Saucer s-1 Page 19

  'That sounds like the Roger I know,' Mrs. Higgin-botham said acidly. 'He hates to be thwarted.'

  'Arthur consulted me because I am an attorney and charge him only modestly for my time, if at all. In the course of my research, I discovered that Hedrick does not own all the stock of this company, although he is indeed a major shareholder and controls one of the seats on the board.'

  'Hedrick owns about ten percent of the stock,' Mrs. Higginbotham said. 'I own or control twenty-eight percent, and my sons and daughters have a smidgen over nine.'

  Olie Cantrell nodded. 'I also understand that your late husband founded this company, Mrs. Higginbotham, and both your sons have built their careers here in oil exploration.'

  'Your research is impeccable.'

  'With all that said, here is the problem. The saucer is very valuable. Hedrick wants it desperately. He has physical possession right now by virtue of several felonies, none of which are provable in court. He has the saucer in Australia and probably intends to exploit it commercially. Sooner or later he may decide to ask an attorney about Wellstar's claim to title of the saucer by virtue of its discovery by an employee. What he will be told is this: Wellstar does indeed have a claim to the saucer, but it is a poor one because young Cantrell did not discover the artifact in the course of his employment. He was not hired to search for flying saucers. He is in the position of a mailman on his appointed rounds who saw a dollar lying on the sidewalk and picked it up. The dollar belongs to the mailman, not the postal service.

  'Still, as an attorney, I can assure you that even a poor claim to a valuable item is better than no claim at all. The rub, for you, is that Hedrick owns ten percent of the company. He may well elect to try to buy control of Wellstar just to be in a position to assert the company's claim.'

  'I could assert the claim for Wellstar,' Mrs. Higginbotham said.

  'Indeed you could, ma'am. Unfortunately for you, Hedrick doesn't seem the type who likes to share. And he has the saucer in Australia. Even if you got a court order directing him to return it to the United States, enforcing it will be problematical, at best.'

  Mrs. Higginbotham looked from one face to another. She scratched an eyebrow. 'What do you propose, sir?'

  'We came here today, ma'am, hoping that we could persuade you to sell Wellstar's claim to the saucer, whatever it is, to our nephew, Rip Cantrell. This course would avoid any threat to your control of Wellstar by Mr. Hedrick.'

  Mrs. Higginbotham tapped the desk with one finger. 'And the threat of a lawsuit by your nephew?'

  Olie Cantrell raised his hands in acknowledgment of her point. 'It may never come to that, but it might. Yes, ma'am.'

  'What haven't you told me that my lawyer will want me to know?'

  Olie grinned. 'He may want to take a look at the law of Chad, where the saucer was found. I have discussed Chadian law with a firm in New York that practices in Africa. My contact tells me that he can find no Chadian statutes, decrees, or court decisions that deal with found property.

  'As you are probably aware, Chad is a miserable, parched little country ruled by a dictator. I'm sure someone could zip off to Chad with a pile of money and the law could become whatever he or she was willing to pay for. I don't think that would play very well in an American court, but it would be another claim, another lever.'

  Mrs. Higginbotham used her hands to push herself erect. 'Gentlemen, I want to talk this matter over with my attorneys. Why don't you come back to see me tomorrow morning at ten o'clock?'

  The Cantrell brothers stood, shook hands, then took their leave. When the door closed behind them, Mrs. Higginbotham called her lawyer.

  It was three in the morning in New South Wales when Charley Pine finally turned off the television. Roger Hedrick had not called her or come to her room; in fact, no one had. She saw the airplane bringing the Russian delegation arrive just after midnight, a four-engine Tupo-lev. Lights remained on in the hangar area for another two hours. Finally most of the lights were extinguished.

  Charley waited another twenty minutes, then opened her window. Just as she thought. Four feet away was a large downspout. The roof of the porch on the main floor of the house was fifteen or so feet below.

  She climbed up onto the windowsill, took one last look around, then leaped for the downspout.

  She almost missed it, striking her head on the pipe and slipping several feet before she managed to jam her foot between the pipe and the wall, stopping her descent.

