Saucer: Savage Planet

18

The following morning, the most historic day in the history of the world according to a talking head on a network morning show, Charley Pine busied herself filing a flight plan for the saucer while Uncle Egg fixed pancakes and sausage. She hadn’t been filing flight plans for saucer flights and had found a nasty letter in the mail from the FAA threatening to revoke her pilot’s license. In her reply last night she had pointed out that flying saucers were not aircraft, which might stump the bureaucrats. For a little while, anyway.

Just to be on the safe side, this morning she called Flight Service and filed an instrument flight plan. Missouri direct to the White House. By presidential invitation. They could check.

Flight Service gave her some radio frequencies so she could talk to Air Traffic Control. Charley told the Flight Service dude when she was leaving and roughly how high she would fly: well above controlled airspace. The guy got rather hostile over the fact her craft didn’t have a radar transponder. She replied haughtily that transponders were not required equipment in flying saucers, then hung up before the conversation could deteriorate further.

After breakfast the trio took their small overnight bags, locked the house and trooped down the long hill to the hangar. Rip opened the door. The rising sun spotlighted the saucer, which didn’t look as ominous as it usually did. Rather benign in appearance, Egg thought.

Rip produced his little camera from his pocket — the one he had forgotten to take when they skedaddled with Solo — and snapped a shot of Egg and Charley in front of the thing. Egg snapped one of Rip and Charley. They were smiling, and Rip had his arms around her shoulders. Egg scrutinized the photo on the little screen, turned off the camera and pocketed it. Rip didn’t seem to notice.

Then, with nothing else to do, Egg and Charley got aboard, fired up the reactor and inched the saucer out of the hangar. Rip closed the hangar door, took one look around, then climbed aboard and closed the hatch. Charley was in the pilot’s seat, looking very comfortable.

She needed flying, Rip acknowledged to himself. Flying was who she was, all she had ever wanted to be. “On to Washington, Ms. Pine,” he said imperiously.

She flashed him a grin, lifted the saucer and snapped up the gear as she started the ship moving. Turned to align it with Egg’s grass runway, got it accelerating with the antigravity rings and lit the rockets. The acceleration came on with a heavy push. The nose came up, and up and up. In about forty seconds nothing could be seen through the heavy canopy except high, thin cirrus clouds and patches of blue sky. A minute later they left the cirrus behind, and the sky began to darken as the atmosphere thinned.

Hello, Ms. Pine. The voice in Charley’s head startled her. For a second she thought it was Solo, but of course it couldn’t be.

“Hello, yourself,” she replied.

I am the communications officer of the starship over your planet. I wonder if I might access your computer to learn if there are any biological threats that we should take precautions for.

She tried to pick up an accent, a gender indication, something, but it wasn’t there. The message was more a thought than a voice. “We have more bacteria and viruses than you can imagine,” Charley said. “We don’t even have names for all of them.”

Precisely. No doubt Adam Solo left a great deal of information on the computer of your saucer that would be of interest to us.

“Access away,” Charley said.

Thank you.

When the voice didn’t say anything else, she gave Rip and Uncle Egg the gist of the conversation.

“Let’s hope they all don’t drop dead of something, like the Martians did in War of the Worlds,” Egg remarked.

“Well, Solo didn’t, and he was probably exposed to every bug and virus on the planet in his thirteen hundred years here.”

Egg and Rip stood on each side of the pilot’s seat and stared out the canopy at the earth and clouds below and the stars in the dark sky above.

“A saucer has gotten airborne from Missouri, Mr. President,” the aide said. “The FAA says Charlotte Pine is the pilot. She filed a flight plan with the White House as her destination.”

“A flight plan?”

“Yes, sir. The FAA demanded a flight plan, they said.”

“God bless the FAA.”

The aide thought that reply sarcastic and took her leave. Petty Officer Third Class Hennessey watched her go. She was kinda cute, he thought, not for the first time. He had hit her up for a date last week and had been refused. He had gotten the impression that enlisted men were beneath her notice. Oh, well.

First Granddaughter Amanda and three of her school chums came running into the room. The Secret Service had always let her roam at will when she visited, a freedom she took full advantage of now that she had a dozen of her school friends here to share the arrival of the starship delegation.

The secretary of state eyed the kids without affection. This meeting with the aliens was going to be diplomacy of the first order of magnitude, and he suspected kids arcing around would only complicate things. He worried about protocol, about crowd control, about communications with the aliens …

“Just how did the aliens communicate with us?” he asked the president.

