Saucer

Egg cradled the three pieces with both hands. 'What's the rule? The number of transistors industry can cram on a chip doubles every eighteen months?' 'That's it,' Rip affirmed. 'If we knew how many transistor like things are in this case, we could calculate how far ahead of us technically these creatures are.'

'Of course,' Rip said, 'the function may cease to be straightline after a while.'

'See this screen. It's a quarter inch thick and flexible.' The screen was also hanging by a wire. Egg twisted it in his hands, pulled it and kneaded it. 'Unbelievable.'

He laid the screen aside and began examining parts. Soon he laughed. 'Look at this headband. This must be the keyboard.'

'Naw,' Rip said, hunting through the parts for something he might recognize.

'Yes. My glory, this has gotta be it! This must be the way you talk to the computer.'

The headband was a collection of very fine wires, thousands of them, fashioned into a complete loop. The wires seemed to be held together with some flexible material, plastic perhaps.

It took Egg only about five minutes to reassemble the computer. 'Turn on the power.'

Rip pulled out the master power knob to the first detent, which fired off the reactor. Then he passed Egg the headband. Egg carefully placed it over his head.

'This isn't the smartest thing you ever did, Unc.'

'We're engaged in a scientific inquiry. If I freak out, get this thing off me.'

'What if — ?'

But Egg had already closed his eyes. He sat impassively.

Rip waited.

He could hear the water running into the fuel tank. The water was from a well, and the hose delivered only three or four gallons a minute, so it was going to take a while.

Now Egg was grinning. Widely. His eyes were open, his hands moving, reaching… Now they were still.

A variety of emotions registered on Egg's face: amazement, happiness, joy.

What was in that computer?

Rip moved his hand back and forth in front of Egg's face. His open eyes didn't track or blink.

Egg's breathing seemed okay. Rip sat watching Egg and listening to the running water and the silence. The silence was exquisite. Rain was pounding on the hangar's tin roof, but the interior of the saucer was quiet as a tomb.

If Professor Soldi was correct, the interior of the saucer had known no sound for a hundred and forty thousand years. God, that was a long, long time! Man became man, the African diaspora spread man all over the planet, the ice sheets came and went, people walked across the land bridge to America, the pyramids rose, Moses led his people from Egypt, Greece flourished, then Rome… The entire human story happened while this machine sat, just like this, silent under the sand. Rip shivered.

Egg's eyes came open. He took off the headband. His grin got wider and wider. 'Yes, yes, yes! This is the cat's nuts, man. Oh, Rip, it's fantastic¹.' 'What is?'

Egg offered the headband. 'Put it on. Follow the picture of the saucer. It's the maintenance manual for this ship… some sort of three-dimensional holograph. You can see everything: how the ship works, how each component functions, how to take it apart, how to repair it. It's so real you'll want to reach out and touch. I never in my life saw anything like it.'

He leaped from the seat and tossed the headband onto it. In seconds he was on his knees working on the compartment's forward bulkhead. A panel opened. Egg reached in and withdrew a package encased in a soft material. He held it out toward Rip.

'Look at this! It's a tool kit. Take a look! It's the tools to fix the machinery on this ship. And here are some more headbands — you wear one to access the computers.'

Rip placed the headband on his head. It was a tad small, but there was some give to it, so it was not uncomfortable.

The saucer was one of three objects before him. He approached them, looking… They were real'!

He jerked the headband off.

Egg broke into laughter. 'I told you! I told you!' He bent down, his face inches from his nephew. 'Try it again, Rip.'

Rip went toward the saucer, merely desired to go closer, and it moved toward him or he toward it — it was hard to say which. The saucer was whole, yet it wasn't. From several feet away the ship was transparent, allowing him to see every piece, every fastener, wire, valve, pipe, etc. And it was real, a three dimensional object with perspective and shadows and a tangible reality. Like Egg, he tried to touch.

The reactor, the water cracker, the antigravity system… Rip leaned closer to examine a computer. The closer he looked, the more he could see. He dove deeper and deeper into the chip in the main computer in front of the pilot, deeper and deeper until he could see the microscopic circuits.

When Rip Cantrell finally took off the headset, he was drained. It took him several seconds to reestablish where he was, whom he was with.

His Uncle Egg was sitting across from him, a smile playing over his lips. 'Amazing, eh?'

'Oh, Egg, I never dreamed… '

'Now you know how the Indians felt when they went aboard Columbus's ship.'

Rip sat stunned, replaying the experience in his mind.

'One thing,' Egg mused. 'One thing we know: Humans built this saucer.'

'But… We — I and the two men I work with — dug it out of sandstone, Egg. I breathed the dirt and dust and dug it out with these two hands. There's no way that was fake rock. That stone had been there for one hundred and forty thousand years, the archaeologist said.'

'This computer, the headband… ' Egg pointed. 'That machine reads our thoughts, tells us what we want to know. The machine is designed to communicate with our brains. With human brains. I can't explain it, but there it is.'

The president and his advisers were serious men (and one serious woman), engaged every day in the serious business of politics, i.e., dividing the pie in such a way as to create maximum advantage for themselves. They didn't smile much; on those rare occasions when they did it was at an enemy's discomfiture. They had a goodly number of enemies. Friends were blindly and intensely loyal to the president and his administration, enemies were everyone else. The great saucer scare left these serious people at a loss over what to do. Nothing in their experience quite fit this situation.

The saucer hullabaloo was perfect for television, a made-to-order media event that glued an extraordinary percentage of the populace to the tube, where they could be sold everything from automobiles to Zantac, brokerage services to suppositories. One of the things television wanted were ten-second sound bites from the serious people. Television reporters and camera crews lay in wait anywhere that an ambush of a serious person was even a remote possibility.

Yet even if the serious people were uncooperative, the insatiable appetite of the medium had to be filled somehow. Enterprising producers sent their minions after the God squad.

'How dare the networks air this trash,' one prominent divine raved on camera. 'This talk of flying saucers and aliens is all right for the movies, but it has no place in serious conversation.'

The president's advisers nodded in sympathy. What could they say on camera? In television everything is on the record. The camera captures every moment, good or bad. If, as seemed probable, the saucer scare turned out to be some kind of hoax, the serious ones would be covered in ignominy if they treated it seriously now. On the other hand, if buried under all this sensationalism was a real flying saucer filled with real aliens, the serious ones had to be out there in the arena ready to fight or shake hands. At least, they had to appear to be ready.

'How did we get into this fix?' the president's chief of staff, PJ. O'Reilly, demanded of Bombing Joe De Laurio. The serious people were very unhappy with the Air Force and Bombing Joe, whom they suspected was somehow responsible for this unholy mess.

Bombing Joe glowered at O'Reilly, who would blame the weatherman for a thunderstorm.