As fast as thought.
'What in hell are you doing in there, Chadwick?'
Now the senior man crawled in. Before he could see the displays, Chadwick pushed the red power button in. The panels turned white and the humming in the compartment behind him died.
'Jesus Christ, you damned fool! Are you running this machine? What in hell do you think you're doing?'
'Trying to find out what makes it go,' Chadwick answered curtly and, stuffing the headband into his pocket, turned around to study the back wall of the cockpit, which must provide access to the machinery he had heard.
What the senior man would have said we will never know, because he was joined by four of his colleagues, and they were instantly lost in a discussion of the wondrous things they saw about them.
Newton Chadwick, on the other hand, found the latches to the machinery compartment hatch, figured out how they worked and scuttled through. From his pocket he produced a small flashlight. With it on, he closed the hatch behind him. The scientists standing shoulder to shoulder in the cockpit paid no attention.
The discussion that evening in the mess hall was curiously antiseptic, Newton thought. During dinner the scientists had been animated, filled to overflowing with wonder and awe at the things they had seen that day. They chattered loudly, rudely interrupted each other and talked when no one was listening. When the mess trays were cleared away and mugs of coffee distributed by soldiers in aprons, the senior man pulled out a message pad and pencil and laid them on the table before him. The conversation died there.
'What should we tell Washington?' he asked, all business.
His colleagues were tongue-tied. None was ready to commit his ideas to paper and be held accountable by his professional peers into all eternity. 'We don't know enough,' Fred muttered. He was the unofficial spokesman, it seemed to young Newton, who sat in one corner watching and listening.
Chadwick had said nothing during dinner. As a young man he had learned the truth of the old adage that learning occurs when one's mouth is shut. He had listened carefully to all the comments, dismissing most, and collected the wisdom of those who had a bit to offer.
He had no intention of opening his mouth, so he was startled when the senior man said sharply, 'Chadwick, you were scurrying around inside that saucer today like a starving mouse. What do you think?'
Young Newton pondered his answer. Finally he said cautiously, 'I don't think the Germans made it.'
'Well, fiddlesticks! I think we can all agree on
'Maybe the swastika burned off when it entered the atmosphere,' some spoilsport suggested.
They wrangled all evening. At ten o'clock the senior man left, thoroughly disgusted, and trekked through the Nevada night to the radio tent. There he wrote the report to Washington. He read it through, crossed out a sentence in the middle and corrected the grammar. Finally he signed the form and handed it to the radio clerk to encode. He took solace from the fact that the message was classified and would never, ever, be read by his faculty colleagues at the university. He paused to light his pipe as the clerk read his composition.
'Can you make that out?' he asked gruffly.
The clerk looked at him with wide eyes. 'Seems clear enough, sir.'
The senior scientist left the tent in a cloud of tobacco smoke.
This is the message the encryption clerk read:
'Team spent day examining the flying saucer, which appears to be a spaceship manufactured upon another planet, undoubtedly in another solar system, by a highly advanced civilization using industrial processes unknown on earth. Appears to be powered by some form of atomic energy. No weapons found. Recommend that extensive, thorough examination continue on a semipermanent basis. Knowledge to be gained will revolutionize every scientific field.'
The encryption clerk whistled in amazement and went to work with the code book.
In the darkness outside the sleeping tent, Newton Chadwick sat in the sand and fingered the headband he had 'borrowed' from the saucer. The magic wasn't in the headband, which was merely a fabric that contained thousands of tiny wires, each thinner than a human hair. This headband, Newton believed, was the way the pilot of the saucer communicated with the electronic brain of the machine. That electronic brain was the heart of the saucer. True, there was a nuclear reactor that used heat in a strange electrolysis process to crack water into its constituent parts. The hydrogen was then burned in the rockets. And there was a huge ring around the bottom of the ship that Newton suspected was used to modulate the planet's gravitational field in some manner.
Yet the crown jewel of the saucer was the artificial brain that talked to his brain through this headband. This headband proved that the crew of the saucer had brains very similar to ours. And there was more: Inside that device, Newton suspected, was some record of the scientific and technical knowledge that the saucer's makers had used to build it. This record was the library housing the accumulated knowl-
edge of an advanced civilization, and it was there for the man with the wit and brains to mine it.
These older men, scientists and engineers — he had listened carefully to their comments all evening. They still didn't understand the significance of the electronic brain, nor the headband. One reason was that they had not powered up the saucer. The other was that Newton had pocketed every headband he found, all four of them.
Given enough time, they would get a glimmer of the truth. They certainly weren't fools, even if they were conventional thinkers.
Actually there were at least three electronic brains that Newton had found. He thought about them now, wondering how so much information could be packaged into such small devices. Amazingly, they weighed about eight pounds each and were no larger than a shoe box.
He was sitting there speculating about how they might work when a soldier drove up in a jeep and rushed into the tent. In a few moments he heard the senior man swear a foul oath.
'Damnation!' he exclaimed to his colleagues. 'Washington refuses to allow further access to the saucer. They want it sealed immediately. We are to return to Florida tomorrow.'
Newton Chadwick leaped to his feet. He stuffed the headband into a pocket as he considered.
Inside the tent Fred declared, 'They've lost their nerve. I was afraid of that.'
There was a jeep parked next to the one the soldier had just driven up, one that had been provided for the use of the senior man. Chadwick walked over and looked in the ignition. The key was there. He hopped in, started the engine, popped the clutch and fed gas.
It wasn't until after breakfast, as the scientists packed, that anyone missed young Chadwick. A search was mounted, and by midmorning it was learned that he visited the saucer about two that morning. He had displayed his badge and was admitted by the sentries, who had not been told to deny entry to badge-holders. Chadwick was inside for only thirty minutes, then drove away in an army jeep.
Despite the protests of the senior scientist, the army officer in charge sealed the saucer and refused to allow further entry, so no one knew what Chadwick had done inside it, if anything. Neither Chadwick nor the jeep could be found. Not that anyone looked very hard. The very existence of the saucer was a tightly held military secret, and the circle of persons with access to that information was very small.
Back in Florida the scientists who had visited the saucer were debriefed by FBI agents. They would be prosecuted, they were told, if they ever discussed the existence of the saucer or anything they had learned about it with any person not authorized to have access to that information. When the senior man asked who had access, he was told, 'No one.'
It was all extremely frustrating. The senior man retired two years after he saw the saucer. He wrote a treatise about it that his daughter thought was fiction. After his death from a heart attack, she tossed the manuscript into the trash.
The other scientists who had gone inside the saucer that day in the desert were also forced to get on with their lives while living with the memory of what they had seen. The Age of the Saucer that they had hoped for didn't arrive. Like the senior man, they too aged and died one by one, bitter and frustrated.
As the seasons came and went and the years slipped past, the saucer they had seen in the Nevada desert sat undisturbed in its sealed hangar.
1
