Saucer: The Conquest (17 page)

• • •

The fixed-gear, high-winged Cessna 182 buzzed low over the tops of the mountain ridges. In the pilot’s seat Rip Cantrell scanned the sky, and occasionally glanced at the instruments to ascertain the health of the single piston engine. High clouds obscured the sky to the west, the precursors of a front that was moving eastward, yet the sky overhead was clear except for a high, thin, gauzy layer of cirrus.

Rip glanced at his watch again and checked the fuel. He had been airborne for an hour and had plenty remaining, yet—

He had been cruising north along the ridge; now he turned south. He throttled back even more and leaned the mixture a tad, trying to save another gallon.

There, in the sky to the west, under the clouds a speck. He watched it intently. He had already been fooled twice, once by an airliner and once by a jet fighter.

The speck was high and descending.

Rip turned eastward, toward the stupendous expanse of salt flats that lay west of the Great Salt Lake, and rapped the mixture and throttle controls forward.

The spaceplane was ten or fifteen thousand feet above him when it passed overhead, descending steeply in a powerless glide. He had the nose down, the throttle and prop controls full forward as Jeanne d’Arc broke her long glide ten miles ahead of him and, with the nose well down, turned 180 degrees and lined up for a landing to the west, into the wind. The spaceplane leveled its wings, descended steadily and flared just before the wheels touched the salt. A plume of dust rose behind it and tailed away to the east—Charley Pine had guessed right on the wind. Jeanne d’Arc rolled and rolled until she came to a complete stop.

Inside the spaceplane’s cockpit, Charley Pine looked at Joe Bob Hooker and said, “Welcome back to earth.”

Joe Bob threw back his head and laughed. “Oh, man, have I got a tale for the grandkids! If you ever get to Dallas…”

Charley was the first out of her seat. She almost fell on her face after the days of weightlessness, broken only by the weak gravity of the moon and occasional bursts of rocket power. Hanging on to whatever she could reach, she carefully made her way aft. The door that she had entered on the moon was the one she wanted, so she set to work releasing the pressure on the seals and opening it. It opened with a hiss.

The cool autumn air enveloped her. It smelled of salty earth and cooked brake pads—well, she did push vigorously on the brakes after she touched down. Wispy contrails floating in that high autumn sky made streaks in the gauzy cirrus. She filled her lungs and exhaled slowly. This certainly wasn’t Kansas, but Dorothy Gale was right: There is no place like home.

By leaning out slightly and bending down she could see one of the right main landing gear’s wheels. It hadn’t sunk more than an inch or two into the salt. She had been worried about the salt’s consistency—if it had been too soft, it could have torn the landing gear right off Jeanne d’Arc, which would have skidded to a quick stop on her belly, shattered beyond repair. She knew it was hard enough the instant she touched down, yet visual confirmation of her pilot’s sense was nice.

Satisfied, she didn’t waste any more time. She went to the locker room where the space suits were kept and brought hers back to the door. She tossed it out. There were three extra suits stored in the ship, just in case one of the fitted suits sprang a leak or was damaged during use. She threw them out the door onto the growing pile.

Joe Bob Hooker was there at the door when she made her last trip. “Why the suits?” he asked.

“You never know when you’ll need a space suit,” she replied, and tossed the air compressor and suit-testing equipment on top of the pile.

He went back for his and threw it out too. “Paid for it,” he explained. “I’ll strut around in it at Lions Club.”

She had to help him down, then tossed his small bag of personal items to him. Then she jumped. She fell heavily and bruised herself.

She arose, dizzy and hurting, and brushed the salt from her sleeves and rump as the wind from distant mountains played with her hair. Eight days away from the earth’s gravity and she was weak, as if she were recovering from a long illness.

Charley heard the Cessna before she saw it. It came out from behind the wing, already on the salt, and taxied up. Rip grinned and waved.

“Here’s my ride,” she said to Joe Bob. “You’re going to have to wait for a while, but someone will be along pretty soon.”

“I reckon somebody saw us land,” Joe Bob said, scanning the seemingly endless expanse of empty, flat salt.

