Saucer: The Conquest

10

"Artois' antigravity strikes only occur during periods of good atmospheric visibility, usually during the sunlight hours," the astronomer said. "We believe he is using some type of optical instrument to aim the antigravity beam."

"Why can't he use city lights to target his weapon?" the president asked.

"It's certainly possible," the astronomer said, "but probably technically difficult. Yet Artois has struck several times during the night hours. As you know, just now the earth is moving between the moon and the sun—" "How do we know that?" O'Reilly demanded. The astronomer gaped, then said, "Don't you look out the window occasionally? The moon is almost full. When the Irth is between the moon and the sun, as it is now, the sur-e of the earth facing the moon would appear very dark when viewed from 238,000 miles away, which is its average 'stance from the earth. The more magnification his optical Istrument has, the darker the surface would appear. And jehind the earth is that huge bright light, the sun."

"Doesn't the relationship change daily?" someone else asked.

The astronomer couldn't believe her ears. "The moon appears to move across our sky every day because the earth is spinning," she explained. "The moon actually takes twenty-nine days, twelve hours and forty-four minutes to complete one revolution around the earth, as measured against the sun. The moon also revolves on its axis, but at the same rate that it circles the earth, which is why we always see the same side of it."

"And when will the moon be overhead today?" the president asked.

The astronomer almost shook her head in amazement. The weather had been fantastic in Washington this past week — as usual, this autumn had the best weather of the year — and the night of the full moon was three days away. The Hunter's Moon, for those with a romantic bent. "At about thirty-eight minutes past ten p.m., sir."

The president looked at his watch. It was almost midnight. He tossed his pencil on his pad with a sigh. "So if Artois doesn't zap Washington tonight using the city lights, he can't do it until tomorrow night."

The leaders of Congress were demanding that he publicly reject Artois' demands, the sooner the better, but he didn't want to trigger Artois' wrath — at least until all the space-planes had been permanently grounded. So he had a little breathing room. Just enough, perhaps.

The president was counting hours on the wall clock, figuring when the attack on France would happen, when a messenger scurried into the room with a piece of paper. He handed it to O'Reilly, who read it and passed it to the president. The president scanned it and tossed it on the table.

"Aha! An ultimatum from the moon. Surrender within forty-eight hours or Artois will flatten Washington."

That remark set off the president's advisers. Everyone wanted to talk at once. The president used to insist they talk one at a time, but he didn't anymore. Now he merely tuned in to snatches of each speech and got the gist of it. One voice hammered on public safety, someone fretted about paying people not to work, several were horrified at the cost to rebuild public buildings, and the attorney general remarked on the government's liability if anyone were injured or killed by flying debris. Evacuation would look bad to voters, everyone agreed. Tourists would flee Washington, the local economy would be devastated, government workers would refuse to commute into the city, essential government services would be disrupted, Social Security checks wouldn't go out on time, the homeless had noplace else to go…

"Now you understand why the French surrendered," the secretary of state said smugly.

The president couldn't resist. "We'll rebuild the capital in Kansas," he told her. "The climate there is better, and it's closer to Texas." Then he shooed them out.

O'Reilly, the national security adviser, and the chairman of the Joint Chiefs remained when the others had left. "Have the director of homeland security make sure every government building in Washington is empty from moonrise to moonset tomorrow and every day after that," the president said to O'Reilly. "Things may get nasty if we don't whack those spaceplanes tomorrow night."

"We'll have to evacuate the White House." Are we going to whack those spaceplanes?" the president asked the national security adviser.

The submarines are in position to launch cruise missiles now, sir," the adviser said. "But I suggest we wait for darkness to fall in France, then launch a coordinated strike. That will maximize the chances of catastrophically damaging the tar-

gets. And the incoming cruise missiles will be perfect cover for the B-2s. Under no circumstance should we risk having the French capture a B-2 crew."

"What do you think?" the president asked the chairman.

"If they move the planes while the missiles are in the air, the missiles will miss. We have a better chance of hitting the birds with B-2s."

"The spaceplanes could fly away while we are waiting," the president objected. "If they're ready to fly. Are they?"

"CIA doesn't know. But if we shoot cruise missiles and miss, I guarantee you that the pro-Artois French will shuffle those planes all over. The B-2s are already in the air. They'll refuel twice on the flight to France and twice coming home."

The president went to the window. The moonlight was so bright the trees in the lawn cast shadows. He looked up. He could see the moon by leaning close to the glass. The seas, really dark areas caused by ancient lava flows, were quite stark.

