Ahead of her the spaceplane's nose dropped as the asymmetrical power took effect.
Still accelerating, the nose fell through the planet's horizon and continued down.
The ship was far ahead now, the white-hot rocket exhaust all that was visible.
The angle of that falling star continued to steepen — it dropped lower and lower and began to move aft in relation to the saucer. Charley rolled her ship so she could see the white pinpoint of exhaust.
Deeper it went, down into the darkness, down toward the waiting atmosphere that enshrouded the massive planet.
Finally, far behind and below the speeding saucer the exhaust plume twinkled out, and there was nothing more to see.
'I hope they're dead before they hit the atmosphere,' Rip said softly.
'Yes,' she said, thinking of Marcel, with the black eyes and the shy smile. 'If God is merciful.'
Jack Hood was a farmer in Kent, England, only a few miles from the white cliffs of Dover. It was after midnight when his wife awakened him. 'There's something out there, Jack. Listen to the cows.'
Hood blinked himself awake and listened hard. The cattle were bawling loudly. Hood glanced at the bedside clock: It was at least an hour before dawn.
'I'd better go check,' he said, and rolled out of bed.
He had a gnarled shillelagh standing in the corner, and after he dressed and stomped into his Wellingtons, he reached for it, just in case. He made his way to the front door of the house without turning on any lights and went out.
It had rained last evening, so the earth was pungent and sweet. During the night the wind had moved out the clouds and now the sky was clear, ablaze with stars, with the moon low in the west. Standing on the porch in the moonlight, Tack Hood remembered the flashlight in the kitchen and went back for it.
The moon gave enough light that he didn't need the flashlight to find his way to the barn. Last night Hood and his wife had watched all the latest news from capitals around the world on the telly and heard the demands of the man in the moon, so as he walked he flashed Pierre the finger.
The cattle stopped bawling when they sensed his presence, yet still they milled about, looking toward the pond. Actually the pond was a small lake, almost two acres in size.
Hood let himself through the gate and walked toward the water. He flipped on the flashlight and swept it around the shore. Nothing out of the ordinary here. A few bushes, lots of mud churned up by cattle, here and there a small tree.
'Out here,' a voice called.
Elmer turned the flashlight toward the center of the pond — and saw a man standing there. In the pond. In only to his ankles. What the—?
'Hope you don't mind treating us to a fill-up,' the man called. He had an American accent, which Jack Hood recognized from the movies. 'We ran out of water and missed North America. We were skipping and hopping and hoping, and this is where we wound up.'
Hood went down right to the water's edge. Now he could see that there was a shape, something dark, mounding up out of the water. Aha, the man was standing on something!
'Name's Rip. Bet we woke you up, huh?'
Jack Hood didn't know what to say. He simply stood and stared.
Now the man bent over and rapped on the thing he was standing on. It rose slowly and gently out of the water. The thing was a saucer! A bloody flying saucer!
It was big! Ohmigosh, it was big, maybe sixty or seventy feet in diameter. As it came completely out of the water, the water level in the pond dropped, perhaps as much as a foot. The saucer moved gently over the pasture with the man still standing on its back. Its legs snapped down, and it settled onto the grass.
The man jumped down and strolled over. He was in his early twenties, clean-cut and lean. He reached for the flashlight and turned it away from his face, then grasped Hood's hand.
'Rip Cantrell. Glad to meet you.'
'Righto,' Jack managed.
'Have a good night,' Rip said, and turned back to the saucer. He went under it and disappeared into the belly.
Seconds later it lifted and the gear retracted.
It moved out over the pond, accelerating, then a small flame burst from a series of rocket nozzles on the trailing edge.
When the saucer was perhaps two miles away, traveling at several hundred knots, the exhaust became intense and all the noise on God's green earth washed over Jack Hood. The fireball rose almost straight up and kept going and going, shrinking to a pinpoint as it drifted toward the east. Finally it disappeared among the stars.
12
The disaster that had claimed the three French spaceplanes was the topic of considerable conversation between Mission Control in France and Pierre Artois on the moon. Newton Chadwick listened on the battery- operated encoded radio in the Roswell saucer and passed on what he heard to his two colleagues. All of the conversation was in French and unintelligible to Egg Cantrell. From Chadwick's reaction, he could tell that the news was bad.
When the radio had finally fallen silent, Chadwick and his colleagues discussed what they had heard for half an hour, and finally Chadwick shared what he had learned with Egg.
'A disaster. The orbital refueling tank exploded when the second of the two ships bound for the moon was refueling. The explosion was actually seen over Japan in the hours before dawn. The tank and that ship were destroyed. The crew of the tanker, which had carried the fuel aloft, thought they saw another ship in the vicinity, but they couldn't be sure. It was black and saucer-shaped. They immediately fired their engines for a reentry, and talked to Mission Control before they entered the atmosphere and lost radio contact.
That ship crashed somewhere in the Pacific, Mission Control believes.'
He sighed. 'No one knows what happened to the third ship. There were several garbled radio transmissions, which the agency is studying, trying to decipher. An oil tanker in the western Pacific reported a large object — they thought it was a meteor — penetrating the atmosphere at a steep angle and burning up a few minutes before dawn.'
'Saucer-shaped?'
'A saucer!' Chadwick made a face. 'The American news media reports that the saucer housed in the National Air and Space Museum in Washington was stolen in midmorn-ing, several hours before the disaster aloft. An extraordinary coincidence that must somehow be explained.'
'Stolen?' Egg said, his disbelief evident in his voice.
'Of course not!' Chadwick replied acidly. 'The American government obviously sent that saucer aloft to attack the spaceplanes while they were still in earth orbit. What kind of weapon the saucer used is unknown.' He stared into Egg's eyes. 'Is there a weapon on this saucer?'
Egg blinked and managed to look surprised. There was the antiproton beam on the saucer from the Sahara, of course, but— Naw! Certainly not! No one knew of it except Rip and Charley. No one in the government—
'Don't be absurd,' Egg said sharply. 'Do you really think the government converted this saucer to a weapons platform? If they did, where is it?' He made a show of looking around the compartment. 'This thing has been sitting in an abandoned hangar in Nevada for how many years?'
Chadwick was thinking — Egg could see that. Obviously he hadn't learned of the antiproton beam in his exploration of this saucer's computer or he wouldn't even have asked the question. In fact, Egg had only discovered its existence from studying the schematics. Chadwick wasn't an engineer; he just wanted to get rich and live forever.
'How could the American government install a space weapon on a museum artifact in a few days?' Egg asked. 'Do you think they bolted it onto the belly? Or put it inside here and cut a porthole in the leading edge to shoot through?'
