Saucer

Chapter Three

Professor Soldi crawled toward the open hatch and sniffed the escaping air. 'It is air, all right,' he said, 'but the aroma is a little strange… '

'That hatch has been closed for a very long time,' Dutch Haagen remarked, more to himself than the others.

The professor stuck his head into the open hatchway and inhaled a lungful through his nose. Then he sagged back onto the sandy rock. 'Stale. Very stale.'

Rip Cantrell snorted. 'I like your scientific method,' he said and laughed.

Soldi didn't even bother to glare at him.

The open hatch beckoned.

'Rip, you found this ship,' Dutch said. 'Would you like to go first?'

Rip didn't have to be asked twice. He scooted over to the hatch and positioned himself immediately under it as Bill Taggart told Dutch, 'Thanks for not asking me.'

Rip got his knees under him and eased his head higher in the hole. His eyes adjusted to the dim light.

His stomach felt like it was full of butterflies.

He inched his head up.

His eyes cleared the rim of the hatchway, and he could see into the ship.

The only light came into the ship through the canopy over the pilot's seat, which was on a pedestal of some kind.

No doubt the pedestal kept the pilot high, so he could see out.

Maybe seven feet of headroom in the center of the ship around the pedestal, less as the distance from the pedestal increased. The compartment was only about ten or twelve feet in diameter. There were six seats with seat belts lying beside them, but no bunks. All the seats faced forward. One seat on each side of the pedestal faced a blank white panel. On each panel were some switches and knobs, but no instruments were in sight — none.

After he had surveyed the entire compartment and his eyes were completely adjusted, Rip stood up in the hatch. His head just cleared the hatchway. The air in the ship was cool. That was unexpected. A metal ship, sitting in the sun. It must be well insulated.

He climbed in. Now he realized that there was a handhold and cutout for his foot, so that he could climb in easier. He hadn't seen that before.

Standing inside the ship, he breathed deeply. Was there a faint odor of salt? Of perspiration? Or was it just his imagination?

Rip Cantrell took a careful look around, then climbed up into the pilot's seat and seated himself. The canopy was deeply tinted and offered the pilot a good view in all directions.

He was examining the knobs and levers and switches on the control panel in front of him when he realized that Professor Soldi was standing on one side and Dutch on the other.

'Can you believe this?' Rip asked. 'Look at this! I've never seen anything like it.'

'It's a shuttle ship,' Dutch decided, 'for taking people and supplies from a spaceship in orbit down to the surface.'

'There's not much room for supplies in here. Maybe they used it for exploration. Or emergencies. Maybe it was a lifeboat.'

'There's a thought.'

'What are all these controls?'

There was a small stick on the right arm of the pilot's seat, which Rip suspected was the control stick. Another lever was mounted on the left side of the seat, but it ran forward at a forty-five-degree angle from a pivot point at the rear of the seat. Rip tugged on it experimentally. This lever moved only up and down. Both of the controls had several knobs and switches near the handgrips.

Where the pilot's feet would rest were pedals. Rudder pedals, Rip thought, then remembered that the saucer had no rudder. Some of its maneuvering jets were mounted beside the rocket exhaust nozzles, he recalled, pointed away from the axis of the saucer at a forty-five-degree angle. No doubt these pedals activated those jets, simulating a rudder.

'The insulation sure keeps the heat down in here,' Rip remarked when he had finished examining the major controls. 'I guess if this thing goes in and out of the atmosphere, it has to be well insulated.'

'These panels have to be computer screens,' Dutch said and pointed to the black panel areas directly in front of each control station. 'Wouldn't Bill Gates like to see these? Then he could get all the money.'

'Wonder why they left this ship here,' Bill Taggart muttered. He was standing behind Haagen, looking over his shoulder.

Rip picked a switch and flipped it. Nothing happened, of course.

'No electrical power,' Dutch murmured.

'But there is,' Rip said. I'll bet the skin is absorbing energy from the sun. We just don't know how to turn on the power.'

'Man, don't go touching stuff, flipping those switches,' Bill pleaded from behind him. 'Makes me nervous as a naked cat.'

'This joystick must control the ship somehow,' Rip said, wrapping his right hand around the handgrip projecting from the right arm of the pilot's seat.

'Man, we don't even know what makes this thing work,' Bill explained. 'Let's not take foolish chances.'

Dutch Haagen chimed in. 'I think that — '

He stopped there, because Rip had reached for a reddish knob protruding from the instrument panel at a sixty-degree angle, near one of the computer screens. He tried to turn it, and when that didn't work, pulled it out. The knob came. As it did, the computer screens burst into life, red and yellow lights appeared all over the panels, and a low rumbling noise came from behind the passenger compartment.