When he was small someone told him about the man in the moon, frightening him. He had hid from the moon's sight, afraid of that man up there. Now a whole generation of kids might grow up afraid.

That egomaniac Artois!

He looked again at his watch. It was a few minutes past six a.m. in France. "Okay," he said. "Wait until darkness in France." The national security adviser and the general left the room.

O'Reilly turned on the television. The president wasn't paying much attention until the announcer said breathlessly, "Earlier this evening a reporter for our Denver affiliate attempted to interview Charlotte Pine, the American pilot for the French space ministry, who stole the spaceplane that took Artois to the moon. Tonight she was a passenger in a private airplane that landed at a general aviation airport in _sAuc.er: theconquest 169

Denver. She refused to be interviewed." The network then played fifteen seconds of footage of Charley Pine snarling at the reporter.

So she was back, and in the United States!

"Have the FBI detain her and bring her here," the president growled at O'Reilly.

He was back at the window, looking at the moon, when a military aide came into the room and handed him a slip of paper. A saucer or rocket had gone into orbit from Nevada.

The president's eyebrows rose toward his hairline. He knew about the saucer that the Air Force had stashed in Area 51, had learned about it the hard way last year. Surely no one had flown that artifact away. That thing had been guarded day and night and locked up tight since 1947!

More than likely this report was another false alarm. Boy, there had been plenty of those. People were edgy, defenseless and ready to stampede. Rumors swept from coast to coast as quickly as telephone switching equipment could handle long distance calls.

Tomorrow night. With the spaceplanes destroyed, Artois would have to reexamine his cards.

"Better check on this report," the president said, and handed the slip of paper about the Area 51 saucer to O'Reilly. "Sounds as if someone in Nevada panicked big time. And find that spaceplane that Pine flew back."

Then he smiled one of those smiles the secretary of state hated.

After arriving at Rkagan National, Charley Pine and Rip Cantrell rented a car, loaded the space suits and air compressor in the trunk and went looking for a motel room.

They found one near the Potomac, south of the city on U.S., which had been the main drag south back in the dark ages pfore the interstates were built. The motel dated from that era, although it had been painted three or four times since.

Charely Pine washed her clothes in the sink of their room and hung them up to dry. Rip gave her a toothbrush and some other personal items that he had brought in a small tote bag from Missouri. When Charley put her clothes on the next morning they were still damp. She complained to Rip, who had just returned from the small diner next to the motel with coffee.

'You gotta be tough this day and age," Rip said, and kissed her good morning.

"I am tough, but wet panties—" Charley shivered.

Charley already had the television on and had watched a replay of her vignette with the Denver reporter. As she and Rip sipped coffee, she flipped back to CNBC and turned the audio down.

"So do you still want to do it?" she asked Rip.

"Artois snatched Egg. If he hadn't, I'd vote to find a hole and crawl in. But we can't."

"You're right. And I owe Pierre. If he wins, he's going to squash me like a bug."

A half hour later, as they ate breakfast in the diner, the news broke that the three spaceplanes in France had just taken off, and had presumably gone into orbit on the first leg of their journey to the moon.

Charley and Rip sat frozen, watching the film clip of the spaceplanes taking off, a minute apart, on the television at the end of the counter.

"They have to get fuel at the orbiting tank," Charley remarked thoughtfully. "I didn't think there was enough there for three spaceplanes."

"What if there isn't?" Rip asked, speaking softly so no one seated at the counter would hear them.

"One of the spaceplanes may have carried up excess fuel for the other two. The crew would pump the excess into the tank, then the receivers would take it out. Much easier than rigging hoses between orbiting bodies."

They soon paid the tab and drove away in the rented car, with the space suits and accessories in the trunk. They stopped at a convenience store and purchased six bottles of water and three bags of jerky. Then they drove to the parking lot of the old RFK football stadium, which was empty. They parked, locked the car, and walked to Independence Avenue, where they found a bus stop and waited. When the local came along, they climbed aboard.

"Going to be a pretty day," the bus driver said to Charley after she smiled at him.

Rip and Charley took a seat and rode into the heart of the city.

The news that the three spaceplanes in southern France had taken off from their base hit the president hard. He had let the military professionals talk him into waiting to attack, and now it was too late. He said three or four cuss words.

