Saucer

'I swear,' Rip said. 'Cross my heart.' 'You others?'

Dutch Haagen got out his pipe and slowly tamped the bowl full of tobacco. 'I don't know what we have, Professor. Tell you what — you loan us the equipment and come along. Take a look. We'll bring you back this evening before dark.'

Soldi didn't mull it long. He was in his fifties, a healthy, vigorous man wearing a cowboy hat. 'Okay, I'll come. I need to think about something besides stone tools.'

'Stone tools? That's what you're digging up?' Rip asked incredulously. 'People used to live around here? In this desert?'

'This wasn't always a desert,' the professor said as he led them to where the compressor was parked. 'The climate didn't become extremely arid until about five thousand years ago. Then the wind carried in most of this sand, which covered up the valleys and low places. What we see protruding from the sand today are the tops of hills and mountains.'

'So the site you are exploring is at least five thousand years old?'

'More like fifteen thousand years old, I suspect. Man lived here during the Ice Age. We are trying to find evidence that these people cultivated grain.'

'By the way,' Rip put in, 'do you folks have any food left over from lunch? Maybe I can get a snack to take along. I'm sorta hungry.'

'Sure, son.' The professor pointed toward a tent and gave him the name of the cook.

Hans Soldi made his examination of the sandstone ledge while the surveyors started the compressor and manhandled the jackhammer into position. Rip waited until Soldi was out of the way, then began hammering.

The heat wasn't unbearable if one were accustomed to it. Wearing jeans, long-sleeve cotton shirts, and hats with wide brims, the men instinctively spent as much time as possible in the shade and swigged on water.

'I never saw anything like it,' Soldi admitted to Dutch as he watched Rip work the hammer. The scientist had been scrambling around with his video camera, shooting footage from every angle.

'We'll see what Rip can do.'

Haagen picked up one of the shards of stone kicked out by the hammer and handed it to the archaeologist. 'How old is this, anyway?'

'Offhand, I could only guess. I'll get it analyzed.'

'More than five thousand years old?'

'Oh, yes. The desert and the ocean came and went through the ages, many times. Time is so… ' He flung his arms wide. 'We talk blithely of time — as we do death and infinity — but humans have difficulty grasping the enormity of it. Perhaps if we could comprehend the vastness of time we would be able to understand God.'

Soldi put the piece of sandstone into a pocket. He gestured at the cliff. 'This is a windblown deposit, I think. You can see how the wind sculpted the sand as it was laid down.'

'I thought those designs were made by wind cutting the rock.'

'I don't think so,' the professor replied. 'The wind made the designs before the sand hardened to stone. After the sand was deposited, it was covered by dirt, probably this red dirt that you see everywhere else. Water and the weight of the dirt transformed the sand into stone. Through the millennia there were repeated periods when the desert encroached. Sooner or later the rains always came again and pushed it back. The desert is winning now, but someday the rains will come again. Everything changes, even climates.'

'Whatever is in that ledge now was there when the sand covered it.'

'So it would seem.'

'Playing it safe?'

'It looks as if the thing is embedded in the stone, but…' Soldi picked up another rock shard and examined it closely. He hefted it thoughtfully as he gazed at the face of the cliff.

'Give me your guess. How old is this rock?'

Soldi took his time before he replied. 'Anywhere from a hundred thousand to a million years old,' he said finally and tossed away the rock. He grinned. 'Doesn't make sense, does it?'

'Don't guess it does.'

Three hours of vigorous, sweaty work with the jackhammer under the desert sun uncovered a curved expanse of metal fifteen feet long. It protruded from the raw stone at least three feet. The structure seemed to be a part of a perfectly round circle, one with a diameter of about seventy feet.

The four men squatted, touching the metal with their hands, examining it with their eyes.

Amazingly, the surface seemed unmarred. Oh, here and there were a few tiny scratches, but only a few, and very small. The dark metal was reflective yet lacked a patina. The water that had percolated through the stone for ages apparently had affected the metal very little. 'Assuming the metal was in the stone,' Dr. Soldi muttered.

'Excaliber,' Rip said as he wiped his face.

Bill Taggart didn't understand the reference.

'The sword Arthur pulled from the rock… Excaliber was its name.'

'Whatever this is,' Dutch remarked, 'it isn't going to make us kings.'

'It's going to take us a couple days to hack this thing completely out of the rock,' Bill Taggart said gloomily. 'The ledge is thicker back there, so the going will be slower. Maybe we ought to just leave it here. Forget about it.'

'So what the hell is it?' Dutch Haagen wondered.

'That's obvious, isn't it?' Rip said. 'I thought you three were sitting here like store dummies because you were afraid to say it. The damned thing is a saucer.'

'A saucer?'

'A flying saucer. What else could it be?'

Dr. Soldi closed his eyes and ran his hands across the metal, rubbing it with his fingertips. 'Two days. Whatever it is, we'll have it out of the rock in a couple of days.'

'Are you trying to tell us that this thing we're sitting in front of is a spaceship?' Bill Taggart demanded.

'Yeah,' Rip Cantrell said with conviction. 'Modern man didn't make this and put it here. Ancient man couldn't work metal like this. This is a highly engineered product of an advanced civilization. That's a fact beyond dispute.'

'I don't believe in flying saucers,' Taggart scoffed. 'I've seen the shows on TV, watched those freaky people from the trailer parks say they saw UFOs in the night sky while the dogs howled and cats climbed the walls.' He made a rude noise. 'I don't believe a word of it.'

Rip was beside himself. 'It's a saucer, Bill,' he insisted.

'Bet it ain't. Bet it's something else.'

'What?' Professor Soldi asked sharply.

The next day they got to the cockpit. It was in the middle of the thing, at the thickest point. The canopy was made of a dark, transparent material. When they wiped away the sand and chips, they could stare down into the ship. There was a seat and an instrument panel. The seat was raised somewhat, on a pedestal that elevated the pilot so he — or she or it — could see out through the canopy.

'It is a saucer!' Rip Cantrell shouted. He pounded Bill on the back. 'See! Now do you believe?'

'It's something the commies made, I'll bet,' Taggart insisted. 'Some kind of airplane.'

'Sure.'

When he finished with his video camera, Professor Soldi eased himself off the ship, climbed down the ledge, and found a shady spot beside the Jeep where he could sit and look at the thing.

He sat contemplating the curved metal embedded in stone. After a bit the other three men joined him in the shade and helped themselves to water from the cooler.

'There hasn't been a discovery like this since the Rosetta Stone,' Soldi said softly. 'This will revolutionize archeology. Everything we know about man's origins is wrong.'

'You're going to be famous, Professor,' Bill Taggart said as he helped himself to the water. Soldi gave him a hard look, but it was apparent that Bill meant the words kindly.