Saucer: The Conquest (28 page)

The other people in the cafeteria were whispering among themselves and glancing at him from time to time. The news about the saucer he had parked over the antigravity beam generator must be spreading like wildfire, he thought. He lowered his gaze to the food on his tray. It was all very good, but he had no appetite.

Egg figured that sooner or later they would realize he was controlling the saucer, but he didn’t think they would figure out how. He hoped not, anyway.

Lalouette, the French spaceplane pilot, came through the door and walked over to Egg’s table. “Would you please come with me, Monsieur Cantrell?”

Egg shrugged. Might as well. He stood and followed.

There were five of them waiting in the com center. Pierre gestured to an empty chair that faced him. “Monsieur Cantrell, please. Let us discuss this matter like gentlemen.”

Egg hesitated. Julie was there, Claudine Courbet, Chadwick and Salmon. Chadwick was propped against a wall with his arms folded across his chest. He met Egg’s eyes.

Egg turned his gaze to Artois. “Have you told these people who is going to be left behind when you and Julie take the saucer back to earth?”

“That’s not your concern,” Pierre said smoothly.

“I’ll bet they are wondering, since the saucer is not large enough to hold more than ten people. And if the saucer leaves, one doubts that it will ever return.”

“Sit down, sir.”

“I suspect you’ll negotiate some sort of immunity for yourself in return for abandoning your attempted conquest. I’m sure you’ll do quite well with a book or two and a movie about your adventure.”

“You’re quite the cynic—” Pierre began. He stopped abruptly when Henri Salmon grabbed Egg from behind.

Julie also leaped at Egg, and he felt a sharp pain in his arm. He looked down, saw the syringe—and felt himself falling as everything went black.

• • •

Jean-Paul Lalouette donned his space suit and exited the lunar base. Standing in the parking area where he could see the saucer, he ordered it to return to its parking place in front of the main air lock. As he thought about it, the saucer responded.

Soon he had it sitting on its landing gear in the spot where Egg had left it a few days before.

Lalouette looked up at the stars. They were clear and seemed very close. It was an optical illusion, he knew. The only thing close was death, and it was just inches away, waiting…

When he had the saucer shut down, he turned and walked back into the air lock.

C
HAPTER
9

The 140,000-year-old saucer Rip had dug from a sandstone ledge in the Sahara Desert crept slowly through the mountains of the moon a hundred feet above the valley floors. Charley Pine sat in the pilot’s seat wearing the headband. The sight reticle of the antimatter weapon was projected on the canopy in front of her. She saw it with every sweep of her eyes.

Rip stood beside her holding tightly to the instrument panel and the back of her seat. He too was looking, ahead, above, as far behind as he could see, and of course to the right and left.

The cliffs were jagged, sheer jumbles of rock and lava raised billions of years ago when the moon was born, torn from proto-earth and ejected into space by the impact of a meteor. The only weathering had been through differential heating caused by the sun’s unfiltered rays, and here and there huge impact marks where ancient meteors had crashed.

Yet there were gullies and canyons, as if at some time in eons past water had rushed down these slopes.

Charley flew the saucer up a canyon, rose slowly to the top of the ridge and paused there momentarily with just the canopy sticking up. She and Rip scanned carefully, looking. The sun was low in the sky, casting long, deep shadows. Mountains, ridges, cliffs in every direction. And far beyond, the lava sea.

“If he’s hiding in one of these shadows, we’ll never see him,” Rip whispered. The only sound in the saucer was the faint, almost inaudible hum caused by liquid coursing through the reactor pipes. Beyond the saucer was a vacuum that would carry no sound. Still, Rip whispered. His palms were perspiring. Without thinking, he wiped each hand on his jeans.

Charley crossed the crest and began descending into a canyon that pointed toward the lava sea.

She and Rip had dropped from lunar orbit an hour ago and were wending their way through the mountains in the general direction of the lunar base using only the antigravity rings. On earth they were capable of lifting the saucer to a height of two hundred feet; on the moon, with its reduced gravity, they would hold the saucer twelve hundred feet above the surface, if Charley wished to keep it that high. She didn’t. She was skimming the rocks, loafing along. They were still at least fifty miles away, an hour’s flight at this rate of speed. Charley Pine was in no hurry.

