Saucer (12 page)

Would the rocket motors start? An anxious dread came over him, brought a layer of sweat to his brow.

The motors have to start. They must! It can’t end like this, the two of them marooned in orbit, condemned to die when the air went bad.

Here came the sun!

With a dazzling rush the sun rose over the earth’s rim and filled the inside of the saucer with its light.

Charley Pine watched the sun climb toward the zenith, then went back to playing with the computers. She went back and forth between the three displays before her. She looked calm, as placid as if she were receiving e-mail on the Internet.

“If the engines don’t start, we’re toast,” Rip told her. “You know that?”

She glanced at him, her expression unchanged. “I tried to focus your attention on the risk before we started.”

“I’m focused as hell now.”

“The risk hasn’t changed. We are no more or less in jeopardy than we were when we were fifteen feet above the ground.”

“It sure feels more dangerous,” he replied, his eyes inadvertently drawn to the planet looming over the ship. Towering cumulus clouds low in the atmosphere cast distinct shadows with military precision. There were thousands of clouds.

She went back to the computers.

“I got a bad feeling about this,” he told her, but she was concentrating on the machines and didn’t hear him.

He pushed gently away from the pilot’s seat and floated effortlessly across the small compartment. When he came within reach of a bulkhead, he pushed off, continued slowly back and forth across the compartment while the earth sped by beneath the saucer and Charley Pine played with the computers.

Okay, she’s a tough broad. Tough.

He was floating along thinking about things when the rocket motors fired. He went crashing into the rear bulkhead. After about three seconds, the motors stopped.

“Hey!”

“Sorry. Forgot to warn you.”

“Well, at least the engines work,” he acknowledged grudgingly. “What was that all about, anyway?”

“That was the cross-trajectory burn. Now we are in the proper orbit, lined up with the descent cone.”

He floated over to look at the display.

As he hung on, Charley turned the saucer and pointed it backward, lining it up with a set of crosshairs that showed in the holographic display on the computer. “About five more minutes, more or less.”

“Okay.”

He wasn’t frightened anymore. Maybe he should have been, but he wasn’t. A great peace came over him. Whoever made this saucer was long dead, yet he felt a kinship to those creatures… people… whoever they were. He was flying their ship as they must have done, and somehow that seemed all right. They had the courage to face the unknown, and now, with no boasting or bravado, Rip Cantrell knew that he had it too.

“We’re going to be okay,” he said to Charley, who was busy fooling with the computer again.

“Yeah,” she replied, intent on examining another display.

Then she brought the reentry holograph back onscreen and rearranged herself in the chair.

“Perhaps you should strap into a seat,” she said.

“Just for the burn.”

“Okay.”

He settled himself into the nearest seat and put on the belt.

He got a glimpse of the display blossoming as they entered the cone and the flame on the display that commanded engine power. Charley came on with the juice and didn’t stint. She went smoothly up to full power while keeping the ship properly oriented.

Just as she reached full power, the motors cut out for a second or so. When they came back on, they weren’t at full power. Maybe half, a little less. Despite his resolve, Rip’s heart threatened to leap up his throat.

The engines burped again, two, three, four times…

“Come on!” That was Charley, talking to her steed. “Don’t do that to me.”

Rip was out of the seat, clawing his way up toward the pilot’s seat so he could see the displays. “What’s wrong?”

More burping from the rocket motors. Then they quit. On the main display, the holograph was commanding full power.

“Uh-oh.”

“This isn’t good…”

“Oh, man!”

Charley fiddled with the controls, jiggled the throttle grip, pushed on it fiercely.

The motors came up to power for a second, two… three…

“We’re out of the cone,” Charley said, her voice taut.

“Keep flying it. There’s nothing we can do.” Rip’s voice was calm and controlled.

She got a steady burn of about four seconds, then the computer commanded a shutoff. The cone was well below the flight path recommended by the computer, which presented its recommendation as a crosshair of attitude and heading.

