Saucer (11 page)

Charley took a deep breath and let it out slowly. Please, Lord, don’t let me screw this up.

She turned the ship with the rudder, pointed it ahead of the boat, which was still dead in the water fifty yards or so from the shore.

She let the saucer move that way. The ship was at least a hundred feet in the air and climbing when it crossed the riverbank. The test pilot kept lifting the collective, lifting the saucer higher and higher. She ran out of collective when the ship was about two hundred feet high; it would go no higher without rocket power.

Taking her time, Charley slowly circled the drifting boat. As she crossed behind the stern, the boat listed the other way as everyone on board shifted sides for a better view.

“If that boat capsizes, a lot of those people will drown,” Rip pointed out.

“Okay.”

Charley turned west and leveled out, nudged the control stick forward to coax more speed out of the saucer. They crossed the lake leisurely, accelerating slowly. On the far shore they passed over a railroad track and a highway. Only then did Charley Pine light the rocket engines.

The acceleration pushed her deeper into the seat. Rip Cantrell held on tightly.

Yes!

A smile lit up her face.

The saucer was accelerating nicely, but it was only a couple thousand feet above the sand and rock wilderness when Rip spotted the first jet fighter and pointed it out to her. The plane was a silver speck in the deep blue sky, glinting in the sun. There was another behind the first, offset to one side.

The fighters were coming in from the right, pointed almost directly at the saucer.

“We stayed too long at the party,” Charley told him.

Even as she spoke, a series of flashes lit up the nose of the first fighter.

“He’s shooting! Let’s go!”

She cranked the rocket engines wide open. The G struck her like a fist.

Rip Cantrell shouted something, lost his grip on the pilot’s seat and instrument panel, and tumbled toward the back of the compartment.

Despite the push of the rockets at full cry, the fighter was closing. Instinctively she banked the saucer toward the fighter, forcing the other pilot into an overshoot. The saucer ripped by the silver delta-winged fighter at a scant hundred yards, accelerating through Mach 2.

At Mach 3, Charley pulled back on the control stick and pointed the saucer almost straight up. She stayed on the juice.

The saucer roared skyward on a cone of fire.

Aboard the boat, the passengers stared with open mouths as the rising fireball began slowly tilting toward the northeast. They could still hear the distant thunder of the engines echoing back and forth between the steep shores of the lake when the bright fire from the rockets merged with the great golden orb of the sun.

C
HAPTER
S
EVEN

The computer displays consisted of graphics and short rows of symbols that both Rip and Charley thought were probably words and numbers. Since they couldn’t read any of it, Rip held on tightly to the pilot’s seat with his left hand and flipped through the displays with his right, looking for…

“I’ve never seen graphics like these,” he shouted. “They’re so real, like you should be able to touch them. They almost look like holographs.”

“They are holographs,” Charley said. “That’s it, right there! That display is the one we want.”

Rip held tight with both hands and stared. A curving pathway led upward and eastward. A series of analog needles arranged vertically along the left side of the display might indicate altitude, airspeed, direction… but which was which?

Ah, yes. The second one down from the top must be altitude, and the one under it airspeed. He said as much to Charley, who told him, “I think you’re right.”

She had the juice full on now. At least four G’s were pushing them toward the rocket engines in the rear of the ship. Rip was holding on as best he could, but he was tiring.

Finally he could hold on no longer and let himself go. He crashed into the aft bulkhead.

Charley Pine was shouting, a primordial yell of pure triumph as she concentrated on the computer graphics before her. She felt so good. All those years of flight training, all those years of school, the sweat, the tears, the sacrifices, and now she was flying this thing into space! Her fellow Air Force test pilots would turn green with envy when they found out. And they would find out, of that she had no doubt.

She inhaled deeply and let out another rebel yell. “Yee-haaaa! Oh, yes. Go, baby, go!”

Charley kept the steering centered on that pathway into space. No doubt there was an autopilot in this thing somewhere and a simple push of a button would couple the ship to it, but she had no idea where it was or how to work it. Even if she had known, she probably would not have used it.

