Saucer (34 page)

“Yes. They knew how all of the forces in the universe are related, which is why they could design and build the antigravity system on the saucer. It is a practical application of that knowledge.”

Charley Pine turned back to the window glass and rested her forehead against it.

After two hours, Egg removed the computer headband from Soldi’s head. The archaeologist blinked repeatedly and scrutinized his surroundings. He reached for the coffee table before him, caressed it with his hands, apparently reassuring himself of the solidity of the real world. Then he touched the saucer’s computer, ran his fingertips across it, laid both hands upon it.

“I must think about this,” he murmured finally.

As he prepared to leave, the archaeologist paused, felt the pocket of his sports coat. “Just a moment,” he said. “In the excitement I almost forgot. This afternoon I received a report from my university lab on some material Rip and I found in the equipment bay of the saucer. The material was the decomposing remains of a collection of personal items, something like a wallet, if you will. I want to share one of the items with you.”

He removed several envelopes from his pocket, examined them, and selected one. Out of it he took a sheet of paper, unfolded it carefully, and laid it upon the coffee table. Charley and Egg bent over to look.

On the paper was a picture of a woman. Obviously a woman, with a woman’s facial features and throat. She was smiling, happy. Her race, however, was difficult to determine.

“What we are seeing,” the professor said, “is a computer reconstruction of a piece of the decomposed material that I gave them. I hesitate to call the material a photograph—it was an image on some kind of paperlike substance. They are still trying to determine exactly what.”

“It’s a portrait of Eve,” Charley Pine said.

“Something like that, I suppose,” the professor said. He carefully folded the paper and returned it to the envelope.

At the door he seized Egg’s hand and pumped it repeatedly. “Thank you, sir. Thank you from the bottom of my heart.”

“Come back in the morning, Professor. We will talk then. Good night.”

Before she went to her room, Charley Pine asked, “How will the universe end, Uncle Egg?”

“It will be reborn,” Egg Cantrell told her, “again and again and again…”

C
HAPTER
T
WENTY

When he left Missouri the sun was within an hour of rising, so Rip Cantrell flew the saucer north into Canada. He parked it on a sandbar beside a wide river that ran north to the Arctic. That afternoon he fished with Egg’s tackle and managed to catch a couple of good ones. They looked somewhat like trout, but Rip doubted that they were.

He cooked them that evening over a fire built of debris he gathered along the riverbank, wood that had apparently been washed north with the melt each spring, hundreds of miles from the forests to the south, until it ended up in tangles on this sandbar.

At these latitudes at this time of year, twilight lasted until late in the evening. The stars came out one by one as a slice of moon crept over the horizon. Finally, as the fire was dying, the black velvet night was ablaze with stars flung like sand against the sky.

Which one was the one? From which one did the saucer makers come?

He sat by the fire hoping to see the aurora borealis until the stars began to fade with the coming of the new day, but it never appeared. At peace with the universe, Rip Cantrell crawled into the saucer and went to sleep.

After two days he decided he had been there long enough. Reconnaissance satellites had undoubtedly located the saucer; it was just a matter of time before someone came to steal it. He wanted to be gone before that someone arrived.

That night after a fish supper, he put out the fire, strapped himself into the pilot’s seat, and took off heading south.

Staying low and slow, less than a thousand feet and below three hundred knots, he thought that he would be able to fly under the coverage of most radars. He experimented with hand-flying the machine. It was almost too responsive for a novice: He found himself overcontrolling. Remembering Charley’s advice, which she had given him in an odd moment, he released the controls, waited while the saucer settled down, then grasped them gingerly again.

The whole gig was a rare hoot. Here he was, a farm kid from Minnesota at the helm of a real flying saucer. He laughed, at himself and the situation and the whole darn mess.

• • •

Rip got to his destination just before dawn. He hid the saucer and walked the six miles home as the sky grew light and the sun peeped over the rim of the earth.

The swing on the front porch looked inviting. He settled into it to wait for his mother to awaken and come downstairs to the kitchen.

The farm looked clean and verdant at the end of summer. He could hear cattle lowing for their breakfast, and he could smell them. He had grown up with that smell, which he rarely noticed unless he was just returning after an absence of several days.

