faith in politicians than you do, but at some point you have to throw the ball in their direction and see if they can catch it.'
Charley began tuning the radio. She certainly didn't know what frequencies she might use to contact Space Command, but no doubt the U.S. air traffic controllers did. Charley tuned to that portion of the VHF band where she thought air traffic controllers might be, and sure enough, there they were, working airliners into and out of… Miami.
She waited until there was a moment of silence, then said, 'Miami Approach, this is Saucer One with a request, over.'
The controller didn't miss a beat. He must get calls from flying saucers every day. 'Saucer One, Miami, you have a flight plan on file?'
'That's a negative. We have a request, though. We need a frequency that we can call Space Command on. Can you recommend one?'
'Where are you, Saucer One?'
'In orbit.'
'Stand by.'
The controller's supervisor soon appeared at his shoulder. Trying to keep his voice as dry and matter-of-fact as possible, the controller said, 'Saucer One says she's in orbit and wants a freq for Space Command.'
The supervisor had just returned from her break, where she had been watching news coverage of the saucer's theft from the Air and Space Museum, a story that had been sandwiched between the latest bulletins from Paris and the moon. 'lust another day at the office,' she said, and picked up the military hotline telephone.
A moment after she was given the Space Command frequency by Miami Approach, Charley Pine lost radio contact with North America. She figured out the conversion and dialed in the frequency. Even the ancients had classified frequencies by the number of cycles in a given time span. Although they didn't use seconds, Egg had figured out the conversion formula long ago, and both Charley and Rip remembered it.
As they rode over the Sahara and the Red Sea, Rip and Charley sat in silence, each lost in his own thoughts. Over the Indian Ocean Charley finally spoke.
'You know that they're going to want us to destroy those spaceplanes.'
'If we pop the refueling tank, we don't need to destroy them. They can't get to the moon without more fuel than they can carry aloft. It'll take a while to get extra fuel into orbit.'
'It's already in orbit.'
'Okay, we pop the cow.'
'Rip, I know these people. I trained with them in France. Blowing up the tank will kill some of them.'
'Hey, I didn't talk Pierre Artois into trying to conquer the world. I didn't give the order to kidnap Egg. His Royal Moonness Emperor Pierre the First gave the order.'
'Not the weenies in the spaceplanes.'
'They signed up to be soldiers in Pierre's army. If you don't want to pull the trigger, get out of the pilot's seat,' Rip said. 'I'll do it.'
'I just want to make sure you know what we're getting ourselves into.'
'Little late for second thoughts, don't you think? Maybe we should have had this conversation outside the Air and Space Museum, before we walked through that door.' 'Maybe, but we didn't, so we're having it now.' 'Outta the seat. I'll do the shooting and I'll live with it afterward.'
'We'll both have to live with it,' Charley Pine said, and stayed in the pilot's chair. She was thinking of Marcel, who had stolen a kiss one evening in the simulator. Was he aboard one of those spaceplanes?
The president was in the cabinet room at the White House as the duty officer at Space Command, an air force two-star general, relayed Charley's comments via telephone. Around the table were the leaders of Congress, who were here to find out exactly what was in the president's speech to the nation, which he had yet to give.
'The French spaceplanes rendezvoused with the fuel tank twenty minutes ago,' the general said. 'They may have finished refueling and have made their lunar orbit insertion burn by the time the saucer gets there.'
'Give Cantrell and Pine all the help you can,' the president whispered into the telephone. Of course, every eye in the room was upon him, yet he didn't want his side of this telephone conversation on the news shows during the next hour. As he waited while the general passed the order to the supervisor, who passed it on to the operators monitoring the progress of the various craft orbiting the earth, the president toyed with the idea of leaving the cabinet room to finish the conversation. He decided to stay put because there wasn't much else to say.
When the general got back to him, the president said softly, 'Tell me again about this weapon Pine says is on board the saucer.'
•Sir, she didn't explain anything about it. Her only comment was that the saucer had a short-range weapon that she could use to attack the spaceplanes. We asked what kind of weapon, and she said, Antimatter.' '
'And that thing sat right down the street in a museum for over a year without our wizards learning that it had a ray gun on it?'
'I couldn't comment on that, sir,' the general said diplomatically.
The president dropped the telephone into its cradle and stared without enthusiasm at the legislators sitting around the table.
'Well, sir?' Senator Blohardt prompted.
'Gentlemen — and ladies, of course,' the president said, 'the fact is that I haven't decided precisely what I want to say to the citizens of the country about this matter. Since you are here, I'd like to hear your views. Perhaps you could lead off, Senator Blohardt.'
'In the first place, Mr. President, you couldn't cede or surrender an iota of this nation's sovereignty to a foreign power without an amendment to the Constitution, which you'll never get.'
'Treaties often cede sovereignty,' a senator from the other party shot back.
After sex and violence, there is nothing Americans love more than legal wrangles, which is why football, which combines all three, is so popular. Naturally most of the legislators were lawyers, so away they galloped, arguing the case. The president sighed and slipped off his shoes. If Artois could figure a way to balance the budget and pay off the national debt, the president thought, turning the country over to him would be an idea worth discussing.
He kept the telephone close at hand.
The refuel tank was a third of an orbit away, behind the saucer.
Charley Pine attacked the saucer's flight computer. This was the first time she had attempted to program it to compute a maneuver more complex than a reentry profile. She couldn't figure it out on the first attempt, and said, 'Rip, you're going to have to help me with this.'
On the third attempt, there it was, a loop that took the saucer high into space and dropped it down on the predicted rendezvous point.
'My Lord, do we have fuel for that?' Rip murmured at Charley, who was already examining the quantity indications.
'It's going to be tight,' Charley Pine said, 'really tight. We won't have any fuel left to maneuver with when we reach the rendezvous — if the tank and spaceplanes are really there. Not if we ever expect to return to earth.'
'I was sorta counting on getting down. One of these days.'
'I was too.'
'Well, hot woman, what do you want to do?'
Charley turned the saucer, pointed it in the direction recommended by the computer and came on smoothly with the power. The saucer leaped forward.
The maneuver the flight computer recommended sent the saucer over the top of a giant loop after a twelve-minute climb. Rip and Charley were no longer weightless in the saucer, which was now traveling in a long arc. They were pushed toward the floor of the saucer at perhaps a tenth of a G. Mild as it was, the acceleration force gave them a sense of up and down. The blue, green and gray earth was above them, over the canopy as they went slowly, lazily over the top and started down the back side of the loop.
Charley checked the flight display, upon which the radar target should be presented. It was empty. The spaceplanes and refueling tank were still somewhere to the west and far below, speeding along at eighteen thousand miles per hour toward that invisible point in space where they would rendezvous with the saucer. That is,