“Comm won’t be a problem,” the elected one said evasively, to P. J. O’Reilly’s disgust. The president had merely given him a handwritten memo about a message he had received from the aliens, told him to pass it to the press and refused to answer questions about it. The Great One was playing his cards close to his vest, as usual.

Except for the kids, everyone was nervous — you could see it in their faces and body language. Well, everyone but the sailor, O’Reilly noted. He looked as if he were patiently waiting for an order to weigh the anchor — just another great navy day.

O’Reilly wandered into the hallway, which was packed with cabinet secretaries, undersecretaries, deputy secretaries, assistant secretaries and agency hoohahs high and low from all over the government. More officials stood around the conference room swilling Kool-Aid, nibbling stale cookies, nervously chewing their fingernails and watching two televisions.

The air was electric with anticipation and excitement both inside the White House and out in the streets, which one announcer said contained over a half-million people within ten blocks of the Executive Mansion in all directions. The National Guard was helping D.C. and federal police with crowd control. People with heart conditions had been warned to stay home because getting emergency vehicles through the crowds would be problematic, at best. Loudspeakers had been set up so the crowd in the streets and parks could hear the words of the diplomats as they were spoken on the White House lawn.

The kids swooped in and raided the cookie plates. They each took a handful, then scampered off, giggling and whispering and laughing outrageously. They almost knocked down the assistant secretary of defense for roll-on-roll-off (RORO). A Supreme Court associate justice spilled his Kool-Aid down a D.C. schoolteacher’s dress when a kid body-blocked him.

Suddenly a whisper shot through the crowd. Rip Cantrell’s Sahara saucer was just five minutes away. The crowd began to surge toward the doors. The kids cleaned the last of the cookies off the plates and, using their elbows, wormed their way through the adults.

O’Reilly was back at the Oval Office by then. He heard the secretary of defense say to the president, “All the brains in the executive and judicial branches are here. If the aliens plan to decapitate the government, it won’t take much of a bang.”

“If that’s their goal,” the president shot back, “they can do it by merely giving O’Reilly three martinis. Everyone else is just window dressing.”

The Oval Office crowd swarmed out and swept the chief of staff along with them.

The weather was perfect for early November: temperature in the sixties, sunlight diffused by high cirrus, and just enough of a breeze to stir the flags, of which there were many.

Charley Pine brought the saucer down the Potomac at the published speed of planes approaching Reagan National Airport, and at the Washington Monument told the approach controller she had the White House in sight. She banked the saucer and let the computer fly the approach. The saucer hovering over the lawn was immediately visible. She decided to land beside it.

The crowd began to roar as the saucer came into sight. From hundreds of thousands of throats, an inarticulate babbling noise rose so loud that the dignitaries and kids and teachers and television crews on the White House lawn behind their crowd control ropes had trouble hearing each other speak. Still, they all shouted at each other and pointed, adding their voices to the hubbub.

The saucer came on with only a tiny growl from the rockets, which fell silent crossing Constitution Avenue. Now it rushed toward the mansion silently, swiftly, growing larger and larger. It seemed to be traveling much too fast, but the more acute observers noticed that the angle of attack was high, so the speed bled off quickly. The saucer came to a dead stop beside the Roswell saucer, one hundred feet in the air. The landing gear came down; then the saucer with Charley Pine at the controls settled slowly until it was completely at rest.

The hatch in the belly opened; Rip Cantrell dropped out. He turned to give Charley Pine his hand, which she seized and held on to as they made their way out from under the ship. They did it gracefully, even though they had to stoop. Egg Cantrell dropped down, closed the hatch and waddled out ungracefully.

The crowd went nuts, clapping and shouting. The president and Amanda came walking over. As the president shook Rip’s and Uncle Egg’s hands in turn, Charley swept Amanda off the ground in a bear hug. She still was hugging Amanda when she shook the presidential appendage.

Petty Officer Hennessey led the group back into the White House and straight down the hallway to the Oval Office. This time it was just the president, Amanda, Hennessey and the Missouri trio.

“Thank you for coming,” the president said. “I hope you had a good flight.”

“Great,” Charley said. She still had one of Amanda’s hands in hers as they sat side by side on a couch.

“The shuttle from the starship left orbit twenty minutes ago.” The president looked at his watch. “They think it will be here in forty-nine minutes.”

