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. If only the computers and communications systems are in order!
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 he removed his mask, too, and stood looking around like a lucky Kmart shopper.
“Amazing,” he said under his breath, then said it again, louder. He reached out to touch things.
Solo moved the flashlight beam around the interior of the ship, inspecting for damage. The cockpit was so Spartan that there was little to damage.
“Does it look like that one the government has in Nevada?” Bryant asked.
“Very similar,” Solo said, nodding.
“Where is the crew? How did they get out with this thing in the ocean?”
Solo took his time answering. “Obviously the crew wasn’t in the saucer when it submerged. I can’t explain it, but that is the only logical explanation.” The flashlight beam continued to rove, pausing here and there for a closer inspection.
“Reverend Bryant, I know you’ve had a long day and have much to think about,” Solo continued. “My examination of the ship will go much faster if you leave me to work in solitude.”
Bryant beamed at Solo. “I didn’t think it could be done,” he admitted. “When you told me you could raise this ship and wring out its secrets, I thought you were lying. I want you to know I was wrong. I admit it, here and now.”
Solo smiled.
“I leave you to it,” Bryant said. “If you will just open that hatch to let me out.” He took a last glance around. “Simply amazing,” he muttered.
Solo opened the hatch and Bryant carefully climbed through, then Solo closed it again.
Alone at last, Solo’s face relaxed into a wide grin. He stood beside the pilot’s seat, grinning happily, apparently lost in thought.
Finally he came out of his reverie and walked to the back of the compartment, where he opened an access door to the engineering compartment and disappeared inside. He was inside there for an hour before he came out. For the first time, he retrieved a headband from the instrument panel and donned it.
“Hello, Eternal Wanderer. Let us examine the health of your systems.”
Before him, the instrument panel exploded into life.
The first mate DeVries strolled along the bridge with the helm on autopilot. The rest of the small crew, including the captain, were in their bunks asleep. The rain had stopped and a sliver of moon was peeping through the clouds overhead. The mate had always enjoyed the ethereal beauty of the night and the way the ship rode the restless, living sea. He was soaking in the sensations, occasionally crossing the bridge from one wing to the other, and checking on the radar and compass, when he noticed the glow from the saucer’s cockpit.
The space ship took up so much of the deck that the cockpit canopy was almost even with the bridge windows. As the mate stared into the cockpit, he saw the figure of Adam Solo. He reached for the bridge binoculars. Turned the focus wheel.
Solo’s face appeared, lit by a subdued light source in front of him. The mate assumed that the light came from the instruments-computer presentations-and he was correct. DeVries could see the headband, which looked exactly like the kind the Indians wore in old cowboy movies. Solo’s face was expressionless… no, that wasn’t true, the mate decided. He was concentrating intensely.
Obviously the saucer was more or less intact or it wouldn’t have electrical power. Whoever designed that thing sure knew what he was about. He or she. Or it. Whoever that was, wherever that was…
Finally the mate’s arms tired and he lowered the binoculars.
He snapped the binoculars into their bracket and went back to pacing the bridge. His eyes were repeatedly drawn to the saucer’s glowing cockpit. The moon, the clouds racing overhead, the ship pitching and rolling monotonously-it seemed as if he were trapped in this moment in time and this was all there had ever been or ever would be. It was a curious feeling… almost mystical.
Surprised at his own thoughts, DeVries shook his head and tried to concentrate on his duties.
Solo didn’t speak the words, he merely thought them. The computer read the tiny impulses as they coursed through his brain, boosted the wattage a billionfold, and broadcasted them into the universe. Yet the thoughts could only travel at the speed of light, so unless there was an interplanetary ship, or a saucer relatively close in space, he might receive no answer for years. Decades. Centuries, perhaps.
Marooned on this savage planet, he had waited so long! So very long.
Solo wiped the perspiration from his forehead as the enormity of the years threatened to reduce him to despair.
He forced himself to take off the headband and leave the pilot’s seat.
Opening the saucer’s hatch, he dropped to the deck. He closed the hatch behind him, just in case, and went below to his cabin. No one was in the passageways. Nor did he expect to find any of the crew there. He glanced into one of the crew’s berthing spaces. The glow of the tiny red lights revealed that every bunk was full, and every man seemed to be snoring. They had had an exhausting day raising the saucer from the seabed.
In his cabin Solo quickly packed his bag. He stripped the blankets from his bunk and, carrying the lot, went back up on deck. Careful to stay out of sight of the bridge, he stowed his gear in the saucer.
A hose lay coiled near a water faucet, one the crew routinely used to wash mud from cables and chains coming aboard. Solo looked at it, then shook his head. The water intake was on top of the saucer; climbing up there would expose him to the man on the bridge, and would be dangerous besides. He couldn’t risk falling overboard, which
