Saucer: Savage Planet (12 page)

He had lived too long.

He knew it then.

He knew it now.

8

“A starship will arrive in orbit a week from now,” Adam Solo told his passengers, who were floating about the interior of the saucer.

“I didn’t hear you talking on a radio,” Charley objected. “Nor did I hear alien voices.”

Solo shrugged.

“So how does the comm gear work?”

It reads my thoughts and broadcasts them, emitting a much stronger signal. And it picks up theirs, too faint for me to receive, and rebroadcasts them to me.

With a start, Charley Pine realized that she had heard Solo, yet he hadn’t made a sound.

You can read minds?
she asked, not voicing the words.

Yes.

“Holy damn,” she said aloud, looking at Rip and Egg. “He can read our thoughts.”

Egg looked thoughtful.
So that’s how he learns languages so quickly,
he thought.

Yes.

Rip wondered,
How many languages does this guy know, anyway?

All of them,
was Solo’s reply.
This skill helped me stay alive. I knew what people I met were thinking when they were thinking it, regardless of the language they spoke, regardless of what they said.

Did you read the president’s thoughts?
Egg wanted to know.

Oh, yes. Amazingly, he is an honest man. He said precisely what he thought. That kind of honesty is rare in the human species.

“I suppose,” Egg said aloud. He wasn’t sure he liked hearing Solo’s voice in his head when none of the others could hear it. He definitely was uncomfortable with Solo reading his thoughts. “Maybe you’d better stay out of my head,” he said aloud and got no reply.

“You’re a difficult man to lie to,” Rip mused.

It is difficult, but not impossible. A few have done it.

“Tell you what,” Egg said. “Since I am kind of old-fashioned, I’ll pretend you can’t get into my noodle and we’ll all just keep saying aloud whatever we want others to know. Deal?”

“Deal,” each of his companions said in turn.

“Well, we can’t stay up here a week waiting for the cavalry to come riding out of the void,” Charley Pine declared. “I need a pit stop within a few hours or it’s gonna get messy.”

“Canada,” Solo said. “We’ll start down in a few minutes.”

They discussed it and agreed since no one else had a better idea.

“But some starship rescuing you from these people howling for your blood isn’t going to do us any good,” Rip said to Solo. “You may have a way off this planet, but we are kinda stuck here. While we are alive, anyway. And I don’t want to be in any other condition anytime soon.”

“I have a plan,” Adam Solo replied. “We need a diversion, something for the public to think about besides us. I’ve given the orbiting saucer instructions.”

“I thought its comm gear was
hors de combat
?” Charley said.

“Its long-range communications gear certainly is, but it can receive my brain waves. However, it can not transmit.”

“So you didn’t get an acknowledgment that it received your order?”

“Life is often uncertain. Let’s wait and see what happens.”

*   *   *

Thick stratus clouds covered most of Canada. The saucer’s pilot and passengers could see the cloud cover from space. Solo had the saucer plunging downward toward the white gauze. It was still afternoon here, with the sun low on the western horizon. A sliver of moon was visible in the eastern sky.

The saucer raced downward, drawn by gravity. The atmosphere below would slow the machine with friction, heating up the leading edge of the saucer to a cherry red glow.

Charley Pine saw it and marveled yet again at the technical achievement of the saucer people, to build such a ship. At least 140,000 years old, it could still perform its mission, carrying people and things up and down from the surface of the planet.

Adam Solo was an alien, and his people were coming back to rescue him. What, she wondered, must the starship be like?

Egg Cantrell was not enjoying the ride. He was fretting about the antiaging drug and the havoc it would cause. Then there was the impact the presence of an alien starship circling the planet would have on the people of earth. Once and for all, irrefutable proof would be flung in the faces of the world’s people that they were not alone in the universe.

A good thing or a bad thing?

Or a fact that would have to be faced, and damn the consequences.

Rip’s thoughts were about Adam Solo. He believed Solo’s tale, he decided … and yet he didn’t. The ability of the mentally ill to weave complex alternative realities was on his mind. As the first tugs of the atmosphere upon the saucer caused him to grab the back of the pilot’s seat, he resolved to keep a wary eye on Solo.