Charley used rudder and side stick to turn the ship, point it down the cone facing forward.

“Are you going to dive into the cone?”

“Too dangerous,” she replied and gestured toward the scene out the canopy. The earth filled most of the windscreen. The nose was definitely down, maybe fourteen or fifteen degrees.

She held the precise attitude recommended by the computer and let the saucer race downward toward the waiting air.

Minutes passed. The earth seemed no closer. Rip asked nervously, “Are you sure we got slowed down enough?”

“No, I’m not sure. Maybe you better strap in and hold on.”

Reluctantly Rip propelled himself into the nearest seat. He had just got the straps fastened when he felt the forward tug of deceleration as the ship bit into the upper edge of the atmosphere.

Telltale flecks of fire raced over the canopy, too fast to really see. They were just streaks.

By moving her head as high as she could, Charley Pine could just see a pinkish glow radiating back from the nose and growing redder by the second as the ship dove deeper and deeper into the atmosphere.

Due to some freak combination of light and moisture, a visible shock wave developed on the canopy aft of the apex about ten minutes into the descent. It played across the transparent material as Rip watched, then was swept aft as the air thickened.

Charley Pine concentrated on keeping the attitude and heading crosshairs centered on the computer display as the saucer plunged into the earth’s atmosphere like a meteor coming in from deep space.

C
HAPTER
E
IGHT

The saucer appeared on a computerized display console at the North American Air Defense Command (NORAD) inside the Cheyenne Mountain bunker near Colorado Springs. It appeared as a blip on the radar screen displaying the Pacific sector west of California. The computer was programmed to remove orbiting satellites and space junk from the display and present only objects traveling faster than or below orbital velocity.

Halfway through a long four-hour watch, the operator was drinking coffee and listening to background music piped in over the loudspeakers as she flipped listlessly through the two dozen possible presentations available at her watch station. She was also thinking about her new boyfriend, who had made it crystal clear last night that he had serious designs on her body.

She stared at the fast-moving blip for several seconds before it cut through the fog of boyfriend, music, and ennui. She slid an icon over the blip and clicked once. Above the blip this information appeared: Co8z 8143 5zNM. Course in degrees true; speed in hundreds of knots; height in thousands of feet until one hundred thousand was reached, then in nautical miles.

The operator rang the alarm bell to attract her supervisor, then pushed buttons to put the blip on the main display of the United States that occupied most of the wall in the front of the room.

The supervisor arrived at her console within seconds. The operator pointed.

“Fourteen thousand miles an hour?”

“It almost looks like a space shuttle coming in, but there isn’t one up there. Maybe space junk reentering, or…”

The unspoken possibility was that the blip was an inbound ICBM warhead. In fact, the primary mission of this facility was to detect and track ICBMs launched from anywhere on the planet.

“Any launch indications?”

“No, sir.”

“Anybody,” the supervisor thundered over the PA system, “do we have any indications of missile launch anywhere on the planet in the last two hours?”

Silence.

“Anywhere?” he repeated, his amplified voice sounding in the operator’s headset as well as over the public address system.

“The target appeared a few seconds ago, sir. As if it dropped out of orbit.”

The supervisor was an old hand. He had seen space junk come in dozens of time. It always decelerated very quickly and burned up long before it could reach the ground. He was watching the numbers on this blip now, waiting for the quick deceleration. Its speed was slowly dissipating, but nowhere near quick enough.

“Coming in pretty shallow for a meteor,” the operator added, quite superfluously.

Warhead, meteor, or space junk—whatever it was, it was going to hit the earth before it burned up.

The supervisor said a cuss word and picked up the red telephone.

• • •

From San Diego to San Francisco, people out and about three hours before dawn saw a fiery red streak cross the sky heading slightly north of east. Slower than a shooting star yet faster by far than any airplane, the fireball had a short tail and glowed reddish yellow. Despite the hour, a few thousand people saw it. Several managed to get underexposed photographs. One man near Bakersfield engaging in his hobby of amateur astronomy caught the saucer’s passage on a time-lapse exposure. Most of the viewers just watched in awe, unaware of what they were seeing or its significance.

