Saucer The Conquest

CHAPTER 6

“Artois’ antigravity strikes only occur during periods of good atmospheric visibility, usually during the sunlight hours,” the astronomer said. “We believe he is using some type of optical instrument to aim the antigravity beam.”
“Why can’t he use city lights to target his weapon?” the president asked.
“It’s certainly possible,” the astronomer said, “but probably technically difficult. Yet Artois has struck several times during the night hours. As you know, just now the earth is moving between the moon and the sun—” “How do we know that?” O’Reilly demanded. The astronomer gaped, then said, “Don’t you look out the window occasionally? The moon is almost full. When the Earth is between the moon and the sun, as it is now, the surface of the earth facing the moon would appear very dark when viewed from 238,000 miles away, which is its average ’stance from the earth. The more magnification his optical instrument has, the darker the surface would appear. And behind the earth is that huge bright light, the sun.”
“Doesn’t the relationship change daily?” someone else asked.
The astronomer couldn’t believe her ears. “The moon appears to move across our sky every day because the earth is spinning,” she explained. “The moon actually takes twenty-nine days, twelve hours and forty-four minutes to complete one revolution around the earth, as measured against the sun. The moon also revolves on its axis, but at the same rate that it circles the earth, which is why we always see the same side of it.”
“And when will the moon be overhead today?” the president asked.
The astronomer almost shook her head in amazement. The weather had been fantastic in Washington this past week—as usual, this autumn had the best weather of the year—and the night of the full moon was three days away. The Hunter’s Moon, for those with a romantic bent. “At about thirty-eight minutes past ten p.m., sir.”
The president looked at his watch. It was almost midnight. He tossed his pencil on his pad with a sigh. “So if Artois doesn’t zap Washington tonight using the city lights, he can’t do it until tomorrow night.”
The leaders of Congress were demanding that he publicly reject Artois’ demands, the sooner the better, but he didn’t want to trigger Artois’ wrath—at least until all the spaceplanes had been permanently grounded. So he had a little breathing room. Just enough, perhaps.
The president was counting hours on the wall clock, figuring when the attack on France would happen, when a messenger scurried into the room with a piece of paper. He handed it to O’Reilly, who read it and passed it to the president. The president scanned it and tossed it on the table.
“Aha! An ultimatum from the moon. Surrender within forty-eight hours or Artois will flatten Washington.”
That remark set off the president’s advisers. Everyone wanted to talk at once. The president used to insist they talk one at a time, but he didn’t anymore. Now he merely tuned in to snatches of each speech and got the gist of it. One voice hammered on public safety, someone fretted about paying people not to work, several were horrified at the cost to rebuild public buildings, and the attorney general remarked on the government’s liability if anyone were injured or killed by flying debris. Evacuation would look bad to voters, everyone agreed. Tourists would flee Washington, the local economy would be devastated, government workers would refuse to commute into the city, essential government services would be disrupted, Social Security checks wouldn’t go out on time, the homeless had noplace else to go…
“Now you understand why the French surrendered,” the secretary of state said smugly.
The president couldn’t resist. “We’ll rebuild the capital in Kansas,” he told her. “The climate there is better, and it’s closer to Texas.” Then he shooed them out.
O’Reilly, the national security adviser, and the chairman of the Joint Chiefs remained when the others had left. “Have the director of homeland security make sure every government building in Washington is empty from moonrise to moonset tomorrow and every day after that,” the president said to O’Reilly. “Things may get nasty if we don’t whack those spaceplanes tomorrow night.”
“We’ll have to evacuate the White House. Are we going to whack those spaceplanes?” the president asked the national security adviser.
“The submarines are in position to launch cruise missiles now, sir,” the adviser said. “But I suggest we wait for darkness to fall in France, then launch a coordinated strike. That will maximize the chances of catastrophically damaging the targets. And the incoming cruise missiles will be perfect cover for the B-2s. Under no circumstance should we risk having the French capture a B-2 crew.”
“What do you think?” the president asked the chairman.
“If they move the planes while the missiles are in the air, the missiles will miss. We have a better chance of hitting the birds with B-2s.”
“The spaceplanes could fly away while we are waiting,” the president objected. “If they’re ready to fly. Are they?”
“CIA doesn’t know. But if we shoot cruise missiles and miss, I guarantee you that the pro-Artois French will shuffle those planes all over. The B-2s are already in the air. They’ll refuel twice on the flight to France and twice coming home.”
The president went to the window. The moonlight was so bright the trees in the lawn cast shadows. He looked up. He could see the moon by leaning close to the glass. The seas, really dark areas caused by ancient lava flows, were quite stark.
When he was small someone told him about the man in the moon, frightening him. He had hid from the moon’s sight, afraid of that man up there. Now a whole generation of kids might grow up afraid.
That egomaniac Artois!
He looked again at his watch. It was a few minutes past six a.m. in France. “Okay,” he said. “Wait until darkness in France.” The national security adviser and the general left the room.
O’Reilly turned on the television. The president wasn’t paying much attention until the announcer said breathlessly, “Earlier this evening a reporter for our Denver affiliate attempted to interview Charlotte Pine, the American pilot for the French space ministry, who stole the spaceplane that took Artois to the moon. Tonight she was a passenger in a private airplane that landed at a general aviation airport in Denver. She refused to be interviewed.” The network then played fifteen seconds of footage of Charley Pine snarling at the reporter.
So she was back, and in the United States!
“Have the FBI detain her and bring her here,” the president growled at O’Reilly.
He was back at the window, looking at the moon, when a military aide came into the room and handed him a slip of paper. A saucer or rocket had gone into orbit from Nevada.