If the guy tried to steal the saucer … well, Rip had a rifle and no qualms. He, Charley and Egg weren’t going to freeze to death in the Canadian Arctic if he could help it. Alien or nutcase, if Solo pulled something, he was going to stop some lead.

That’s a warning, Solo.

Received.

After a long ride down, the saucer plunged into the top of the stratus layer. “At least everyone on the ground won’t see us,” Egg remarked.

Rip wondered how many people were this far north as the Canadian winter began to wrap its icy fingers around the land and lakes.

Plunging downward through the clouds, everyone in the saucer watched the computer presentations on the instrument panel. The radar was painting a picture of land and places without return—no doubt frozen lakes. The radar’s energy bounded off the ice and didn’t return to the antenna.

Solo seemed quite comfortable with the presentations on the screens before him. They changed occasionally, as fast as thought, because he was wearing the headband and had merely to think about the information he would like to have, and the computer presented it to him.

Down, down, down. Toward the surface of the planet. Still doing several times the speed of sound.

Solo leveled finally and let the speed bleed off. He didn’t start the rocket engines, didn’t change course, merely let the saucer slow, and when he judged the moment right, he raised the lever on his left to activate the antigravity rings and prevent the saucer from impacting the earth.

At last it came out of the clouds, a thousand feet or so above a flat countryside of snow-covered trees and frozen lakes. Solo changed course almost ninety degrees, to the northeast. He let the saucer descend until it was running perhaps a hundred knots just above the treetops in this flat wilderness.

The sun slipped below the horizon and the sky darkened. The saucer ran on in the twilight.

“You do know where you are going?” Rip asked Solo.

“Yes.”

“When was the last time you were here?”

“A long time ago.”

“How long?”

“Very long.”

“How about a straight answer?”

“I lost count of the seasons several times in my life. Nine hundred of your years ago, I think, give or take.”

“Who were your shipmates?” Egg asked, although he expected he knew the answer.

“Little men, bearded, tough. Warriors inured to the cold. Vikings.”

“You were with them?”

“I was their leader. I pointed out the dangers of the voyage, and they insisted we go anyway. They trusted me. They knew life was short and they would end up in Valhalla, so the adventure drew them on.”

“And you?”

“I didn’t care if I lived or died.”

“Do you care now?” Charley asked.

Solo didn’t reply. Ahead in the twilight they could see water. Hudson’s Bay.

*   *   *

“It’s Canada,” Johnny Murk told Harrison Douglas. They were sitting in the FBO lounge at the Greenwich, Connecticut, airport. Heidi was massaging Murkowsky’s neck. The chairman and CEO of Murk Corporation turned off his cell phone and dropped it into his shirt pocket. “That was a guy with Space Command who wants a job after his military hitch is up. He says the White House is being notified.”

“So we are ahead of the government?”

“If we can move fast enough, we are.”

Heidi finished Murkowsky’s neck with a vigorous short rub. “You need to stay loose, Johnny.”

“Yes, dear.”

*   *   *

The cliff at the edge of the lake was about a hundred feet high and ran parallel to the lakeshore for several miles. It was a geological anomaly in this flat country scoured by glaciers.

Solo cruised just above the water, looking at the cliff. He couldn’t seem to find what he was looking for. If he was looking for a cave, it wasn’t visible.

“Was the water level lower then?”

“Higher, actually. The world was warmer.”

He stopped the saucer and stared through the canopy at a massive round formation that ran right to the water.

“I think there has been an earthquake,” he said. “Looks like that formation has slipped toward the water.”

“No cave there now.”

Solo didn’t answer. He flipped on the saucer’s landing light and let it drop into the choppy water. It went under and he used the antigravity rings to take it toward the cliff.

In a few seconds the stone formation appeared before them, illuminated by the light.

“No cave there,” Rip said flatly.