Rip killed the engine of the little plane and jumped out. He rushed over to Charley and enveloped her in his arms. When he came up for air, he whispered, “Missed you, lady.”

“Oh, Rip—“

“Here comes someone now,” Joe Bob said, pointing. A plume of dust was rising from the vast dirty-white expanse, still miles away. It looked as if it might be a car, or perhaps an SUV.

“Let’s load the suits and get out of Dodge,” Charley said to Rip.

They were in the Cessna taxiing when a police car rolled to a stop beside the spaceplane. Charley waved at the officer, a woman, while Rip reset the trim and eased the throttle in. The plane gathered speed and lifted off. Rip turned to the southeast.

Charley sat looking at Jeanne d’Arc as long as she was visible. As they flew away, the ship seemed to shrink on the endless expanse of salt, under the huge, high autumn sky. She looked small, almost toylike. Hard to believe she had flown to the moon and back.

The Cessna hummed loudly and bumped along in light turbulence. It was certainly real enough. Charley reached for Rip’s arm, felt the firmness of his muscles. Rip grinned at her. “Welcome home,” he said over the song of the engine.

She kissed him again.

• • •

Jeanne d’Arc’s fiery plunge into the earth’s atmo-sphere was monitored by Space Command, which projected that the ship’s flight path would impact at the Bonneville Salt Flats in Utah. The news was flashed to the Pentagon and the White House while the spaceplane was still miles high, descending. The news should have made a huge splash at the White House, but today, of all days, the government of France was in chaos. The news of the spaceplane’s return didn’t even reach the brain trust that surrounded the president.

In Paris the cabinet ministers were in conference behind closed doors. The networks had live feeds featuring reporters in front of the doors with nothing to report but speculation and the hourly communique from Pierre Artois, demanding responses to his nonnegotiable demands. The CIA had no idea what was going on in Paris. If the British knew, they weren’t telling.

The U.S. ambassador to France was huddled with his mistress, who had a brother who worked as a janitor in the French parliament building. Every now and then one of the politicians visited the men’s room where the brother was pretending to work and commented on this or that. The brother telephoned his sister, who told it to the ambassador, who flashed the comment to the State Department in Washington, where it was passed to the White House for the president and his advisers to ponder.

Periodically news of another French municipal or national monument rising abruptly into the sky, only to return to earth in ruins, was announced on television by breathless reporters. Enterprising producers ordered camera crews to set up in front of likely monuments in the hope that they could broadcast an attack from the moon as it happened. Pictures of rubble after the event had less dramatic impact.

In various places around the world the crisis was denounced as a hoax. The ayatollahs in Iran refused to discuss Artois’ demands or allow news about them to be aired on television. Much of the Islamic world followed suit and buried their heads in the sand. On the moon, Pierre didn’t have time just now to whip the little countries into line. He would get to them later. His priorities were France, then Europe, the United States, Japan and China. If he could get the big nations to fall into line, the rest, he thought, would have to follow.

Pierre had done his homework. He began making promises. Universal health care, universal employment, free care for the sick and elderly, free drugs (the medicinal kind), and free food for everyone on the planet were some of the major benefits that would accrue to all who followed his banner. “Together,” he said, “free from the petty squabbles that have embroiled mankind since the dawn of recorded history, we can solve the world’s problems and build a better life for people all over the globe.” Needless to say, Pierre didn’t talk about the messy details that he would have to handle to deliver his Utopia, nor where the assets would come from to fund the free goodies.

Public debate broke out all over the English-speaking world. In Great Britain and across America political outcasts, conspiracy theorists, religious zealots and crackpots of every stripe accused the government—always their own government—of manufacturing a crisis to cover up something. The political opposition in every democracy on the planet was having a field day. Every spy agency in the world had overlooked a virulent, malignant conspiracy embedded in the French space agency. Even worse was the possibility that the spymasters had detected it and the governments involved failed to act, or were now reacting inappropriately. Political rivals postured, investigations were called for, resignations demanded, jail terms threatened.

