'Shouldn't we be taking more pictures or something?' Rip asked Soldi. 'Something that will prove we found it buried in the rock?'
'We have the videotape,' Bill reminded them.
'If it is a spaceship, then it must have been manufactured on another planet,' Soldi mused. 'Once we examine it, there should be no doubt of that. Where and how it was found will be of little importance.' He held his hands to his head. 'I can't believe I said that, me — a professor of archeology. Yet it's true. For fifty years we've been inundated with UFO photos, most of them faked. The thing must speak for itself or all the photos in the world won't matter.'
'So what should we do?' Dutch asked.
'Do?' Soldi looked puzzled.
Rip gestured toward the saucer. 'Should we keep hammering? Uncover it?'
'Oh, my, yes. Before we tell the world about this, let's see what we have. Is it intact? Is it damaged?'
'What I want to know,' Rip said, 'is there a way in?'
'I'm not a nut,' Bill Taggart announced, 'and I sI'lll don't believe in flying saucers.'
'A spaceship,' Soldi muttered. 'No one is going to believe this. Not a soul.' He couldn't have been more wrong about that, but he didn't know it then. He sighed. 'When this hits the papers, the faculty is going to laugh me out of the university.'
'Perhaps we should keep this under our hats,' Rip Cantrell suggested. 'When we do go public we don't want anyone laughing.'
'I hear you,' Dutch murmured.
Rip looked toward the sun, gauging its height above the horizon. 'We have three or four hours of daylight left, but it's almighty hot and we have only a gallon or two of gasoline for the compressor. I think we have ten gallons at camp.'
'I want to go back to my dig,' the professor said. 'Get some clothing and a toothbrush. We have four five- gallon cans of gasoline, I think. At the rate we're going, my guess is that it will take us another two days to completely uncover this thing.'
I'll drive the professor over to his camp and bring him back,' Rip said eagerly, 'if it's all right with you, Dutch?'
'Sure, kid. Sure.'
'Bring back some food, kid,' Bill called mournfully. 'And don't eat all of it on the way.'
'What's he talking about?' Soldi asked.
'He's a big ladder,' Rip replied curtly.
Rip took Dutch and Bill back to their camp, then drove away with the professor.
'Twenty-two years old, and Rip's a take-charge kind of guy,' Dutch said as he watched the Jeep's dust plume tail away on the hot wind.
'Got a lot of his mother in him, I suspect,' Bill said. 'The kid told me his father was a farmer in Minnesota and died when Rip was twelve. His mother has run the farm ever since. She must be quite a woman.'
'He gets on your nerves, doesn't he?' Dutch remarked.
'A little, I guess.' Taggart shrugged.
Dutch slapped Bill on the shoulder. 'We're going to be famous too, you know. Finding a flying saucer sounds like a new career to me. Maybe they'll stick us on the cover of
'We'll have to shave, then, I reckon.'
'We'll put the saucer in a parking lot in Jersey City and charge five bucks a head to go through it. We'll make millions. Our ship has come in, Bill.'
Chapter Two
'So whaddaya think, Professor?' Rip asked as they bounced along in the Jeep at thirty miles per hour, at least ten miles per hour too fast for the ancient caravan trail that he was generally following.
'The thing in the rock?'
'The saucer. Yeah.'
'It's too soon to say. I don't recognize the metal, if it is metal. I don't yet have explanations for anything.'
Hans Soldi weighed his words. 'I feel overwhelmed. This discovery is unexpected. If it is what it seems to be, the scientific benefits are going to be extraordinary. Think of the spillover from the American space program of the sixties and seventies — this could be many times that big. Ultimately the life of everyone on this planet could be affected.' He released his death grip on the side of the Jeep momentarily to wipe his forehead with his sleeve. 'I just don't know what to think, where to start.'
'We need some other scientists in on this, wouldn't you agree?'
'Of course. Experts in a variety of fields. First, however, I think we should uncover the ship, see what is there, satisfy ourselves that it is what it appears to be. If we even hint to the outside world that we've found an alien spaceship and it isn't, I'll be laughed out of the profession. I won't be able to get a job digging basements.'
'Uh-huh.'
'When we are absolutely convinced that it could be nothing else, then we tell the world.'
'I was thinking about the local government,' Rip said with a glance at the professor. 'The Libyan border is just a few miles north, isn't it?'
Soldi frowned. 'Our dig is in Chad. They issued the archaeological permit.'
'The saucer may be in Libya, Chad, or the Sudan for all I know,' Rip remarked. 'Borders are political — you can't see or touch them. Qaddafi might run us off and confiscate the saucer if he gets wind of this. We've got to get it out of this desert before we say anything to anybody.'
'Let me do the talking at the dig,' Professor Soldi told him.
By evening the following day, the four men had the sandstone completely removed from the top of the spaceship, which was indeed circular in form, with a diameter of a few inches over seventy feet. The top of it seemed to be in perfect condition, although the bottom was still embedded in stone.
'The thing looks like it's sitting on a pedestal in front of a museum,' Dutch remarked.
'That's probably its ultimate fate,' Rip replied, then went back to work clearing the last of the stone from the four exhaust pipes that stuck out the rear. Each of these nozzles was about a foot in diameter.
Arranged around the circumference of the ship, but pointing up and down, were more exhaust nozzles, small ones. These, everyone agreed, must be maneuvering jets, to control the attitude of the ship in yaw, roll, and pitch. The upper ones were packed with sandstone.
Although it was late in another long day, Rip still had plenty of energy. He had ceased asking Professor Soldi questions only when the scientist quit supplying answers.
Soldi was lost in his own private world. He and Bill measured the ship with a tape as carefully as they could. Soldi took notes on a small computer and shot more videotape. He also shot up several rolls of 35mm film.
The archaeologist studied the surface of the ship with a pocket magnifying glass, dripped a bit of acid from the Jeep's battery on one tiny spot, and muttered over the result.
'It's a giant solar cell,' Rip remarked.
'What is?'
'The skin. Put your fingers on it. You can feel it absorbing energy from the sun. And notice how the reflectivity has changed — it seems to change with the temperature, and probably the state of the battery charge.'
The professor gave Rip a surprised look. As soon as the younger man turned away, he caressed the skin with his fingers. A solar power cell, absorbing the sun's energy and converting it to electricity! Of course!
He drew back suddenly, as if he had been shocked. Rip implied that the solar cells were absorbing energy
He lay for an hour on top of the ship with a mirror to direct the sun's rays down inside the cockpit like a
