Saucer: The Conquest

17

Pierre Artois had stationed a man on top of the lunar base in a space suit to radio him firsthand reports of the saucer battle. Each suit had a radio in the helmet; the transmissions were picked up by a small antenna mounted on the top of the base air lock. With the base radio tower in pieces, these transmissions were not automatically rebroad-cast to earth, nor could Pierre talk to or hear Mission Control in France on the com center radios. The man outside spotted the exhaust plume of the saucer leaving the moon. He reported it to Pierre.

"Which one is it?" Pierre asked, a question that revealed the depths of his despair, because even he knew that there was no way to tell one saucer from the other from a distance. And the distance was great, at least twenty miles.

"I don't know."

"Keep watching," Pierre ordered, trying to calm himself. He made a transmission on the handheld, calling Jean-Paul Lalouette.

There was no answer.

Julie strummed her fingers on top of one of the useless large radio transmitters, which didn't help the emperor's mood. He called several more times on the small radio before he finally gave up and laid it on the plastic counter. Henri Salmon, Fry One and Claudine Courbet were also in the com center, so he weighed his words before he spoke.

"It must have been Charley Pine," he said. "Lalouette probably frightened her."

Julie said nothing as Pierre recalled his contacts with the American pilot. She never struck him as a woman who would frighten easily. He cursed under his breath.

Of course, Jean-Paul Lalouette wasn't a person who would turn tail and run from a fight either. He was French, after all, and he believed body and soul in the glory of Pierre's crusade.

"Or something went tragically wrong," he admitted aloud.

"Newton Chadwick," Julie said bitterly.

Ah, yes, Pierre thought. Chadwick, a man without a shred of honor. If something happened to Lalouette, Chadwick would abandon the fight, abandon the people on the lunar base, abandon the dream of world conquest, abandon everything to save his own skin. If something happened to Lalouette, Chadwick would run like a rabbit. He was that kind of man.

"Without a saucer, how are we going to get back to earth?" Claudine Courbet asked rhetorically. Pierre and the other two men stared at her.

"Putting Chadwick in the saucer with Lalouette was a mistake," Julie said, unable to resist a dig at Pierre's decision to send them both to shoot down Pine. 'You fool!" she continued shrilly, addressing the emperor and unable to control the timbre of her voice. "You taught Pine to fly the space-planes, you allowed her to come to the moon when she knew nothing of our plans, you failed to prevent her escape with the spaceplane, and you sent a person of dubious loyalty with Lalouette in our only possible transport off this miserable rock."

Pierre sat frozen, unable to think, unable to analyze the situation. Never in his worst nightmares had he envisioned a situation like this. Marooned on the moon!

Julie unconsciously brushed the hair back from her forehead and eyes. In times past Pierre had thought the habitual gesture captivating, but he didn't now.

He watched mesmerized as Julie took several deep breaths and by sheer force of will brought herself back under icy control. "Fortunately all is not lost," she said. "We still have Egg Cantrell. Pine and her boy-toy will undoubtedly try to rescue him. They will land their saucer somewhere nearby. We must have that saucer."

She scrutinized the faces of her listeners, ignoring Pierre. Then she looked directly into the eyes of Henri Salmon and began issuing orders.

When she finished, Julie Artois sent everyone off to make preparations. Pierre remained, listlessly staring at the useless radios.

She waited for him to meet her eyes, but he didn't. After a moment she walked out. Salmon was heading into the mess hall to address the assembled base personnel when she saw him. She caught his eye and motioned for him to follow her. They ducked into the Artois living compartment and shut the door.

"You saw him. Do you think he is still capable of leading us?" Julie asked bluntly.

Salmon considered carefully. He wasn't sure where she was going with this and didn't want to make a mistake. They needed the saucer, which had a limited carrying capacity.

Regardless of how the cake was cut, many of the base personnel would have to be left behind. Henri Salmon didn't want to be one of them.

"I don't know," he said after a pause.

"Oh, you know," she said, "and you are hedging." She moved closer, reached for his hand and placed it on her breast. "That's what you want, isn't it? I've seen the way you look at me."

"You are a beautiful woman," Salmon admitted.

"The conquest of earth was my idea," Julie said, holding his hand in place and staring into his eyes. "I thought Pierre was the man who could do it, but when major difficulties arose, he folded. You, I think, are made of sterner stuff."

Salmon said nothing. He was very aware of the ripe firmness of her breast. The rumors weren't true, he decided. She had not had surgical enhancement.

"If we take the saucer to earth, negotiate, then return, the antigravity beam generator will still be here. We can still force the world's governments to yield. Honor, power, glory, wealth — it can all be ours. You and I — we can rule a united earth!"

Salmon felt the power of her personality. And he wanted off the moon. He swept her into his arms and kissed her.

Rip Cantrell and Charley Pine stared through the canopy of their saucer at the lunar base, which was about two miles away. The saucer was behind a ridge northwest of the base, with just the canopy protruding above the bare rock ledge. The only sign of man that they could see was the pile of rubble that had been the radio tower — and the tiny figure of an individual in a space suit standing near it. The sun reflecting off his silver space suit made him readily visible.

"So what do you think?" Rip asked.

"I dunno."

"We are going to have to go in there after Egg."

"I suppose."

"Can you think of another way?"

"Make them send him out."

"How?"

"That's the problem," she admitted, and inadvertently glanced upward. The other saucer had left an hour ago in a plume of rocket exhaust, on its way into orbit or back to earth. Or, perhaps, leaving the area so that it could reenter later and try to ambush her and Rip, one more time. She wished she knew which of the three possibilities was the fact.

Rip seemed to read her thoughts. "You must have hurt him badly," he said.

"Umm."

"Flying across the antimatter stream at point-blank range — something must have popped in that saucer. Telling the saucer to pull up and fire the rocket engines may have been Lalouette's last conscious thought. He might 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.

O'Reilly couldn't sit still. He bounded from his chair and paced the small office. The president kept his gaze riveted on the speaker of the telephone, waiting.