Saucer: The Conquest

14

The Roswell saucer, with Egg Cantrell in the pilot's seat, looped around the back side of the moon. Egg positioned the saucer so that it was flying backward, and, while still behind the moon, fired the rockets to begin a descent to the lunar base on the side facing earth. When the burn was completed, he turned the saucer 180 degrees so that it was again aligned with its trajectory, which he could alter slightly, as necessary, with the saucer's maneuvering jets.

He had weighed the possibility of using the antimatter weapon on the lunar base when it hove into view, but he was unsure how to fire it or how much damage the weapon would do. As the saucer descended toward the lunar surface, crossing from the darkness into the light, soaring over stupendous mountain ranges and dark lunar lava flows, Newton Chadwick was hovering on his right side and Fry Two on the left. At the most, he thought, a two- or three-second burst was about all he could hope for before Chadwick and the Fries throttled him.

Egg also considered crashing the saucer, power-diving the moon to make a new crater. That would quickly and painlessly kill him and his three passengers and permanently maroon Pierre Artois and his disciples. Egg thought about it for about two seconds and decided he didn't have it in him. He wasn't suicidal. Nor, he decided, was he warrior enough to pull the trigger on Chadwick, the Fries and the French astronauts, even if there were a way he could live through the experience. Maybe he should have had the courage, if that was what it was, but he didn't and he knew it. As that great American philosopher Dirty Harry Callahan once said, a man has to know his limitations.

Eventually, as the saucer descended and slowed, the lunar base appeared, right where it should be. The solar power panels were an unmistakable landmark. Egg snapped down the landing gear and sat watching as the flight computer used the maneuvering jets and the antigravity system to bring the saucer gently into a hover outside the entrance to the base. Now he saw the lunar dune buggy and the forklift, parked near the main air lock.

Talking silently to the flight computer, he allowed the saucer to settle toward the lunar surface. It touched down almost imperceptibly on its three legs, and all motion stopped.

Egg found that he had been holding his breath. He exhaled convulsively and pushed in the power knob to the first detent, which retained electrical power on the saucer but killed the reactor and propulsion system. Then he used a shirttail to swab the perspiration from his face.

Only then did he look at Newton Chadwick. Chadwick's face was devoid of color. The man had been hanging on with both hands, a death grip he was unable to release, even now.

"We're here, Chadwick," Egg said, pointing out the obvious. He was surprised how cool and calm his own voice sounded. Yeah, man, I'm Egg Cantrell, saucer pilot. I do this every day. As he mopped his brow again he noticed that his hands were trembling.

"So, you are the brilliant cantrell," Plerre Artois said in lightly accented English. He said that as if Egg's reputation were somehow disreputable. They were standing inside the com center.

Egg had managed to wriggle into a space suit without ripping it, but it was a close call. He needed to lose at least twenty pounds to lessen the strain on the zipper. Maybe thirty. He was out of the space suit now, trying to take in everything, see how the lunar base was laid out.

He concentrated on Pierre. Of medium height, erect, charismatic, with what some might term good looks, Pierre radiated control. "That's right," Egg said slowly, shaking his head. "The brilliant Cantrell."

"We have experienced a new phenomenon I wish to ask you about, Cantrell. The effects are unknown to science. Suddenly, all in the same moment, a series of minor explosions rocked the base. Two were in our observatory. I wonder if you might be able to shed some light on this unique experience."

"Sorry. This is my first trip to the moon." Egg thought that a rather witty answer.

"I thought perhaps this phenomenon might be the end product of some kind of weapon. On the other saucer, perhaps, the one your nephew stole from the Air and Space Museum in Washington just a few days ago, the one he used to shoot down three French spaceplanes and murder the crews."

"I know nothing about the other saucer. I have been an unwilling guest of Mr. Chadwick. Perhaps you can enlighten me — in this new Utopia that you will lead, will kidnapping be illegal?"

"I haven't the time to split the hairs, as you Americans say." He nodded at Henri Salmon and turned back to the radio mike. Salmon placed his hand on Egg's arm.

"If you will come with me, sir. We'll show you to your quarters."

"I need food and a bath," Egg shot back. He made eye contact with Julie Artois, who was standing against one wall frowning slightly, as they led him out.

When Egg was out of sight, Pierre turned on the charm for Chadwick and embraced him. "Your arrival in that saucer has saved us, saved our great quest. Our debt to you is large."

Chadwick beamed. The terrors of the flight were over, and he was on the winning team — it doesn't get any better than that.

"Would you like to see the saucer?" he asked Pierre, who readily agreed.

As they were donning space suits for the walk to the parked saucer, Chadwick said, "Cantrell lied to you. There is a weapon aboard the saucer, a generator that fires antipro-tons in a continuous stream."

"Antiprotons?"

