Saucer

saucer, touched it, ran his fingers along the smooth leading edge. He cocked his head and looked at Charley Pine, who also had a hand on the machine.

'When I heard about this saucer,' he said, 'I didn't believe the report. Fantastic! A great hoax. I see more grandiose schemes than one might imagine, all designed to separate me and my money.' He snorted. 'As if that were easy to accomplish.'

He caressed the saucer's skin, stared at his reflection in the dark material.

'You will fly this saucer for me, Ms. Pine.'

'Let's have the rest of it. If I don't… '

'Ah, but you will not refuse. You have a mother teaching school in Virginia, a father building houses in Georgia, a sister in New York who wants to paint… How long should I make the list? Whom should I add? Egg Cantrell, young Rip…?'

'Extortion is a crime in America, Mr. Hedrick. So is kidnapping and murder.'

'Ms. Pine. You are young, beautiful, foolish. You will do what I ask, when I ask it. This saucer is very valuable. I want it. I will do whatever it takes to get it. Do you understand?' He was closer now, looking straight into her eyes, without blinking, without a twitch anywhere on his face. 'Whatever it takes!'

Charley hoped she was doing as good a job controlling her own expression.

'You will do as I ask, Ms. Pine, or no one will ever find the bodies.'

'And afterward. You'll let me go?'

'I'll do better than that. I shall pay you for your time and services. Three thousand American dollars per day or any fraction thereof, including today.' Hedrick grinned, a disarming, charming grin. 'Think of this as a well-paying short-term job, Ms. Pine, and of me as your employer.'

I'll fly it.'

'I thought you would see it my way. But first, tell me a little about this machine. What powers it?'

Charley gave him a five-minute brief covering the main points. When she finished, he smiled. 'Shall we?' he said, indicating the saucer.

Charley led the way through the open hatch. Hedrick got into the ship with her, as did his chief lieutenant, Rigby. Charley closed the hatch behind them, then climbed into the pilot's seat and fastened the seat belt and shoulder harness.

Pulling out the main power control to the first detent lit off the reactor. As the computers and cockpit panel lights came alive, Hedrick stood frozen, watching.

Rigby looked around curiously.

Gently, gently, Charley lifted the saucer off the ground, snapped up the gear, and eased it out of the hangar, which stood at the western end of the grass runway. She halted the saucer, still about five feet above the grass, then turned it with the foot pedals, the 'rudder.' A few grass clippings lifted by the antigravity field were picked up by the breeze and swirled away. The windsock near the trees was indicating four or five knots from the northeast.

Hedrick's thugs stood by the open hangar door, their mouths hanging open.

She reached for the computer headband, adjusted it over her head.

Computer, do we have enough hydrogen for full power?

A linear graph appeared on the screen before her. About ninety percent, climbing nicely. Another few seconds.

Hedrick was standing beside her looking at the instrument panel. Rigby was opening the equipment bay, looking inside. It was doubtful he realized that the saucer was off the ground, so gently had Charley handled it.

'Where to, Mr. Hedrick?'

'A hundred miles due west of Sydney. I have a cattle station — a ranch, if you will — located there.'

Charley Pine looked straight ahead, down the runway, put her head back in the headrest, braced her feet on the rudder pedals, and twisted the rocket throttle control to the stop.

The rocket engines lit with a roar and the G came almost instantaneously. Hedrick and Rigby were swept off their feet and smashed against the rear panel of the compartment.

Egg and Rip were sitting on the back porch when the saucer floated from the hangar into sight. It turned there in front of the hangar and stopped with the nose pointed east, down the runway.

Rip massaged his neck.

'I wonder if she told everyone to take a seat and strap in,' he whispered to Egg.

The first glimmer of fire from the rocket exhausts made both men clap their hands over their ears. They missed the worst of the noise, a howl rising in pitch and volume to soul-numbing intensity. Behind the saucer the fire from the nozzles scorched the runway grass, lit it on fire.

When the saucer was doing about a hundred knots, Charley pulled the nose up into the vertical. The thunder of the engines massaged Rip and Egg's flesh and vibrated the windowpanes.

The two men sat motionless on the porch until the sound of the rockets had completely faded.

The grass fire burned for a minute or so, then went out, leaving a black, smoking strip on the runway sod.

Hedrick's flunkies came walking up from the hangar. Their suits looked as if they had been rolling in the grass. They were rubbing their ears, opening and closing their mouths repeatedly.

'That close to the rocket exhaust, their eardrums may have burst,' Egg muttered.

'Have a nice day,' Egg said to the first one as he walked by, going around the house toward the cars parked in the drive.

'Hope the damage is permanent,' Rip told the last one, who didn't even look at him.

Chapter Twelve

First Lieutenant Raymond Stockert never forgot that morning. For the remainder of his life he would marvel at the combination of luck and fate that put him over central Missouri in an F-16 at the precise moment that a flying saucer came rocketing up from beneath him, missing his plane by a scant hundred yards.

It had been one of those mornings. The military had gone to Defense Condition One, DEFCON ONE — war alert — during the wee hours. Raymond had been awakened at home and ordered to report to his National Guard squadron ready to fly.

The evening before he had been watching the great saucer scare on television, along with every other sentient creature on the North American continent, but he didn't connect this alert to the scare until he got to the squadron.

The skipper was in a rare mood. 'Okay, guys. Here is how it is: Washington has ordered all the planes armed. Each of you will be assigned a sector to patrol. You will take off, patrol your sector until fuel requires you to return or you are relieved on station.'

'And?' someone asked incredulously. None of the pilots believed this spiel. This was a gag, of course, but what a gag! For this they had forfeited a night's sleep?

'And,' said the skipper, 'if you see a flying saucer, shoot it down.'

His pilots gaped at the colonel as if he had lost his mind.

'Honestly, those are the orders. Shoot flying saucers on sight. That said, I don't want any of you clowns shooting at anything but flying saucers. Anyone who shoots at an airliner had better not come back.'

So instead of counting pills behind the pharmacy counter of the supermarket where he labored five days a week, fifty weeks a year, this morning Raymond Stockert was in the cockpit of an F-16 over central Missouri, ready to fire the first shot in the war of the worlds. This was his second patrol this morning. And, by all that's holy, here directly in front of him going straight up like a giant bottle rocket was a real, genuine, honest-to-God flying saucer.

Raymond flipped on the master armament switch as he pulled the nose of his fighter into the vertical and slammed the throttle forward into afterburner. Amazingly — the luck of some people! — the saucer was only ten