The president’s eyebrows rose toward his hairline. He knew about the saucer that the Air Force had stashed in Area 51, had learned about it the hard way last year. Surely no one had flown that artifact away. That thing had been guarded day and night and locked up tight since 1947!
More than likely this report was another false alarm. Boy, there had been plenty of those. People were edgy, defenseless and ready to stampede. Rumors swept from coast to coast as quickly as telephone switching equipment could handle long distance calls.
Tomorrow night. With the spaceplanes destroyed, Artois would have to reexamine his cards.
“Better check on this report,” the president said, and handed the slip of paper about the Area 51 saucer to O’Reilly. “Sounds as if someone in Nevada panicked big time. And find that spaceplane that Pine flew back.”
Then he smiled one of those smiles the secretary of state hated.
? ? ?

After arriving at Reagan National, Charley Pine and Rip Cantrell rented a car, loaded the space suits and air compressor in the trunk and went looking for a motel room.
Charley found one near the Potomac, south of the city on U.S. which had been the main drag south back in the dark ages before the interstates were built. The motel dated from that era, although it had been painted three or four times since.
Charely Pine washed her clothes in the sink of their room and hung them up to dry. Rip gave her a toothbrush and some other personal items that he had brought in a small tote bag from Missouri. When Charley put her clothes on the next morning they were still damp. She complained to Rip, who had just returned from the small diner next to the motel with coffee.
“You gotta be tough this day and age,” Rip said, and kissed her good morning.
“I am tough, but wet panties—” Charley shivered.
Charley already had the television on and had watched a replay of her vignette with the Denver reporter. As she and Rip sipped coffee, she flipped back to CNBC and turned the audio down.
“So do you still want to do it?” she asked Rip.
“Artois snatched Egg. If he hadn’t, I’d vote to find a hole and crawl in. But we can’t.”
“You’re right. And I owe Pierre. If he wins, he’s going to squash me like a bug.”
A half hour later, as they ate breakfast in the diner, the news broke that the three spaceplanes in France had just taken off, and had presumably gone into orbit on the first leg of their journey to the moon.
Charley and Rip sat frozen, watching the film clip of the spaceplanes taking off, a minute apart, on the television at the end of the counter.
“They have to get fuel at the orbiting tank,” Charley remarked thoughtfully. “I didn’t think there was enough there for three spaceplanes.”
“What if there isn’t?” Rip asked, speaking softly so no one seated at the counter would hear them.
“One of the spaceplanes may have carried up excess fuel for the other two. The crew would pump the excess into the tank, then the receivers would take it out. Much easier than rigging hoses between orbiting bodies.”
They soon paid the tab and drove away in the rented car, with the space suits and accessories in the trunk. They stopped at a convenience store and purchased six bottles of water and three bags of jerky. Then they drove to the parking lot of the old RFK football stadium, which was empty. They parked, locked the car, and walked to Independence Avenue, where they found a bus stop and waited. When the local came along, they climbed aboard.
“Going to be a pretty day,” the bus driver said to Charley after she smiled at him.
Rip and Charley took a seat and rode into the heart of the city.
? ? ?

The news that the three spaceplanes in southern France had taken off from their base hit the president hard. He had let the military professionals talk him into waiting to attack, and now it was too late. He said three or four cuss words.
While he waited for his blood pressure to return to normal, he thought about the situation. Due to the fact that the moon was overhead during the middle of the night when public buildings in Washington—such as the Capitol, White House, Supreme Court Building, Pentagon and Treasury—were empty, the government didn’t yet have to panic the electorate by evacuating those buildings during the day, in effect shutting down official Washington. During the day the government could continue with business as usual. For a week or so.
Across the street in Lafayette Park several thousand demonstrators were cavorting in front of television cameras.
They were demanding the United States surrender to Artois. His promises sounded pretty good, they said. A handful of stars were there with the demonstrators, telling everyone watching on television that the man in the moon was a better deal than the United States Constitution.
What the heck, the president thought, I might be dead in a week. There might be a revolution, a meteor might strike the earth, Yellowstone might explode, or California might slide off into the Pacific. A whole week…
? ? ?

Standing outside the National Air and Space Museum on the side that faced the Mall, the northern side, Rip examined the huge glass facade. Just beyond this wall of windows were the most important treasures the museum possessed, the Wright Flyer, the Spirit of St. Louis, the Bell X-l, and the saucer Rip had found in the Sahara. Behind him Charley Pine was purchasing sunglasses, baseball caps and sweatshirts from a pushcart vendor.
She donned her sweatshirt, cap and sunglasses and offered Rip’s to him. Her sweatshirt sported an American flag on the front and the Capitol dome on the back. Rip’s sweatshirt had a likeness of the president on it. “This the only one they had?” he asked.
“It was the cheapest,” Charley replied.
“If they took the reactor out of the saucer,” Rip said, “you and I are going to spend the next ten or twenty days in the city jail.” One of the conditions Rip had put on his donation of the saucer to the museum was that the reactor be removed, rendering the saucer incapable of flight.
“You know they didn’t,” Charley said. “They don’t have a place to store nuclear materials.”
The lack of adequate storage was the reason the museum had been sued by local antinuclear activists, who had obtained an injunction against removal of the reactor from the saucer.
“But if they did…” Rip said.
The sunglasses were plastic wraparound mirrors that cost three dollars a pair. With glasses on and ball caps pulled down, they joined the queue for the security checkpoints at the north entrance. There weren’t a lot of tourists here today—most folks were probably huddled around a television somewhere, trying to catch the latest news—so Rip and Charley breezed through the metal detectors and soon found themselves inside the museum.
The saucer was on the main floor, with the Spirit of St. Louis hanging from the ceiling above it. They walked to the velvet rope that surrounded it. Rip could see that the hatch in the belly of the saucer was closed.
“What do you think?” he whispered to Charley, who was looking at the armed security guards. They had to get into the saucer and close the hatch before the guards could react.
“Check to see if the reactor is there.”
Well, why not? The light from the wall of windows fell directly upon the saucer’s skin; that electrical current should be enough to maintain a minimum charge on the battery.
Saucer, power up! Last year, when Rip flew the saucer, the computer memorized his brain waves. If it had enough electrical power to pick them up now…

