use, I would have thrown you out of the office.'
'As everyone else did,' Newton Chadwick said with a gleam in his eye. 'No one else believed. Not one.'
'And so, this is where your journey led. To the moon, eh?' Artois was jovial. He slapped Chadwick on the back. After all, he
Newton Chadwick gave them the tour, explained the propulsion system, the antigravity rings, gave summaries about the various computers and let each sit in the pilot's seat wearing the headband.
A long hour later, Artois asked Chadwick, 'This saucer has a weapon?'
'Oh, yes.' Chadwick put the optical sighting crosshairs on the canopy and ran through what he had learned of the system from his explorations of the computer.
Artois listened intently. 'With this weapon we can prevent the saucer that is on its way here from Washington from hurting us.'
'True,' Chadwick admitted.
'Can you fly this ship?'
Chadwick took a deep breath and held it while he studied the instrument panel. He had watched Egg do it, of course. Watched intently. Wearing the headband, one merely asked the computer for the appropriate maneuver and it manipulated the various propulsion, control and navigation systems. And yet…
Newton Chadwick exhaled. 'No,' he said forcefully. He glanced at Jean-Paul Lalouette, then looked Artois in the eyes. 'I could teach him, though. He is a pilot. He has the… the confidence, the judgment, the experience… that I do not.'
Artois looked expectantly at Lalouette, who was not thinking of the saucer but of Charlotte Pine. She would be flying the saucer that he was supposed to attack. She had become famous last year by flying it, and now she was at it again. He had gotten to know her fairly well during the training cycle for the spaceplane mission. A U.S. Air Force Academy graduate, Pine served a tour in F-16 fighters before she went to test pilot school. When Artois had hired her to fly the space-plane, Lalouette was very skeptical. He didn't believe anyone could learn the ship in the short time available. And she had. Not only had she learned to be a copilot, she had flown it solo back to earth and landed in Utah. She was, he thought now, perhaps the finest natural pilot he had ever met.
Lalouette cleared his throat and examined the various displays on the instrument panel. There was no book that explained all this. One had to intuitively grasp the significance of what one was seeing or… or else.
He looked again at Artois. 'You want me to shoot down the other saucer?'
'Yes.'
So there it was. Lalouette rubbed the stubble on his jaw. He found that Salmon was staring at him, his face expressionless.
When Salmon captured Jean-Paul's eyes, he said, 'If you don't fly this ship, the other saucer may destroy or hopelessly damage it. The only other ship on earth capable of reaching us is in the United States. The American president will probably order it destroyed. The lunar base will be our burial crypt. Do you want to die here?'
Still Lalouette hesitated. When he was younger he spent three years flying Super Entendard fighters. He fingered the throttle grip on the antigravity lever. The water necessary to refuel this saucer was here, at the lunar base, but without a radar or GCI controller, intercepting the other saucer at altitude was impractical. The interception would have to be made low, near the lunar base, while the other saucer was on its final approach with the antigravity system. Yes, he decided, that was the best way to do it.
'Chadwick will fly with you,' Artois said. 'He knows the systems. He doesn't want to die.' He turned his gaze on the redheaded American. 'Do you?' he asked.
There was something in the tone of his voice that sent a cold chill up Chadwick's spine.
'Billions and billions of stars. Do you ever stop and wonder what's really out there?' Rip said to Charley Pine. Head to head, they were staring through the canopy at the Milky Way, that huge splash of stars that streaked the heavens, our galaxy.
'Our species will be exploring it until the end of time,'
Charley replied. She too felt the magic of the moment. Hurling though space toward an uncertain rendezvous, with life hanging in the balance, still there was time to look at the eternal… and wonder.
'Like Egg, I've spent time this winter and spring surfing the saucer's computer,' Rip said. 'But the people who built the saucer stopped making entries 140,000 years ago. What have they learned since then?'
'If they still exist?'
'Oh, they're out there,' Rip replied thoughtfully. 'Someplace out there, amid all those stars, are people just like us. Professor Soldi was right, I suspect — they are our cousins. And they are probably looking our way and wondering about those colonists that went bravely forth into the great unknown a hundred and forty millennia ago.'
'If you look into the abyss long enough, the abyss stares back. Didn't someone smart say that?'
'Speaking of the abyss, how are we going to go about rescuing Egg when we get to the moon?'
When Jean-Paul Lalouette donned the headband that allowed the saucer's computer to read and respond to his brainwaves, he felt as if he had walked through a doorway into another world, another dimension. He could see—
Frightened, he ripped off the headband. He was in the pilot's seat of the saucer, the panel was there… he fingered the controls, reassuring himself with their tangible solidity, the texture and sensuous shape of their surfaces. Yes, this was real.
He looked at the headband, fingered it, then placed it back upon his head.
Oh, now he understood. He was living in two worlds, that of the cockpit and, superimposed over it, that of the computer.
He decided that the first command would be to lift the saucer from the lunar surface where it rested, and he instantly felt a tiny lurch as the ship rose until it was absolutely level, then severed its contact with the moon.
He was up; he could see the change in perspective.
'See how easy it is,' someone said. Chadwick's voice. Chadwick, one of life's spectators, one of those who lacked the courage to put his own lips to the silver cup.
Lalouette snapped up the landing gear and let the saucer accelerate away from the base, out across the vast dark lava flow that stretched away to the south and east. It accelerated slowly, no doubt because the lunar gravity was so weak. Yet it was accelerating, faster and faster, until on just the antigrav-ity system alone the saucer was doing about two hundred knots, which appeared to be terminal velocity unless he lit the rockets. He did — and the saucer accelerated abruptly.
After a few moments he tilted the saucer and used the controls to turn and head back for the base, maneuvering freely to get the feel of the machine.
With the rockets off near the lunar surface, he tilted the saucer to sixty degrees and used the antigravity system and a squirt from the ship's maneuvering jets to turn a sharp corner. The G came hard and, after two weeks away from the earth's gravitational field, almost blacked him out. He strained against it, fighting to stay conscious.
He straightened out and raced back across the lava flow toward the lunar base, its solar cells marking its position. Behind the base was the first of the ridges. He climbed progressively higher and higher, aiming for the tops of the crags on the highest ridge, which towered fifteen thousand feet above the flat lava bed below.
The ridges were knife edges, sheer and steep, untouched by the forces of erosion in a place without wind or rain, although they did bear the scars of weathering caused by the fierce temperature extremes between sunlight and shadow. The stark sunlight and deep purple, almost black, shadows made the jagged formations seem even more severe. The French pilot worked the saucer up the slopes and ridges, barely clearing the high points, turning first one way, then another, tilting right and left, staying just a few feet over the rock.
He slowed the saucer and brought it to a halt, finally, above the highest peak — stopped it above that apex as if it were mounted on an invisible pedestal.