"Antimatter. When an antiproton strikes a regular proton, they annihilate each other. I don't know if the Sahara saucer has this weapon, but the Roswell one does. And it sounds from your description as if you were showered with antiprotons."

"Charley Pine," Pierre said grimly. "She and young Cantrell are presumably headed this way. The press reported the saucer going into orbit from Washington about six hours ago. Four hours ago we experienced the attack." He was silent as he zipped himself into the suit, then said, "Now that Egg Cantrell is here, I doubt if they will again shower us with antimatter. But Pine and young Cantrell are coming, so we must arrange a suitable reception."

He pushed the intercom button on the wall and spoke to the duty officer in the com room. "Ask Jean-Paul Lalouette and Henri Salmon to come to the suit room. They will enjoy seeing the saucer."

When the four men were inside the saucer, Chadwick closed the hatch and repressurized the interior. He had watched Egg depressurize it, so he reversed the process. When the pressure had stabilized, he removed his helmet and gestured for Pierre, Salmon and Lalouette to do likewise.

"This is it," he told them. "Roswell, New Mexico, 1947. What do you think?"

Pierre looked at everything, stared at the holographic displays on the instrument panel, touched this and that, before he finally spoke. "I confess, Chadwick, when you first approached me with your antigravity device, I did not believe you. If you had not had a working model that proved that the antigravity theory could be put to practical use, I would have thrown you out of the office."

"As everyone else did," Newton Chadwick said with a gleam in his eye. "No one else believed. Not one."

"And so, this is where your journey led. To the moon, eh?" Artois was jovial. He slapped Chadwick on the back. After all, he was the emperor of France. "Show us how this saucer works."

Newton Chadwick gave them the tour, explained the propulsion system, the antigravity rings, gave summaries about the various computers and let each sit in the pilot's seat wearing the headband.

A long hour later, Artois asked Chadwick, "This saucer has a weapon?"

"Oh, yes." Chadwick put the optical sighting crosshairs on the canopy and ran through what he had learned of the system from his explorations of the computer.

Artois listened intently. "With this weapon we can prevent the saucer that is on its way here from Washington from hurting us."

"True," Chadwick admitted.

"Can you fly this ship?"

Chadwick took a deep breath and held it while he studied the instrument panel. He had watched Egg do it, of course. Watched intently. Wearing the headband, one merely asked the computer for the appropriate maneuver and it manipulated the various propulsion, control and navigation systems. And yet…

Newton Chadwick exhaled. "No," he said forcefully. He glanced at Jean-Paul Lalouette, then looked Artois in the eyes. "I could teach him, though. He is a pilot. He has the… the confidence, the judgment, the experience… that I do not."

Artois looked expectantly at Lalouette, who was not thinking of the saucer but of Charlotte Pine. She would be flying the saucer that he was supposed to attack. She had become famous last year by flying it, and now she was at it again. He had gotten to know her fairly well during the training cycle for the spaceplane mission. A U.S. Air Force Academy graduate, Pine served a tour in F-16 fighters before she went to test pilot school. When Artois had hired her to fly the space-plane, Lalouette was very skeptical. He didn't believe anyone could learn the ship in the short time available. And she had. Not only had she learned to be a copilot, she had flown it solo back to earth and landed in Utah. She was, he thought now, perhaps the finest natural pilot he had ever met.

Lalouette cleared his throat and examined the various displays on the instrument panel. There was no book that explained all this. One had to intuitively grasp the significance of what one was seeing or… or else.

He looked again at Artois. "You want me to shoot down the other saucer?"

'Yes."

So there it was. Lalouette rubbed the stubble on his jaw. He found that Salmon was staring at him, his face expressionless.

When Salmon captured Jean-Paul's eyes, he said, "If you don't fly this ship, the other saucer may destroy or hopelessly damage it. The only other ship on earth capable of reaching us is in the United States. The American president will probably order it destroyed. The lunar base will be our burial crypt. Do you want to die here?"

Still Lalouette hesitated. When he was younger he spent three years flying Super Entendard fighters. He fingered the throttle grip on the antigravity lever. The water necessary to refuel this saucer was here, at the lunar base, but without a radar or GCI controller, intercepting the other saucer at altitude was impractical. The interception would have to be made low, near the lunar base, while the other saucer was on its final approach with the antigravity system. Yes, he decided, that was the best way to do it.

"Chadwick will fly with you," Artois said. "He knows the systems. He doesn't want to die." He turned his gaze on the redheaded American. "Do you?" he asked.

There was something in the tone of his voice that sent a cold chill up Chadwick's spine.

"Billions and billions of stars. Do you ever stop and wonder what's really out there?" Rip said to Charley Pine. Head to head, they were staring through the canopy at the Milky Way, that huge splash of stars that streaked the heavens, our galaxy.