Outside the sky was almost black, a deep obsidian black arcing over the blue planet. They were high, twenty or thirty miles, she guessed, and going higher. The ship was still accelerating at four G’s with the canopy pointed toward earth, climbing at about a forty-degree angle. With the earth above them, the concept of up and down seemed to no longer apply.

The glowing of the saucer’s nose faded as the ship raced through the last remnants of the atmosphere. Although slightly muffled now, the dull roar of the rocket engines still filled the saucer’s cabin with sound.

Orbital velocity was eighteen thousand miles per hour. Charley Pine had to accelerate to at least that speed or she would merely go over the top and begin reentry. Excess speed would cause her to orbit higher and higher. If she accelerated past twenty-five thousand miles per hour, escape velocity, the saucer would fly off into space on a voyage into eternity.

Charley knew the physics cold; what she didn’t know was the computer program that she was using as a flight director. If only she could read the words and numbers!

This had to be the right program! It had the right look; the physics seemed right; everything about it seemed right.

But how was she going to know when she reached orbital velocity? And how high would this orbit be?

Why was she asking herself these questions? The saucer flew, whoever designed it obviously knew their stuff, whoever made it sure as hell built it right. Whoever they were…

She was well out over the Indian Ocean now, which appeared above her since the saucer was inverted. The curvature of the earth was quite prominent, the atmosphere a hazy blue line on the curved horizon. Clouds, small gauzy cotton things, stuck to the sea’s surface. A squall line, a front, obviously, appeared as a row of clouds, tiny things with minuscule shadows.

The earth hanging over her head, the deep black of space, the roar of the rocket engines hurling her into that blackness, the G pushing her into her seat like the hand of God… the experience was sublime, a sensory feast, and Charley Pine shouted again from pure joy.

Beside her Rip Cantrell was fighting to get erect so he could see out of the canopy. She glanced at him. Sweat coated his face, the veins in his arms stood out like cords. He lifted himself even with her, fighting the G.

“Oh, wow!” he breathed, then filled his lungs and joined her in a shout.

Just then the pathway disappeared from the computer screen. One second it was there, then it was gone.

Charley Pine shut down the rocket engines, and Rip shot forward as the G instantly stopped. His contracted muscles propelled him right into the instrument panel.

He bounced off the panel and floated toward the back of the cabin, weightless. “Hot damn! We made it!”

Charley laughed. She felt so terrific.

Rip kicked off a bulkhead and caught himself on the arm of the pilot’s seat. He anchored himself there and studied the earth hanging above them, the riot of subtle colors, the blackness of space framing it all.

“There’s the Persian Gulf and the Himalayas.”

“Earth,” said Charley Pine and laughed again.

“Are we in orbit?”

“Maybe. Maybe not. If the ship starts heating up, we didn’t make it.” All of the red had now disappeared from the saucer’s skin.

The earth seemed to be rotating slowly above them. Cloud systems and smears of land moved steadily along. They watched mesmerized as they crossed the zone from day into darkness.

“It’s really weird with the earth above us,” Rip commented. “Can you turn the ship?”

Charley Pine nudged the stick sideways a trifle, then recentered it. The nudge was enough. Slowly the saucer rolled until the earth was below them. Then Charley stopped the roll with another small displacement of the stick.

“Oh, man!” Rip exclaimed. “What a show!”

Charley felt the same way. It came to her then that she had lived her whole life to get to this moment. Everything led to this.

Without thinking she rubbed her hand absently through Rip’s hair. He didn’t seem to notice.

Rip was the first to come back to reality. He began punching up displays on the computer, studying the graphics, looking for something, anything, that might tell him the dynamics of their orbit.

He found a display, finally, that depicted an elongated oval. “This is us, I think,” he muttered, studying the symbols.

“Anything on how to get down?” Charley Pine asked.

“Not that I’ve seen yet. If you have any ideas, this might be a good time to trot them out.”

She too began playing with the computers. In the weightless environment, being strapped to the pilot’s seat was a distinct advantage. Floating in the air, Rip held himself in position with the fingertips of one hand.