The saucer went deeper, with the cliff right in front of it. Then it wasn’t there. It ended in a shelf. Deeper still Solo took the saucer, then began creeping forward, under the stone roof. The glow of the landing light helped. The floor of the sea bed rose, so Solo coaxed the saucer up. They broke the surface. The landing light revealed that they were in a large cave, surrounded by rock. Ahead of them was a beach, perhaps a hundred yards long. High on the beach, under another stone shelf, sat a ship. A wooden ship, but without a mast. Sweeping prow and stern. Clinker-built.

“A Viking ship,” Charley whispered.

“Still there,” Solo said with a sigh. “Right where we left it.”

*   *   *

“Mr. President, one of the saucers is coming out of orbit.”

“Which one?”

“The one that launched from Missouri.”

The aide gave him the projected flight path. Space Command said the saucer descended over Alaska. The projected flight path had it impacting in the northern Canadian wastes.

“Ridiculous,” the president said, glancing at the three-foot globe mounted on a stand in the corner. He stepped over to it and gave it a spin.

“They’ll refuel it in a lake somewhere,” O’Reilly suggested. He was, the president thought, a master of the obvious.

“The United States government had better find out which lake before anyone else does,” the president said pointedly, frowning at O’Reilly.

The president was worried. Petty Officer Hennessey’s comment about waiting for aliens had planted a seed. This situation was out of control, with everyone in an uproar over an antiaging drug. Yet if there was any truth to Hennessey’s comment, things could get worse.
A lot worse!
Aliens!

A painting on the wall caught his eye. It was an original, on loan from the Smithsonian. A group of almost naked Indians with a few feathers in their hair stood on a beach watching Christopher Columbus’ three ships approach.

Things hadn’t worked out so well for the Indians after Columbus’ arrival. Would the arrival of people—or creatures—from another planet start a similar collapse of the current civilization?

The president rooted in his drawer for his Rolaids bottle and helped himself to a handful.

*   *   *

Solo landed the saucer on the rock-strewn beach beside the Viking ship. When he turned off the landing light the darkness was total. The four people in the cockpit looked at each other in the glow of the instrument lights, but no one spoke.

“I brought a flashlight,” Egg said finally.

“Let’s get out,” Rip suggested, “see if we can find some wood to use for a fire.”

“We can always burn the ship,” Charley noted.

“If we spend the winter here, we’ll have to.”

They opened the hatch and Rip dropped through. Then Charley, Adam Solo and Uncle Egg.

Indeed, there was ancient dry wood in a crevice near the ship. Slivers cut with Rip’s pocketknife provided the kindling. In minutes a small fire was burning, and its light illuminated the ship’s hull. Charley came to the fire straightening her clothes. “Are we going to get asphyxiated in here?” she asked.

“I feel air moving,” Rip said. “I think we’re okay.”

“You guys need to put toilets in those flying plates,” she told Solo.

After answering nature’s call, Solo inspected the sides of the Viking ship, then clambered aboard.

Charley joined him. The flashlight beam illuminated seats, some shields, spears … short swords. Helmets. Bones in one corner. “Caribou,” Solo said.

A large slab of stone that had apparently fallen from the roof lay on a portion of the stern, which was wrecked when it fell.

“After all these years…” Charley mused.

“The wood is deteriorated but not dust. The cold air preserved it, I guess. The thing wouldn’t even float now, even if that rock hadn’t fallen on it. But back then she was a good ship. Rode the back of the seas, didn’t leak much, sailed well downwind … a good ship.”

He climbed over the side and boosted Egg up.

They heard a shout from Rip. “Hey, over here. There is a breeze coming in from the outside.”

After scrambling over the rock, he found the opening, a crack that led to the outside. Rip took the flashlight and, turning sideways, slipped through. In a moment he was back. “Goes all the way outside. Cold out there.”

“Must have opened in the landslide that dropped the roof,” Solo said.

“Let’s get the rest of our stuff on the beach and build a bigger fire. We’ll need it tonight.”

Rip went back to the saucer and climbed inside. He grabbed bundles and pushed them through the hatch. Solo and Charley took them and headed toward the fire, where Egg unpacked and arranged things. When all the duffel was out the hatch, Rip climbed down. He picked up two sleeping bags and the sack of food and trailed along toward the fire.