Saucer: The Conquest

and pulled the object from the pocket to inspect it. Yep, a radioactivity safety badge. A few seconds later she found the key to the padlock. She checked the leg pockets. Eureka! A digital Geiger counter, about the size of a fountain pen.

She returned the objects to the flight suit pockets and headed for the cockpit. When she reached the door she saw Pierre Artois in the copilot seat. He and Lalouette were engaged in earnest conversation. They ceased the instant they glimpsed Charley.

Very curious, she thought.

3

Two hours into her watch on the flight deck of Jeanne d'Arc, Charley Pine learned the subject of Artois' and Lalouette's conversation. The French pilot was sick. She listened in on the three-way radio conversations between Artois, the physician at the lunar base and Mission Control. Although she didn't understand the French medical terminology, she understood the diagnosis well enough. Lalouette was suffering a gall bladder attack.

Artois sat beside her in the pilot's seat on the flight deck wearing Lalouette's headset during this discussion. Aborting the mission and returning to earth was one possibility weighed by the decision makers. The other was to proceed to the moon. The physician at the lunar base was equipped to operate, and could as soon as Lalouette arrived.

This development meant that Charley Pine was now in full control of the ship. She would have to pilot it into lunar orbit and thence to the surface without Lalouette's help. Artois asked her bluntly, 'Can you do it?'

'Of course,' she said firmly.

'Safety is paramount. If you prefer, we can skip the lunar landing, slingshot around the moon and return directly to earth.' Both she and Artois knew that reversing the ship's course without the use of the moon's gravity would take more fuel than they had. 'As the pilot, you are responsible for the lives of everyone aboard,' Artois continued. 'The decision to land or return immediately is yours to make.'

She had flown the entire mission in the simulator numerous times; the computers and autopilot were working perfectly. Charley, Lalouette and the controllers monitoring telemetry data had only identified seven gripes on the space-plane, none of them major. If the spaceplane were experiencing serious mechanical problems, she would not be as confident as she was, but she was in no mood to share that thought with Artois.

'I can hack the program,' she told him now. 'I can fly this bucket anywhere we have the fuel to go. You know the state of the medical facilities at the lunar base, not I. If you feel Lalouette will get adequate care there, then we can go on.'

Wearing a trace of a smile, Artois asked, 'Did you know that the simulator instructors referred to you as Captain America?'

Her look of surprise widened his smile. Apparently satisfied, he keyed his headset microphone to tell Mission Control and the lunar base physician of his decision. 'We continue,' he said. 'Our destination remains the moon.' With that pronouncement, he gave Charley a nod and flashed another smile, then left the headset on the top of the instrument panel and went aft to check again on Lalouette.

Charley Pine took a deep breath and exhaled slowly. Whew! Double whew! She was going to have to be on top of her game — she had certainly been there before — and she was going to walk on the lunar surface. She would be the first American to do so since the Apollo astronauts left their footprints in the lunar dirt thirty-two years before. No doubt the footprints were still there. 'Hot diggity dog,' she muttered, and smiled broadly.

All alone in the cockpit, she took off and stowed her copilot's headset. Although it would function perfectly if plugged into the pilot's radio jacks, she wanted Lalouette's. She transferred to the pilot's seat and retrieved the headset from its glare shield bracket. She settled it on her head.

It fit perfectly.

She punched up a navigation computer display. The ship was within a minute of crossing the invisible boundary that separated the pull of earth's gravity from the pull of the moon's. Alone, covered with goose bumps, she watched the seconds tick down. Then they were across. As it crossed this invisible boundary, the ship had coasted to its slowest speed of the journey; now under the pull of lunar gravity, it would accelerate. Just for grins, she began monitoring the speed on the navigation readout. Within a minute it began to respond, picking up a few dozen feet per second with every passing minute. Only fourteen hours to go to lunar orbit insertion.

The voice of the mission controller crackled in her ears. 'If you are going to go it alone, we need to begin now on the systems function tests and checklist items.' His name was Bodard. Charley had spent many hours with him during training. He had a paunch and always smelled of garlic and tobacco.

Charley's mood instantly shifted to all business. 'Let us begin,' she said.

'Are you ready?' Egg called. He was standing in front of the hangar aiming a video camera mounted on a tripod.

'I guess,' Rip Cantrell answered, loudly enough to be heard over the sound of the idling truck engine. He was seated in Egg's old Dodge in the center of the grass runway. He had removed the batteries from the truck bed and installed two large generators in the engine compartment of the pickup, with sheaves and belts to power them from the fan-belt takeoff.

'Any time,' Egg shouted, and bent to his viewfinder.

Rip wiped the perspiration from his forehead, so it wouldn't get into his eyes, and tightened the belts in his three-point harness. His stomach was tied into a knot. He goosed the engine a couple of times with the accelerator, watching the amp meter rise and fall. Oil pressure okay, radiator temp okay. He did it one more time, allowing the engine RPM to rise. The truck rose a few inches, then settled back onto the tires as he let the RPM drop.

He had a small control box he had salvaged from a model airplane radio-control unit mounted on a piece of metal, a joy stick, protruding from the dash to the right of the steering wheel. He moved the stick back and forth, left and right.

'Here goes nothing,' he muttered, and jammed the accelerator to the floor.

The truck rose into the air as the electrical power from the generators energized the antigravity rings under the pickup. The truck began to tilt backward. Rip moved the small control stick forward, lowering the truck's nose and stopping rearward movement.

The truck rose until it was about a dozen feet in the air. The natural gravitational field of the earth and the man-made one he had induced in the truck were repelling each other. As the engine under the hood roared at full power, Rip kept the pickup level and stationary by using the stick.

Ha! Satisfied he had control, he moved the stick ever so slightly to the right. The truck tilted and began drifting in that direction.

Now he leveled the truck, then tilted the nose down a trifle for forward movement. The truck obediently began moving. Slowly at first, then faster and faster. He jockeyed the stick to control the rate.

After he had gone a hundred feet, when he was doing perhaps fifteen miles per hour, he laid the truck into a left turn. He had enough room. The nose of the truck obediently swung around, turning back toward the hangar.

He had just gotten it stabilized when a cloud of steam rose from under the hood. Water and steam sprayed on the windshield. The radiator temp gauge needle pegged right. Rip let up on the accelerator.

Not quickly enough. He heard a loud bang, then the engine noise stopped dead.

Still slightly nose down, the bottom fell out and the truck dropped toward the earth.

The shock of impact snapped his head forward and stunned him.

In the silence that followed the crash, he became aware of his uncle leaning in through the window. He had trouble focusing his eyes. Part of the reason was the dirt in the air— he seemed to be sitting in the middle of a dust cloud.

'You okay, Ripper?' his uncle shouted, only inches from his head.

'Yeah. Sure.'

'Let's get you out of this thing. I smell gasoline. You may have fractured the fuel tank.'