He thought he heard a faint whine from the direction of the saucer, but he couldn’t be sure. It would take a moment or two for the reactor temps to rise enough to begin generating electricity. In the interim, Saucer, flash the interior light.
He saw the blink inside the dark cockpit.
So did Charley, who squeezed his arm, then said, “I think you should pull the fire alarm in the men’s room while I open the hatch.”
“I’ve got a better idea. You pull the fire alarm in the women’s room while I open the hatch.”
“Too late,” Charley told him. “I suggested it. Go do it, Ripper.”
“You sure about this?” Rip whispered to Charley. He knew it was the right thing to do, but still… “If you thought stealing Jeanne d’Arc got them in an uproar, wait until you see what happens after we fly out of here.”
“Are you going to stand here all morning talking, or are you going to get on with it?”
The man beside Charley tapped her on the shoulder. He was in his forties and balding, wearing baggy shorts and a sweatshirt. “Say, aren’t you Charley Pine, the saucer pilot?”
“Uh—”
“Well, if that don’t beat all!” the man loudly exclaimed. “I recognized you right off. You’re a mighty pretty woman, and I knew you were somebody. Matilda, come over here. There’s somebody I want you to meet. Here she is, Charley Pine, the woman that swiped that spaceplane from the moon and left that idiot Frenchie high and dry.”
Everyone within earshot turned and stared at Charley.
? ? ?

“Are you trying to say someone really stole the Air Force’s Roswell saucer out of its hangar in Area Fifty-one?” the president demanded.
“Yessir,” the aide stammered. “That’s what they said.”
“Area Fifty-one is a top secret base. How in the world did thieves get in there?”
“They drove through a gate, sir.”
The president eyed the aide without affection. Young, with a terrible haircut and baggy pants, the aide had to be the dullest of the first lady’s cousins, the president thought. Then he remembered that last family picnic he attended. Perhaps not. “Who let them through the gate?” he asked with more patience than he felt. “Why didn’t the security forces find the thieves and arrest them before they flew away?”
“I don’t know the answers to those questions, sir. The Air Force and FBI are investigating, Mr. O’Reilly said.”
“So where is the saucer now?”
The aide jabbed a thumb at the ceiling. “Up there.” When O’Reilly came in a few minutes later, the president had his feet on his desk and his chin on his chest. O’Reilly had two Secret Service types with him. O’Reilly pointed, and they began taking paintings down from the wall. The president watched morosely as each agent carried two from the room, one in each hand, and then returned for more.
? ? ?

The tourist had a voice like a carny barker, Charley Pine thought. Or a leather-lunged politician. A dozen people were staring at her. “We’re from Ohio,” the man brayed, “just here visiting, you understand, staying with my brother’s in-laws—they’re retired from the government—and taking in some of the sights. The White House people wouldn’t let us take a tour with all this craziness going on, so we came to the museum this morning. Terrorists, demonstrators, idiots on the moon, and look who we run into! If this isn’t something—”
The wail of the fire alarm cut him off.
As everyone looked around for smoke or flames, Charley ducked under the velvet rope and scooted under the saucer. She put her hand on the latch to warm it, trying not to hurry.
“Hey, you, get out from under there!” The shout could be heard even above the howl of the fire alarm.
Now. The latch rotated in her hand. The hatch dropped open and Charley shot up through the hole.
Rip was right behind her. So was one of the guards.
“Sorry, pal, you didn’t buy a ticket,” Rip said, and slammed the hatch shut in his face. In seconds he had it latched.
Charley Pine was already in the pilot’s seat. Through the canopy she could see horrified tourists and running guards. In front of her the computer displays came vividly to life.
She tore off the ball cap and sunglasses she was wearing and tossed them away. The computer headband lay on the console before her; she placed it on her head. Hello, she said to the computer.
Lift us up about afoot.
She felt the motion as the computer gave the necessary commands to the flight computer and the ship responded.
Gear up!
She heard the whine as the three arms retracted into the body of the saucer, and the final thump as the gear doors slammed shut. Now she turned the saucer, pointing it at the wall of windows.
Do we have any water in the system? she asked the computer.
A graph appeared on the main screen before her. Rip had brought the saucer here a year ago with some water in it, and the staff had apparently never drained it out. The ship was about thirty percent full, she estimated.
Outside the saucer, the crowd was backing away, panic-stricken. A steady stream of people were forcing their way out the main entrance. A half dozen uniformed guards stood in front of the saucer with their pistols drawn. They seemed unsure of what to do.
Charley lowered the saucer to within a few inches of the floor to ensure no one would be crushed under it in the antigravity field. Then she began moving the saucer forward. She thought the command, and the flight computer altered the current to the field just enough to move the machine.
She could still hear the fire alarm sounding, although the sound was muffled. She ignored it and concentrated on moving the saucer.
The guards scattered. A tourist information booth was shoved out of the way, as were several crowd control stanchions and a sign that explained how Rip Cantrell had found the saucer in the Sahara Desert, as the saucer moved slowly toward the window at about half the speed a man could walk. Staring, pointing people lined the walls, including some parents with fierce grips on their kids.
With the saucer inches from the windows, Charley Pine stopped forward motion and caused it to rise until it was about halfway up the glass. She was a little concerned about nudging the Spirit, which was someplace behind and above the saucer, but the higher she hit the windows, the easier they would be to break.
Now the saucer contacted the glass. Forward!
The window directly in front of the saucer shattered, yet the framework stayed intact.
“Better back up and whack it,” Rip suggested. He was standing right beside her.
“I really don’t need suggestions from the peanut gallery,” she muttered, and backed the saucer up about a yard.
“Just trying to be helpful,” Rip said, not a bit apologetic.
She drove the saucer forward as hard as she could. The framework cracked and buckled in a shower of glass. Still it held, preventing the saucer from passing.
She backed up, smashed the wall again. This time the saucer shot through.
No one under her on the patio outside. The shower of glass from the window had moved everyone away.
The saucer was only fifty feet from the building when Charley lit the rocket engines and turned it to the left so she wouldn’t fly over the downtown. The fire from the rocket exhaust nozzles of the accelerating saucer was subdued since she had only asked for a little power, but the noise was awe-inspiring.
It was heard all over downtown Washington.
In the White House the president heard it and wondered, Now what? He went to the window of the Oval Office just in time to see the saucer accelerating toward the Lincoln Memorial trailing a sheet of fire.

