Saucer The Conquest

CHAPTER 2

Charley Pine had just lived through the busiest six weeks of her life. From dawn to midnight seven days a week, the French had trained her to be a copilot in their new spaceships.
Unwilling to bet lives on just one ship, the French had built four of them. Two generations beyond the American space shuttles, the French ships were reusable spaceplanes, launched from a long runway in the south of France. They carried two large fuel tanks, one on either side, which they jettisoned after they had used the fuel. They then flew on into orbit, where they rendezvoused with a fuel tank, refilled their internal tanks and continued on to the moon. After delivering their cargo, the spaceplanes returned to earth orbit and reentered the atmosphere. They landed in France on the runway they had departed from and were readied for another voyage to the moon.
Bored with doing nothing, unable to interest Rip in anything other than sitting around, Charley had instantly accepted Pierre Artois’ job offer. She didn’t tell Rip until the following morning. Then she broke the news at breakfast and was gone fifteen minutes later.
Sure, leaving Rip had been hard, but she was unwilling to retire at the ripe old age of thirty. Sooner or later, Rip was going to have to figure out life. When he did, then she would see. If he did.
Pierre Artois believed in maximum publicity. The French government was spending billions on the lunar mission, so he didn’t miss many chances to get all the good press he could. This evening, six hours before launch, he and his lunar crew stood in front of a bank of television cameras to answer questions.
Before the press zeroed in on Artois and the French space minister, one of the reporters asked a question of Charley, who was wearing a sky blue flight suit that showed off her trim, athletic figure. Her long hair was pulled back in a pony-tail. The reporter was an American, who naturally asked his question in English.
In addition to all the technical information she was trying to absorb, Charley was also taking a crash course in French. Her four semesters of French way back when allowed her to buy a glass of wine, find a restroom and ask for a kiss, but that was about it. She gave up trying to learn the names of all the people shoving information at her, and called everyone amigo. That froze a few smiles, but Pierre Artois said she was one of his pilots, so frozen smiles didn’t matter. She was actually grateful the first question was in English, until she heard it.
“Ms. Pine, some American pundits have said that hiring you to fly to the moon is just a publicity stunt by Monsieur Artois. Would you care to comment upon that?”
“Not really,” she said lightly, trying to be cool. “I’ve been in space before.” Actually her flying credentials were as good as anyone’s. A graduate of the Air Force Academy and the air force’s test pilot program, a veteran fighter pilot and the pilot of the flying saucer that had made such a splash last year, she believed she deserved this job, so the sneering hurt. It also immunized her against second thoughts about Rip. She was going to do this or die trying.
The chief pilot on the first mission was a man, Jean-Paul Lalouette. He was five or six years older than Charley and seemed to share the condescending opinion of the American newspaper pundits, but he was too wise to let it show—very much. Charley picked up on it, though. She glanced at him now and saw he was wearing the slightest trace of a smile.
Lalouette and his male colleagues thought she should be very impressed with them. The fact that she wasn’t didn’t help their egos. “T. S.,” Charley Pine muttered, which was American for “C’est la guerre.”
After a couple of puff questions that allowed Charley to say nice, inane things about the French people and the lunar base project, the press zeroed in on Pierre Artois, to Charley’s intense relief. She took several steps backward and tried to hide among the technicians she and Lalouette were flying to the moon.
Pierre obviously enjoyed the glare of television lights. A slight, fit man whose physical resemblance to Napoleon had occurred to so many people that no one remarked on it anymore, he looked happy as a man could be. And well he should, since he was making his first trip to the moon on this flight. His journey to the lunar base after years of promoting, cajoling, managing and partially financing—from his own pocket—the research and industrial effort made this appearance before the press a triumph.
Charley Pine didn’t quite know what to make of Pierre, whom she had met on only three occasions. She had watched him in action on television for several years, though. The scion of a clan of Belgian brewers and grandson of the legendary Stella Artois, Pierre struck Charley as a man who desperately wanted to be somebody. An endless supply of beautiful women, a river of money and an exalted social position weren’t enough—he had larger ambitions.