Charley was scrolling through displays one by one when she hit it—a presentation of the descent path over a planet. The two of them studied the presentation, a complex three-dimensional graphic.

On impulse Charley reached for the screen with a fingertip. The planet rotated under her touch.

“It’s earth,” she said. “There’s North and South America, the Azores…”

“Well, look at that!” Rip exclaimed, and pointed. The Mediterranean Sea was dry, without water. “And there, the English Channel.” On the presentation the British Isles weren’t islands at all, but part of the mainland.

“That’s Earth as it looked long ago,” Charley said, thinking aloud. “I wonder how long?”

“Use your finger to spin the planet to Missouri, then touch it.”

“Is that where you want to land?”

“Yeah. If we can get down, we’ll put this thing on my uncle’s farm.”

“He’s a farmer?”

“Uncle Egg lives on a farm, but he’s no farmer. He’s a bit of everything—inventor, wizard, mechanic extraordinaire… He has about twenty patents in a variety of fields, lives off his royalties.”

She did as he suggested. A tap of the fingertip on Missouri caused the graphic to change. Now the point of a long cone rested there. The body of the cone rose and bent westward a third of the way around the globe, with the wide mouth just west of the Hawaiian Islands.

“We’ll have to try it on our next orbit,” Rip said. He pointed. “See the small dot of red light? That’s us, I think, and we’re in the wrong orbit. We need a trajectory change to get us to the reentry point.”

Charley kept scrolling through the displays. “Here it is, I hope.” She studied the three-dimensional graphic, then pointed. “The minimum burn will be right here.”

“How much fuel will it take?”

She played with the displays for almost a minute before she said, “I don’t know. If we burn up all our fuel maneuvering, we won’t have enough to get out of orbit. If we lose orbital velocity but don’t burn long enough to hit the cone, we’ll skip off the atmosphere like a rock, over and over, until finally we go in steeply.”

“Steeply? I don’t like the sound of that.”

“We’ll probably burn up in the atmosphere like a meteor.”

“How much fuel do we have remaining?”

“See this display?” Charley pointed at another computer presentation. “This might be fuel remaining. We’re under five percent, I think.”

Rip looked slowly around. “These saucer people must have taken on another load of water from the mother ship while they were in orbit.”

“No more than a few gallons. Water in space is precious. One suspects they used the mother ship to make cross-track trajectory changes.”

“So what do we do? Missouri or where?”

“Let me work with the computers,” she said and bent to study the screens.

Finally she took a deep breath. “I think we can make North America. Missouri. We’ll make the orbit change, then fire the rockets to drop us into that cone on the computer.”

Rip nodded vigorously. “We’ll coast down over the Pacific and plop into the good ol’ U. S. of A. If we overshoot, we’ll hit the Atlantic.” Rip smiled confidently. “But not to worry, Charley baby. North America is a big target. We’ll be okay.”

“Uh-huh.”

“Trust me.”

“Don’t call me baby.”

“Nothing personal, Captain Pine, you being an older woman and all.”

The ship had rotated on its axis about ninety degrees, or so it seemed. The dark planet was off to their left, filling half the sky. They fell silent then, stared at the massive orb.

“We’re coming up on the U.S. now,” Charley whispered.

Sure enough, the lights of Los Angeles soon came into view, twinkling merrily, covering the hills and valleys. The huge city was a vast smear of light. The orbiting saucer soon left it behind. The Mojave Desert was black and empty, the interstates tiny twinkling ribbons, the little towns mere splotches in the darkness.

When Rip finally looked into space he saw only unwinking stars against an obsidian sky. A shiver ran through him.

The peril of their position washed over him like a cold shower. They were several hundred miles above the surface of the earth in an ancient spaceship that he had jackhammered from a rock ledge. If anything went wrong, both he and Charley were going to die. In this saucer. Very soon.

He felt slightly nauseated. It’s the weightlessness, he told himself, wanting to believe that. The reality of his recklessness he tried to ignore. Pine wanted to come, he thought; she was here of her own free will.

He wondered about the water, how much remained in the tank.