  Down she went, straining every muscle, holding on for dear life. Safely on the roof, she felt her lip, spit out something black. Blood. She had bitten her lip. Her right foot was hurting too, so she rubbed it.

  Charley Pine tiptoed across the roof and lay full-length so she could look over the edge and see if anyone was on the porch.

  One man, smoking a cigarette.

  He was forty feet away, facing the other way, listening to music coming through a French door that was open a few inches. Someone was playing a piano. Bach.

  From time to time the smoker turned and looked across the lawn. From his position he could see the hangar and the main horse barn, both of which were lit only by security lights.

  Moving ever so slowly, Charley crawled across the roof to the corner farthest away from the guard. Here a column held up the roof. As she looked the area over, she decided she would hang by her hands from the gutter and put her feet on the porch rail. The column would help. It would be behind her, breaking up her silhouette if the guard should look this way.

  Just as she was about to swing a leg over, the guard left the French door where he had been listening and walked in her direction.

  She held her breath. Now she could see that the guard carried some kind of weapon on a strap over his shoulder.

  The guard stopped after he had traversed half the distance between them and stood looking at the hangar and barn. Beyond were low mountains under a clear night sky full of stars.

  Charley Pine could just hear the piano, ever so faintly.

  The guard took a last drag on his cigarette and flipped it away. Then he turned and walked slowly back toward the open French door.

  Charley swung a leg over, then forced her body over the edge. Her hands and arms absorbed her weight. She lowered herself until her feet touched.

  She released the gutter and bent over. With her hands on the railing, she pushed off with her feet and dropped between the bushes below and the porch foundation.

  She crouched there, scarcely daring to breathe.

  The guard must have had his back turned during the descent, which had taken no more than five or six seconds.

  Staying bent at the waist, she slipped along the porch to the corner of the house, then peered through the bushes.

  Perhaps it was a sixth sense; she felt someone was near. She knelt there, watching and listening. A minute passed, then another.

  Now she heard steps, voices. She lay on the ground behind the bushes, looked out underneath.

  Two guards with rifles over their shoulders, chatting, pointing flashlights this way and that, walked slowly toward her.

  She closed her eyes and lowered her head, just in case.

  When the sound had completely faded, she looked again. The yard was clear. Inching her head up, she looked under the porch railing. The porch guard was not in sight.

  She slipped out of the bushes and ran toward the dark area to the right of the horse barn. When she got there, she flattened herself against the wall and listened.

  Moving slowly, carefully, from one dark shadow to another, she worked her way around the barn and toward the hangar. Another pair of guards passed her near the hangar. She was lying in a slight depression then, in plain sight if the guards had just lowered their flashlights and looked. They didn't.

  Heart pounding, Charley Pine ran the last few feet to the personnel door on the side of the hangar and tried the knob. It turned. She let go of the doorknob and looked around one more time. There was a small naked bulb above the door, perha
ps forty watts. She reached up and unscrewed it until it went out.

  Twelve minutes had passed since she left her room.

  She twisted the doorknob and pulled gently. With the door open about an inch, she put her eye to the crack.

  The hangar was big, at least a hundred and fifty feet square. There was only one light, a spot that shone down from the roof trusses directly above the saucer.

  Charley Pine pulled the door open and stepped into the hangar. She pulled the door completely closed behind her.

  In the far corner of the cavernous space was a desk with a small illuminated lamp on it. Someone was seated at the desk, someone reading.

  She surveyed the equipment parked and stacked along the walls. Like most hangars, this one was also used to store wheeled equipment that didn't have another home. She got behind an aircraft tow tractor and lay down so she could see under it, between the wheels. The hatch under the saucer was open. Oooh, that tantalized her. If she could just get in the saucer, she could fly it right through the closed main door. With just a squirt from the rockets, the saucer would take that giant overhead door right off its hinges.

  She turned her attention to the man at the desk. He seemed to be slumped over, reading a magazine that lay flat on the desk in front of him.

  She had watched him for several minutes when she realized the man was asleep.

