Lalouette, the French spaceplane pilot, came through the door and walked over to Egg's table. 'Would you please come with me, Monsieur Cantrell?'
Egg shrugged. Might as well. He stood and followed.
There were five of them waiting in the com center. Pierre gestured to an empty chair that faced him. 'Monsieur Cantrell, please. Let us discuss this matter like gentlemen.'
Egg hesitated. Julie was there, Claudine Courbet, Chad-wick and Salmon. Chadwick was propped against a wall with his arms folded across his chest. He met Egg's eyes.
Egg turned his gaze to Artois. 'Have you told these people who is going to be left behind when you and Julie take the saucer back to earth?'
'That's not your concern,' Pierre said smoothly.
'I'll bet they are wondering, since the saucer is not large enough to hold more than ten people. And if the saucer leaves, one doubts that it will ever return.'
'Sit down, sir.'
'I suspect you'll negotiate some sort of immunity for yourself in return for abandoning your attempted conquest. I'm sure you'll do quite well with a book or two and a movie about your adventure.'
'You're quite the cynic—' Pierre began. He stopped abruptly when Henri Salmon grabbed Egg from behind.
Julie also leaped at Egg, and he felt a sharp pain in his arm. He looked down, saw the syringe — and felt himself falling as everything went black.
Jean-Paul Lalouette donned his space suit and exited the lunar base. Standing in the parking area where he could see the saucer, he ordered it to return to its parking place in front of the main air lock. As he thought about it, the saucer responded.
Soon he had it sitting on its landing gear in the spot where Egg had left it a few days before.
Lalouette looked up at the stars. They were clear and seemed very close. It was an optical illusion, he knew. The only thing close was death, and it was just inches away, waiting…
When he had the saucer shut down, he turned and walked back into the air lock.
16
The 140,000-year-old saucer Rip had dug from a sandstone ledge in the Sahara Desert crept slowly through the mountains of the moon a hundred feet above the valley floors. Charley Pine sat in the pilot's seat wearing the headband. The sight reticle of the antimatter weapon was projected on the canopy in front of her. She saw it with every sweep of her eyes.
Rip stood beside her holding tightly to the instrument panel and the back of her seat. He too was looking, ahead, above, as far behind as he could see, and of course to the right and left.
The cliffs were jagged, sheer jumbles of rock and lava raised billions of years ago when the moon was born, torn from proto-earth and ejected into space by the impact of a meteor. The only weathering had been through differential heating caused by the sun's unfiltered rays, and here and there huge impact marks where ancient meteors had crashed.
Yet there were gullies and canyons, as if at some time in eons past water had rushed down these slopes.
Charley flew the saucer up a canyon, rose slowly to the top of the ridge and paused there momentarily with just the canopy sticking up. She and Rip scanned carefully, looking. The sun was low in the sky, casting long, deep shadows. Mountains, ridges, cliffs in every direction. And far beyond, the lava sea.
'If he's hiding in one of these shadows, we'll never see him,' Rip whispered. The only sound in the saucer was the faint, almost inaudible hum caused by liquid coursing through the reactor pipes. Beyond the saucer was a vacuum that would carry no sound. Still, Rip whispered. His palms were perspiring. Without thinking, he wiped each hand on his jeans.
Charley crossed the crest and began descending into a canyon that pointed toward the lava sea.
She and Rip had dropped from lunar orbit an hour ago and were wending their way through the mountains in the general direction of the lunar base using only the antigravity rings. On earth they were capable of lifting the saucer to a height of two hundred feet; on the moon, with its reduced gravity, they would hold the saucer twelve hundred feet above the surface, if Charley wished to keep it that high. She didn't. She was skimming the rocks, loafing along. They were still at least fifty miles away, an hour's flight at this rate of speed. Charley Pine was in no hurry.
Somewhere ahead was the other saucer, the Roswell saucer that had rested in a secret hangar in Area 51 since 1947. It would be waiting.
Jean-Paul Lalouette was probably at the controls. His job was quite simple. He had to shoot down the Sahara saucer.
Charley and Rip were absolutely certain that Pierre Artois intended to destroy the saucer they were in. His life and the lives of all his followers depended upon keeping the Roswell saucer intact, able to fly back to earth. Charley and Rip were a mortal threat.
After millions of years of evolution and thousands of years of civilization, the wheel had turned full circle. Once again the law was kill or be killed.
The saucer was still a mile or so away from the floor of the lava sea, only a hundred feet above the rock but perhaps a thousand feet in elevation above the lava, when Charley brought it to a stop in the shadow of a steep ridge that rose precipitously into the black sky.
'So where is the base?' Rip asked, still speaking softly.
Charley pointed. 'About six or seven miles that way.' She stared. Fortunately, in the absence of an atmosphere, the visibility was perfect. She could plainly see the base's solar panels. She could even see the radio tower. 'I don't think it's there.' She meant the other saucer.
'He's around,' Rip said, thinking of Lalouette. He had never met the man, knew only what Charley had told him. Charley was certain, and Rip agreed, that Lalouette would be flying the Roswell saucer. Rip wondered if Lalouette had ever killed anyone.
They sat hidden in the shadow, watching and waiting. A slow hour passed, then another. Finally Charley climbed from the pilot's seat and used the makeshift toilet facility, then got something to eat and a bottle of water to drink. She stood beside Rip sipping water as the minutes ticked by.
'He's out here, somewhere,' Rip remarked, 'waiting for us, just like we're waiting for him.'
Rip was absolutely right, of course. Jean-Paul Lalouette was hiding in a shadow cast by a ridge, about five miles from the lunar base. He had the Roswell saucer inside a meteor crater with just the canopy protruding. He too was waiting.
Lalouette had more than his share of patience, but his passenger, Newton Chadwick, certainly didn't. Chadwick didn't know the meaning of the word. He had tried to read a book, tried to study the saucer's computer via a headband and tried to nap, all to no avail.
There was a shootout coming — perhaps soon. Newton Chadwick knew that someone was going to die. Despite Lalouette's sangfroid, Chadwick thought the odds excellent that the dead men might be Lalouette and… him.
After hours of waiting he sealed himself inside the tiny toilet compartment and prepared an injection of youth serum. The liquid was clear and colorless. He drew the proper dose into the needle, slipped it into his arm and pushed the plunger.
He studied his reflection in the shiny metal above the sink. It wasn't much of a mirror, but it was adequate.
He looked, he decided, about mid- to late thirties. Perhaps forty.
Talk about a miracle drug — the serum had indeed stopped aging. The drawback, of course, was that he had to take the drug at regular intervals for the rest of his life. Forever! Newton Chadwick smiled broadly.