Startled, Rip pushed the knob back in. The lights died, the computer screens went blank, the noise stopped.

'Oh, sweet Jesus!' Bill exclaimed, then turned and clambered quickly out the hatch.

'It's got to be nuclear-powered,' Dutch said, looking over the blank, dark panels. 'That noise must have been the reactor.'

'Must be.'

'Professor, if this thing has sat here for eons, how could a reactor have any juice left? Wouldn't it go dead, like a battery?'

'Over a terrific span of time, yes. The half-life of plutonium is a quarter million years. After five hundred thousand years, a reactor would still have twenty-five percent of its energy remaining.'

Rip reached for the knob again. Dutch's hand shot out.

'Not just now, son. Bill had a valid point. I know you're a tiger, but let's think this over very carefully.'

'This ship may have been abandoned because it was no longer in operational condition,' Dr. Soldi suggested.

'Yeah,' Bill said from the hatch. Only his head was visible. 'You go turning stuff on willy-nilly and we all may wind up knocking on the pearly gates sooner than we figured, Rip.'

'We've got to figure out what makes this thing go,' Rip argued.

'Let's study up a bit more,' Dutch insisted and put his hand on Rip's shoulder.

Rip got out of the seat and Taggart climbed back into the ship. The four men began poking and prodding. The low panels between the seats were on hinges. The latches were pushbuttons.

Behind the panels was the machinery. Pipes, pumps — well… they looked like pumps — lines for carrying fluid, insulated wires.

'This insulation must be rotten,' Dutch muttered and laid a rough hand on the nearest wire. He flexed it, twisted it, and still it remained intact.

'What is this stuff?'

'Somebody built this thing to last.'

'Over here is the reactor.'

It was small, not much bigger than a forty-gallon can. It was almost invisible, nestled amid a tangle of wires, pressure hoses, and other machinery.

'Yeah, that's it.'

'Isn't it awful small?' Bill asked.

'How big should it be?'

'I dunno. I guess I thought it would be about the size of a car or something.'

'If that thing's cracked, we're probably absorbing a fatal dose of radiation,' Dutch pointed out.

'It isn't cracked,' Rip replied, suddenly sure of himself. 'There's nothing wrong with this ship. Nothing.'

'And on what do you base that scientific conclusion?'

'I just know.' The youngster shrugged. 'Call it instinct.'

'I call it wishful thinking,' Bill said from the equipment room hatch. He had not crawled in, which was a good thing. The other three filled up all the space not occupied by machinery.

'Maybe you should stay as the mine canary, Rip,' Dutch suggested, 'while the rest of us wait outside.'

'Exploring this ship is dangerous,' Soldi told them. 'We are surrounded by unknown technology, in a ship with unknown problems. Radiation, bacteria, viruses from space… this ship should be explored by engineers wearing full-body clean suits.'

Bill Taggart's head disappeared. Despite Soldi's comment, neither Haagen, Rip Cantrell, nor the professor moved toward the hatch.

They found the batteries, the wires that seemed to lead to them from the skin of the ship, bundles of wires that led away from them to buses, and from there to a bewildering conglomeration of strange boxes and devices. They studied the devices one by one, trying to decide what each might be.

'Whoever built this was well ahead of where our civilization is today,' Dutch Haagen said finally. 'This is like looking into the equipment bay of the space shuttle, only more so.'

Although he was still an engineering student, Rip had the most recent experience with high-tech applications. 'This ship is less cluttered,' he decided, thinking about last summer's trip to Cape Kennedy. 'In a way, things are simpler, ' He ran out of words. After a bit, he said, '… refined. Advanced. Better.'

They continued their explorations until finally the compartment was so hot and stuffy they wanted out.

Rip held them back. 'Come look at this, Professor.'

The young man was on his hands and knees, looking at something wedged between the machinery. He was holding his flashlight in his left hand.

Soldi crawled over for a look.

'It's a pile of something that has deteriorated over the years.'

'Looks like it, doesn't it?'

The professor adjusted his glasses, stuck his nose down almost in the pile, which looked somewhat like the pages of a very old book that had lost its binding.

'Paper? Pages?'

'Pages of something, I'll bet. Let me get my camera and a bag.'

'What do you think it is?'

'My God, Rip! I have no idea.'

When Rip crawled out of the engineering spaces, Dutch was sitting with his back to the pilot's seat pedestal, his arms curled around his legs.

'What do you think?'

'I feel as if I'm in a museum. This thing is ancient.'

'They've been dead a long time.'

'A long, long time. Too long for us even to comprehend the enormity of it.'

'I still don't understand how everything works,' Rip mused. 'It's got electrical power, a reactor, but what powers the ship?'

