Saucer: The Conquest

be dead. The saucer might orbit the sun forever, or eventually fall into it.'

'I hope he's on his way back to earth,' Charley Pine said, and meant it. She had liked Jean-Paul.

'I wish he'd crashed back there in that canyon,' Rip shot back. 'Then we'd know.'

After thinking through the possibilities one more time, she said, 'I think we should wait for a while.'

'He may return,' Rip mused. 'An hour from now, a week, two weeks, whenever. He could be stalking us right now.'

'If Lalouette comes back when we're out of this ship, he'll destroy it.' Charley knew she could expect no mercy from the French pilot. 'You and I and Egg will die here on the moon.'

'That's right,' he said, and turned his head to look at her.

She met his eyes. 'So how long do you want to wait before we go get Egg?'

After another half hour, the man standing beside the carcass of the radio tower disappeared from view. Rip and Charley decided he had gone back inside the base. Charley was in the pilot's seat. She lifted the saucer, and they flew slowly, as low as they dared, toward the base. The sun was well down toward the horizon. In another forty-eight hours or so it would set and the two-week lunar night would begin.

They looked for the dome over the antigravity beam generator and didn't see it. Finally they saw the hole, several hundred yards away. The dome was open.

'That's my way in,' Rip said.

'And what do you want me to do?'

They were discussing it when they saw a knot of six people in space suits walk out of the shadow of the base air lock into the sun.

'There's our reception committee.' They quickly lowered the saucer out of sight.

After a brief discussion, they donned their space suits, each helping the other. That's when Charley remembered that Rip had never before worn a space suit. She made him finger every control and explained how everything worked.

'The outer shell is the protective cover, very hard to damage. But under it is the pressure suit, and it can be torn or ripped. The tiniest leak will kill you. Now here's the dangerous part — a fall that won't tear the outer shell may still damage the pressure suit.'

'Oh, that's comforting.'

'If the pressure suit is damaged, there will never be any little Cantrells.'

'I'll keep that in mind.'

'Remember the first time you and I crawled into this saucer and tried to fly it?'

'Sure.'

'This is not that risky.'

'I hate to tell you this, lady, but I'm older now, not as carefree and stupid as I was when I was young.' A whole year had passed since he found the saucer. 'I don't even buy lottery tickets these days.'

'Right.'

'Was that a Freudian thing, that mention of little

Cantrells?'

'Well, I was thinking, maybe someday…'

He kissed her, gently and tenderly.

Charley found she had an eye that was leaking and swabbed at it, then clamped her helmet on her head.

With the helmets on and latched to the suits, they turned on the helmet radios. French sounded in their ears. Charley understood most of it. She touched her helmet to Rip's and said, 'That's Julie. She's outside.'

'What's she saying?'

'She's telling them to stand easy. We'll be along.'

'I feel like a sausage in this thing,' Rip said.

'That's good. When you don't, you're in big trouble.'

Rip put three hand grenades in the small belly pocket of his space suit. Getting the pins out with his gloves on would be difficult, but it could be done. There were two M-16 rifles. Charley loaded them both, chambered rounds and put the weapons on safe. She showed Rip how they worked, then asked, 'Are you ready?'

'Yeah. You?'

'Yes.'

They pulled on their gloves and zipped them to the sleeves of the suits. After each of them checked the other one last time, Charley told the saucer to extend its landing gear, then to land. It settled several feet and came to rest.

When all motion had stopped, she depressurized the ship. Air was pumped from the interior of the saucer into a pressure tank. Finally, when the interior of the saucer was at a near vacuum, Rip opened the belly hatch. He felt a tiny rush of air as the last of it escaped from the ship. He dropped though the open hatchway and stood in it.

Charley gave him a thumbs-up. He blew her a kiss, then closed the hatch behind him.

'Mr. President,' P.J. O'Reilly said, 'we've got audio from the moon. Apparently they are outside the base in space suits and talking to one another.'

The president was still at the 'secret, undisclosed location.' He brightened. 'I thought we couldn't hear anything from the moon.' The folks on earth had heard nothing from the moon since the radio tower there went down. And they didn't know why.

'Space suit helmet transmissions are only a few watts. We can normally hear them only when they are picked up and rebroadcast by the base's transmitters, which are apparently off the air. We're getting these signals from the National Radio Astronomy Observatory's hundred-meter telescope in Greenbank, West Virginia. The moon is above the horizon now, and they have the telescope aimed at the lunar base.'

'Let's listen,' the president said.

O'Reilly picked up the phone. After a few words, he listened, nodded and punched the buttons so they could hear the audio on the speakerphone. Then he hung up the handset.

Voices speaking French filled the office.

'Get a translator,' the president said. 'I want to know what's going on up there.'

Rip Cantrell carefully walked away from the saucer. In the reduced lunar gravity the trick was keeping his balance, he decided. He had to work carefully at it. He was a hundred feet away from the saucer when it lifted off in a swirl of dust. He turned to look. He could see Charley's hel-meted head in the pilot's seat. He waved and she waved back. After the saucer had moved off, he watched the dust settling. It sifted slowly down undisturbed by the slightest breeze.

He watched the saucer go around the base, pass over the remains of the radio tower and settle onto the lava bed in front of the main air lock.

Then he walked toward the gaping hole in the top of the cavern that held the antigravity beam generator.

He paused near the edge and approached it carefully. The cavern was lit — but he couldn't see if there was anyone in it. Nor did he know if the beam generator was in use. Better find out, he thought. He stooped, picked up a pebble, and tossed it across the hole. It sailed across like a baseball thrown from the outfield. They're not using it, he concluded. If they zvere, that little rock ivould have soared up out of sight, like a pebble caught in a torrent from a fire hose.

Now he needed to know if there was anyone in the control room. He laid the rifle down, got to his hands and knees and began crawling toward the edge.

The saucer came into view of the small crowd stand-ing in front of the air lock from their right. It was low, only ten feet or so above the surface, and moved slowly, trailed by a cloud of dust.

They had been waiting for it, yet they were surprised when it appeared. 'It's not Lalouette!' someone shouted into his helmet microphone. 'The saucer is too small.'

'Oui,' Julie agreed bitterly.

'They made it!' O'Reilly exclaimed triumphantly when he heard the translation. 'Rip and Charley made it!'

'Umm,' said the president.