Saucer: The Conquest (12 page)

“Enough!” Julie commanded with a chopping gesture. “What’s done is done. How long before you can get the generator operational?”

“We’ll have to hook up the reactor and test the system. Can’t run it to full power without serious testing, not unless you want this cave to glow in the dark for the next ten thousand years.”

“How long?”

“A week. Perhaps a day or two less.”

“You have three days,” Julie said, staring at Claudine. “And if you don’t make it work, I have people who can. We’ll put you in the air lock without a space suit and watch you die. Do you understand?”

Claudine Courbet appealed to Pierre, who turned his face away. She turned back to Julie. “You are really sick, madame.”

“The future of mankind is at stake,” Julie Artois said. “I’m not going to let you or anyone else stand in our way.”

Julie looked at Salmon. “Have someone with her every moment. Don’t leave her alone,” she said coldly.

Then she walked out. Pierre followed.

They went to their private suite and made sure the door was locked behind them before they spoke.

“Years of work, a decade of planning, billions of euros invested, the future of mankind at stake, and one foolish woman allows another to sabotage everything!” Pierre stormed.

His wife took a deep breath, closed her eyes momentarily, then opened them again.

Pierre rubbed his eyes, tried to steady his breathing.

Illogical, stupid, venal, selfish people he understood. He had certainly met enough of them through the years. Those people he could handle. On the other hand, the Charlotte Pines of the world were a different breed.

He had counted on the spaceplane, which was a guaranteed ride back to earth when the time came. Without it, he and everyone else on this rock were marooned until another spaceplane made the trip.

“Can we force the French to send a spaceplane?” he asked Julie.

“Nothing important has changed,” his wife said curtly. “Key people in the government are with us, as they have always been. Under our leadership France will assume its rightful place in the world. Our friends want us to succeed—they will bring Europe with them. France, Europe and the world. The glory of France will shine as it never has before.”

The pitch and timbre of her voice rose as she spoke, mesmerizing Pierre. She had always had the ability to show him the grandeur that lay just beyond the shadows. He believed, and he knew others would too.

Still… “What of the British, the Americans?” he asked now.

“Their day is done. The world will speak French. If they refuse to see reason, we will bring them to their knees.” She made a fist. “And destroy them.”

• • •

After rocket engine shutdown, when the three flight computers all agreed that the spaceplane was established on course to an earth orbit rendezvous with the refueling tank, Charley checked the ship’s habitability systems one more time, leaned back and sighed.

Without the background chatter from Mission Control and people in the ship talking on the intercom, the cockpit was unusually quiet. The only sounds that could be heard were ship’s noises, the hum of air circulation fans and an occasional thumping from a pump that kicked in for a few seconds.

She yawned. “What say we see if there’s anything aboard this garbage scow to eat, then grab a few winks.”

“Maybe you had better tell me why we did an unscheduled boogie without people or cargo,” Joe Bob Hooker said. “Sorta curious, I guess.”

“Over food. I haven’t eaten”—she looked at her watch— “in fifteen hours.”

She unstrapped and headed for the locker where the space suits were kept. After she had properly stored hers, she went to the kitchen, where she found Joe Bob floating around.

“There isn’t much,” he said. “Gonna lose a few pounds on this flying fat farm.”

He extracted some tubes of pureed goo from a refrigerator and tried to read the French labels aloud. “What’s cheval?”

“Horse, I think.”

“I forgot that we’re dealing with gourmets. Here’s something green.”

“I’ll take it. Nuke it to warm it up.”

“This red stuff looks good to me. I’m a real sucker for red goo; can’t get enough of it.”

There was wine. With a squeeze bottle of vino each and their goo, they headed back for the flight deck.

The earth was visible through the windscreen, off to the right. They were on course for the point in space where the planet would be in three days. Behind the left wing, a sliver of the sunlit surface of the moon was visible. On the right, the surface of the moon was still in shadow, a dark presence.

As they squeezed and squirted, Charley told Joe Bob about finding the reactor on the outbound voyage, her inspection of the observatory and her conversation with Claudine Courbet.

