Saucer: The Conquest

'Oh, Rip—'

'Here comes someone now,' Joe Bob said, pointing. A plume of dust was rising from the vast dirty-white expanse, still miles away. It looked as if it might be a car, or perhaps an SUV.

'Let's load the suits and get out of Dodge,' Charley said to Rip-

They were in the Cessna taxiing when a police car rolled to a stop beside the spaceplane. Charley waved at the officer, a woman, while Rip reset the trim and eased the throttle in. The plane gathered speed and lifted off. Rip turned to the southeast.

Charley sat looking at Jeanne d'Arc as long as she was visible. As they flew away, the ship seemed to shrink on the endless expanse of salt, under the huge, high autumn sky. She looked small, almost toylike. Hard to believe she had flown to the moon and back.

The Cessna hummed loudly and bumped along in light turbulence. It was certainly real enough. Charley reached for Rip's arm, felt the firmness of his muscles. Rip grinned at her. 'Welcome home,' he said over the song of the engine.

She kissed him again.

9

Jeanne d'Arc's fiery plunge into the earth's atmo-sphere was monitored by Space Command, which projected that the ship's flight path would impact at the Bonneville Salt Flats in Utah. The news was flashed to the Pentagon and the White House while the spaceplane was still miles high, descending. The news should have made a huge splash at the White House, but today, of all days, the government of France was in chaos. The news of the spaceplane's return didn't even reach the brain trust that surrounded the president.

In Paris the cabinet ministers were in conference behind closed doors. The networks had live feeds featuring reporters in front of the doors with nothing to report but speculation and the hourly communique from Pierre Artois, demanding responses to his nonnegotiable demands. The CIA had no idea what was going on in Paris. If the British knew, they weren't telling.

The U.S. ambassador to France was huddled with his mistress, who had a brother who worked as a janitor in the

French parliament building. Every now and then one of the politicians visited the men's room where the brother was pretending to work and commented on this or that. The brother telephoned his sister, who told it to the ambassador, who flashed the comment to the State Department in Washington, where it was passed to the White House for the president and his advisers to ponder.

Periodically news of another French municipal or national monument rising abruptly into the sky, only to return to earth in ruins, was announced on television by breathless reporters. Enterprising producers ordered camera crews to set up in front of likely monuments in the hope that they could broadcast an attack from the moon as it happened. Pictures of rubble after the event had less dramatic impact.

In various places around the world the crisis was denounced as a hoax. The ayatollahs in Iran refused to discuss Artois' demands or allow news about them to be aired on television. Much of the Islamic world followed suit and buried their heads in the sand. On the moon, Pierre didn't have time just now to whip the little countries into line. He would get to them later. His priorities were France, then Europe, the United States, Japan and China. If he could get the big nations to fall into line, the rest, he thought, would have to follow.

Pierre had done his homework. He began making promises. Universal health care, universal employment, free care for the sick and elderly, free drugs (the medicinal kind), and free food for everyone on the planet were some of the major benefits that would accrue to all who followed his banner. 'Together,' he said, 'free from the petty squabbles that have embroiled mankind since the dawn of recorded history, we can solve the world's problems and build a better life for people all over the globe.' Needless to say, Pierre didn't talk about the messy details that he would have to handle to deliver his Utopia, nor where the assets would come from to fund the free goodies.

Public debate broke out all over the English-speaking world. In Great Britain and across America political outcasts, conspiracy theorists, religious zealots and crackpots of every stripe accused the government — always their own govern-_ment—of manufacturing a crisis to cover up something. The political opposition in every democracy on the planet was having a field day. Every spy agency in the world had overlooked a virulent, malignant conspiracy embedded in the French space agency. Even worse was the possibility that the spymasters had detected it and the governments involved failed to act, or were now reacting inappropriately. Political rivals postured, investigations were called for, resignations demanded, jail terms threatened.

All this was marvelous public theater and played out against a backdrop of antigravity beam strikes from the moon, with which Pierre Artois tried to silence the critics and extort capitulations from the various governments.

The French government decided to surrender when the first cathedral went up in a beam and came back to earth in a rain of stone and rubble.

The secretary of state rushed into the Oval Office to deliver the news to the president and the assembled national security types. 'The premier says he has no choice,' she reported. 'Artois is threatening to destroy Paris.'

'Buildings and monuments are just stone and mortar,' the president replied, 'even cathedrals. They can be rebuilt.'

'Paris is the soul of France, its legacy to all the generations to come,' the secretary of state explained. Talking to the president was always difficult, she knew all too well, because he was so obtuse. The voters had a lot to answer for.

She forced herself to say calmly, 'France is not like other countries. France is… inhabited by the French. Don't you understand? Innocent people might be killed, Paris — the most beautiful city on earth — destroyed, laid waste. The French government has no choice, none at all.'

The president's tone never changed. 'If the premier surrenders France to that madman, we'll nuke Paris. For the next thousand years the only living things in the rubble will be radioactive beetles. Tell him that.'

All conversation in the room came to a dead stop.

The secretary was horrified. 'My God! I can't believe you said that! Surely you wouldn't!' She stared at the president, who returned her scrutiny without expression.

'Get on the phone,' he urged, finally, to get her moving. 'Tell the premier what I said.'

She dashed from the room. Conversation slowly began again.

'Uh-oh,' O'Reilly whispered to the president. 'We're in real trouble now. She thinks you would really do it. She'll repeat that comment to every reporter she knows. It'll be the headline in the Washington Post tomorrow.'

'Explain to me again why she is the secretary of state.'

'You wanted a bipartisan cabinet, and State was the only office she would accept.'

'In a country infested with politicians, I picked that one. Sometimes I dazzle myself with my own stupidity.'

Twenty minutes later the television had a live feed from Paris of the premier surrendering to Artois.

'That tears it,' the president said to O'Reilly. He wadded up the latest communique from the men's room of the French capital and threw it into the wastebasket beside his desk. 'How much longer until we can whack those space-planes?'

'It will be at least another twenty-four hours, sir. We don't have any carriers in position, and the submarines are still _well out of range.'

'How about a B-2 strike?'

'It's already dark in France,' the chairman of the Joint Chiefs replied. 'We can't get B-2s there until tomorrow night unless you want to send them in daylight, in which case the French may shoot down one or two.'

The darn B-2s cost over a billion bucks apiece, the president knew, but were defenseless against enemy fighters and vulnerable to them during the day. Taking a chance that the French air force might drop a few into the French countryside didn't seem wise. 'Tomorrow night,' the president agreed reluctantly, 'unless the Brits can do it sooner. Ask them.'