Saucer: The Conquest

water in it, and the staff had apparently never drained it out. The ship was about thirty percent full, she estimated.

Outside the saucer, the crowd was backing away, panic-stricken. A steady stream of people were forcing their way out the main entrance. A half dozen uniformed guards stood in front of the saucer with their pistols drawn. They seemed unsure of what to do.

Charley lowered the saucer to within a few inches of the floor to ensure no one would be crushed under it in the antigravity field. Then she began moving the saucer forward. She thought the command, and the flight computer altered the current to the field just enough to move the machine.

She could still hear the fire alarm sounding, although the sound was muffled. She ignored it and concentrated on moving the saucer.

The guards scattered. A tourist information booth was shoved out of the way, as were several crowd control stanchions and a sign that explained how Rip Cantrell had found the saucer in the Sahara Desert, as the saucer moved slowly toward the window at about half the speed a man could walk. Staring, pointing people lined the walls, including some parents with fierce grips on their kids.

With the saucer inches from the windows, Charley Pine stopped forward motion and caused it to rise until it was about halfway up the glass. She was a little concerned about nudging the Spirit, which was someplace behind and above the saucer, but the higher she hit the windows, the easier they would be to break.

Now the saucer contacted the glass. Forward!

The window directly in front of the saucer shattered, yet the framework stayed intact.

'Better back up and whack it,' Rip suggested. He was standing right beside her.

'I really don't need suggestions from the peanut gallery,' she muttered, and backed the saucer up about a yard.

'Just trying to be helpful,' Rip said, not a bit apologetic.

She drove the saucer forward as hard as she could. The framework cracked and buckled in a shower of glass. Still it held, preventing the saucer from passing.

She backed up, smashed the wall again. This time the saucer shot through.

No one under her on the patio outside. The shower of glass from the window had moved everyone away.

The saucer was only fifty feet from the building when Charley lit the rocket engines and turned it to the left so she wouldn't fly over the downtown. The fire from the rocket exhaust nozzles of the accelerating saucer was subdued since she had only asked for a little power, but the noise was awe-inspiring.

It was heard all over downtown Washington.

In the White House the president heard it and wondered, Now what? He went to the window of the Oval Office just in mie to see the saucer accelerating toward the Lincoln Memorial trailing a sheet of fire.

* * *

Charley turned hard over Georgetown and came back down the Potomac. She passed the Pentagon, still low, only about a hundred feet above the river so that she wouldn't interfere with airline traffic into and out of Reagan National, then turned and headed for RFK Stadium. The rockets were silent as she coasted toward the lone car parked in the empty acres of asphalt. She used the antigravity system to lower the saucer onto its landing gear beside the car.

Rip went out the hatch like ajackrabbit. Two minutes later he had the space suits and compressor loaded. The food and water in bags on the backseat took another two minutes, then he popped back up through the hatchway.

'Check the fuel cap to ensure that it's open,' Charley said. She had told the computer to open it, but it wouldn't hurt to check.

Rip leaped back out.

A police car roared across the empty parking lot with lights flashing and siren howling. It was still fifty yards away when Rip scampered back up through the hatchway, shouted, 'It's open,' and pulled the hatch shut behind him.

'The cops are coming,' he called to Charley, who was still busy with the computer displays. 'Whenever you're ready.'

She lifted the saucer, retracted the gear and headed back for the Potomac. At the confluence of the Anacostia and Potomac, she stopped all relative motion, then lowered the saucer into the river. Brown water covered the canopy. A gurgling could be heard as the water flowed into the open neck of the fuel tank.

'This water is pretty bad,' Rip said nervously. 'Lots of mud in it.'

Charley didn't respond to that comment. She concentrated on the computers, plotting their journey.

When the tank was full of water, Charley lifted the saucer from the river and flew along two hundred feet above the Potomac using the antigravity rings. Several miles downriver she saw a golf course on the east bank and landed on a fairway. Rip dropped through the hatchway to check that the fuel cap had indeed latched shut.

Two golfers drove up in a golf cart and stopped a hundred feet from the saucer. They sat frozen with their jaws hanging open.

'It's on tight,' Rip reported when he was back inside, with the hatch shut. 'But before we go, hadn't we better check the antiproton beam?'

'Good idea,' Charley admitted. When Egg analyzed the systems aboard the saucer, it took him a while to realize that the power that generated the antigravity force was coupled into some weird-looking heavy-duty electrical conductors that he originally thought were part of the lift/control system. It turned out, though that the power was routed to drive an antiproton beam weapon. Antiprotons are forms of antimatter and are manufactured on earth today only in giant accelerators in particle physics laboratories. The creators of the saucer, however, equipped it with a small accelerator, which generated an antiproton beam.

Charley lifted the saucer ten feet in the air and stabilized in a hover. At her command, crosshairs appeared in front of her on the canopy. She turned the saucer to line it up on a large oak tree on the edge of the fairway. The trunk appeared to be about three feet in diameter.

Rip was right beside her, his head at her shoulder.

Fire!

A smoky beam of fire, almost like lightning, shot from a point on the leading edge of the saucer and reached out for the oak. Some of the antiprotons were striking ordinary protons in the molecules that made up the air, destroying them and releasing gobs of energy, hence the lightning.

The lightning went completely through the oak tree and out the other side, since there was so much space in and between the molecules of the tree that some of the antipro-tons could survive their trips through it and emerge out the other side. Pieces began flying from the tree.

'Better stop—' Rip began, just as the tree trunk exploded from the release of energy.

Charley stopped the beam. The stub of the trunk smoked as the top of the tree crashed to the ground and fragments of wood showered down.

'Holy cow,' Rip said, and whistled.

'Let's get outta here,' Charley Pine muttered, and told the saucer to go.

Two seconds later the rocket engines ignited, blasting the saucer forward over the carcass of the devastated tree. Charley held the nose down as the ship accelerated. When the speed had reached several hundred knots, she commanded the computer to lift the nose and follow that holographic pathway on the display before her.

The president was on the south lawn of the White House as the saucer shot above the treetops, going almost straight up, on its journey into space. When he saw the saucer fly over the Mall a half hour ago, he suspected it would soon go into orbit, so he ran out here to catch the show. Although he was now at least ten miles from the saucer, the president had to squint against the glare of the white-hot rocket exhaust rising into the sky.

The noise was a loud, deep, bass roar that overwhelmed the senses.

Without realizing he was doing it, the president shouted in frustration. His shout was lost amid the thunder of the saucer.