Dutch ran his fingertips slowly across the deck. He touched everything in reach, taking his time, looking, feeling.

'We aren't alone in the universe,' he said after a bit.

'Gives me the willies.' Rip shivered. 'This shouldn't be real. Can't be real. Yet it is.'

'What would it be like to take that saucer into space?' Rip asked. Everyone else had finished lunch, but he was still eating. They were sitting under a tarp rigged as a sunshade.

Dutch just shook his head. He watched Rip stuff food into his mouth. Maybe the kid does have a tapeworm, he thought.

'The limiting factor would be the heat on reentry,' Rip said thoughtfully as he chewed. I'll bet the material that ship is made of is almost impervious to heat.'

'One wonders,' Dr. Soldi murmured.

'There is no food storage or prep area,' Dutch pointed out. 'The ship must be a shuttle, used to ferry people and supplies between a ship in orbit and the surface.'

'Why is the saucer here?' Rip asked, with his mouth full. 'I mean, why in this place and not in another?'

'Questions, questions, questions… all we have are questions, but no answers.' Soldi said this, but he didn't seem upset. Difficult problems had always fascinated him.

'Dutch, this afternoon you must examine the ship more closely. I want to take this pile of whatever that Rip found to the archeology dig and examine it in the lab.'

They cleaned up perfunctorily, then Soldi left in the Jeep.

Standing outside the saucer, looking it over, Dutch told Rip, 'We should start at the reactor. That is the heart of this thing.'

'Okay.'

'You want to help, Bill?'

'No thanks.' Bill Taggart was sitting in shade smoking a cigar. 'You guys are nuts to poke around inside this thing. You have no idea what could be in there.'

'So we're nuts.'

'Soldi wasn't whistling Dixie.'

'You don't have to help.'

'I know that. And I don't intend to.'

'Ease up, Bill.'

'Dutch, you're acting the fool. That damn thing has been sealed up tight since Christ was a corporal. You're breathing viruses that haven't had a host for a zillion years. Maybe the germs are from another planet, another solar system. God only knows what you'll catch.'

Rip grabbed his throat, staggered, made a rasping noise. His eyes bugged out.

'Stop that, Cantrell,' Bill barked. 'You half-wit!'

Rip made a dismissive gesture at Taggart.

'Come on, Dutch,' he said. 'Let's look at the reactor.' The youngster climbed into the ship without another glance at Bill, who hadn't moved from his seat.

'Hey, Dutch. Look at this. This pipe is marked.'

Rip held his flashlight beam on a pipe. Dutch studied the markings.

'Looks like scratches.'

'Maybe a little. But they're markings. They've marked the pipe.'

'Doesn't look like anything I ever saw.'

'Course it doesn't. But this proves this thing was made by people, doesn't it?'

Dutch Haagen held his flashlight so the beam illuminated the inscription from an angle. 'Looks like it's painted on or something. Maybe etched in.' The symbol on the left was small and elegant. Above it and to the right was a small marking, like an upside-down cone but with no bottom. Following that was another symbol, different from the first, but even with it.

'Never saw anything like this.'

'It's probably a label, telling us what the line carries,' Rip explained.

'Yeah, kid. That's a good guess. But I can't read it. Can you?'

'Ahh, yes… "Bill Taggart is a jerk".' That's the translation, anyway.' Rip shrugged. 'I think they covered this stuff in the sixth grade, but I had the flu that week.'

'This couldn't be the only marking. Look around.'

It took Rip only fifteen seconds to find another marking, this time on a pressure line. This was different from the first set of symbols.

Over the next half hour they found that almost every line was marked, and many of the symbols seemed to be the same.

'If we could read these damn marks, we could figure this thing out,' Rip exclaimed.

Dutch didn't reply. He continued to look for marks, examine fittings, study everything he saw. After a bit he said, 'This piece of gear in front of me looks like a generator. See all these electrical wires coming off it? They go down there, hook into those cable ends.'

The two men continued to explore. Finally Dutch said, 'Well, it looks to me like the generator makes power, which is sent to these circular cables that go around the bottom of the ship.' There were six of these cables, making six concentric rings that circled the bottom of the saucer. 'More juice goes into those big buses over there. I'll bet a nickel those things are circuit breakers or fuses of some kind. From the buses, the juice goes all over the ship.'

'Antigravity rings?' Rip suggested. 'Maybe the big circular cables cut the gravity force lines of the planet?'

'Maybe, kid. Maybe.' Dutch crawled on.

In the hour before dark, Rip worked on clearing sandstone from the saucer's maneuvering ports. He used a small screwdriver as a chisel, pounding on the handle with a hammer. Blowing into the hole cleaned out the shards. The job went pretty fast.