Somewhere ahead was the other saucer, the Roswell saucer that had rested in a secret hangar in Area 51 since 1947. It would be waiting.

Jean-Paul Lalouette was probably at the controls. His job was quite simple. He had to shoot down the Sahara saucer.

Charley and Rip were absolutely certain that Pierre Artois intended to destroy the saucer they were in. His life and the lives of all his followers depended upon keeping the Roswell saucer intact, able to fly back to earth. Charley and Rip were a mortal threat.

After millions of years of evolution and thousands of years of civilization, the wheel had turned full circle. Once again the law was kill or be killed.

The saucer was still a mile or so away from the floor of the lava sea, only a hundred feet above the rock but perhaps a thousand feet in elevation above the lava, when Charley brought it to a stop in the shadow of a steep ridge that rose precipitously into the black sky.

“So where is the base?” Rip asked, still speaking softly.

Charley pointed. “About six or seven miles that way.” She stared. Fortunately, in the absence of an atmosphere, the visibility was perfect. She could plainly see the base’s solar panels. She could even see the radio tower. “I don’t think it’s there.” She meant the other saucer.

“He’s around,” Rip said, thinking of Lalouette. He had never met the man, knew only what Charley had told him. Charley was certain, and Rip agreed, that Lalouette would be flying the Roswell saucer. Rip wondered if Lalouette had ever killed anyone.

They sat hidden in the shadow, watching and waiting. A slow hour passed, then another. Finally Charley climbed from the pilot’s seat and used the makeshift toilet facility, then got something to eat and a bottle of water to drink. She stood beside Rip sipping water as the minutes ticked by.

“He’s out here, somewhere,” Rip remarked, “waiting for us, just like we’re waiting for him.”

• • •

Rip was absolutely right, of course. Jean-Paul Lalouette was hiding in a shadow cast by a ridge, about five miles from the lunar base. He had the Roswell saucer inside a meteor crater with just the canopy protruding. He too was waiting.

Lalouette had more than his share of patience, but his passenger, Newton Chadwick, certainly didn’t. Chadwick didn’t know the meaning of the word. He had tried to read a book, tried to study the saucer’s computer via a headband and tried to nap, all to no avail.

There was a shootout coming—perhaps soon. Newton Chadwick knew that someone was going to die. Despite Lalouette’s sangfroid, Chadwick thought the odds excellent that the dead men might be Lalouette and… him. We’re two fools waiting for Wyatt Earp and Doc Holliday to come strolling along on their way to the OK Corral, he told himself. It was not a happy thought.

After hours of waiting he sealed himself inside the tiny toilet compartment and prepared an injection of youth serum. The liquid was clear and colorless. He drew the proper dose into the needle, slipped it into his arm and pushed the plunger.

He studied his reflection in the shiny metal above the sink. It wasn’t much of a mirror, but it was adequate.

He looked, he decided, about mid- to late thirties. Perhaps forty.

Talk about a miracle drug—the serum had indeed stopped aging. The drawback, of course, was that he had to take the drug at regular intervals for the rest of his life. Forever! Newton Chadwick smiled broadly. Forever!

Artois had insisted that he accompany Lalouette so he could answer any questions about the saucer. This flight was an unnecessary risk, of course, but if this saucer were destroyed, the people at the lunar base would be stranded. They would die when the food ran out, because the hydroponic ponds couldn’t make enough, or when the chemicals that were used to generate oxygen and scrub the air were exhausted.

Even if the number of people were lowered to match the food supply—by whatever method—the chemicals were finite, and inevitably equipment casualties would take their toll. The machinery that scrubbed and purified the air and recycled human waste would eventually fail to work. The machinery in the lunar base wasn’t like the machinery in the saucer, which had been built to essentially last forever without failure, or so it seemed.

Chadwick removed a comb from his pocket and used it on his hair. He tugged at a tangle—and lo, the whole tangled knot of red hair came out with the comb.

He stared at the comb and the wad of hair. He grabbed his hair with his free hand, tugged on it—and more came out.

God in heaven! He was losing his hair.

This wasn’t supposed to be happening!