Everyone nodded.

“I have a request,” Amanda’s grandfather continued. “Could one of you folks lower that big saucer to the ground?”

Uncle Egg said, “Sure. I can do that. I want to be close enough to watch it, though.”

“If you would, please. Hennessey, would you escort him out and back?”

“Yes, sir. This way, Mr. Cantrell.”

After they were gone, the president asked Rip and Charley, “Did you folks put that damn thing up there?”

“No,” Rip replied. “Adam Solo did. He thought it would be a nice diversion. Give everyone something to think about besides us.”

The president sighed and leaned back in his chair. “He was certainly right about that. Sorry he’s no longer with us.”

“He was ready to go, I think,” Charley said softly, and smiled at Amanda, who grinned right back. Charley Pine had been a rock star with Amanda ever since she gave her a saucer ride.

“What I’d like,” the child whispered to Charley, “is to fly up to see the starship. Can you help with that?”

“I don’t know,” Charley said. “Let’s wait and see what happens. If things go okay, I’ll ask for both of us.”

“Totally cool.” Amanda beamed at her grandfather and Rip. No two ways about it: She felt fine.

The president, however, was getting fidgety. He asked Rip, “So what do you think? Is this starship in orbit an Imperial Battle Cruiser? Are we going to be entertaining a bunch of Klingons here in a bit?”

Rip grinned. “I doubt if these people are Klingons. Adam Solo was an acute observer, a natural leader, a warrior and a survivor if ever there was one. If this starship crew is anything like him, they are basically good people.”

“People like us?”

“Forget good, which is a value judgment,” Rip said. “The fact is those saucers’ computers recognize our thoughts. The computers were built by people with brains like ours or that feat would be impossible. These folks communicate by telepathy, which also would be impossible if their brains were significantly different. They are probably as far in the technological future from us as we are from Julius Caesar. Still, I don’t think you’ll find them hard to deal with. Be reasonable, and when you must, take no for an answer. After all, this isn’t their first visit. Nor, probably, their tenth.”

“What was Solo doing here on this planet anyway?”

“Food,” Rip said flatly. “Finding ways to genetically engineer new food sources is the only real payoff for the tremendous costs involved in space exploration. They certainly weren’t going to take tons of ore or rare metals into orbit and transport them to another star system. That would be impractical.

“No, Solo was undoubtedly here to collect DNA samples from every living plant and animal he could find. Learning how living creatures that had evolved elsewhere solved the basic functions of life was the goal. Heck, scientists on earth are genetically engineering crops, which are the key to mankind’s future. But Solo was also a librarian. These guys use the living creatures of earth as a giant DNA library.”

The president was horrified. “You mean they put their DNA in us?”

A thoughtful look crossed Rip’s face. “I doubt if it’s their genome. Our researchers are already storing digital data on DNA, then reading the code with lasers and reconverting it to digital computer code. Think about it: If you have a tremendous amount of critical scientific data acquired at great cost or historical data that you don’t want to lose, where would you store it?”

The president look skeptical.

“A star can explode,” Rip continued, “a planet can be destroyed by an asteroid impact, nuclear war could break out … so you convert the records you want to preserve into DNA and insert it into living species on a variety of planets in different solar systems. The creatures that carry it will be unaffected, and they will pass the coded DNA on to their descendants. The data would deteriorate at a very slow, known rate, which is basically the speed that DNA evolves under radiation.

“One of Solo’s tasks was to check on the species carrying code and perhaps insert new code or read old code.”

The president remained silent for almost a minute. Then he said, “Why was Solo stranded?”

“One of his shipmates went nuts and stole their saucer. It had been a hard, difficult voyage. Think of the ancient Polynesians sailing across the Pacific looking for islands. We’ll never know how many set out and died at sea.” Rip shrugged. “I think the other castaways with Solo died or were killed soon afterward. Solo was alone, marooned like Robinson Crusoe, on this planet. This ‘savage planet,’ he called it.’

“Is Earth still their DNA sample lab and library?”

“Of course. As for storing data, perhaps they didn’t store it in the people of earth. Or perhaps not only in people. Other mammals and birds and reptiles could be carriers. One suspects the DNA is in a large number of species to ensure valuable records and data will survive if individual species become extinct. That is the most cost-effective approach, of course, the one with the highest probability of success.”