  Lord, yes. The idiot has fallen asleep! Charley rose noiselessly. She was wearing tennis shoes, which might squeak on that painted concrete floor, so she took them off, tied the strings together, draped them around her neck.

  The man at the desk was still slumped over, motionless.

  She took a couple of deep breaths, squared her shoulders, then stepped out of the shadows. She walked directly to the saucer, bent down, and went under it toward the open hatch.

  Charley stood in the hatchway, climbed up… Rigby was sitting in the chair by the pilot's seat. He had a shotgun in his lap, pointed right at her.

  'I thought you'd never get here,' he said. He looked at his watch. 'Seventeen minutes.'

  Charley Pine climbed into the saucer, tossed down her shoes. The shotgun was pointed right at her gut.

  'That's close enough, baby,' Rigby said. 'I'd hate to have to shoot — '

  She knocked the barrel aside with her left hand and kicked Rigby square in the face.

  Rigby's head bounced off the pilot seat pedestal and he lost his grip on the shotgun, but he didn't go down or out. Charley planted her left foot and kicked again with her right, aiming for his larynx.

  She missed. Got him on the shoulder.

  Rigby grabbed at her foot. She kicked a third time, but without shoes she wasn't doing enough damage.

  Rigby got her ankle that time, held on to it, dragged her to the floor.

  He was pounding on her kidneys when Hedrick said, 'That's enough, Rigby. We have more rides to give tomorrow.' Hedrick's head was sticking up through the hatch.

  'I think the bleedin' bitch broke my nose,' Rigby said through gritted teeth and thumped Charley in the kidney one more time.

  'Tsk, tsk.' Hedrick clucked his tongue. 'And you gave me your word, Ms. Pine.'

  Chapter Fifteen

  After a large Australian breakfast, Rip Cantrell set forth from Bathurst in his borrowed car to see what he could of Hedrick's empire. As he drove west the coastal mountains soon petered out, giving way to low, rolling grasslands. Water appeared to be rather scarce, the flora looked semiarid. still, plenty of cattle and sheep could be seen from the paved, two-lane road grazing peacefully amid scattered trees, which seemed to grow best near creeks and low places.

  The problem was going to be getting in. He suspected that tradesmen from Bathurst, the nearest town to Hedrick's station, must come and go regularly. That was worth looking into. As he drove he kept an eye out for tradesmen's vans. He saw a bakery truck go by on the way back to town, but traffic was sparse. Every now and then a truck, occasionally a car.

  He was driving along a particularly long, dull, empty straight stretch when he saw a turnout ahead and a gate. The gate was a steel pole across the road, tended by at least three men. As he drove by he saw the Hedrick name on a sign.

  Rip continued on, watched for other roads, other entrances, guards, anything. Ten miles later he was still going by Hedrick's land, he thought, having seen no boundary fences joining the fence alongside the road.

  When the road topped a low ridge between watersheds, Rip pulled over and got out to stretch his legs.

  The highway in both directions was empty. Fences along both sides of the road, but no livestock in sight. A few trees along a distant creek, and far to the east, the low Blue Mountains. High up, a cloud layer was moving in from the east; soon it would block the sun.

  He was about to get back in the car when he heard a distant, low-pitched rumbling sound, like a jet climbing at full throttle. Rip shaded his eyes, searched the sky to the south.

  He despaired of seeing it when all of a sudden, there it was — a small black dot low in the sky, moving at a high subsonic speed.

  The object turned north, climbing, and headed in his general direction. It was about four miles from him when he realized he was looking at the saucer.

  That evening at the Bathurst Hotel, four Japanese in suits and ties sat at a table near Rip. They had apparently just arrived that afternoon.

  Rip was quick to notice that these four wore their hair shorter than was stylish, carried no extra weight, and looked remarkably fit. Not a gray hair in the bunch. The oldest was perhaps thirty. Four soldiers, he concluded, and wondered what had brought them to this corner of the earth.

  As Rip worked his way through his second large steak, he noticed that these four also had good appetites. Must be the invigorating air down under, he thought, and went back to musing about how he was going to get past Hedrick's security guards.

