Douglas smacked a fist into the palm of his other hand. Yes, the people of the saucers must have possessed an antiaging drug.
Douglas was musing on how much money such a drug would make World, and himself, of course, the CEO who made it happen, when he heard Captain Johnson give a shout.
Douglas glanced through the porthole. He saw waves washing over a shape even darker than the night sea.
“It’s up!” he said excitedly. With that he grabbed the foul-weather coat and dashed through the door onto the bridge. He went straight through, right by the captain, onto the open wing of the bridge and charged down a ladder to the main deck.
Adam Solo slowly folded the page of the newspaper that contained the story of the Australian artifact and placed it in his shirt pocket. He pulled on a cap and stepped onto the bridge. Ignoring the captain at the helm, Solo walked to the unprotected wing of the bridge and gazed down into the heaving dark sea as the wind and rain tore at him. The wind threatened to tear his cap from his head, so he removed it. Dr. Douglas was there on the main deck at the rail, holding on with both hands.
Floodlights from both ships lit the area between the ships and the heavy cables that disappeared into the water. From the angle of the cables, it was obvious that what they held was just beneath the surface. Snatches of the commands the chief on deck shouted to the winch operators reached Solo. Gazing intently at the scene before him, he ignored them.
As Solo watched, swells separated the ships slightly, tightening the cables, and something again broke the surface. It was a mound, dark as the black water; swells broke over it.
As quickly as it came into view, the shape disappeared again as the ships rolled toward each other.
Over the next five minutes the deck crews aboard both ships tightened their cables inch by inch, lifting the black shape to the surface again, then higher and higher until finally it was free of the water and hung suspended between the ships. The spotlights played upon it, a black, saucer-shaped object, perfectly round and thickest in the middle. It was not small — the diameter was about ninety feet — and it was heavy; the cables that held it were taut as violin strings, and the ships listed toward it a noticeable amount.
Solo stepped back into the sheltered area of the bridge and wiped the rain from his hair with his hand, then settled the cap onto his head as he listened to the voices on the bridge loudspeaker. The deck chiefs of this ship and the other vessel were talking to each other on handheld radios, coordinating their efforts as the saucer was inched over the deck of this ship. The ship’s radio picked up the conversation and piped it here so that the captain could listen in and, if he wished, take part in the conversation.
A moment later Dr. Douglas came in from the bridge wing, pulling the door shut behind him and brushing water from his coat.
“Well, we got it up, Doctor,” Captain Johnson said heartily. “And they said it couldn’t be done. Ha! You owe us some serious money.”
“I will when you have it safely on the dock in Newark,” Douglas replied.
“We’ll get ’er there, you can bet on that,” Johnson said confidently. “The company has big money ridin’ on it. They promised every man in the crew a bonus, including me. Gonna be nice money, and I’ll be damn glad to get it.”
It took twenty minutes for the deck crew to get the dark, ominous ovoid shape deposited onto the waiting timbers on Atlantic Queen’s deck and lashed down. The saucer was so large it filled the space between the bridge and the forward crane and protruded over both rails. It seemed to dwarf the ship on which it rode, pushing it deeper into the sea.
When the cables that had lifted the saucer from the sea floor had been released, the sea anchors were brought aboard and the ship got under way. Solo felt the ride improve immediately as the screws bit into the dark water. The other ship, which had helped raise the saucer, had already dissolved into the darkness.
“There you are,” Johnson said heartily to Douglas, who had his nose almost against the window, staring at the spaceship. “Your flyin’ saucer’s settin’ like a hen on her nest, safe and sound, and she ain’t goin’ noplace.”
Douglas flashed a grin and dashed for the ladder to the main deck.
Solo went back into the navigator’s shack. He emerged seconds later carrying a hard plastic case and descended the bridge wing ladder to the main deck, where the sailors were milling around, inspecting the saucer while they rigged ropes across it and chained the ropes to padeyes in the deck. Several of them were touching the machine … and marveling.
As Douglas watched, Solo opened his case, took out a wand and adjusted the switches and knobs within, then donned a headset. Carrying the instrument case, he began a careful inspection of the saucer, all of it that he could see from the deck. He even climbed the mast of the forward crane to get a look at the top of it, then returned to the deck. As he walked and climbed around he glanced occasionally at the gauges in his case, but mostly he concentrated on visually inspecting the surface of the ship. He could see no damage whatsoever.
Douglas asked him a couple of questions, but Solo didn’t answer, so eventually he stopped asking. One by one the tired sailors left the deck, heading for their berths. They had been hard at work for almost twenty hours and were exhausted.
Solo crawled under the saucer and lay there studying his instrument. Finally he took off his headset, stowed it back inside the case and closed it.
One of the officers squatted down a few feet away. This was the first mate. “No radiation?” he asked Solo. The sailor was in his early thirties, with unkempt wind-blown hair and acne scars on his face.
“Doesn’t seem to be.”
“Boy, that’s amazing.” The mate reached and placed his hand on the cold black surface immediately over his head. “So this is the one that went straight into the ocean like a bullet from over a hundred thousand feet up,” said the mate, whose name was DeVries. “Yeah, I heard all about it on TV. Saw all those reruns of the saucers chasin’ each other over Manhattan. Bet this thing made one hell of a splash when it hit! I didn’t figure we’d find it in one piece, I can tell you. An impact like that…”
Solo studied the belly of the saucer as the raw sea wind played with his hair. At least here, under the saucer, he was sheltered from the rain.
“Everything inside is probably torn loose, I figure,” DeVries continued, warming to his subject. “Scrambled up inside there like a dozen broken eggs. And that crazy Frenchman flying it must still be inside, squashed flat as a road-killed possum. Couldn’t nobody live through a smashup like that. He’s gotta be as dead as Napoleon Bonaparte and getting pretty ripe, I’ll bet. This thing’s been in the water a whole month.”
The first mate turned to Douglas and asked, “So, Doctor, how come you’re spending all this money raisin’ this flyin’ saucer off the ocean floor?”
Douglas said matter-of-factly, “Scientific curiosity.”
“Eight million bucks is a lot to pay to scratch that itch,” DeVries said thoughtfully, a remark Douglas let pass without comment. The salvage operation was going to cost Douglas at least that much.
As those two watched, Adam Solo had placed his hand on the hatch handle and held it there. Now, after ten seconds or so, he pulled down on one end of the handle and turned it sideways. The handle rotated and the hatch opened above his head. Water began dripping out.
Not much, but some. The saucer had been lying in 250 feet of water; if the integrity of the hull had been broken, seawater under pressure would have filled the interior. This might be leakage from the ship’s tank, or merely condensation. Solo wiped a drip off the hatch lip and tasted it. He was relieved — it wasn’t saltwater.