Ten minutes later she was back in the main cabin.
One of the Chinese had looked under the floor panels.
She pried up the panels he had opened. And found a bomb with her fingertips. It was wedged as far forward as one could reach, in a cranny impossible to inspect with the naked eye. She gingerly pulled it from its hiding place and inserted it in a pocket of her flight jacket.
Did the German engineer also look in there? She couldn't remember.
She hunted for another ten minutes, looking everywhere that she had seen any of the engineers look. Nothing.
Rigby was lying on the floor of the hangar exactly as she had left him. He hadn't moved.
Perhaps he was dead.
Maybe she should check to see if he was breathing.
Naw…
Outside on the mat were four large jets. Two of them were Grumman Gulfstream V's, one was a Russian airliner, another was a Boeing 737. One of the Gulf-streams sported the Hedrick family coat of arms on the tail; Charley Pine walked over for a look.
The soldiers in front of the hangar made no move to follow. They were guarding the hangar, not the airliners.
Charley Pine put one of the bombs in the right main gear well of the Gulfstream wearing the Hedrick coat of arms. The Chinese bomb went in a gear well of the Boeing, which carried the insignia of the Chinese national airline.
When she walked away from the airliners, heading toward the house, the soldiers were talking among themselves, paying no attention.
Lunch was a harried affair. The members of the delegations were tense and preoccupied and said little. They ate quickly and rushed from the room to confer with their groups and make last-minute overseas telephone calls.
Charley was dawdling over a full plate, abandoned by her luncheon companions and unable to eat, when Bernice came bouncing in wearing a wide grin.
'It'll be over soon, Roger says. Somebody will get the saucer this afternoon.' Bernice giggled. 'Roger is
'I'm happy for him,' Charley Pine said.
'Oh, I am too,' Bernice gushed. 'He's worked so hard for this.'
'Right.'
'Just think, we're watching history being made! I can positively feel the electricity in the air.'
She strode away, off to the library, probably, leaving Charley to her uneaten lunch.
Charley filled her coffee cup and took it across the hallway to a television room. She settled into one of the overstuffed chairs and began surfing channels.
She stopped when she glimpsed Professor Soldi's tanned mug.
'… Of course, we have no evidence to prove my theories, but archaeologists have none to disprove them, either.'
'But your thesis that Homo sapiens came to earth in the saucer would necessarily mean that the fossil record of hominid development here on earth was wrong.'
Soldi shook his head. 'No, sir; Not wrong. The record is fragmentary at best, and some of it may have been misinterpreted. The fact is that the earliest archaeological evidence we have for Homo sapiens — modern man — is only one hundred thousand years old. Before that we find Neanderthal man and Homo erectus.'
'Could the saucer people have displaced the hominids that evolved on earth?'
'Displaced, killed, or simply survived while the natives perished. We don't know enough even to guess.'
'Professor, you have admitted that your theory is based on the assumption that evolution followed a similar course elsewhere. Could you comment on that?'
'I think evolution follows similiar courses when similar conditions exist,' Professor Soldi explained. 'All things being equal, the evolutionary pressures will also be equal. A statistician might note that while all things are rarely equal, on occasion they may be essentially so. For example, if a star similar in size to our sun had a planet of about the right size, at about the right distance, then we can expect the laws of chemistry and physics to operate to make the planet very similiar to earth. People seem to forget, there are at least a hundred
'There are not one or two planets similar to earth in the universe,' Soldi said with narrowed eyes. 'There are hundreds. Thousands. Perhaps hundreds of thousands. Could any of those hundreds of thousands of worlds similar to ours contain creatures similar to us? I submit that it would be astounding if they didn't.'
'So we are not alone in the universe?' the interviewer prompted.
'Of course not. Ask anyone who has seen the saucer. Ask what he or she thinks.'
Charley Pine reached for the remote control. After she turned the television off, a male voice behind her said, 'I think the damned thing was made in Brazil.'
She turned. Sharkey.
Charley Pine got up and walked down the hall to the library. The door was closed and there was an armed man sitting on a stool. He didn't say anything. Charley opened the door and went inside.
Rip Cantrell was sitting in an empty horse stall in the barn. There was no door on the stall. In front of the stall on the far side of the barn sat a guard on a stool with a rifle across his knees.
Above Rip a shaft of sunlight shown in through a small glassless window. He sat in the hay trying to think. He wasn't tied up or chained. The only thing keeping him here was the guard's implicit threat to shoot him if he tried to leave.
The guard was maybe forty, slightly above medium height, with a modest spare tire around his middle. The butt of an automatic pistol protruded from a holster under his left armpit. He kept his rifle, some kind of army assault weapon, pointed in Rip's general direction. His right hand rested on the trigger assembly.
'Hi,' Rip said conversationally.
The guard didn't even blink.
Rip moved around a bit, trying to get comfortable.
He still had a screwdriver in his pocket. Sharkey had forgotten to search him. He could feel the screwdriver against his arm as it rested on his lap. About four inches long, the screwdriver had a standard bit.
Without moving, he mentally took inventory of his pockets. He still had his wallet, a key to the borrowed car, a hotel room key, American and Australian coins, some paper money, a paper clip, a ballpoint pen, and a small piece of newsprint that he had torn out of a paper a few days ago at Egg's house, a story about compulsive eaters.
Taggart… he had never even suspected. Well, it was his own fault for trusting him.
He wondered about Dutch Haagen. Did Dutch double-cross him too?
Well, he was good and stuck. until that clown with a gun went to sleep or left, he was going nowhere.
Rip sighed, leaned back against the wall behind him, and tried to relax. After a bit he closed his eyes, tried to sleep.
Charley Pine… he touched his cheek where she had touched him, and shivered.
Charley sat in her usual seat by the safe in the library. The tension in the room was palpable. Of all the bidders, only the Europeans looked halfway relaxed. Roger Hedrick was all business, his emotions buried behind a mask of studied calm. still, Charley thought that she caught occasional glimpses of the man who lived in there, a man who knew that he was holding a royal flush.
Pieraut finished writing on his bid sheet, signed it with a flourish, and put it in an envelope. He handed the envelope to Bernice.
That was the last one. Bernice handed all four envelopes to Hedrick and took her seat with the Australian deputy prime minister and the tax man, who were here again today.