The saucer was far too high for the sonic boom to reach the ground, which was perhaps just as well.

As quickly as it came, the fireball disappeared into the eastern sky. A few dozen people called in the sightings to local radio stations, and within seconds reports were on the Internet.

As the saucer dropped below Mach 10, the on-board computer commanded a steeper descent. Charley Pine was reluctant to obey—the surface of the saucer was a cherry red—but after a second of hesitation, she lowered the nose a few degrees. Not as many as the computer commanded, but a few. The airspeed was dropping a bit, she thought, scanning the displays for something that might indicate airspeed, but her primary concern was the saucer’s skin temperature. Of course it was designed to take these astronomical temps, but still, the skin was very, very old.

The glow of the saucer’s skin seemed to lessen.

She lifted the nose still higher, and the redness faded rapidly. Now she lowered the nose, let the saucer hunt for a descent angle that felt right.

The saucer was still traveling in excess of Mach 4 when Charley descended through a hundred thousand feet just west of St. Louis. Behind her the shock wave touched the ground, a stupendous clap of thunder that shook houses, rattled windows, and frightened livestock and wildlife. It was, perhaps, the loudest noise ever heard in St. Louis. Every human not comatose or stone deaf heard it as a deep, bass boom of overwhelming power, painfully loud, but not loud enough to shatter eardrums. Many thought they had just heard a large explosion a few blocks away. Lights came on all over the metropolitan area and the telephone system was overloaded as everyone within reach of a telephone tried to dial 911.

Charley Pine felt for the earth. The saucer descended through a layer of low broken clouds, then came out in a dark area with few lights. She had carefully milked the glide, never using engines, all the way down. When she was about a thousand feet above the ground—it was hard to tell from looking outside, and she had no idea about the increments on the cockpit indicators—she used the antigravity control. Pulled it as high as it would go, then let the saucer fly down until the descent slowed.

The descent stopped at about two hundred feet. Low. Too low.

She almost flew into a radio tower that loomed in front of her, lit by only a few red beacon lights.

Safely around that, she followed a road toward a town she had seen when she came out of the bottom of the clouds.

Thank heavens the land hereabouts was relatively flat. Coming down in this thing into a mountainous region at night would be a good way to commit suicide.

Rip was standing beside her now. “Where are we?” he asked, looking out the canopy for lights.

“I don’t know.”

“Missouri, you think?”

“Not very likely.”

“The United States?”

“Maybe.”

“Pinpoint accuracy. I like that.”

The sky was getting light in the east when she brought the saucer to a stop on the edge of a small town.

It wasn’t much of a town, just a conglomeration of houses on a small paved road in farming country.

They looked the town over from a hundred feet up. Not a car was stirring. “It must be about four-thirty or five in the morning here,” Charley muttered.

“Yeah.” Rip pointed. “Try that filling station. Maybe they got a water hose.”

“I’m getting pretty desperate for a bathroom, now that we’re back in civilization.”

“Bet everything’s locked.”

She maneuvered the saucer through some trees and set it down in a vacant lot beside the filling station, as close to the building as possible. Rip opened the hatch and dropped through.

The smells of earth and summer and motor oil were like perfume. He inhaled deeply. The sky and clouds were pink in the east, which bathed the landscape in soft light. After two and a half months in the desert, Rip thought he had never seen a prettier place than this little town.

There was a water tap on the corner of the building but no hose. He turned on the tap, just to make sure. Water came out. He turned it off and stood up, looking around. Across the street from the filling station was a diner, still closed, of course. Four little houses were in sight, with pieces of others visible through the trees. Might as well try the house next door, Rip thought.

He walked through the trees. The house was a white one-story with a single-car garage. The garage door was open, revealing a Chevy pickup and lawn mower parked inside. A coil of garden hose hung from a hook on the wall. Rip helped himself.