Saucer (3 page)

“We need some other scientists in on this, wouldn’t you agree?”

“Of course. Experts in a variety of fields. First, however, I think we should uncover the ship, see what is there, satisfy ourselves that it is what it appears to be. If we even hint to the outside world that we’ve found an alien spaceship and it isn’t, I’ll be laughed out of the profession. I won’t be able to get a job digging basements.”

“Uh-huh.”

“When we are absolutely convinced that it could be nothing else, then we tell the world.”

“I was thinking about the local government,” Rip said with a glance at the professor. “The Libyan border is just a few miles north, isn’t it?”

Soldi frowned. “Our dig is in Chad. They issued the archaeological permit.”

“The saucer may be in Libya, Chad, or the Sudan for all I know,” Rip remarked. “Borders are political—you can’t see or touch them. Qaddafi might run us off and confiscate the saucer if he gets wind of this. We’ve got to get it out of this desert before we say anything to anybody.”

“Let me do the talking at the dig,” Professor Soldi told him.

• • •

By evening the following day, the four men had the sandstone completely removed from the top of the spaceship, which was indeed circular in form, with a diameter of a few inches over seventy feet. The top of it seemed to be in perfect condition, although the bottom was still embedded in stone.

“The thing looks like it’s sitting on a pedestal in front of a museum,” Dutch remarked.

“That’s probably its ultimate fate,” Rip replied, then went back to work clearing the last of the stone from the four exhaust pipes that stuck out the rear. Each of these nozzles was about a foot in diameter.

Arranged around the circumference of the ship, but pointing up and down, were more exhaust nozzles, small ones. These, everyone agreed, must be maneuvering jets, to control the attitude of the ship in yaw, roll, and pitch. The upper ones were packed with sandstone.

Although it was late in another long day, Rip still had plenty of energy. He had ceased asking Professor Soldi questions only when the scientist quit supplying answers.

Soldi was lost in his own private world. He and Bill measured the ship with a tape as carefully as they could. Soldi took notes on a small computer and shot more videotape. He also shot up several rolls of 35mm film.

The archaeologist studied the surface of the ship with a pocket magnifying glass, dripped a bit of acid from the Jeep’s battery on one tiny spot, and muttered over the result.

“It’s a giant solar cell,” Rip remarked.

“What is?”

“The skin. Put your fingers on it. You can feel it absorbing energy from the sun. And notice how the reflectivity has changed—it seems to change with the temperature, and probably the state of the battery charge.”

The professor gave Rip a surprised look. As soon as the younger man turned away, he caressed the skin with his fingers. A solar power cell, absorbing the sun’s energy and converting it to electricity! Of course!

He drew back suddenly, as if he had been shocked. Rip implied that the solar cells were absorbing energy now! Could that be true?

He lay for an hour on top of the ship with a mirror to direct the sun’s rays down inside the cockpit like a spotlight. Each of the men joined him there, looking at the seat and controls, the blank dark panels. The cockpit looked like nothing they had ever seen, and yet it was familiar in a way that was hard to describe.

“It’s human-size,” Rip remarked.

“Isn’t that extraordinary?” Soldi muttered.

Most of the afternoon Soldi spent sitting in the shade tapping on his computer, with long pauses to stare at the ship.

They had found no blemish on the upper skin of the ship and no way in. The skin was seamless.

“The hatch must be underneath,” Rip told Dutch and kept working with the jackhammer. He seemed almost immune to the heat and dust.

Twice the jackhammer slipped when Rip was working close to the ship’s skin. The hard steel bit whacked the ship several smart raps. Soldi examined the spots with his magnifying glass and said nothing.

Finally, with the evening sun fully illuminating the ship, Soldi shot two more rolls of 35mm film.

The rock under the ship was difficult to remove. After it was broken up, the shards and remnants had to be shoveled away.

Just before dusk, they managed to clear the first landing gear. It was a simple skid protruding from the bottom of the saucer, held down by what appeared to be a hydraulic ram.

“No wheels,” Soldi muttered and resumed chewing on his lower lip.

“It must land vertically,” Rip Cantrell said.

“So it would seem,”

“That means it must have some other mode of thrust besides the rocket engines to hold it up.”