"Our species will be exploring it until the end of time,"

Charley replied. She too felt the magic of the moment. Hurling though space toward an uncertain rendezvous, with life hanging in the balance, still there was time to look at the eternal… and wonder.

"Like Egg, I've spent time this winter and spring surfing the saucer's computer," Rip said. "But the people who built the saucer stopped making entries 140,000 years ago. What have they learned since then?"

"If they still exist?"

"Oh, they're out there," Rip replied thoughtfully. "Someplace out there, amid all those stars, are people just like us. Professor Soldi was right, I suspect — they are our cousins. And they are probably looking our way and wondering about those colonists that went bravely forth into the great unknown a hundred and forty millennia ago."

"If you look into the abyss long enough, the abyss stares back. Didn't someone smart say that?"

"Speaking of the abyss, how are we going to go about rescuing Egg when we get to the moon?"

When Jean-Paul Lalouette donned the headband that allowed the saucer's computer to read and respond to his brainwaves, he felt as if he had walked through a doorway into another world, another dimension. He could see—

Frightened, he ripped off the headband. He was in the pilot's seat of the saucer, the panel was there… he fingered the controls, reassuring himself with their tangible solidity, the texture and sensuous shape of their surfaces. Yes, this was real.

He looked at the headband, fingered it, then placed it back upon his head.

Oh, now he understood. He was living in two worlds, that of the cockpit and, superimposed over it, that of the computer.

He decided that the first command would be to lift the saucer from the lunar surface where it rested, and he instantly felt a tiny lurch as the ship rose until it was absolutely level, then severed its contact with the moon.

He was up; he could see the change in perspective. Now fonoard—and the saucer began to move.

Stop!

Aft!

Right!

Left!

Higher—oh, it was magic!

"See how easy it is," someone said. Chadwick's voice. Chadwick, one of life's spectators, one of those who lacked the courage to put his own lips to the silver cup.

Lalouette snapped up the landing gear and let the saucer accelerate away from the base, out across the vast dark lava flow that stretched away to the south and east. It accelerated slowly, no doubt because the lunar gravity was so weak. Yet it was accelerating, faster and faster, until on just the antigrav-ity system alone the saucer was doing about two hundred knots, which appeared to be terminal velocity unless he lit the rockets. He did — and the saucer accelerated abruptly.

After a few moments he tilted the saucer and used the controls to turn and head back for the base, maneuvering freely to get the feel of the machine.

With the rockets off near the lunar surface, he tilted the saucer to sixty degrees and used the antigravity system and a squirt from the ship's maneuvering jets to turn a sharp corner. The G came hard and, after two weeks away from the earth's gravitational field, almost blacked him out. He strained against it, fighting to stay conscious.

He straightened out and raced back across the lava flow toward the lunar base, its solar cells marking its position. Behind the base was the first of the ridges. He climbed progressively higher and higher, aiming for the tops of the crags on the highest ridge, which towered fifteen thousand feet above the flat lava bed below.

The ridges were knife edges, sheer and steep, untouched by the forces of erosion in a place without wind or rain, although they did bear the scars of weathering caused by the fierce temperature extremes between sunlight and shadow. The stark sunlight and deep purple, almost black, shadows made the jagged formations seem even more severe. The French pilot worked the saucer up the slopes and ridges, barely clearing the high points, turning first one way, then another, tilting right and left, staying just a few feet over the rock.

He slowed the saucer and brought it to a halt, finally, above the highest peak — stopped it above that apex as if it were mounted on an invisible pedestal.

Now Lalouette took off the headband and looked around. Both Artois and Chadwick were unconscious on the floor. They had succumbed to the G forces. Salmon was conscious, however, strapped into one of the seats. He looked grimly at Lalouette.

Jean-Paul snorted and shook his head, then donned the headband again. He looked up at the earth, which was merely a black spot against the sunlit sky.

Pierre Artois thought he was the emperor of the earth, but oh, how little he knew!

Jean-Paul dumped the saucer's nose and let it accelerate down the slope. It accelerated slowly, pulled by the weak lunar gravity, as if life were being lived in slow motion.

On the crest of a lower ridge he saw a sharp promontory, a spire of rock that had stood upright since the ridge was made. Even as the thought crossed his mind, the crosshairs of the antimatter weapon appeared on the canopy before him. The saucer turned slightly, pointing precisely at that rock finger, superimposing the crosshairs over it.

Fire!

Flashes from the rock. Shards and dust flew off as antipro-tons found protons and the particles obliterated each other in bursts of pure energy.

The spire was obscured in an opaque cloud of rock fragments when he stopped shooting at the last instant and pulled the saucer up just enough to avoid smashing into it. Accelerating downward toward the lava sea, the saucer quickly left the shattered spire behind.

Lalouette's face wore a terrible grin.