The swing rocked back and forth, the chains squeaking on their hooks, just as they always had.

Rip was dozing when he heard his mother in the kitchen. He stood, stretched, and yawned, then went inside.

“Hi, Mom.”

“Oh, my God! You scared me, Rip.” She reached for him and gave him a mighty hug.

“Where on earth have you been, boy? When those men came, I didn’t know what to say.” She searched his face. Tears welled in her eyes. “I was scared, Rip. For you. And me.”

“It’s okay, Mom. You didn’t have any choice. You had to answer their questions. I know that.”

She tried to talk and couldn’t. Rip held her tightly. When she seemed to have calmed down, Rip relaxed his grip. His mother grinned nervously and wiped the tears from her eyes.

“They talk about you on television every day. You’re the most famous man on earth.”

“It’ll pass, Mom. It’ll pass. Next year no one will remember my name. They’ll talk about ol’ what’s-his-name, the saucer guy.”

“How about breakfast? Ham and eggs and potatoes?”

“You fix it, I’ll eat it.”

She paused for a good look at his face, then got busy. “All I know is what the television said, so tell me all about it.”

He seated himself at the kitchen table and began with the desert, hot and dirty and empty under a brassy sky, with a gleam of sunlight reflecting off something far away, on a distant ridge.

He finished the story as he finished his breakfast. The part about Rigby he left out. His mother was leaning back against the sink sipping a cup of coffee.

“So where is the saucer now?”

“Hidden.”

“You aren’t going to tell me?”

“No. Those men might come back.”

He saw panic in her eyes.

“I doubt if they will, Mom, but if they do, answer any question they ask.”

She nodded, repeatedly. “Okay,” she said. She turned back to the sink. “So where do you go from here? When this is over?”

“I don’t know. I haven’t even had time to think about it.”

“Classes at the university started three days ago.”

“Maybe I ought to sit out a semester. I could work here on the farm.”

“Until this saucer flap is over, the only place you could get work would be in the state pen making license plates.”

“I suppose.”

“You could help out some on the farm, I guess. I’d be lying if I told you we needed you desperately. The boys get the chores done every day.”

Rip nodded. “Uncle Egg is supposed to call in a couple of weeks. He wants me to stay out of sight until then. You can tell the guys I’m here if you make them promise not to tell anyone else.”

“They might tell, Rip. They like to drink beer on Saturday nights and they’ve got girlfriends.”

“If they suspect I’m here and we didn’t tell them, we’ll have problems. Ask them not to tell. That’s all we can do.”

“Okay.”

“The saucer is hidden where no one can find it. I thought maybe after dark tonight I’d take some clothes and grub and walk up to the lake. I could stay in the cabin up there, fish a little, read some of those books I never seem to have time for.”

“People fish that lake, Rip. It’s open to the public.”

“Anybody in a boat will be too far out to see who I am.”

“Reporters have called here two or three dozen times this past week, pestering me something fierce. I’m surprised the phone hasn’t rung this morning.”

“When Uncle Egg calls in a couple of weeks, you could drive up to the lake and get me.”

“If that’s what you want.”

“If no one finds out I’m here, this whole thing will blow over. The press will write about something else tomorrow. The politicians will want another tax, one of the president’s old girlfriends will tell all, there will be another scandal du jour in Hollywood… something. The papers are full of something every day.”

“Is that a prediction?”

“It’s a prayer. I can’t live like this for very long.”

“How serious are you about this Charley woman?”

“Mom!”

“That’s a fair question.”

“Who said I was serious?”

“I wasn’t born yesterday. You didn’t go all the way to Australia to rescue a piece of machinery.”

“I like her. All right? Is there anything wrong with that?”

“Well, I don’t know. You never tell me anything. Exactly how old is she, anyway?”

“I don’t know exactly. I didn’t ask to see her driver’s license.”

“She sounds pretty old to me. A test pilot, retired from the Air Force—”

“She is not retired! She resigned.”