While he waited for his blood pressure to return to normal, he thought about the situation. Due to the fact that the moon was overhead during the middle of the night when public buildings in Washington — such as the Capitol, White House, Supreme Court Building, Pentagon and Treasury — were empty, the government didn't yet have to panic the electorate by evacuating those buildings during the day, in effect shutting down official Washington. During the day the government could continue with business as usual. For a week or so.

Across the street in Lafayette Park several thousand demonstrators were cavorting in front of television cameras. hey were demanding the United States surrender to Artois. His promises sounded pretty good, they said. A handful of ¹ '" stars were there with the demonstrators, telling everyone watching on television that the man in the moon was a better deal than the United States Constitution.

What the heck, the president thought, I might be dead in a week. There might be a revolution, a meteor might strike the earth, Yellowstone might explode, or California might slide off into the Pacific. A whole week…

Standing outside the National Air and Space Museum on the side that faced the Mall, the northern side, Rip examined the huge glass facade. Just beyond this wall of windows were the most important treasures the museum possessed, the Wright Flyer, the Spirit of St. Louis, the Bell X-l, and the saucer Rip had found in the Sahara. Behind him Charley Pine was purchasing sunglasses, baseball caps and sweatshirts from a pushcart vendor.

She donned her sweatshirt, cap and sunglasses and offered Rip's to him. Her sweatshirt sported an American flag on the front and the Capitol dome on the back. Rip's sweatshirt had a likeness of the president on it. "This the only one they had?" he asked.

"It was the cheapest," Charley replied.

"If they took the reactor out of the saucer," Rip said, "you and I are going to spend the next ten or twenty days in the city jail." One of the conditions Rip had put on his donation of the saucer to the museum was that the reactor be removed, rendering the saucer incapable of flight.

"You know they didn't," Charley said. "They don't have a place to store nuclear materials."

The lack of adequate storage was the reason the museum had been sued by local antinuclear activists, who had obtained an injunction against removal of the reactor from the saucer.

"But if they did…" Rip said.

The sunglasses were plastic wraparound mirrors that cost three dollars a pair. With glasses on and ball caps pulled down, they joined the queue for the security checkpoints at the north entrance. There weren't a lot of tourists here today — most folks were probably huddled around a television somewhere, trying to catch the latest news — so Rip and Charley breezed through the metal detectors and soon found themselves inside the museum.

The saucer was on the main floor, with the Spirit of St. Louis hanging from the ceiling above it. They walked to the velvet rope that surrounded it. Rip could see that the hatch in the belly of the saucer was closed.

"What do you think?" he whispered to Charley, who was looking at the armed security guards. They had to get into the saucer and close the hatch before the guards could react.

"("heck to see if the reactor is there."

Well, why not? The light from the wall of windows fell directly upon the saucer's skin; that electrical current should be enough to maintain a minimum charge on the battery.

Saucer, power up! Last year, when Rip flew the saucer, the computer memorized his brain waves. If it had enough electrical power to pick them up now…

He thought he heard a faint whine from the direction of tin' saucer, but he couldn't be sure. It would take a moment or two for the reactor temps to rise enough to begin generating electricity. In the interim, Saucer, flash the interior light.

He saw the blink inside the dark cockpit.

So did Charley, who squeezed his arm, then said, "I think you should pull the fire alarm in the men's room while I open the hatch."

"1 ve got a better idea. You pull the fire alarm in the women's room while /open the hatch."

'Too late," Charley told him. "I suggested it. Go do it, Ripper."

*ou sure about this?" Rip whispered to Charley. He knew it was the right thing to do, but still… "If you thought stealing Jeanne d'Arc got them in an uproar, wait until you see what happens after we fly out of here."

"Are you going to stand here all morning talking, or are you going to get on with it?"

The man beside Charley tapped her on the shoulder. He was in his forties and balding, wearing baggy shorts and a sweatshirt. "Say, aren't you Charley Pine, the saucer pilot?"

"Uh—"

"Well, if that don't beat all!" the man loudly exclaimed. "I recognized you right off. You're a mighty pretty woman, and I knew you were somebody. Matilda, come over here. There's somebody I want you to meet. Here she is, Charley Pine, the woman that swiped that spaceplane from the moon and left that idiot Frenchie high and dry."

Everyone within earshot turned and stared at Charley.

"Are you trying to say someone really stole the Air Force's Roswell saucer out of its hangar in Area Fifty-one?" the president demanded.

"Yessir," the aide stammered. "That's what they said."

"Area Fifty-one is a top secret base. How in the world did thieves get in there?"

"They drove through a gate, sir."