? ? ?

Charley turned hard over Georgetown and came back down the Potomac. She passed the Pentagon, still low, only about a hundred feet above the river so that she wouldn’t interfere with airline traffic into and out of Reagan National, then turned and headed for RFK Stadium. The rockets were silent as she coasted toward the lone car parked in the empty acres of asphalt. She used the antigravity system to lower the saucer onto its landing gear beside the car.
Rip went out the hatch like a jackrabbit. Two minutes later he had the space suits and compressor loaded. The food and water in bags on the backseat took another two minutes, then he popped back up through the hatchway.
“Check the fuel cap to ensure that it’s open,” Charley said. She had told the computer to open it, but it wouldn’t hurt to check.
Rip leaped back out.
A police car roared across the empty parking lot with lights flashing and siren howling. It was still fifty yards away when Rip scampered back up through the hatchway, shouted, “It’s open,” and pulled the hatch shut behind him.
“The cops are coming,” he called to Charley, who was still busy with the computer displays. “Whenever you’re ready.”
She lifted the saucer, retracted the gear and headed back for the Potomac. At the confluence of the Anacostia and Potomac, she stopped all relative motion, then lowered the saucer into the river. Brown water covered the canopy. A gurgling could be heard as the water flowed into the open neck of the fuel tank.
“This water is pretty bad,” Rip said nervously. “Lots of mud in it.”
Charley didn’t respond to that comment. She concentrated on the computers, plotting their journey.
When the tank was full of water, Charley lifted the saucer from the river and flew along two hundred feet above the Potomac using the antigravity rings. Several miles downriver she saw a golf course on the east bank and landed on a fairway. Rip dropped through the hatchway to check that the fuel cap had indeed latched shut.
Two golfers drove up in a golf cart and stopped a hundred feet from the saucer. They sat frozen with their jaws hanging open.
“It’s on tight,” Rip reported when he was back inside, with the hatch shut. “But before we go, hadn’t we better check the antiproton beam?”
“Good idea,” Charley admitted. When Egg analyzed the systems aboard the saucer, it took him a while to realize that the power that generated the antigravity force was coupled into some weird-looking heavy-duty electrical conductors that he originally thought were part of the lift/control system. It turned out, though that the power was routed to drive an antiproton beam weapon. Antiprotons are forms of antimatter and are manufactured on earth today only in giant accelerators in particle physics laboratories. The creators of the saucer, however, equipped it with a small accelerator, which generated an antiproton beam.
Charley lifted the saucer ten feet in the air and stabilized in a hover. At her command, crosshairs appeared in front of her on the canopy. She turned the saucer to line it up on a large oak tree on the edge of the fairway. The trunk appeared to be about three feet in diameter.
Rip was right beside her, his head at her shoulder.
Fire!
A smoky beam of fire, almost like lightning, shot from a point on the leading edge of the saucer and reached out for the oak. Some of the antiprotons were striking ordinary protons in the molecules that made up the air, destroying them and releasing gobs of energy, hence the lightning.
The lightning went completely through the oak tree and out the other side, since there was so much space in and between the molecules of the tree that some of the antiprotons could survive their trips through it and emerge out the other side. Pieces began flying from the tree.
“Better stop—” Rip began, just as the tree trunk exploded from the release of energy.
Charley stopped the beam. The stub of the trunk smoked as the top of the tree crashed to the ground and fragments of wood showered down.
“Holy cow,” Rip said, and whistled.
“Let’s get outta here,” Charley Pine muttered, and told the saucer to go.
Two seconds later the rocket engines ignited, blasting the saucer forward over the carcass of the devastated tree. Charley held the nose down as the ship accelerated. When the speed had reached several hundred knots, she commanded the computer to lift the nose and follow that holographic pathway on the display before her.
? ? ?