When she ran down, Joe Bob said, “Pierre Artois, ruler of the universe. Not very catchy.”

“Yeah. He’s not a corporal with a cool name, like Hitler.”

“I see your point. So what do you want to do?”

“I’m inclined to do nothing for a while. We have about seventy hours before we rendezvous with the fuel tank.”

“Is the French government behind Artois?”

“Beats me. The politicians put up a huge chunk of the cost of the lunar project. Either he’s betraying them or he’s acting on their behalf. But that’s neither here nor there. I get on the radio with this tale and no one will believe me. You can bet Pierre is telling as big a lie as he thinks he can get away with right now.”

“We could listen in. Don’t the radios pick up the base frequencies?”

“We could listen,” she acknowledged. “But I don’t want to. He’ll think I’m listening and threaten me. I don’t need the aggravation. I want to sleep and think.”

“So what happens when he starts firing this antigravity beam at the earth?”

“Assuming the reactor generates sufficient power, the polarity of the earth’s gravitational field will be reversed in the area of the beam, so objects on the surface will be repelled by the planet.”

“You mean…?”

“Stuff will fly off into space,” Charley Pine said, and squirted the last of her wine into her mouth. “Buildings, ships, people, cities, everything.”

“You can bet someone will launch a rocket with a nuclear warhead at the moon. Squash the lunar base.”

“Not if Pierre zaps the rocket before it’s ready to fly.”

Joe Bob thought that over before he said, “Do you really think he’d kill people?”

“I think Pierre Artois is a Looney Tune. If Henri Salmon and Claudine Courbet are fair samples, he has surrounded himself with people just as crazy as he is. There is no way to predict what crazy people will do.”

“Unless you’re a shrink.”

“I’m a pilot. Flying is my gig.”

“What if he fires the beam at this ship?” Joe Bob asked softly.

“He’d have to know precisely where we are. We’re not flying a straight line; we’re flying a parabola. I don’t think he has a radar that can pinpoint us. Space is a big place.”

“Even bigger than Texas,” Joe Bob admitted.

• • •

Pierre Artois sat in the base communications room collecting his thoughts as the radioman on duty played dumb with Mission Control. They had heard the exchange between Artois and Charley as she took off and were demanding an explanation.

He stared at the radio. All his plans, all his dreams, the very future of the human race, jeopardized by that woman! She wasn’t talking on the radio to Mission Control, but she could come on at any time.

She had gone crazy. That was it. The stress of training and the flight—she was unsuitable, had become extremely paranoid, accused them of horrible things, then, when they tried to sedate her, escaped and stole the spaceplane.

He tapped the operator on the shoulder. The man moved from his chair. Pierre sat down, arranged the microphone in front of him and called Mission Control.

• • •

Rip Cantrell was installing antigravity rings on the bottom of the Extra when his uncle Egg came down the hill and called, “Hey, Rip. Better come look at the television. Something has gone wrong on the moon.”

Rip dropped his tools and trotted past the hangar. “What?”

“Come watch.”

Soon they were in front of the television watching one of the twenty-four-hour news channels. A reporter was interviewing one of the spokespersons for the French space ministry.

“According to these guys,” Egg said, summarizing, “one of the pilots has taken Jeanne d’Arc and left the moon, presumably headed back for earth. The flight wasn’t authorized.”

“You mean somebody stole the spaceplane?”

“An unauthorized flight, they called it.”

“Same thing.”

“So who is the pilot?”

“They haven’t said. This happened six hours ago, according to the spokesman.”

“So is Charley stranded on the moon or flying the plane?”

“Rip, I don’t know.”

The story unfolded slowly. Jeanne d’Arc had been the only spaceplane on the moon, so the passengers and scientific experiments that were to return aboard her were still there. Another spaceplane would be ready to launch in two weeks. Food and supplies at the lunar base were sufficient to support the people who were there for months, perhaps as many as six. The people—they implied there was more than one—aboard Jeanne d’Arc were maintaining radio silence. She had insufficient fuel to orbit the moon, return to the lunar base, then return to earth, so the experts believed she was heading for earth now.