All this was marvelous public theater and played out against a backdrop of antigravity beam strikes from the moon, with which Pierre Artois tried to silence the critics and extort capitulations from the various governments.

The French government decided to surrender when the first cathedral went up in a beam and came back to earth in a rain of stone and rubble.

The secretary of state rushed into the Oval Office to deliver the news to the president and the assembled national security types. “The premier says he has no choice,” she reported. “Artois is threatening to destroy Paris.”

“Buildings and monuments are just stone and mortar,” the president replied, “even cathedrals. They can be rebuilt.”

“Paris is the soul of France, its legacy to all the generations to come,” the secretary of state explained. Talking to the president was always difficult, she knew all too well, because he was so obtuse. The voters had a lot to answer for.

She forced herself to say calmly, “France is not like other countries. France is… inhabited by the French. Don’t you understand? Innocent people might be killed, Paris—the most beautiful city on earth—destroyed, laid waste. The French government has no choice, none at all.”

The president’s tone never changed. “If the premier surrenders France to that madman, we’ll nuke Paris. For the next thousand years the only living things in the rubble will be radioactive beetles. Tell him that.”

All conversation in the room came to a dead stop.

The secretary was horrified. “My God! I can’t believe you said that! Surely you wouldn’t!” She stared at the president, who returned her scrutiny without expression.

“Get on the phone,” he urged, finally, to get her moving. “Tell the premier what I said.”

She dashed from the room. Conversation slowly began again.

“Uh-oh,” O’Reilly whispered to the president. “We’re in real trouble now. She thinks you would really do it. She’ll repeat that comment to every reporter she knows. It’ll be the headline in the Washington Post tomorrow.”

“Explain to me again why she is the secretary of state.”

“You wanted a bipartisan cabinet, and State was the only office she would accept.”

“In a country infested with politicians, I picked that one. Sometimes I dazzle myself with my own stupidity.”

Twenty minutes later the television had a live feed from Paris of the premier surrendering to Artois.

“That tears it,” the president said to O’Reilly. He wadded up the latest communique from the men’s room of the French capital and threw it into the wastebasket beside his desk. “How much longer until we can whack those spaceplanes?”

“It will be at least another twenty-four hours, sir. We don’t have any carriers in position, and the submarines are still well out of range.”

“How about a B-2 strike?”

“It’s already dark in France,” the chairman of the Joint Chiefs replied. “We can’t get B-2s there until tomorrow night unless you want to send them in daylight, in which case the French may shoot down one or two.”

The darn B-2s cost over a billion bucks apiece, the president knew, but were defenseless against enemy fighters and vulnerable to them during the day. Taking a chance that the French air force might drop a few into the French countryside didn’t seem wise. “Tomorrow night,” the president agreed reluctantly, “unless the Brits can do it sooner. Ask them.”

“Do we really want the British to fire the first shot?” the national security adviser asked. He was thinking of the reaction of Joe Six-Pack out there in the American heartland. Joe would want America to lead the charge.

The secretary of state returned to the Oval Office in time to hear that exchange. “This entire discussion is outrageous,” she declared heatedly. “The French are our oldest allies. They have been forced to surrender to a terrorist; now you intend to stab them in the back. If you attack France, I must resign my office. I’ll have no part in this.”

“We’ll be sorry to see you go,” O’Reilly shot back. “But before you leave, please tell us: Did you deliver the president’s ultimatum to the French premier?”

“I did, and of course he refused to believe me.” She made a dismissive gesture. “He said you would never destroy Paris, but Artois would.”

The president sighed. Unfortunately he had recently announced that he would run for reelection. He realized that he should probably reconsider. He flipped listlessly through a marked-up copy of his speech, which the leaders of Congress were demanding he deliver right now, if not sooner. His eyes went to a photo of a Montana trout stream that hung upon the wall. Sunlight glistened upon the water, and distant mountains wore a crown of snow. “Why me, Lord?” he muttered.

• • •

“You’ve been studying this ship’s computer for fifty-plus years,” Egg Cantrell said to Newton Chadwick. “Why don’t you fly it?” They were in the saucer’s main machinery space checking the integrity of fittings.