The president was on the south lawn of the White House as the saucer shot above the treetops, going almost straight up, on its journey into space. When he saw the saucer fly over the Mall a half hour ago, he suspected it would soon go into orbit, so he ran out here to catch the show. Although he was now at least ten miles from the saucer, the president had to squint against the glare of the white-hot rocket exhaust rising into the sky.
The noise was a loud, deep, bass roar that overwhelmed the senses.
Without realizing he was doing it, the president shouted in frustration. His shout was lost amid the thunder of the saucer.
? ? ?

Pierre Artois felt that sense of sublime satisfaction that comes to those who dare great things, run tremendous risks and win. A deep calm descended over him. He was standing on a mountain peak with the world at his feet. Actually he was standing on the moon, looking up at the earth, but the folks on earth were looking up at him. All of them.
Indeed, he reflected, he had won. Three spaceplanes were in orbit, one of which carried extra fuel to recharge the orbiting fuel tank; the other two would top off and journey on to the moon. In the unlikely event anything went wrong with the spaceplanes, Newton Chadwick and Egg Cantrell were on their way to the moon with the Roswell saucer, which Chadwick had managed to steal from under the nose of the U.S. Air Force. Most important, the government of France had surrendered, renounced the republic and proclaimed Pierre Artois emperor, pledging loyalty, honor and obedience.
“First France, then Europe, then the world. Fame, fortune and power,” he said to his wife, Julie. “Life doesn’t get better than this.”
“We haven’t won yet,” Julie pointed out. “The British are just across the Channel, their moat, and they can be so tiresome.”
“That little ditch won’t save them this time,” Pierre said confidently. “We can handle the British.”
“Then there are the Americans. The U.S. president is a Neanderthal—I don’t know why they elect such men.”
“Probably couldn’t find any better,” Pierre said, and made a gesture of dismissal. He didn’t want to fret about the Americans today. He felt like music, a banquet, champagne and, afterward, Julie in a large, soft bed. He eyed her speculatively.
“Forget it,” Julie told the emperor of France. “We don’t have time.”
? ? ?

Aboard the Roswell saucer, coasting toward the moon, Newton Chadwick and his two French friends were nearly as ecstatic as Pierre Artois. The news of the French government’s surrender came to them via a battery-powered radio that Chadwick had brought aboard. Egg sat listening, saying nothing.
Later Chadwick locked himself in the saucer’s head. He wore a small fanny pack at all times, and it contained, Egg suspected, his antiaging drug. Egg wondered if the drug took the form of a pill, a liquid that must be injected or some kind of cream. Egg also wondered about how much of the drug Chadwick had with him. Hmmm…
When he tired of plumbing the depths of the Roswell saucer’s memory, Egg Cantrell amused himself by frequency surfing on the saucer’s radio; he listened to taxi drivers in Rio, police calls from Moscow, ships at sea, soldiers on maneuver and air traffic controllers talking to airplanes. And he caught part of the great debate over the demands made by Pierre Artois. Amid the babble he could hear a steady, hard drumbeat of voices insisting that while Pierre’s promises were very nice, the ability to vote out unpopular governments—the freedom to choose—was more important. Egg paid particular attention to American news reports. Charley Pine was in America; he concluded that the spaceplane she stole from the moon was probably also there. The three spaceplanes in France had taken off, presumably on their way to the moon. Finally, someone had stolen the saucer from the National Air and Space Museum in Washington and flown it into space.

Chadwick and his friends were asleep when Egg heard the flash about the other saucer, and still asleep when the reporters figured out that apparently Rip Cantrell and Charley Pine were the guilty parties.
So the equation had changed, Egg mused. He had agreed to fly the saucer for Chadwick because he feared for Rip and Charley’s safety, and his own. Chadwick and his thugs certainly weren’t above using force if he failed to obey Chadwick’s demands. Yet if they disabled or killed Egg, Chadwick would have to fly the saucer—if he could. If he couldn’t, he and his two pals would also die in this thing.
Egg wasn’t ready to die just yet. He enjoyed life and wanted more of it.
And now wasn’t the time to play the hero. The best way to get back to earth was to continue on this trajectory, which would slingshot the saucer around the moon and start it back for earth unless he fired the engines to slow it and put it into lunar orbit.
He turned the saucer so that earth filled the canopy. He searched the jeweled darkness around the planet, trying to spot the twinkle of rocket exhaust that would indicate the presence of a saucer or spaceplane. A saucer or spaceplane accelerating for a journey to the moon. He saw nothing of the kind, of course. The distances were too vast, the exhaust plumes far too small.
Egg grinned widely. Rip and Charley, a real pair of aces.
He loosened the safety belt that held him in the pilot’s seat, leaned back and drifted off to sleep thinking about his nephew Rip and the beautiful Charley Pine.
? ? ?