“One would think so, yes.”

“What kind of thrust?”

“I dig up ancient villages,” Soldi said irritably. “How would I know?”

“Well, Professor, I never saw an airplane like this. No, sir-ree. Did you?”

Soldi pointed at the stone. “Hammer some more rock out. There’s another fifteen minutes of daylight left.”

• • •

Just before he quit for the evening, Rip uncovered the first landing light. The material that covered it seemed as hard and impervious as the canopy. Still, through the covering he could see the bulb of a powerful spotlight.

That night they ate dinner sitting on folding camp stools in the circle of light cast by a propane lantern mounted on a pole. “We have a supply plane from Cairo scheduled in tomorrow afternoon,” the professor told his hosts. The transport landed on unprepared flat, sandy places as if they were a huge paved airfield.

“It would be best if the crew of the plane didn’t see the saucer,” Dutch Haagen remarked.

“I think that’s wise,” the professor said. “We have several large tents at my dig. I suggest that after dinner we drive over and get one. We can erect it over the saucer tomorrow morning.”

“Okay,” Dutch agreed. “And I was thinking that perhaps we should move our camp closer to the saucer.”

They talked about the day’s events, about what the ship looked like. They were winding down, watching Rip eat the last of the cooked vegetables as they sipped their coffee, when Rip asked, “What have we really got here, Doc? Give us your off-the-record opinion.”

Soldi puffed on his pipe as he scrutinized each face. “It’s very, very old. Ancient man didn’t make it. That much I am reasonably sure of.”

“Is it a spaceship?” Dutch asked.

“You see, that’s the danger of loose language. The thing may fly, probably does—the shape is a symmetrical, saucer-shaped lifting body—but whether it is capable of flying above the atmosphere…” He shrugged. “Later, if we can get inside, we’ll get a better idea.”

“So who brought it here?”

Soldi puffed slowly on his pipe and said nothing.

“Why did they leave it?”

“I have seen no exterior damage.”

“Where are the people who flew it?”

“People?”

“Whatever.”

Soldi waggled a finger. “The answers to those questions, if we can find answers, are going to rock civilization.” He nodded in the direction of the saucer, several miles away in the night. “That thing is going to revolutionize the way we think about the universe, about ourselves. We must be very careful about the words we use because they have enormous implications.” He smoked some more, then repeated the phrase, “Enormous implications.”

Bill Taggart ran his fingers through his hair. “Maybe we should have left it in the rock.”

Rip Cantrell looked up at the sea of stars almost within arm’s reach. “We couldn’t, Bill,” he said softly. “We had to dig it out because it’s our nature to wonder, to explore.”

“Maybe that’s why they came,” Dutch Haagen remarked.

Soldi, Rip, and Dutch were deep in a discussion of the physics of atmospheric entry when Bill Taggart wandered off into the darkness. When he was well away from the light of the camp lanterns, he walked quickly to the supply tent. By the light of a pencil-thin flash, he found the satellite telephone. He opened the dish antenna and turned the thing on.

Bill removed a small book from his hip pocket and consulted it by the light of the pencil flash. He dialed in the frequency he wanted, picked up the telephone like handset, and waited for the phone to lock onto the satellite.

He punched a long series of numbers into the keyboard, waited some more. He looked again at the numbers. That country code, that was Australia, wasn’t it?

He heard the number ringing. A sleepy voice answered.

“This is Bill Taggart. Is Neville there?”

“Neville who?”

“Just Neville.”

“I’ll see. Say your name again, mate.”

“Bill Taggart.”

“Wait.”

Time passed. A minute, then two. Taggart glanced through the tent flap at the three figures sitting in the light near the camp stove. They hadn’t moved.

Finally the voice came back on. “Neville isn’t here. Why don’t you tell me what you want, mate.”

“I met Neville about eighteen months ago. In Singapore. He mentioned that he would be interested in buying certain kinds of information.”

“That Neville…” the male voice said noncommittally.

“I have some information to sell. It’s very valuable.”

“All information has value. The question is, is it valuable to us? We will discuss price with you after we have evaluated what you have. Sorry about that, but it’s the only way we can do business. You have to trust us.”