Charley had devoted ten seconds of thought to the question of what made Pierre tick, and concluded that the answer was beer. Every French farmer who ever squished a grape had more panache than Pierre did. France was all about wine, and Pierre was beer. This tragedy fairly cried out for psychoanalysis by a top-notch woman—or even a man— but unfortunately Pierre hadn’t bothered; like Napoleon, he had looked for a world to conquer. The French lunar expedition was his, lock, stock and barrel, and he was going to make it a success… or else.
Despite Artois’ love of the spotlight, Charley Pine admired him. Pierre Artois was a man who dreamed large. He dreamed of a French space program, with a base on the moon as a stepping-stone to Mars, which he defined as a challenge worthy of all that France had been and could be in the future. He had fought with all the will and might of Charlemagne to make it happen. His vision, optimism and refusal to take no for an answer had triumphed in the end.
The real reason for the French space program, or indeed any space program, was that the challenge was there. The moon was there; Mars was there; the stars beckoned every night. Charley Pine believed that people needed dreams, the larger the better. Our dreams define us, she once told Rip.
What a contrast the dreamer Pierre Artois was, Charley mused, to the modern Americans. Somewhere along the way they had lost the space dream. Space costs too much, they said. NASA had morphed into a petrified bureaucracy as innovative as the postal service. These days Americans fretted about foreign competition and how to save Medicare—and who was going to foot the bill. Rip once remarked that the current crop of penny-pinching, politically correct politicians would have refused to finance Columbus. Watching Artois, Charley knew that Rip was right.
The press conference was a photo op and nothing more. One of the American reporters asked about the fare-paying passenger Artois had agreed to take to the moon, one Joe Bob Hooker, who rumor had it was paying twenty-five million euros for his round-trip ticket. “This is a profit-making venture,” Artois responded. “He paid cash.” He refused to say more about his passenger.
“Your wife has preceded you to the moon, has she not?”
Ah, yes—true love on the moon. No fool, Pierre knew the media would play this story line like a harp. He glanced longingly at the ceiling, then said simply, “We will soon be together. I have missed her very much.” He touched his left breast and added with a straight face, “She is the best part of me.” Charley Pine nearly gagged.
After a few more one-liners for television and a pithy comment or two for the newspapers, Pierre led his crew off the stage.
Soon they began the suiting-up process, some of it filmed by a cameraman with a video camera. Then the crew boarded a bus for the two-mile journey to the spaceplane, which sat on the end of a twelve-thousand-foot runway. The bus had to travel a hundred yards or so on a public highway, one lined with the curious and small knots of protesters with signs. Apparently even the Europeans couldn’t do anything these days without someone complaining, Charley thought.
She found herself beside the American passenger, a stout man in his fifties. “You the American woman?” he asked.
Hooker’s color wasn’t so good.
“That’s right.”
“Glad you’re going. Nice to have somebody to speak American to.”
“Right.”
“’Bout had it up to here with the frogs.”
“They kept you busy, have they?”
“Like a hound dog with fleas. You can really fly this thing?”
“No. I’m a Victoria’s Secret model that Artois hired when he found he couldn’t afford the real Charlotte Pine.”
Hooker gave her a sharp look and said nothing more.
After a glance out the window she concentrated on lowering her own anxiety level. This is just another flight, she told herself, just like all those flights in high-performance airplanes she made in the air force. More precisely, like those saucer rides with Rip Cantrell.
She was thinking of Rip when the spaceplane came into view. Jeanne d’Arc. She had explored every inch of the craft during training and spent several weeks in the simulator, yet the sight of the ship sitting on the concrete under the floodlights, ready to fly, caused a sharp intake of breath.
She was really going to do it.
She was going to the moon!
Yee-haa!
I hope Rip is watching on television!
? ? ?

He was watching on television, of course. Due to the time difference, it was early evening in America when the live coverage began. A dozen scientists crowded around the television in the living room of the Missouri farmhouse with Egg and Rip.
“It’ll be okay,” Egg muttered to Rip, who didn’t respond. He was intent on the television, listening to the commentator, ignoring everyone around him.
The countdown went smoothly. There were two minor holds, for only a few seconds each, and the commentator didn’t give the reasons for either.
The spaceplane looked weird with the two huge external fuel tanks attached to its side. This particular ship, Jeanne d’Arc, was a proven platform, with three round trips to the moon already in her logbook. Rip thought about that now, reassuring himself that everything would go well, that Charley would come back safe and sound.
Still, better than anyone else in the room, he understood the dangers involved in space flight. Not to mention going back and forth to the moon. The French lunar project was mankind’s biggest leap yet off the planet, akin to tackling the Atlantic in a rowboat.
His heart was pounding and he was covered with a sheen of perspiration when the first glimmer of fire appeared in the nozzles of the spaceplane’s rocket engines. The flame grew steadily until it was as bright as the sun, overpowering the television camera’s ability to adjust for light.
The roar came through the television’s speakers, a mere shadow of the real thing. Still, it filled the living room and drowned out the last of the conversations.
The spaceplane began moving. Faster and faster, accelerating. The nose wheel stayed firmly on the runway as the ship accelerated past a hundred knots, then two hundred. A small number at the bottom of the screen reported its increasing velocity.
At 264 knots the nose rose a few feet off the pavement. At 275, the ship lifted off. Seconds later the landing gear began retracting.
The nose kept rising, up, up, up. The ship was exceeding four hundred knots when the nose reached fifty degrees above the horizon and the autopilot stopped the rotation.
Soon the fireball from the engines was all that could be seen on the screen.
It gradually became smaller and smaller as the sound faded… until it was merely a bright point of light in the heavens.
The camera followed the light until it was out of sight, then returned to the tarmac. The cameraman focused on the spot where the spaceplane had begun its roll, a spot now empty.
“She’s on her way,” Egg said.
Rip Cantrell took a deep breath and exhaled very carefully. He surreptitiously wiped at the tears that were leaking down his cheeks. “Yeah,” he whispered. “She’s on her way.”
? ? ?