The ride into space was even more exciting than Rip remembered it. He wanted to sing, but managed to stifle himself.
Charley Pine was all business. When the rocket engines stopped, signaling that the saucer had achieved orbit, she began tuning the radio that she remembered from her previous adventure in this ship. Like the one Egg was listening to in the Roswell saucer, this radio was also capable of receiving and transmitting on an extraordinarily wide band of frequencies.
She knew the one she wanted: the spaceplane’s orbital refueling freq. She had to play a while with the radio, then finally found it.
The spaceplanes were already in orbit and were now rendezvousing with the fuel tank. The problem was that she didn’t know where the tank was. Oh, she knew it was orbiting the earth at a height of about a hundred miles, more or less, but where above the earth was it?
As she listened to the French pilots chat back and forth between themselves and their controller on the ground, she tried to reason her way through the problem. When she and LaFollette had launched in Jeanne d’Arc, the launch was timed so that when the spaceplane reached orbiting velocity, it would be in the vicinity of the fuel tank. She suspected the French had done the same thing this time. Indeed, if they hadn’t, the spaceplanes would waste prodigious quantities of fuel and time maneuvering for a rendezvous.
She and Rip hadn’t timed their launch, of course. They had to find and rendezvous upon the spaceplanes before they successfully refueled and began their lunar orbit insertion burn. Once they did, she and Rip would never catch them in the saucer; it didn’t have enough fuel.
She examined the radar display, running it out to what she hoped was maximum range. The only way to determine what that range was would be to find a target and let the computer figure a course and burn to intercept. She could make an estimate based on that.
Which was beside the point, because the display was empty.
If the radar was working.
But why wouldn’t it be working? Everything in the saucer had worked as it was supposed to from the day Rip and his friends hammered it from a sandstone ledge in the Sahara. Assume that it is working, Charley told herself.
“How are you going to find these dudes?” Rip asked. He was watching over her shoulder.
“I don’t know that we can.” She gestured toward the radio. “They’re already rendezvousing with the fuel tank. We don’t know when they launched, so they could be anywhere above the planet.”
“Let’s ask for help.”
She looked at him. “Who from?”
“How about Space Command? Bet they know where that tank is.” Space Command was a branch of the U.S. Air Force charged with monitoring the position of satellites, among other things.
Charley Pine thought about it. “The duty officer will refer the request to Washington, and they’ll have to staff it, which could take a day or two. We have a few hours, at best. And if the U.S. government helps us, Pierre will be most unhappy with them. They will suspect that.”
“Life’s full of trade-offs,” Rip remarked. “If Pierre gets those spaceplanes, he’ll be sitting in the catbird seat. Most Americans must be very unhappy with him right now. The worst that Space Command can do is say no.”
“And make a lot of threats.”
“I don’t figure we’re winning any Citizen of the Year Award points now. Oh, I know, I don’t have any more faith in politicians than you do, but at some point you have to throw the ball in their direction and see if they can catch it.”
Charley began tuning the radio. She certainly didn’t know what frequencies she might use to contact Space Command, but no doubt the U.S. air traffic controllers did. Charley tuned to that portion of the VHF band where she thought air traffic controllers might be, and sure enough, there they were, working airliners into and out of… Miami.
She waited until there was a moment of silence, then said, “Miami Approach, this is Saucer One with a request, over.”
The controller didn’t miss a beat. He must get calls from flying saucers every day. “Saucer One, Miami, you have a flight plan on file?”
“That’s a negative. We have a request, though. We need a frequency that we can call Space Command on. Can you recommend one?”
“Where are you, Saucer One?”
“In orbit.”
“Stand by.”
The controller’s supervisor soon appeared at his shoulder. Trying to keep his voice as dry and matter-of-fact as possible, the controller said, “Saucer One says she’s in orbit and wants a freq for Space Command.”
The supervisor had just returned from her break, where she had been watching news coverage of the saucer’s theft from the Air and Space Museum, a story that had been sandwiched between the latest bulletins from Paris and the moon.
“Just another day at the office,” she said, and picked up the military hotline telephone.
A moment after she was given the Space Command frequency by Miami Approach, Charley Pine lost radio contact with North America. She figured out the conversion and dialed in the frequency. Even the ancients had classified frequencies by the number of cycles in a given time span. Although they didn’t use seconds, Egg had figured out the conversion formula long ago, and both Charley and Rip remembered it.
As they rode over the Sahara and the Red Sea, Rip and Charley sat in silence, each lost in his own thoughts. Over the Indian Ocean Charley finally spoke.
“You know that they’re going to want us to destroy those spaceplanes.”
“If we pop the refueling tank, we don’t need to destroy them. They can’t get to the moon without more fuel than they can carry aloft. It’ll take a while to get extra fuel into orbit.”
“It’s already in orbit.”
“Okay, we pop the cow.”
“Rip, I know these people. I trained with them in France. Blowing up the tank will kill some of them.”
“Hey, I didn’t talk Pierre Artois into trying to conquer the world. I didn’t give the order to kidnap Egg. His Royal Moonness Emperor Pierre the First gave the order.”

“Not the weenies in the spaceplanes.”
“They signed up to be soldiers in Pierre’s army. If you don’t want to pull the trigger, get out of the pilot’s seat,” Rip said. “I’ll do it.”
“I just want to make sure you know what we’re getting ourselves into.”
“Little late for second thoughts, don’t you think? Maybe we should have had this conversation outside the Air and Space Museum, before we walked through that door.”
“Maybe, but we didn’t, so we’re having it now.”
“Outta the seat. I’ll do the shooting and I’ll live with it afterward.”
“We’ll both have to live with it,” Charley Pine said, and stayed in the pilot’s chair. She was thinking of Marcel, who had stolen a kiss one evening in the simulator. Was he aboard one of those spaceplanes?
? ? ?

