smaller.”
When the cables that had lifted the saucer from the sea floor had been released, the sea anchors were brought aboard and the ship got under way. Solo felt the ride improve immediately as the screws bit into the dark water. The other ship that had helped raise the saucer had already dissolved into the darkness.
“There you are,” Johnson said heartily to Bryant, who had his nose almost against the window, staring at the spaceship. “Your flying saucer’s settin’ like a hen on her nest, safe and sound, and she ain’t goin’
Bryant flashed a grin and dashed for the bridge wing ladder to the main deck.
Solo went back into the navigator’s shack. He emerged seconds later carrying a hard plastic case and descended the ladder to the main deck.
As Bryant watched, Solo opened the case, took out a wand, and adjusted the switches and knobs within, then donned a headset. Carrying the instrument case, he began a careful inspection of the saucer, all of it that he could see from the deck. He even climbed the mast of the forward crane to get a look at the top of it, then returned to the deck. As he walked and climbed around he glanced occasionally at the gauges in his case, but mostly he concentrated on visually inspecting the surface of the ship. He could see no damage whatsoever.
Bryant asked a couple of questions, but Solo didn’t answer, so eventually he stopped asking.
Solo crawled under the saucer and lay there studying his instrument. Finally he took off his headset, stowed it back inside the case, and closed it.
One of the officers squatted down a few feet away. This was the first mate. “No radiation?” he asked Solo. The sailor was in his early thirties, with unkempt windblown hair and acne scars on his face.
“Doesn’t seem to be.”
“Boy, that’s amazing.” The mate reached and placed his hand on the cold black surface immediately over his head. “A real
“Not from our solar system.”
“Another star…” The mate, whose name was DeVries, retracted his hand suddenly, as if the saucer were too hot to touch.
Solo studied the belly of the saucer as the raw sea wind played with his hair. At least here, under the saucer, he was sheltered from the rain.
“Everything inside is probably torn loose, I figure,” DeVries continued, warming to his subject, “when that thing went into the drink. Scrambled up inside there like a dozen broken eggs. And those aliens inside, squashed flat as road-killed possum and just as dead. Couldn’t nothing or nobody live through a smashup like that. And how about germs, if you open that thing up? What if the bugs get out and kill us or contaminate the world?”
Solo ignored that remark.
The first mate turned to Bryant and asked, “So, reverend, how come you’re spending all this money raisin’ this flyin’ saucer off the ocean floor?”
Bryant said matter-of-factly, “I intend to make some money with it.”
“Well, I hope,” DeVries said thoughtfully, a remark Bryant let pass without comment.
As those two watched, Adam Solo donned self-contained breathing apparatus. He fiddled with the controls and adjusted the mask until he was satisfied with the airflow, then he motioned the other two back.
They waddled out from under the saucer. Satisfied, he placed his hand on the hatch handle and held it there. Now, after ten seconds or so, he pulled down on one end of the handle and rotated it. The hatch opened above his head. Water began dripping out.
Not much, but some. The saucer had been lying in 250 feet of water; if the integrity of the hull had been broken, seawater under pressure would have filled the interior. This might be leakage from the ship’s tank, or merely condensation. Solo wiped a drip off the hatch lip, jammed his finger under the breathing mask, and tasted it. He was relieved-it wasn’t saltwater.
Now Solo inspected the yawning hole. He stuck the wand inside and studied the panel on his Geiger counter. “Background radiation,” he told Bryant, who had also donned breathing apparatus. The preacher rubbed his hands together vigorously, a gesture that Solo had noticed he used often.
Solo turned off the Geiger counter. He carefully wrapped the cord around the wand and stowed it in the plastic case, then shoved the case up into the dark belly of the saucer.
DeVries craned his neck, trying to see inside the saucer. “Like, when you going to climb into this thing?”
A smile crossed the face of Adam Solo. “Now,” he said. He raised himself through the hatchway into the belly of the ship.
Jim Bob Bryant crawled under the ship, then squirmed up through the entryway. He closed the hatch behind him.
The first mate slowly shook his head. “Glad it was them two and not me,” he said conversationally, although there was no one there to hear him. “My momma didn’t raise no fools. I wouldn’t have crawled into that thing for all the money on Wall Street.”
The first mate made his way to the bridge. Captain Johnson was still at the helm. “Well, did you ask him?” the captain demanded.
“Wants to make money, Bryant said.”
“I already know that,” the captain said sourly. “Oh, well. As long as we get paid…” After a moment the captain continued, “Solo’s weird. That accent of his-it isn’t much, but it’s there. I can’t place it. Sometimes I think it’s eastern European of one kind or another, then I think it isn’t.”
“All I know,” DeVries said, “is that accent isn’t from Brooklyn.”
The captain didn’t respond to that inanity. He said aloud, musing, “He’s kinda freaky, but nothin’ you can put your finger on. Still, bein’ around him gives me the willies.”
“They got money,” DeVries said simply. In his mind, money excused all peculiarities, an ingrained attitude he had acquired long ago because he didn’t have any.
“Imagine what that thing must have looked like flying.”
They fell silent as they stared at the craft, looked from right to left and back again, trying to take it all in, to understand, as the sea wind whispered and ocean spray occasionally spattered the windows.
DeVries finally broke the silence. “It’s heavy as hell. Like to never got it up. We almost lost it a dozen times.”
“Notice how the ship’s ridin’? Hope we make harbor before the sea kicks up.”
DeVries grunted. After a moment he said, with a touch of wonder in his voice, “A real, honest-to-God flying saucer… Never believed in ’em, y’know?”
“Yeah,” the captain agreed. “Thought it was all bull puckey. Even standing here looking at one of the darn things, I have my doubts.”
The only light inside the saucer came through the canopy, a dim glow from the salvage vessel’s masthead lights. It took several seconds for Solo’s eyes to adjust.
The room was large, almost eight feet high in the middle, tapering toward the edges. In the rear of the room was a hatch, one that apparently gave entry to the engineering spaces. Facing forward was a raised instrument panel and a pilot’s seat on a pedestal, one with what appeared to be control sticks on each side, in front of armrests. As Solo had told Bryant, the seats were sized for humans. The pilot could look forward and to each side about 120 degrees through a canopy made of an unknown material.
Solo used a small flashlight to inspect the cockpit compartment, then the instrument panel. There were no conventional gauges, merely flat planes where presumably information from the ship’s computers was displayed. There were a few mechanical switches mounted on one panel, but only a few.
Lying carelessly on the panel, where the impact of the crash or the jostling of salvage had carried them, were two headbands, almost an inch wide, capable of being easily expanded to give the wearer a tight fit.
Hope flooded him. At first glance the ship seemed intact.
Solo was still standing rooted in his tracks, taking it all in, when Jim Bob Bryant crawled up through the entry and closed the hatch behind him. As he looked around, he said something under the breathing mask that Solo didn’t understand. Solo slowly removed his own mask and laid it on the instrument panel.
Bryant kept glancing at Solo, the mine canary, for almost a minute as he tried to take in his surroundings. Then
