Saucer

Charley Pine turned back to the window glass and rested her forehead against it.

After two hours, Egg removed the computer headband from Soldi's head. The archaeologist blinked repeatedly and scrutinized his surroundings. He reached for the coffee table before him, caressed it with his hands, apparently reassuring himself of the solidity of the real world. Then he touched the saucer's computer, ran his fingertips across it, laid both hands upon it.

'I must think about this,' he murmured finally.

As he prepared to leave, the archaeologist paused, felt the pocket of his sports coat. 'Just a moment,' he said. 'In the excitement I almost forgot. This afternoon I received a report from my university lab on some material Rip and I found in the equipment bay of the saucer. The material was the decomposing remains of a collection of personal items, something like a wallet, if you will. I want to share one of the items with you.'

He removed several envelopes from his pocket, examined them, and selected one. Out of it he took a sheet of paper, unfolded it carefully, and laid it upon the coffee table. Charley and Egg bent over to look.

On the paper was a picture of a woman. Obviously a woman, with a woman's facial features and throat. She was smiling, happy. Her race, however, was difficult to determine.

'What we are seeing,' the professor said, 'is a computer reconstruction of a piece of the decomposed material that I gave them. I hesitate to call the material a photograph — it was an image on some kind of paperlike substance. They are still trying to determine exactly what.'

'It's a portrait of Eve,' Charley Pine said.

'Something like that, I suppose,' the professor said. He carefully folded the paper and returned it to the envelope.

At the door he seized Egg's hand and pumped it repeatedly. 'Thank you, sir. Thank you from the bottom of my heart.'

'Come back in the morning, Professor. We will talk then. Good night.'

Before she went to her room, Charley Pine asked, 'How will the universe end, Uncle Egg?'

'It will be reborn,' Egg Cantrell told her, 'again and again and again… '

Chapter Twenty

When he left Missouri the sun was within an hour of rising, so Rip Cantrell flew the saucer north into Canada. He parked it on a sandbar beside a wide river that ran north to the Arctic. That afternoon he fished with Egg's tackle and managed to catch a couple of good ones. They looked somewhat like trout, but Rip doubted that they were.

He cooked them that evening over a fire built of debris he gathered along the riverbank, wood that had apparently been washed north with the melt each spring, hundreds of miles from the forests to the south, until it ended up in tangles on this sandbar.

At these latitudes at this time of year, twilight lasted until late in the evening. The stars came out one by one as a slice of moon crept over the horizon. Finally, as the fire was dying, the black velvet night was ablaze with stars flung like sand against the sky.

Which one was the one? From which one did the saucer makers come?

He sat by the fire hoping to see the aurora borealis until the stars began to fade with the coming of the new day, but it never appeared. At peace with the universe, Rip Cantrell crawled into the saucer and went to sleep.

After two days he decided he had been there long enough. Reconnaissance satellites had undoubtedly located the saucer; it was just a matter of time before someone came to steal it. He wanted to be gone before that someone arrived.

That night after a fish supper, he put out the fire, strapped himself into the pilot's seat, and took off heading south.

Staying low and slow, less than a thousand feet and below three hundred knots, he thought that he would be able to fly under the coverage of most radars. He experimented with hand-flying the machine. It was almost too responsive for a novice: He found himself overcontrolling. Remembering Charley's advice, which she had given him in an odd moment, he released the controls, waited while the saucer settled down, then grasped them gingerly again.

The whole gig was a rare hoot. Here he was, a farm kid from Minnesota at the helm of a real flying saucer. He laughed, at himself and the situation and the whole darn mess.

Rip got to his destination just before dawn. He hid the saucer and walked the six miles home as the sky grew light and the sun peeped over the rim of the earth.

The swing on the front porch looked inviting. He settled into it to wait for his mother to awaken and come downstairs to the kitchen.

The farm looked clean and verdant at the end of summer. He could hear cattle lowing for their breakfast, and he could smell them. He had grown up with that smell, which he rarely noticed unless he was just returning after an absence of several days.

The swing rocked back and forth, the chains squeaking on their hooks, just as they always had.

Rip was dozing when he heard his mother in the kitchen. He stood, stretched, and yawned, then went inside.

'Hi, Mom.'

'Oh, my God! You scared me, Rip.' She reached for him and gave him a mighty hug.

'Where on earth have you been, boy? When those men came, I didn't know what to say.' She searched his face. Tears welled in her eyes. 'I was scared, Rip. For you. And me.'

'It's okay, Mom. You didn't have any choice. You had to answer their questions. I know that.'

She tried to talk and couldn't. Rip held her tightly. When she seemed to have calmed down, Rip relaxed his grip. His mother grinned nervously and wiped the tears from her eyes.

'They talk about you on television every day. You're the most famous man on earth.'

'It'll pass, Mom. It'll pass. Next year no one will remember my name. They'll talk about ol' what's-his-name, the saucer guy.'

'How about breakfast? Ham and eggs and potatoes?'

'You fix it, I'll eat it.'

She paused for a good look at his face, then got busy. 'All I know is what the television said, so tell me all about it.'

He seated himself at the kitchen table and began with the desert, hot and dirty and empty under a brassy sky, with a gleam of sunlight reflecting off something far away, on a distant ridge.

He finished the story as he finished his breakfast. The part about Rigby he left out. His mother was leaning back against the sink sipping a cup of coffee.

'So where is the saucer now?'

'Hidden.'

'You aren't going to tell me?'

'No. Those men might come back.'

He saw panic in her eyes.

'I doubt if they will, Mom, but if they do, answer any question they ask.'

She nodded, repeatedly. 'Okay,' she said. She turned back to the sink. 'So where do you go from here? When this is over?'

'I don't know. I haven't even had time to think about it.'

'Classes at the university started three days ago.'

'Maybe I ought to sit out a semester. I could work here on the farm.'

'Until this saucer flap is over, the only place you could get work would be in the state pen making license plates.'

'I suppose.'