Saucer

It was small, not much bigger than a forty-gallon can. It was almost invisible, nestled amid a tangle of wires, pressure hoses, and other machinery.

'Yeah, that's it.'

'Isn't it awful small?' Bill asked.

'How big should it be?'

'I dunno. I guess I thought it would be about the size of a car or something.'

'If that thing's cracked, we're probably absorbing a fatal dose of radiation,' Dutch pointed out.

'It isn't cracked,' Rip replied, suddenly sure of himself. 'There's nothing wrong with this ship. Nothing.'

'And on what do you base that scientific conclusion?'

'I just know.' The youngster shrugged. 'Call it instinct.'

'I call it wishful thinking,' Bill said from the equipment room hatch. He had not crawled in, which was a good thing. The other three filled up all the space not occupied by machinery.

'Maybe you should stay as the mine canary, Rip,' Dutch suggested, 'while the rest of us wait outside.'

'Exploring this ship is dangerous,' Soldi told them. 'We are surrounded by unknown technology, in a ship with unknown problems. Radiation, bacteria, viruses from space… this ship should be explored by engineers wearing full-body clean suits.'

Bill Taggart's head disappeared. Despite Soldi's comment, neither Haagen, Rip Cantrell, nor the professor moved toward the hatch.

They found the batteries, the wires that seemed to lead to them from the skin of the ship, bundles of wires that led away from them to buses, and from there to a bewildering conglomeration of strange boxes and devices. They studied the devices one by one, trying to decide what each might be.

'Whoever built this was well ahead of where our civilization is today,' Dutch Haagen said finally. 'This is like looking into the equipment bay of the space shuttle, only more so.'

Although he was still an engineering student, Rip had the most recent experience with high-tech applications. 'This ship is less cluttered,' he decided, thinking about last summer's trip to Cape Kennedy. 'In a way, things are simpler, ' He ran out of words. After a bit, he said, '… refined. Advanced. Better.'

They continued their explorations until finally the compartment was so hot and stuffy they wanted out.

Rip held them back. 'Come look at this, Professor.'

The young man was on his hands and knees, looking at something wedged between the machinery. He was holding his flashlight in his left hand.

Soldi crawled over for a look.

'It's a pile of something that has deteriorated over the years.'

'Looks like it, doesn't it?'

The professor adjusted his glasses, stuck his nose down almost in the pile, which looked somewhat like the pages of a very old book that had lost its binding.

'Paper? Pages?'

'Pages of something, I'll bet. Let me get my camera and a bag.'

'What do you think it is?'

'My God, Rip! I have no idea.'

When Rip crawled out of the engineering spaces, Dutch was sitting with his back to the pilot's seat pedestal, his arms curled around his legs.

'What do you think?'

'I feel as if I'm in a museum. This thing is ancient.'

'They've been dead a long time.'

'A long, long time. Too long for us even to comprehend the enormity of it.'

'I still don't understand how everything works,' Rip mused. 'It's got electrical power, a reactor, but what powers the ship?'

Dutch ran his fingertips slowly across the deck. He touched everything in reach, taking his time, looking, feeling.

'We aren't alone in the universe,' he said after a bit.

'Gives me the willies.' Rip shivered. 'This shouldn't be real. Can't be real. Yet it is.'

'What would it be like to take that saucer into space?' Rip asked. Everyone else had finished lunch, but he was still eating. They were sitting under a tarp rigged as a sunshade.

Dutch just shook his head. He watched Rip stuff food into his mouth. Maybe the kid does have a tapeworm, he thought.

'The limiting factor would be the heat on reentry,' Rip said thoughtfully as he chewed. I'll bet the material that ship is made of is almost impervious to heat.'

'One wonders,' Dr. Soldi murmured.

'There is no food storage or prep area,' Dutch pointed out. 'The ship must be a shuttle, used to ferry people and supplies between a ship in orbit and the surface.'

'Why is the saucer here?' Rip asked, with his mouth full. 'I mean, why in this place and not in another?'

'Questions, questions, questions… all we have are questions, but no answers.' Soldi said this, but he didn't seem upset. Difficult problems had always fascinated him.

'Dutch, this afternoon you must examine the ship more closely. I want to take this pile of whatever that Rip found to the archeology dig and examine it in the lab.'

They cleaned up perfunctorily, then Soldi left in the Jeep.

Standing outside the saucer, looking it over, Dutch told Rip, 'We should start at the reactor. That is the heart of this thing.'

'Okay.'

'You want to help, Bill?'

'No thanks.' Bill Taggart was sitting in shade smoking a cigar. 'You guys are nuts to poke around inside this thing. You have no idea what could be in there.'

'So we're nuts.'

'Soldi wasn't whistling Dixie.'

'You don't have to help.'

'I know that. And I don't intend to.'

'Ease up, Bill.'

'Dutch, you're acting the fool. That damn thing has been sealed up tight since Christ was a corporal. You're breathing viruses that haven't had a host for a zillion years. Maybe the germs are from another planet, another solar system. God only knows what you'll catch.'

Rip grabbed his throat, staggered, made a rasping noise. His eyes bugged out.

'Stop that, Cantrell,' Bill barked. 'You half-wit!'

Rip made a dismissive gesture at Taggart.

'Come on, Dutch,' he said. 'Let's look at the reactor.' The youngster climbed into the ship without another glance at Bill, who hadn't moved from his seat.

'Hey, Dutch. Look at this. This pipe is marked.'

Rip held his flashlight beam on a pipe. Dutch studied the markings.

'Looks like scratches.'

'Maybe a little. But they're markings. They've marked the pipe.'

'Doesn't look like anything I ever saw.'

'Course it doesn't. But this proves this thing was made by people, doesn't it?'

Dutch Haagen held his flashlight so the beam illuminated the inscription from an angle. 'Looks like it's painted on or something. Maybe etched in.' The symbol on the left was small and elegant. Above it and to the right was a small marking, like an upside-down cone but with no bottom. Following that was another symbol, different from the first, but even with it.

'Never saw anything like this.'

'It's probably a label, telling us what the line carries,' Rip explained.

'Yeah, kid. That's a good guess. But I can't read it. Can you?'