The president eyed the aide without affection. Young, with a terrible haircut and baggy pants, the aide had to be the dullest of the first lady's cousins, the president thought. Then he remembered that last family picnic he attended. Perhaps not. "Who let them through the gate?" he asked with more patience than he felt. "Why didn't the security forces find the thieves and arrest them before they flew away?"

"I don't know the answers to those questions, sir. The Air Force and FBI are investigating, Mr. O'Reilly said."

"So where is the saucer now?"

The aide jabbed a thumb at the ceiling. "Up there." When O'Reilly came in a few minutes later, the president had his feet on his desk and his chin on his chest. O'Reilly had two Secret Service types with him. O'Reilly pointed, and they began taking paintings down from the wall. The president watched morosely as each agent carried two from the room, one in each hand, and then returned for more.

The tourist had a voice like a carny barker, Charley Pine thought. Or a leather-lunged politician. A dozen people were staring at her. "We're from Ohio," the man brayed, "just here visiting, you understand, staying with my brother's in-laws — they're retired from the government — and taking in some of the sights. The White House people wouldn't let us take a tour with all this craziness going on, so we came to the museum this morning. Terrorists, demonstrators, idiots on the moon, and look who we run into! If this isn't something—"

The wail of the fire alarm cut him off.

As everyone looked around for smoke or flames, Charley ducked under the velvet rope and scooted under the saucer. She put her hand on the latch to warm it, trying not to hurry.

"Hey, you, get out from under there!" The shout could be heard even above the howl of the fire alarm.

Now. The latch rotated in her hand. The hatch dropped open and Charley shot up through the hole.

Rip was right behind her. So was one of the guards.

"Sorry, pal, you didn't buy a ticket," Rip said, and slammed fce hatch shut in his face. In seconds he had it latched.

Charley Pine was already in the pilot's seat. Through canopy she could see horrified tourists and running guards. In front of her the computer displays came vividly to life.

01 one tore off the ball cap and sunglasses she was wearing and tossed them away. The computer headband lay on the console before her; she placed it on her head. Hello, she said to the computer.

Lift us up about afoot.

She felt the motion as the computer gave the necessary commands to the flight computer and the ship responded.

Gear up!

She heard the whine as the three arms retracted into the body of the saucer, and the final thump as the gear doors slammed shut. Now she turned the saucer, pointing it at the wall of windows.

Do we have any water in the system? she asked the computer.

A graph appeared on the main screen before her. Rip had brought the saucer here a year ago with some water in it, and the staff had apparently never drained it out. The ship was about thirty percent full, she estimated.

Outside the saucer, the crowd was backing away, panic-stricken. A steady stream of people were forcing their way out the main entrance. A half dozen uniformed guards stood in front of the saucer with their pistols drawn. They seemed unsure of what to do.

Charley lowered the saucer to within a few inches of the floor to ensure no one would be crushed under it in the antigravity field. Then she began moving the saucer forward. She thought the command, and the flight computer altered the current to the field just enough to move the machine.

She could still hear the fire alarm sounding, although the sound was muffled. She ignored it and concentrated on moving the saucer.

The guards scattered. A tourist information booth was shoved out of the way, as were several crowd control stanchions and a sign that explained how Rip Cantrell had found the saucer in the Sahara Desert, as the saucer moved slowly toward the window at about half the speed a man could walk. Staring, pointing people lined the walls, including some parents with fierce grips on their kids.

With the saucer inches from the windows, Charley Pine stopped forward motion and caused it to rise until it was about halfway up the glass. She was a little concerned about nudging the Spirit, which was someplace behind and above the saucer, but the higher she hit the windows, the easier they would be to break.

Now the saucer contacted the glass. Forward!

The window directly in front of the saucer shattered, yet the framework stayed intact.

"Better back up and whack it," Rip suggested. He was standing right beside her.

"I really don't need suggestions from the peanut gallery," she muttered, and backed the saucer up about a yard.

"Just trying to be helpful," Rip said, not a bit apologetic.

She drove the saucer forward as hard as she could. The framework cracked and buckled in a shower of glass. Still it held, preventing the saucer from passing.

She backed up, smashed the wall again. This time the saucer shot through.

No one under her on the patio outside. The shower of glass from the window had moved everyone away.

The saucer was only fifty feet from the building when Charley lit the rocket engines and turned it to the left so she wouldn't fly over the downtown. The fire from the rocket exhaust nozzles of the accelerating saucer was subdued since she had only asked for a little power, but the noise was awe-inspiring.