Inside Jeanne d’Arc Charley Pine monitored the instruments as the ship roared away from the earth. To her left Jean-Paul Lalouette was similarly engaged. Her duties were to bring any anomaly she noticed to his attention. Her eyes swept the panel again, looking for warning lights, errant pressures, a gauge indication that hinted something, anything was not as it should be. Yet all was precisely as it should be, perfect, as if this were a simulator ride and the operator had yet to push a failure button.

Both pilots wore their space suits, complete with helmets, in the event the plane lost pressurization during launch. They planned to take them off after all the systems checks were completed in orbit.
The acceleration Gs felt good, pushing Charley straight back into her seat. The voices of the French controllers passing information about the trajectory and data-link information sounded clear and pleasant in her ears; the background was the low rumble of the rocket engines.
When the external tanks were empty, they were jettisoned explosively. The engines then began burning fuel from the internal tanks as the spaceplane continued to climb and accelerate.
Charley’s eyes flicked to the windscreen, four inches of bulletproof glass. At this nose-up angle the night sky filled the windscreen, full of stars and a sliver of moon. As they climbed through the atmosphere the stars became brighter and ceased their twinkling, and the crescent-moon gleamed more starkly against the background of obsidian black.
She had little time to enjoy the scenery. The next task was rendezvousing with the orbiting fuel tank. She became engrossed in the problem, watching the display that depicted the spaceplane and the orbiting tank and the three-dimensional course to intercept.
When she realized that the join-up was working perfectly and Lalouette had everything under complete control, she glanced again at the moon. For some reason it seemed larger than it did standing on the surface of earth. Now it appeared as what it was, another world.
The obsidian sky full of stars, the weightless feeling, the earth hanging beside the spaceplane with storms over the oceans and snowy mountain peaks twinkling in the sun—Charley Pine had been here before and been forever changed by the experience. Now she was back. She was sooo excited… and just as her personal karma account began overflowing she remembered Rip and felt the tiniest twinge of guilt.
Yeah, so, he wasn’t here! He was only twenty-three, for Christ’s sake. He didn’t earn a seat in a spaceplane’s cockpit; she did! All those years in college, flying, test pilot school—yet she wouldn’t be here if it weren’t for Rip.
Well, she would tell him about it when she returned to earth. That was the best that she could do. She brushed Rip away and returned to the business at hand, controllers and trajectories and systems.
Charley Pine took physical control of Jeanne d’Arc for the first time over the Pacific Ocean to effect the rendezvous with the orbiting fuel cell. With the sound of her breathing rasping in her ears and her heart thudding in her chest, she made tiny control inputs as the spaceplane crossed the distance between the two orbiting bodies. She knew from her military flying experience and the simulator that it was necessary to check the closure rate on the instruments—not to rely on her eyes—since the rate would appear to increase as the bodies closed the distance.
With Lalouette monitoring the instruments and calling out the distance and closure rate, she flew the spaceplane into the rendezvous position and stopped all closure. Only after all relative motion had stopped did she nudge the controls enough to gently bring the spaceplane into the fueling port. The clunk of the hydraulic latches closing, locking the ship firmly to the tank, was the best sound she had heard in years. She breathed a huge sigh of relief.
“Nicely done,” said a male voice, not Lalouette.
She looked around. Pierre Artois was watching. He was suspended in the cabin, floating, maintaining his position by occasionally touching something fixed to the ship. Even though this was his first journey into space, he looked quite comfortable.
“Thank you.”
“If I may ask, mademoiselle, why did you accept my offer to join our expedition?”
Charley glanced at Lalouette, a working pilot who had beaten out hundreds of other applicants for one of the four first-pilot positions, and saw him glance curiously at her.
“I was looking for a flying job,” Charley replied, “and you made an offer.” She shrugged. Gallicly, she hoped.
Artois wasn’t satisfied. “I have heard that you are a part owner of the patents on the flying saucer propulsion technology that was recently licensed by Monsieur Cantrell. If true, you must be a very wealthy woman.”
Lalouette’s eyes widened when he heard that remark. To the best of Charley’s knowledge, her ownership of a portion of the proceeds from the saucer propulsion licensing deals had not been publicly reported. Apparently Artois had done his homework before he hired her.
“That comment is going to do wonderful things for my social life,” Charley shot back. “Listen, Mr. Artois. I’m a professional aviator. Flying is what I do. I’ll fly anything you people own, including spaceships, as long as the paychecks cash. Bounce one and I’m outta here.”
“Sounds fair enough,” Artois said dryly, and shoved off.
Charley Pine shrugged at Lalouette, one of those what-can-you-do? shrugs that are popular in New York, and together the two of them began the process of readying Jeanne d’Arc to receive fuel as the coast of California slid under them.