The president was in the cabinet room at the White House as the duty officer at Space Command, an air force two-star general, relayed Charley’s comments via telephone. Around the table were the leaders of Congress, who were here to find out exactly what was in the president’s speech to the nation, which he had yet to give.
“The French spaceplanes rendezvoused with the fuel tank twenty minutes ago,” the general said. “They may have finished refueling and have made their lunar orbit insertion burn by the time the saucer gets there.”
“Give Cantrell and Pine all the help you can,” the president whispered into the telephone. Of course, every eye in the room was upon him, yet he didn’t want his side of this telephone conversation on the news shows during the next hour. As he waited while the general passed the order to the supervisor, who passed it on to the operators monitoring the progress of the various craft orbiting the earth, the president toyed with the idea of leaving the cabinet room to finish the conversation. He decided to stay put because there wasn’t much else to say.
When the general got back to him, the president said softly, “Tell me again about this weapon Pine says is on board the saucer.”
“Sir, she didn’t explain anything about it. Her only comment was that the saucer had a short-range weapon that she could use to attack the spaceplanes. We asked what kind of weapon, and she said, ‘Antimatter.’”
“And that thing sat right down the street in a museum for over a year without our wizards learning that it had a ray gun on it?”
“I couldn’t comment on that, sir,” the general said diplomatically.
The president dropped the telephone into its cradle and stared without enthusiasm at the legislators sitting around the table.
“Well, sir?” Senator Blohardt prompted.
“Gentlemen—and ladies, of course,” the president said, “the fact is that I haven’t decided precisely what I want to say to the citizens of the country about this matter. Since you are here, I’d like to hear your views. Perhaps you could lead off, Senator Blohardt.”
“In the first place, Mr. President, you couldn’t cede or surrender an iota of this nation’s sovereignty to a foreign power without an amendment to the Constitution, which you’ll never get.”
“Treaties often cede sovereignty,” a senator from the other party shot back.
After sex and violence, there is nothing Americans love more than legal wrangles, which is why football, which combines all three, is so popular. Naturally most of the legislators were lawyers, so away they galloped, arguing the case. The president sighed and slipped off his shoes. If Artois could figure a way to balance the budget and pay off the national debt, the president thought, turning the country over to him would be an idea worth discussing.
He kept the telephone close at hand.
? ? ?

The refuel tank was a third of an orbit away, behind the saucer.
Charley Pine attacked the saucer’s flight computer. This was the first time she had attempted to program it to compute a maneuver more complex than a reentry profile. She couldn’t figure it out on the first attempt, and said, “Rip, you’re going to have to help me with this.”
On the third attempt, there it was, a loop that took the saucer high into space and dropped it down on the predicted rendezvous point.
“My Lord, do we have fuel for that?” Rip murmured at Charley, who was already examining the quantity indications.
“It’s going to be tight,” Charley Pine said, “really tight. We won’t have any fuel left to maneuver with when we reach the rendezvous—if the tank and spaceplanes are really there. Not if we ever expect to return to earth.”
“I was sorta counting on getting down. One of these days.”
“I was too.”
“Well, hot woman, what do you want to do?”
Charley turned the saucer, pointed it in the direction recommended by the computer and came on smoothly with the power. The saucer leaped forward.
The maneuver the flight computer recommended sent the saucer over the top of a giant loop after a twelve-minute climb. Rip and Charley were no longer weightless in the saucer, which was now traveling in a long arc. They were pushed toward the floor of the saucer at perhaps a tenth of a G. Mild as it was, the acceleration force gave them a sense of up and down. The blue, green and gray earth was above them, over the canopy as they went slowly, lazily over the top and started down the back side of the loop.
Charley checked the flight display, upon which the radar target should be presented. It was empty. The spaceplanes and refueling tank were still somewhere to the west and far below, speeding along at eighteen thousand miles per hour toward that invisible point in space where they would rendezvous with the saucer. That is, if the designation of the spaceplanes’ position was even in the ballpark.
The saucer hurtled downward on the back side of its prodigious loop as Charley and Rip waited, their eyes on the flight display. Seconds turned into minutes.
“Space Command, Saucer One, where are they?”
“Our computer shows you are four minutes from target merge.”
Rip and Charley were looking straight at earth as the saucer accelerated toward it. Rip gave a gentle jump and did a somersault in midair, then landed on his feet. “Four minutes,” he said, his voice dripping with disgust.
“I really admire your endless patience,” Charley remarked. “It’s one of your better traits.”
“Hold that thought.” Rip did another flip, but faster. “I always wanted to be an acrobat, but earth’s gravity was just too much.”
“Held you down, did it?”
After three more somersaults, he tired of it and decided to take advantage of the G to relieve himself in an empty water bottle. “Don’t look behind you,” he advised Charley Pine.
“I never do,” she said. He was back at her side when she murmured, “Here they come.”
The spaceplanes were slightly to one side, ahead, moving upward on the display. The displacement from dead ahead was, Charley knew, a graphic presentation of the inaccuracy with which she input the target’s position. But she had come close enough. Maybe.
The nose of the saucer continued to rise toward the earth’s horizon.
Charley Pine, jet fighter pilot, knew the rendezvous was going to work out.
They didn’t see the spaceplanes until they were about twenty miles away. They appeared as tiny dots of reflected sunlight.
The saucer still had a speed and angular advantage, which caused it to close the distance. Ten miles out Charley Pine took over manually and used the saucer’s maneuvering jets as a brake to reduce some of the overtaking speed. Her experience as a fighter pilot visually judging closure rate was very helpful here.