“I never thought of you with an older woman. It’s… upsetting, somehow…”

“I’m going upstairs and lie down, Mom. Okay? I didn’t get any sleep last night.”

“If she calls, should I wake you up?”

“Oh, Mom!”

As Rip climbed the stairs, she called after him, “Has Charley been married before?”

His room looked like he remembered it: kid stuff stuck all over, a couple of pinups, a football he had scored a winning touchdown with his senior year, a movie poster, souvenirs from baseball games in Chicago… It was time to throw most of this junk away.

His father’s old Winchester was in the closet under the eaves. Rip got it out and worked the lever several times. He dug through the closet until he found a box of ammo for the thing. The stuff was five or six years old but it would have to do.

He loaded the rifle, made sure the hammer was down, and set it beside the bed within easy reach. Only then did he take off his shoes and lie down.

• • •

Rip got to the cabin a little after midnight. Jet lag still had him in its grip, so he got the broom and swept out the place, put his knapsack of canned goods on the shelf. Mice had eaten a few holes in the sheets and blankets. He shook them out, put them on the bed anyway.

Rip’s father built the cabin two or three years before he died. Rip remembered coming here several times with his father that first summer, then his father’s health began failing.

During his high school years Rip spent a few nights here with his pals, drinking beer and smoking cigarettes they weren’t supposed to have and generally acting stupid.

The cabin was just a place in his life, a place without a lot of memories good or bad.

The kerosene lamp didn’t really give enough light to read by. Rip sat on the porch in the darkness listening to the night sounds of frogs and insects. The mosquitoes weren’t ravenous, they just nibbled now and then.

Toward dawn he found himself nodding off, so he went to bed.

The days settled into a routine. He slept when he was sleepy, ate when he was hungry, fished when he wasn’t reading. The fish he caught he ate. The third day he was there rain fell for several hours.

He had been at the cabin a week when one of the hired men brought him two bags of groceries. “Your mom sent the food. Me and Otis chipped in for the six-pack.”

“Thanks, Sherman. ’Preciate it.”

“Me and Otis won’t tell a soul you’re here, Rip. Honest.”

“I believe you.”

“We’ve really been asked, that’s for darn sure. Reporter outta Los Angeles offered me a hundred bucks to tell him what I know. Mainly he wanted to know about you when you were a kid. I turned him down cold, of course. I wouldn’t run my mouth against my friends for any amount of money. You know me.”

“Right.”

“Everybody in town is dying to ask you all about that saucer, where it is, how’d you learn to fly it, all that stuff.”

“Uh-huh.”

“Sorta curious my own self too, you understand.”

“Soon as I’m able, I’ll tell you all about it.”

“Me and Otis won’t tell a soul, Rip. Honest.”

“It’s good to have friends like you guys.”

“You know, I never even seen a flying saucer. Not a one. In this day and age, can you believe it?”

“They’re kinda rare.”

“Maybe you can give us a ride too, huh?”

“Well…”

“My girlfriend Arlene, she is so excited. She’s really into aliens and parallel universes, reads a lot of books. Knows all about saucers. She’d think I was the hottest thing in jeans if you gave her a ride too.”

“I’ll try to do that for you, Sherman. Thanks for coming up.”

“Yeah, Rip. Me and Otis won’t tell a soul. Honest.”

Sherman and Otis would talk, and Rip knew it. In fact, he would bet a hundred to one that Arlene and all her friends knew the saucer was somewhere nearby.

As Rip watched Sherman drive away, it came to him that someone would soon come to get the saucer. He had been assuming that because the saucer was hidden, no one would know where he was. Ha!

The question was who would arrive first, government agents or Roger Hedrick’s thugs. Or some third party. The saucer was too valuable. $150 billion, Charley said. Having that much money would be like owning California.

He had been a fool, sitting here dumb and happy reading books and fishing, confident that Hedrick was beaten and the government was stupid. The miracle was that they hadn’t already arrived. So what should he do? Take the saucer and skedaddle? Leave the saucer hidden and boogie for a week or so, giving Egg and Olie time to litigate? Or stay right here?

He took the groceries inside, opened a couple cans of chili, and put the contents in a saucepan to heat on the wood stove.