Saucer

On the next trip back up the hill with full cans, Rip relieved Charley of her can. 'What do you think we ought to do?' he asked as he poured water into the saucer.

'We should fly this thing to the States, give it to the Air Force.'

Rip tilted the can, listened to the gurgling water. When the can was empty, he tossed it in the sand and picked up the other one.

'No,' he told her.

'Well, where do you want to go?'

'I don't know,' he confessed.

'This ship is designed to shuttle back and forth between an orbiting mother ship and the surface of a planet. I doubt if it carries enough fuel to operate continuously in the atmosphere.'

'What are you saying?'

'This craft is designed to shuttle up and down from the surface, not fly cross-country like an airplane.'

'Can we safely go into space without knowing how to run the computers?'

'Don't kid yourself. There's nothing we can safely do with this ship except let it sit right where it is.'

'I don't want to leave it here and I don't want to give it to the Air Force.'

She didn't say anything to that.

'I don't want to let those Aussies have it,' Rip added. 'Qaddafi either.'

'Uh-huh.'

'I just don't know,' Rip Cantrell said.

'Well, we're going to have to do something. Sitting here on this riverbank is going to attract a crowd before long. And I could use something to eat and something tall and frosty to drink.'

Finally they got the saucer's tank full. They could tell by the sound that the tank was filling up. Rip poured water in until it overflowed, then tossed both cans inside the ship. The tank had taken about one hundred and sixty gallons.

They were sitting in the shade of the saucer, neither of them saying anything, when a small steamer drifted to a stop about fifty yards from the riverbank. It must have been in sight for at least fifteen minutes but they hadn't noticed it. The small ship was perhaps seventy feet long, with two decks above the waterline, and crammed with people and animals. All the people were looking this way. So many had crowded to this side of the boat that it was listing.

'Uh-oh!'

Everyone on the boat seemed to be talking at once and pointing this way. The gabble of voices carried across the water.

'Do you speak Arabic?' Charley asked Rip.

'Nowhere near enough to talk to those guys.' Rip stood and dusted off his trousers.

'Maybe we better get aboard and bop on out of here.'

'Boy, look at 'em,' Rip said. 'You'd think they'd never seen a flying saucer.'

'Ha, ha, and ha.'

Rip waved at the mob on the boat. Several waved back, but most just stared. They seemed to be silent now.

With his hands on his hips, Rip looked around as if he were trying to memorize the setting. 'This place is gonna be famous,' he said with a grin. 'The Roswell, New Mexico, of the Nile Valley. People will come from miles around just to see the place where the saucer sat.' He waved at the boat crowd again. 'Who knows, there are probably some folks aboard that boat who will eat out for the next twenty years on their story of what they saw today. 'And then, just before he went aboard his spaceship and blasted off, one of the aliens waved. Damnedest thing I ever did see.''

'That's enough, E.T. Into the ship.'

After one last wave to the people on the boat, the imaginary fans on the landward side, and an unseen television audience all over the globe, Rip Cantrell ducked down and waddled his way under the saucer to the open hatch.

'We must do something about the method of ingress. It's just plain undignified.'

He fired off the reactor, waited a bit for some water to percolate through the system, then helped Charley Pine into the pilot's seat. She wiggled the stick and rudder. Little puffs of dirt and dust rose from each of the maneuvering jets. She kept wiggling the stick until the puffs stopped.

Rip stood beside her on the step where he had stood last night.

'You want to get strapped in or something?'

'Just take it easy, lady. Don't do anything exciting.'

She slowly lifted the collective, concentrated on making only tiny movements with the stick. The saucer became light on the skids, then rose off the ground in a little cloud of dust. She lifted it into a hover about six feet above the ground, then used her left hand to reach for the gear switch. A humming noise was audible from the machinery spaces until the gear legs were in.

Charley took a deep breath and let it out slowly. Please, Lord, don't let me screw this up.

She turned the ship with the rudder, pointed it ahead of the boat, which was still dead in the water fifty yards or so from the shore.

She let the saucer move that way. The ship was at least a hundred feet in the air and climbing when it crossed the riverbank. The test pilot kept lifting the collective, lifting the saucer higher and higher. She ran out of collective when the ship was about two hundred feet high; it would go no higher without rocket power.

Taking her time, Charley slowly circled the drifting boat. As she crossed behind the stern, the boat listed the other way as everyone on board shifted sides for a better view.

'If that boat capsizes, a lot of those people will drown,' Rip pointed out.

'Okay.'

Charley turned west and leveled out, nudged the control stick forward to coax more speed out of the saucer. They crossed the lake leisurely, accelerating slowly. On the far shore they passed over a railroad track and a highway. Only then did Charley Pine light the rocket engines.

The acceleration pushed her deeper into the seat. Rip Cantrell held on tightly.

Yes!

A smile lit up her face.

The saucer was accelerating nicely, but it was only a couple thousand feet above the sand and rock wilderness when Rip spotted the first jet fighter and pointed it out to her. The plane was a silver speck in the deep blue sky, glinting in the sun. There was another behind the first, offset to one side.

The fighters were coming in from the right, pointed almost directly at the saucer.

'We stayed too long at the party,' Charley told him.

Even as she spoke, a series of flashes lit up the nose of the first fighter.

'He's shooting] Let's go!'

She cranked the rocket engines wide open. The G struck her like a fist.

Rip Cantrell shouted something, lost his grip on the pilot's seat and instrument panel, and tumbled toward the back of the compartment.

Despite the push of the rockets at full cry, the fighter was closing. Instinctively she banked the saucer toward the fighter, forcing the other pilot into an overshoot. The saucer ripped by the silver delta-winged fighter at a scant hundred yards, accelerating through Mach 2.

At Mach 3, Charley pulled back on the control stick and pointed the saucer almost straight up. She stayed on the juice.

The saucer roared skyward on a cone of fire.

Aboard the boat, the passengers stared with open mouths as the rising fireball began slowly tilting toward the northeast. They could still hear the distant thunder of the engines echoing back and forth between the steep shores of the lake when the bright fire from the rockets merged with the great golden orb of the sun.