Saucer: The Conquest

11

Pierre Artois felt that sense of sublime satisfac-tion that comes to those who dare great things, run tremendous risks and win. A deep calm descended over him. He was standing on a mountain peak with the world at his feet. Actually he was standing on the moon, looking up at the earth, but the folks on earth were looking up at him. All of them.

Indeed, he reflected, he had won. Three spaceplanes were in orbit, one of which carried extra fuel to recharge the orbiting fuel tank; the other two would top off and journey on to the moon. In the unlikely event anything went wrong with the spaceplanes, Newton Chadwick and Egg Cantrell were on their way to the moon with the Roswell saucer, which Chadwick had managed to steal from under the nose of the U.S. Air Force. Most important, the government of France had surrendered, renounced the republic and proclaimed Pierre Artois emperor, pledging loyalty, honor and obedience.

First France, then Europe, then the world. Fame, fortune and power,' he said to his wife, Julie. 'Life doesn't get better than this.'

'We haven't won yet,' Julie pointed out. 'The British are just across the Channel, their moat, and they can be so tiresome.'

'That little ditch won't save them this time,' Pierre said confidently. 'We can handle the British.'

'Then there are the Americans. The U.S. president is a Neanderthal — I don't know why they elect such men.'

'Probably couldn't find any better,' Pierre said, and made a gesture of dismissal. He didn't want to fret about the Americans today. He felt like music, a banquet, champagne and, afterward, Julie in a large, soft bed. He eyed her speculatively.

'Forget it,' Julie told the emperor of France. 'We don't have time.'

Aboard the Roswell saucer, coasting toward the moon, Newton Chadwick and his two French friends were nearly as ecstatic as Pierre Artois. The news of the French government's surrender came to them via a battery- powered radio that Chadwick had brought aboard. Egg sat listening, saying nothing.

Later Chadwick locked himself in the saucer's head. He wore a small fanny pack at all times, and it contained, Egg suspected, his antiaging drug. Egg wondered if the drug took the form of a pill, a liquid that must be injected or some kind of cream. Egg also wondered about how much of the drug Chadwick had with him. Hmmm…

When he tired of plumbing the depths of the Roswell saucer's memory, Egg Cantrell amused himself by frequency surfing on the saucer's radio; he listened to taxi drivers in Rio, police calls from Moscow, ships at sea, soldiers on maneuver and air traffic controllers talking to airplanes. And he caught part of the great debate over the demands made by Pierre Artois. Amid the babble he could hear a steady, hard drumbeat of voices insisting that while Pierre's promises were very nice, the ability to vote out unpopular governments — the freedom to choose — was more important. Egg paid particular attention to American news reports. Charley Pine was in America; he concluded that the space-plane she stole from the moon was probably also there. The three spaceplanes in France had taken off, presumably on their way to the moon. Finally, someone had stolen the saucer from the National Air and Space Museum in Washington and flown it into space.

Chadwick and his friends were asleep when Egg heard the flash about the other saucer, and still asleep when the reporters figured out that apparently Rip Cantrell and Charley Pine were the guilty parties.

So the equation had changed, Egg mused. He had agreed to fly the saucer for Chadwick because he feared for Rip and Charley's safety, and his own. Chadwick and his thugs certainly weren't above using force if he failed to obey Chad-wick's demands. Yet if they disabled or killed Egg, Chadwick would have to fly the saucer — if he could. If he couldn't, he and his two pals would also die in this thing.

Egg wasn't ready to die just yet. He enjoyed life and wanted more of it.

And now wasn't the time to play the hero. The best way to get back to earth was to continue on this trajectory, which would slingshot the saucer around the moon and start it back for earth unless he fired the engines to slow it and put it into lunar orbit.

He turned the saucer so that earth filled the canopy. He searched the jeweled darkness around the planet, trying to spot the twinkle of rocket exhaust that would indicate the presence of a saucer or spaceplane. A saucer or spaceplane accelerating for a journey to the moon. He saw nothing of the kind, of course. The distances were too vast, the exhaust plumes far too small.

Egg grinned widely. Rip and Charley, a real pair of aces.

He loosened the safety belt that held him in the pilot's seat, leaned back and drifted off to sleep thinking about his nephew Rip and the beautiful Charley Pine.

The ride into space was even more exciting than Rip remembered it. He wanted to sing, but managed to stifle himself.

Charley Pine was all business. When the rocket engines stopped, signaling that the saucer had achieved orbit, she began tuning the radio that she remembered from her previous adventure in this ship. Like the one Egg was listening to in the Roswell saucer, this radio was also capable of receiving and transmitting on an extraordinarily wide band of frequencies.

She knew the one she wanted: the spaceplane's orbital refueling freq. She had to play a while with the radio, then finally found it.

The spaceplanes were already in orbit and were now rendezvousing with the fuel tank. The problem was that she didn't know where the tank was. Oh, she knew it was orbiting the earth at a height of about a hundred miles, more or less, but where above the earth was it?

As she listened to the French pilots chat back and forth between themselves and their controller on the ground, she tried to reason her way through the problem. When she and Lalouette had launched in Jeanne d 'Arc, the launch was timed so that when the spaceplane reached orbiting velocity, it would be in the vicinity of the fuel tank. She suspected the French had done the same thing this time. Indeed, if they hadn't, the spaceplanes would waste prodigious quantities of fuel and time maneuvering for a rendezvous.

She and Rip hadn't timed their launch, of course. They had to find and rendezvous upon the spaceplanes before they successfully refueled and began their lunar orbit insertion burn. Once they did, she and Rip would never catch them in the saucer; it didn't have enough fuel.

She examined the radar display, running it out to what she hoped was maximum range. The only way to determine what that range was would be to find a target and let the computer figure a course and burn to intercept. She could make an estimate based on that.

Which was beside the point, because the display was empty.

If the radar was working.

But why wouldn't it be working? Everything in the saucer had worked as it was supposed to from the day Rip and his friends hammered it from a sandstone ledge in the Sahara. Assume that it is working, Charley told herself.

'How are you going to find these dudes?' Rip asked. He was watching over her shoulder.

'I don't know that we can.' She gestured toward the radio. 'They're already rendezvousing with the fuel tank. We don't know when they launched, so they could be anywhere above the planet.'

'Let's ask for help.'

She looked at him. 'Who from?'

'How about Space Command? Bet they know where that tank is.' Space Command was a branch of the U.S. Air Force charged with monitoring the position of satellites, among other things.

Charley Pine thought about it. 'The duty officer will refer the request to Washington, and they'll have to staff it, which could take a day or two. We have a few hours, at best. And if the U.S. government helps us, Pierre will be most unhappy with them. They will suspect that.'

'Life's full of trade-offs,' Rip remarked. 'If Pierre gets those spaceplanes, he'll be sitting in the catbird seat. Most

Americans must be very unhappy with him right now. The worst that Space Command can do is say no.'

'And make a lot of threats.'

'I don't figure we're winning any Citizen of the Year Award points now. Oh, I know, I don't have any more