That was a lot for the president to digest. He glanced at Charley Pine, whose face showed no emotion, then scrutinized Rip’s innocent visage.

After a moment he said, “I’m going to ask the aliens to take both these saucers with them.”

Rip’s and Charley’s eyes met. “We sorta figured that,” Rip said. “They’ve caused a lot of trouble, and yet mankind is better off because we had them for a little while.”

The president didn’t want to argue. In his opinion the verdict wasn’t in on the saucers. Yes, the technology was revitalizing industry, stimulating research, innovation and investment that was leading to millions of new jobs and a new prosperity here and around the globe, but this Fountain of Youth medical stuff had him worried. For the past ten days he’d felt as if he were sitting on a volcano of public and political pressure that threatened to destroy all that had been gained. Now there was the secret DNA library. If the public got wind of that there would be hell to pay.

A loud round of applause sounded outside. The president’s television depicted the Roswell saucer slowly descending with its landing gear out.

“Come on,” Charley said to Amanda. “Let’s give your friends a saucer tour.”

When they were alone, the president said to Rip, “You’re a pretty bright young man.”

“I get by,” Rip acknowledged without a trace of modesty.

That didn’t bother the president, who also had a high opinion of his own abilities. He asked, “What are you going to do with your life, after this?”

Rip sighed. “Darn if I know.”

When the Roswell saucer was on the ground, Uncle Egg said to Petty Officer Hennessey, “Want to climb inside with me? I want to check out the condition of the ship.”

“Sure,” Hennessey said brightly. Man, this navy gig is looking up. A flying saucer, no less.

They climbed inside, and Egg sat in the pilot’s seat and donned the headband. Soon he had the computer probing the health of every system. Yes, as Solo said, the communications equipment was kaput, as was one of the computers. The other two seemed to be functioning normally, however, and the engineering checks seemed fine.

Satisfied, he took off the headband, verbally sketched out the workings of the saucer for the sailor and answered a few questions.

Egg secured the reactor and closed the hatch when they both were once again on the ground.

As he stood up, he heard a voice call, “Arthur Cantrell! Arthur Cantrell!”

He spotted her in the front row of the scientists’ area. Professor Deborah Deehring, the archaeologist. She was smiling and waving. Uncle Egg felt his pulse soar.

He veered and strode toward her. Some Secret Service type with a badge and earpiece, talking into his lapel, gestured to Egg to stay back, but Hennessey took a hand. He had the badge of a presidential aide, so he was a big shot. He raised the rope for Deborah.

She gave Egg a hug, in front of the whole crowd and the television cameras, a hug seen round the globe.

“I was worried about you, Arthur,” she said.

“I was in good hands. Rip and Charley’s.”

They chatted as they strolled toward the Sahara saucer, where Charley Pine stood with a delegation of children around her as she touched the fuselage, pointed at the rocket engines and landing gear, and gave a grade-school explanation of saucer flight.

They stood back until she finished. Charley gave Deborah a little wave, then went under the saucer and opened the hatch, and the kids swarmed in. Egg and Deborah followed them.

Inside, Egg and Professor Deehring stood back while the kids romped and listened to Charley’s explanations. After about five minutes, Charley shooed the kids out and followed them, leaving the two adults alone. Egg seated Deborah in the pilot’s seat, put a headband on her and turned on the power.

She sat mesmerized as she once again explored the memories of the computers and the displays on the panel tracked her progress. Finally, almost reluctantly, she took off the headband.

“Oh, Arthur.”

Egg laughed. “Life holds its surprises.”

“No wonder you were so enthralled. There is so much information, it would take ten lifetimes to even sort through it, much less analyze it. Are you going to—?”

“No,” he said firmly. “Charley and Rip thought our flight here this morning was our last saucer flight, and I think they are right. The saucer gives too much. Just too much. Mankind isn’t ready yet.”

Egg glanced at his watch. “The shuttle from the starship should be here within minutes. Let’s get out and watch it land. See how the president handles it.”

“And the First Granddaughter,” Deborah added. “Amanda.”

“She’ll do fine,” Egg replied. “It’s the grandfather I’m worried about. All this talk about Fountain of Youth pills, eternal life by prescription … It would be madness, but the public and politicians are screaming for it.”

“That information is in these computers, isn’t it?”

“Yes. If the aliens don’t want these ships back, Rip, Charley and I agreed to launch them into the sun.”