At about ten miles she could see all four objects. There was the tank, with one of the spaceplanes nestled to it. But was that the donor or a receiver craft? The other two spaceplanes were nearby, within a few hundred yards of the ship that was joined to the tank.
The saucer’s computer read Charley’s brainwaves, and the optical crosshairs appeared on the canopy.
Perhaps, she thought, she had braked too much. The spaceplanes and the tank were growing larger, but the closure rate seemed slow. She glanced at the flight display, trying to judge the distance. Now she could have used a radar screen calibrated in miles or kilometers or whatever, but she didn’t have it.
She maneuvered slightly to put the crosshairs on the fuel tank.
Still closing.
“What’s the range of the shooter?” Rip asked.
“How would I know?” Charley said, her voice so tense she had trouble getting the words out.
“No atmosphere to siphon off antiprotons,” Rip mused. “Why don’t you give ’em a squirt now, just to see what happens?”
She thought of the Frenchmen she had trained with—and nothing happened. No! She shouted, “Shoot! Goddamn it, shoot!” Instantly the weapon began discharging a steady stream of antiprotons. As it did so, a small warning light appeared beside the optical crosshairs.
As Rip had implicitly predicted, without an atmosphere, there was no chain lightning effect. The only visible evidence that the antimatter weapon was working were the sparkles that appeared on the side of the tank.
The saucer was now less than a mile from the other ships. “Better stop your forward progress,” Rip urged, “before that thing—“
The tank exploded in a blinding flash. Fire shot away in every direction.
The concussion rocked the saucer. Dead ahead, the brilliant red and yellow fireball, expanding rapidly, grew larger and larger and rushed toward them, engulfing the saucer.
As the saucer bounced in the turbulence, Charley Pine ripped off the headset and shut her eyes. She didn’t want to collide with anything, if indeed there were anything left to collide with, yet she didn’t want to coast out of the area.
Seconds ticked by, and finally she opened her eyes. The expanding gases were still glowing, as if a new universe had been born. Her eyes slowly adjusted to the glare.
“What do you see?” Rip asked, his hand hard on her shoulder. She reached for his hand, grasped it hard.
The incandescent gases gradually burned out. Where the explosion had occurred, nothing remained. “Oh, God!” Charley moaned. “I think we killed them all.”
“There, to the left!”
Charley looked left. A spaceplane, perhaps two miles away, pointed almost at the saucer, was moving perceptibly away from the epicenter of the blast. The burning, expanding gases must have pushed on the side of it, like a sail, imparting a velocity vector. It wasn’t stationary, but was in a slow, flat spin, like a Frisbee. Of course; the blast pushed harder on the vertical tail, less so on the nose.
Rip grabbed at her arm. “Up there, to the right!” There was the other one, also moving away. Its nose pointed up and farther right.
One or both might have completed refueling and be capable of flying on to the moon. But which one?
The spaceplane on the left spun through one more revolution, the spin visibly slowing; the motion ceased when the nose pointed west in relation to the planet below, a direction over Charley’s left shoulder.
“Maybe that’s the tanker,” Rip said, “and it had finished filling the tank. Maybe—”
Before he could speak again, the rockets in the tail of that westward-pointing spaceplane ignited. It began accelerating in the direction it was pointing.
“Maybe it’s going—” Rip shouted as the ship crossed Charley’s left shoulder.
“Going to reenter the atmosphere,” Charley muttered. The rocket burn must be decreasing the spaceplane’s velocity in relation to the spinning planet below, which would send it into a lower orbit. If the deceleration burn was long enough, the spaceplane would reenter the atmosphere.
As the ship shot out of sight behind her, she looked again at the ship high and to her right. The distance was probably three miles. Its orientation had also changed. Now it was pointing more along the vector in which it and the saucer were orbiting, and the nose was up above the horizon, about ten degrees. If the rocket engines fired, it would accelerate and climb. If the engines burned long enough, it would reach escape velocity and, perhaps, be on its way to the moon. To Pierre and Julie, for conquest and glory.
She turned the saucer, pointed it toward the spaceplane and asked the engines for power.
As the saucer’s rockets responded, the high spaceplane’s rockets burped to life.
“It’s going to the moon!” Rip shouted. He didn’t even know he was shouting.
Charley came on hard with the juice and turned to parallel the other ship’s course. Both ships were accelerating, but if she deviated from her victim’s course, she would drop behind.
“Get him, get him, get him!” Rip urged.
She was at full power now, trying to close that gap, the Gs pressing her backward into her seat. Beside her Rip held on for dear life.
She didn’t have the fuel for much of this nonsense, not if she hoped to ever return to earth. Even as that thought crossed her mind, the computer displayed the fuel remaining. Less than ten percent.
By God, she didn ‘t have enough now!
The gap didn’t seem to be closing. Desperate, she fired the antiproton weapon and swung the nose to the right, intending to rake the antimatter beam across the fleeing spaceplane. This would work or it wouldn’t.
The crosshairs projected on the canopy in front of her crossed the spaceplane, and she kicked rudder, trying to hold it there as the French ship widened the distance between them.
A second passed, then two. Three…
And the three smaller rocket engines on the underside of the ship went dark, leaving only the main engine and the two small engines above it still firing.
Instantly Charley cut off her rockets to save what water she had for a reentry attempt.
Ahead of her the spaceplane’s nose dropped as the asymmetrical power took effect.
Still accelerating, the nose fell through the planet’s horizon and continued down.
The ship was far ahead now, the white-hot rocket exhaust all that was visible.
The angle of that falling star continued to steepen—it dropped lower and lower and began to move aft in relation to the saucer. Charley rolled her ship so she could see the white pinpoint of exhaust.
Deeper it went, down into the darkness, down toward the waiting atmosphere that enshrouded the massive planet.
Finally, far behind and below the speeding saucer the exhaust plume twinkled out, and there was nothing more to see.
“I hope they’re dead before they hit the atmosphere,” Rip said softly.
“Yes,” she said, thinking of Marcel, with the black eyes and the shy smile. “If God is merciful.”