  After dinner Rip Cantrell went for a walk around town. There was a large market just two blocks from the hotel, but then Bathurst was a small town. Delivery trucks were parked out back.

  Rip went inside, walked through the aisles looking over the produce and packaged food. The meat counter was well stocked too. Finally he selected a couple of pastries and went to the checkout counter to pay.

  The man there rang up his purchases without comment. Rip went back to the sidewalk and took a pastry from the bag to munch on. He walked along the side of the building to a spot where he could look over the market's delivery trucks.

  One way or the other, he thought, I've got to get inside.

  The last delegation to arrive and receive a saucer ride was the one from the European Union. A German, a Frenchman, and an Italian seemed to be the committee in charge. They had engineers along, but the three politicians whispered among themselves all the time.

  Charley Pine gave them a gentle ride, no G's, no maneuvering, then sat in the pilot's seat for two hours and watched as the Europeans played with the computers, looked at this, prodded that.

  The Frenchman introduced himself as Nicholas Pieraut. 'Enchante, mademoiselle,' he said with a grin.

  'Same here,' Charley Pine replied.

  'You are the aviatrix?'

  'That's right. Wherever the saucer goes, I go.' She changed positions slightly to ease the pain in her back.

  'Ahh,' said Pieraut.

  After a formal dinner in the huge main dining room of the station mansion, Roger Hedrick led the four delegations back to the hangar. Valets serving cognac and cigars worked the crowd. Tastefully and modestly spotlighted in the center of the hangar was the saucer.

  Charley Pine stood nearby with a glass of white wine in her hand, ready to answer questions about the saucer if asked. When she dressed for dinner in a gown loaned to her by Bernice, her lower back was black, blue, purple, and yellow. No blood in her urine, thank God, and apparently no ribs broken. She carried herself gingerly. She was on her third glass of wine, so now her back hurt only when she took a deep breath.

  Rigby was just aft of her le
ft elbow, as she was keenly aware. He looked awful: Someone had straightened his nose and taped it to hold it in position. still, the swelling would take a few days to subside.

  She glanced at Rigby again and decided his face was worth the pain in her back.

  'Tomorrow, gentlemen, we begin the auction.' Hedrick boomed his words while the translators buzzed to those who didn't speak English. 'You delegates representing your respective nations have a chance to change history, to affect the lives of everyone on the planet. The nation that takes the saucer home will become the superpower of the twenty-first century.'

  In the silence that followed, the delegates looked about them at the other delegations. It seemed to Charley Pine that they thought Hedrick was right. And he was.

  'Each of you has had a demonstration ride in the saucer, each of you has witnessed its amazing capabilities with your own eyes. You have examined it at great length and have spent hours on the satellite telephones talking to your governments. Our test pilot, the beautiful Ms. Pine, has answered your questions. You are, I hope, fully informed about this remarkable machine, in touch with your governments, and ready to make serious bids.'

  You have to hand it to the bastard, Charley Pine thought. He really does it up brown. The valet with the cigar box strayed within reach, so Charley snagged herself a stogie. Why the hell not?

  She finished off the wine while the valet used a little guillotine on the butt end of the thing and struck a big long kitchen match. When the cigar was going, she held out her empty wineglass for cognac.

  Hedrick nodded at Bernice, who handed a sheet of paper to the senior member of each delegation.

  'If you will please refer to your copy of the bidding rules that my assistant is passing out,' Hedrick was saying. 'As you will see, the bidding will take place in rounds. The minimum bid in the first round will be ten billion American dollars. Each bid in the second and subsequent rounds must be at least one billion dollars more than the highest bid of the last round or the bidder will be disqualified from the auction. The auction shall continue until only one bidder remains, and that bidder shall be the winner. The purchase price of the saucer shall be payable in American dollars or negotiable securities denominated in American dollars unless prior to the auction the bidding party and I agree on the value of the goods being offered in trade. Finally, the purchase price must be paid in full before the winning bidder takes possession.'