Rip enjoyed touching the ship, running his fingers over it. The saucer fascinated him. As the sun got lower and lower on the horizon, he found himself sitting, staring at the ship, mesmerized. Who flew this ship here? Who were these people?

'I had to get our geologist involved,' Professor Soldi reported that evening when he returned from his dig. He poured himself a cup of coffee from the pot on the propane stove. 'He examined the sandstone sample under an electron microscope.'

'What did he think?' Rip asked as Soldi paused to sip coffee.

'It took him a while to sort out the pollens.'

'Uh-huh.'

'One hundred and forty thousand years, plus or minus ten.'

Dutch Haagen whistled. Soldi sipped coffee. Rip Cantrell wrapped his arms around his legs and stared into the fire.

Tonight the seismic crew was camped in front of the ledge, less than a hundred yards from the saucer. Moving the camp was no big deal, a chore the crew normally accomplished every other day. The camp consisted of two tents, one for sleeping, one for cooking, and a sunscreen rigged to keep the sun off the two water wagons, each of which was a two-hundred-gallon tank welded to a wheeled chassis. Most evenings Rip slept outside in a sleeping bag.

'We're going to have to tell somebody about the saucer,' Dutch said after a bit.

'Like our boss in Houston,' Bill Taggart rumbled. 'That poor fool thinks we're doing honest work.'

'What do you think, Professor?'

'The geologist is a gossip. My assistant wanted to know where I've been. Maybe I should have taken more time to listen to him tell me what they have accomplished.' He shrugged, drained the coffee cup. 'I asked them to keep quiet for two more days. Maybe they will, maybe they won't.'

'You mean you told them about the saucer?'

'I had to.'

'I'll bet they're on the horn this very second,' Rip said glumly.

'Well

'What about that pile of stuff we found in the machinery spaces?' Rip asked.

'Our lab man was working on that when I left. The stuff isn't paper.' Soldi poured a second cup of coffee. 'He's running some chemical tests, but I think we'll have to send it to a lab in the States to get a reliable analysis.'

It was one a.m. when Rip awakened with a start. He had been dozing, examining the saucer inch by inch in his mind when the answer came to him. He sat up in his sleeping bag.

No one else was awake. The camp lanterns were out, a million stars looked down from a deep black sky.

In the starlight he could just see the outline of the tarp that covered the saucer.

Shivering in the chill air, he felt for his boots, knocked them out, slipped them on. Pulled on a sweater, fumbled for his flashlight.

Inside the saucer the temperature had not changed. It was insulated equally well from heat and cold.

Warmer, Rip crawled straight into the machinery compartment and put his light on the inscription he had first noticed.

Well, it could be. Maybe. If that raised figure between the two symbols stood for the number two, then the inscription might mean H₂O. Water.

If so, then there should be a cracker, some device that separates the hydrogen and oxygen. Mix gaseous hydrogen and oxygen together, burn the mixture in the rocket engines, use some of the oxygen for the cabin atmosphere.

Rip traced the line. Okay, this thing could be a tank. This could hold water. The line went… This thing with the reinforcing bands must be the cracker, or separator.

Lines leading out, yes, they are labeled with one of the two symbols from the water line. This one must be hydrogen, this one oxygen.

Full of his discovery, Rip sat on the floor staring at the machinery. Everything was packed so tightly it was difficult to see how the system functioned, but he had it figured out now. He hoped. Well, it made sense… sort of.

The water intake valve must be on the outside of the ship. How had he missed it?

He had been busy with the jackhammer breaking rocks. He hadn't had time to examine the surface of the ship inch by inch or the nooks and crannies of the exhaust nozzle area. There must be a water intake there somewhere and he hadn't seen it.

He went outside, began exploring with the flashlight.

Water!

Oh, man. Water is everywhere. Except here in the desert, of course. Maybe they ran out of fuel over the desert…

But it might not have been desert then. Maybe the crew was out exploring and something happened to them. Something ate them, or they got sick… Or humans attacked them.

He found it. He found a tiny hairline crack and used his pocket knife to pry on it. Finally it opened. A cover. Yes.

Inside the cover was a cap, a bit like a fuel cap on a car. This must be where the water goes in.

He had just closed the cover when a flashlight beam hit him. He turned toward it and heard a male voice say,

'Well, hello friend. Didn't expect you.' The words were English, the voice definitely American.

The flashlight played over the skin of the ship. Did he have the cover closed before the flashlight beam hit him? He decided he did.

The voice reflected its owner's amazement. 'By all that's holy! It is a flying saucer!'

'Or a good mock-up.' That was an American voice too, a woman's.