place in serious conversation.'

  The president's advisers nodded in sympathy. What could they say on camera? In television everything is on the record. The camera captures every moment, good or bad. If, as seemed probable, the saucer scare turned out to be some kind of hoax, the serious ones would be covered in ignominy if they treated it seriously now. On the other hand, if buried under all this sensationalism was a real flying saucer filled with real aliens, the serious ones had to be out there in the arena ready to fight or shake hands. At least, they had to appear to be ready.

  'How did we get into this fix?' the president's chief of staff, PJ. O'Reilly, demanded of Bombing Joe De Laurio. The serious people were very unhappy with the Air Force and Bombing Joe, whom they suspected was somehow responsible for this unholy mess.

  Bombing Joe glowered at O'Reilly, who would blame the weatherman for a thunderstorm.

  'This whole thing is very troubling,' the president said. 'I don't know what our options are.'

  'Mr. President,' Bombing Joe began, 'the CIA tells me that Qaddafi may have our UFO team in custody, and — ' 'Don't try to blame this on Qaddafi,' O'Reilly snarled, interrupting.

  'I was trying to say that — '

  'I know high-tech when I see it. That thing' — O'Reilly pointed at the video from Egypt — 'sure as hell looks high-tech to me.'

  'Who knows what it is?' Bombing Joe sneered. 'You ought to go to the movies more often. It's absolutely amazing what the special effects crowd can do with computers these days.'

  The national security adviser picked up a wad of computer printouts of wire service stories on the St. Louis boom and the Indiana appearance and fluttered them. 'Twenty-seven sane people in Indiana swore they saw a flying saucer in broad daylight from a range of less than a hundred yards. Four of those twenty-seven swore they touched it! Special effects?'

  Bombing Joe tried earnestly to explain: 'I'm telling you that nothing in anybody's inventory looks like that thing on television or flies like that. Sure, we have some black projects, but they are airplanes, for God's sake. You know that! I resent the implication that the Air Force has developed some magic machine without the knowledge of the government.'

  'What if it's really a flying saucer?' the president asked. The president was a politician because he enjoyed being in front of a crowd. He wanted to be liked, yet he hated making decisions. 'From somewhere out there? Do you realize the implications? Technically advanced beings from another world? Would I have to meet them in the Rose Garden, surrender the nation?'

  Just then Dr. Jim Bob Cantwell, the famous evangelist, appeared on CNN. 'The events we are witnessing today herald the coming of the Antichrist,' he intoned.

  Furious, P.J. O'Reilly grabbed the television remote control and shut off Cantwell. 'Cantwell is a fool,' he growled.

  Another serious person pointed out, 'A sizable percentage of the voters are churchgoers. They are worried about the implications of this saucer mania on their faith.'

  'I don't do religion,' the president said firmly. 'Other than a few platitudes on holidays — '

  Bombing Joe excused himself and walked from the room, looking for a telephone. He should have retired years ago and got seriously into golf; he knew that now.

  Chapter Ten

  It was early evening when Rip and Egg Cantrell climbed the gentle grade to the small house nestled in the trees. Charley Pine was wearing her gray flight suit, now clean, and pacing back and forth in front of the television.

  Both the men looked tired, she thought. 'The water cracker was full of mud,' Rip told her. 'Egg cleaned it out. We're ready to go.'

  'Go where?'

  'I don't know,' Rip said crossly. 'Somewhere that the Air Force and Qaddafi and those Aussie nuts can't find us.' The injustice of the pursuit bothered him. The saucer was his.

  Charley gestured toward the television. 'Sit down, you two. Watch some of this. It's a media meltdown. Every channel has flying saucers continuously or is offering instant updates for breaking news.'

  They sat. CNN was running the video of the saucer lifting off from the shore of Lake Nasser one more time. 'This has been on every channel on earth ten dozen times today,' Charley ex
plained. 'The only saving grace is that the tape starts with the saucer lifting off, not with Rip and me pouring water into it or climbing aboard.'

  'Humpf.'

  'The West Coast… St Louis… Upshur, Indiana… the press has done it up brown. They've interviewed everyone who might have a pebble to contribute. Just for balance, they've also interviewed every UFO nutcase in the country who is willing to say something outrageous.'

  She flipped through the channels to give them a taste of it.

  Five minutes was enough. 'Turn it off,' Rip said. 'Let's go get something to eat. I'm starved.'

  As Charley reached for the clicker, the talking head mentioned Clarksville, Missouri. Egg held up his hand. 'Wait,' he said. 'Clarksville is just east of here.'

  A farmer appeared. 'I saw a saucer this morning, so I did,' he announced solemnly. 'Right over the treetops, flying along quiet as a prayer. Round it was, sorta dark, black-like in the mist and rain, sinister as all get-out. I was on the tractor, going down to plow the winter-wheat field, when it caught my eye…

  'Wouldn't be talking about it now, you understand, but I called my minister. He said it was my Christian duty to tell what I know so the government can take steps, do what has to be done to protect us from them.''Them?' Egg asked.

  'Them,' Charley said firmly and turned off the television. 'The hunters are close, Rip. Just a few miles from here. They'll be here soon.'

  Egg swiveled to examine her face. 'The government is looking for the saucer?'

  'Absolutely. Satellites photographed the saucer in the Sahara. My UFO team was sent to investigate.' She wasn't about to mention the hypersonic reconnaissance plane, the very existence of which was a top secret. 'The other members of the team were there when Rip and I flew it out. As soon as the U.S. government knows who we are, they'll find out where our parents live, where we grew up. They'll look for us by talking to all those people, checking every place we might be.'

  'You're speculating,' Rip said, his face ominous.