He leaned toward the mirror, blinked mightily—for some reason, his vision was a little fuzzy—and stared at the face that stared at him.

Crow’s-feet around his eyes!

He backed away from the mirror a trifle—and the image blurred.

His eyes! His vision was deteriorating.

He turned away from the mirror and fumbled with the fanny pack. The serum was in two bottles. He jabbed the needle of the syringe into one, took the tiniest amount and squirted it onto his finger.

He tasted it.

Oh, my God! Water!

Chadwick’s mind raced. Someone had stolen his serum, obviously. Who?

Any of them could have done it while he slept. Any of them. Including Lalouette.

Newton Chadwick charged from the head screaming and leaped across the saucer with his hands outstretched, going for Lalouette, who was still in the pilot’s seat.

Jean-Paul heard the ungodly howl and turned in his seat just in time to see Chadwick stretched out in midair, flying at him like a human missile. He deflected the outstretched hands and smashed at Chadwick’s neck with his fist as the American flew by, right into the instrument panel. The collision with the panel, or perhaps the pilot’s fist, knocked Chadwick out; he collapsed unconscious on the floor of the saucer.

• • •

“Let me back in the seat,” Charley said to Rip, who willingly changed places.

Charley fastened her seat belt, then aligned the sight reticle with the base radio tower.

“Let’s let Pierre know we’re here,” she said.

“Okay,” Rip said, and grinned.

Fire!

The light appeared beside the reticle. Sparks began to appear on the base of the radio tower. Thousands of antiprotons, perhaps tens of thousands, were passing through the metal of the tower every second. Some found protons in the metal; some continued on to burrow into the ridge a mile behind.

Fifteen seconds after she ordered the weapon fired, Charley noticed that the tower was no longer perfectly erect. It was leaning slightly. As the antimatter particles continued their bombardment, the tower slowly tilted and, in agonizingly slow motion, collapsed, raising a cloud of dust.

Cease fire!

“I hope you didn’t ruin Pierre’s day,” Rip said.

• • •

Pierre Artois was in the com center dictating an ultimatum to the United Kingdom when the radio tower collapsed. Pierre finished a page, released the transmission key to clear his throat and heard nothing from the operator on earth who was recording his words.

A long five minutes passed—a silent five minutes—before the radio technician gave him the bad news. Something was wrong with the base antenna, which appeared incapable of functioning. Engineers would go outside onto the lunar surface to inspect it, a chore that would take most of an hour.

Julie looked at Pierre. “Charley Pine. She’s here with her saucer.”

“So it would appear,” Pierre said, trying to look calm and collected. He picked up the handheld radio. “Jean-Paul, our base radio antenna seems to have become inoperative. Ms. Pine may be in the vicinity.”

One word came back, embedded in static. “Roger.”

• • •

Jean-Paul Lalouette had seen the flashes as the antimatter particles annihilated themselves inside the metal of the tower, and he had seen the tower fall. By sheer happenstance, he had chosen a location in which to wait that prevented him from spotting the impact point of those particles that went through the tower and failed to find positrons, so he wasn’t sure precisely where the other saucer was.

That it was nearby, with its optical sight centered on the radio tower, was a given. But where?

He craned his neck, searching in every direction.

Newton Chadwick was curled up in a fetal position on a chair in the back of the compartment, apparently oblivious to Lalouette and his problems.

Chadwick had been that way for the last hour, ever since he regained consciousness. “Someone stole it,” he muttered, looking wildly at Lalouette, reaching for him.

The French pilot pointed toward the rear of the saucer and raised his right fist threateningly. The American shrank away, still muttering. “It came out,” he said mysteriously. “I’m aging quickly. I need more serum. God in heaven, how am I going to get it stuck on the moon?”

Lalouette didn’t know what to say. Chadwick seemed to have come completely unhinged.

“My serum,” the American shouted at him, “someone has stolen my serum.”

After that he fell silent. He sat in a chair, and seemed somehow to shrink into it, becoming smaller and smaller.

Lalouette forgot about Chadwick.

Pine wasn’t out on the lava sea. He would see her ship if she were there. No, she was somewhere in these mountains, either to the right or left, or perhaps above him.