The press conference raised more questions than it answered, yet the spokesperson refused to give additional information.

“They’ve gotten the when, what and where,” Rip grumped, “and left out the who and why.”

“Yeah.”

“So what do you think, Unc?”

“Something weird happened on the moon.”

As the sun set and night crept over the earth, they sat watching television, hoping for more information. None came.

• • •

Pierre Artois considered his options. He had, of course, told Mission Control and the French space minister that Charley Pine had gone insane and stolen Jeanne d’Arc. As he sat watching Claudine Courbet run tests on the reactor and slowly power it up, he examined the moves on the board.

Pine had said nothing on the radio to anyone so far, and perhaps she would not. With women, one never knew. On the other hand, what could she say that would hurt him? Well, she could stir up such a mess on earth that the people here at the lunar base might refuse to obey orders. Or try to refuse. Once he gave the governments of the earth his ultimatum, what she had to say wouldn’t matter. Oh, she would undoubtedly wind up on television and tell what she had seen, but so what? That turn of events would be at worst only a minor irritant, Pierre concluded.

What he really needed was a way to get back to earth if the unexpected happened, as the unexpected was wont to do.

It didn’t take much noodling to arrive at a method that might work. Pierre returned to the communications center and tuned the radio to a private frequency. Then he removed a notebook from his pocket and consulted it. When he found the code he wanted, he dialed it into the voice encoder. After the encoder timed in, he keyed the mike and began speaking.

• • •

Charley tossed and turned and dozed a little in her hammock, but she couldn’t get to sleep. She couldn’t relax knowing that no one was in the cockpit. Finally she gave up, took a shower and put on the clothes she had just taken off. She went to the galley to make coffee. Without gravity, the process was a chore. After the coffee grounds and water were heated together, you pushed a plunger that forced the hot liquid into a squeeze bottle while trapping the grounds. At least it was hot.

She went to the cockpit and strapped herself into the pilot’s seat. She spent fifteen minutes checking ship’s systems and the flight computers while pulling gently on the coffee. Satisfied that all was well, she sat staring at the earth, a black-and-white marble against a sky shot with stars. She could perceive deep blue hues amid the swirls of clouds. The planet appeared slightly larger than it had been when she went to bed. When they reached it, of course, it would fill half the sky.

She toyed with the controls of the radio panel. Did the French government know about Pierre’s antigravity beam generator? Were the people at Mission Control on Artois’ team, or was he a French traitor, an adventurer with an agenda? What were his plans?

She didn’t know any of the answers. She put little faith in anything Claudine Courbet had told her. The woman defined “flake.” On the other hand, the reactor and beam generator had been the real McCoys, despite the fact that lunar project managers had repeatedly assured a nervous public through the years that no nuclear material would be carried aloft from French soil.

She got out of the pilot’s chair and went aft to the main communications room, where the video cameras and lights were stored. Artois had filmed a cell phone commercial from orbit. Did he leave the phone here?

After a one-minute search she found it. It had a sliding cover. She opened it and turned it on. No service, but the battery charge was good. She turned it off and pocketed it.

She was working on her second bottle of coffee when Joe Bob Hooker joined her. He hung his coffee squeeze bottle in midair, strapped himself into the copilot’s seat so he would stay put, then rescued the bottle.

“Sleep okay?” he asked.

“No. You?”

“No. So what do you think we should do?”

“Can’t decide.”

“Me either.”

They sat looking at the earth.

“I never met anyone like you,” Joe Bob said.

Charley eyed him suspiciously. “Oh?”

“Yeah. You’re a smart, take-charge, capable lady who isn’t afraid to do what you think right. Aren’t many of those around. Not where I’ve been hanging out, anyway.”

“Don’t get any big ideas.”

“Heck, I’m a married man. You realize, though, that down in Texas there’s folks who would say that we’re shacked up.”

Charley Pine couldn’t help herself. She laughed. “Hoo boy.”

“Honestly,” he said. “Man and woman, all alone for three days. Long enough to fall in love or raise the dead.”

“There went my reputation.”