It was heard all over downtown Washington.

In the White House the president heard it and wondered, Now what? He went to the window of the Oval Office just in mie to see the saucer accelerating toward the Lincoln Memorial trailing a sheet of fire.

Charley turned hard over Georgetown and came back down the Potomac. She passed the Pentagon, still low, only about a hundred feet above the river so that she wouldn't interfere with airline traffic into and out of Reagan National, then turned and headed for RFK Stadium. The rockets were silent as she coasted toward the lone car parked in the empty acres of asphalt. She used the antigravity system to lower the saucer onto its landing gear beside the car.

Rip went out the hatch like ajackrabbit. Two minutes later he had the space suits and compressor loaded. The food and water in bags on the backseat took another two minutes, then he popped back up through the hatchway.

"Check the fuel cap to ensure that it's open," Charley said. She had told the computer to open it, but it wouldn't hurt to check.

Rip leaped back out.

A police car roared across the empty parking lot with lights flashing and siren howling. It was still fifty yards away when Rip scampered back up through the hatchway, shouted, "It's open," and pulled the hatch shut behind him.

"The cops are coming," he called to Charley, who was still busy with the computer displays. "Whenever you're ready."

She lifted the saucer, retracted the gear and headed back for the Potomac. At the confluence of the Anacostia and Potomac, she stopped all relative motion, then lowered the saucer into the river. Brown water covered the canopy. A gurgling could be heard as the water flowed into the open neck of the fuel tank.

"This water is pretty bad," Rip said nervously. "Lots of mud in it."

Charley didn't respond to that comment. She concentrated on the computers, plotting their journey.

When the tank was full of water, Charley lifted the saucer from the river and flew along two hundred feet above the Potomac using the antigravity rings. Several miles downriver she saw a golf course on the east bank and landed on a fairway. Rip dropped through the hatchway to check that the fuel cap had indeed latched shut.

Two golfers drove up in a golf cart and stopped a hundred feet from the saucer. They sat frozen with their jaws hanging open.

"It's on tight," Rip reported when he was back inside, with the hatch shut. "But before we go, hadn't we better check the antiproton beam?"

"Good idea," Charley admitted. When Egg analyzed the systems aboard the saucer, it took him a while to realize that the power that generated the antigravity force was coupled into some weird-looking heavy-duty electrical conductors that he originally thought were part of the lift/control system. It turned out, though that the power was routed to drive an antiproton beam weapon. Antiprotons are forms of antimatter and are manufactured on earth today only in giant accelerators in particle physics laboratories. The creators of the saucer, however, equipped it with a small accelerator, which generated an antiproton beam.

Charley lifted the saucer ten feet in the air and stabilized in a hover. At her command, crosshairs appeared in front of her on the canopy. She turned the saucer to line it up on a large oak tree on the edge of the fairway. The trunk appeared to be about three feet in diameter.

Rip was right beside her, his head at her shoulder.

Fire!

A smoky beam of fire, almost like lightning, shot from a point on the leading edge of the saucer and reached out for the oak. Some of the antiprotons were striking ordinary protons in the molecules that made up the air, destroying them and releasing gobs of energy, hence the lightning.

The lightning went completely through the oak tree and out the other side, since there was so much space in and between the molecules of the tree that some of the antipro-tons could survive their trips through it and emerge out the other side. Pieces began flying from the tree.

"Better stop—" Rip began, just as the tree trunk exploded from the release of energy.

Charley stopped the beam. The stub of the trunk smoked as the top of the tree crashed to the ground and fragments of wood showered down.

"Holy cow," Rip said, and whistled.

"Let's get outta here," Charley Pine muttered, and told the saucer to go.

Two seconds later the rocket engines ignited, blasting the saucer forward over the carcass of the devastated tree. Charley held the nose down as the ship accelerated. When the speed had reached several hundred knots, she commanded the computer to lift the nose and follow that holographic pathway on the display before her.

The president was on the south lawn of the White House as the saucer shot above the treetops, going almost straight up, on its journey into space. When he saw the saucer fly over the Mall a half hour ago, he suspected it would soon go into orbit, so he ran out here to catch the show. Although he was now at least ten miles from the saucer, the president had to squint against the glare of the white-hot rocket exhaust rising into the sky.

The noise was a loud, deep, bass roar that overwhelmed the senses.

Without realizing he was doing it, the president shouted in frustration. His shout was lost amid the thunder of the saucer.