“How do I know you will play fair?”

“As I said, you have to trust us. Do you?”

“No.”

“Well, you have our number. If you—”

“Wait a minute! Okay? I have to think about this for a minute.”

“We’re on your dime, mate.”

Soldi was standing, looking into the darkness toward the ship. Rip lay in the sand, looking skyward at the stars. Dutch was sipping coffee.

“I work for an oil company,” Bill Taggart said to the man on the other end of the satellite phone. “I’m on a seismic survey crew working in the Sahara Desert. I’ll give you the coordinates in a minute. We’ve found something, something extraordinary that I think would be of interest to Neville and his associates.”

“I’m listening, Bill. Talk away.”

“I want two million dollars.”

“I’d like ten my own self.”

“I’m serious.”

“I am listening, my friend. You’re paying for this call.”

• • •

Captain Kathleen Sullivan was the duty officer in the operations center at Space Command, in Colorado Springs, Colorado, when one of the enlisted technicians called her over to his computer console.

“We were processing data from the equatorial satellite when the computer found an anomaly, Captain. I think you should take a look at this.”

“Okay,” Captain Sullivan said.

“The area we are looking at is the Sahara, on the border between Libya and Chad. The computer says the area of interest is a few meters inside Libya, but as I recall, the exact border has never been formally agreed upon.”

“What do you have?” Sullivan asked brusquely. She was in no mood for a long wind-up.

“This.” The sergeant punched a key on the computer keyboard and a picture appeared. He used a track ball to make the picture larger, and larger, and larger. In the center was a perfect circle. The sergeant stood back from the console with his hands behind his back.

“That circular shape is made of metal, is highly reflective, is about twenty meters in diameter, and wasn’t there four days ago on the satellite’s last look at that area.”

Sullivan leaned close to the computer screen. “This is a new one on me,” she muttered.

“Yes, ma’am,” the sergeant agreed. “Me too. If I didn’t know better, I’d say the damn thing is a flying saucer.”

“Or the top of a water tank.”

“There? In the middle of the Sahara?” The sergeant reached for the computer keyboard. “There is one vehicle near it and one small piece of wheeled equipment.”

“People?”

“At least one, perhaps two. If we had a little better angle on the sun we might have gotten a shadow…”

Sullivan straightened up and frowned. “You don’t believe in flying saucers, do you?”

“I have an open mind, Captain. An open mind. I’m just saying that circular shape looks like a saucer. It could be a water tank. It could be the top of a nuclear reactor. It could be a twenty-meter metal sunshade for the queen of England’s garden party.”

Sullivan picked up a notepad, jotted a series of numbers off the computer screen, then tore off the sheet of paper.

“Thank you, Sergeant,” she said and walked back to her office.

“Since I’m not an officer,” the sergeant muttered under his breath, “I can believe any damned thing I want. Sir.”

Captain Sullivan consulted the telephone number list taped to her desk, then dialed a secure telephone. After two rings, a male voice answered.

She explained about the anomaly and dictated the latitude and longitude coordinates. She was very careful not to label the anomaly a flying saucer. “It appears to be the top of a water tank, but it’s in an empty, barren godforsaken place. I suggest, sir, that we request a more thorough examination of this site.”

“Libya?”

“Near the place where the borders of Libya, Chad, and Sudan come together.”

“I’ll be down for a look in five minutes.”

Exactly six and a half minutes later, the general was leaning over the sergeant’s shoulder while Captain Sullivan watched from several paces away.

“We’re doing an initial analysis before we send this data to NIMA,” she explained. NIMA was the National Imagery and Mapping Agency, which collected, analyzed, and distributed imagery for the various agencies of the U.S. government.

“Hmm,” said the general.

“Yes, sir,” the sergeant agreed flippantly.

“What do you think it is, Sergeant?”

“Looks like a flying saucer to me, General, but I just work here.”

“Darned if it don’t,” the general said. He straightened, checked the lat/long coordinates on the screen, nodded at Captain Sullivan, then walked away.

• • •

In less than an hour a computer printer spit out a sheet of paper in a windowless office on the ground floor of a hangar in Nevada, at an airfield that wasn’t on any map, in a place known only as Area 51.