“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.
“What do you think of the Viking ship?” Rip asked softly, so only Egg could hear.
“It’s real, all right.” Egg sighed. “Every museum on the planet would love to have it. The wood has deteriorated, but still … Rip, it’s as if they pulled it up on the beach, climbed down and walked away, intending to come back, but they never did. Or when they returned a slab had fallen from the rock roof, or perhaps the whole mountain had shifted and they couldn’t get their ship out of what had become a cave.”
Egg warmed his hands at the fire and finally began inspecting the interior of the cave, what he could see. The only illumination was from the fire, so it was difficult. The ceiling appeared to be about eighty feet high.
“Smoke is rising nicely,” Rip observed. “There might be a hole or crack in the roof.”
Using the flashlight, Egg inspected the rear wall of the cave. He found a Celtic rune hacked into the stone. He cast the beam around to see what else might be there, then studied the rune by flashlight.
Solo joined him. “I buried a man here,” he said. “Scurvy, starvation, and a respiratory infection. He didn’t last long.”
“To die here in this wilderness…” Egg looked around again with the flashlight’s beam.
“We all have to die someplace, sometime,” Solo said curtly. “He died among friends, and this is as good a place as any.”
“How would you know? You’re the man who doesn’t die.”
“Oh no, Egg Cantrell. You have that wrong. I am just a man who is living a little longer. But my time will come. Rest assured of that.”
The night could have been worse, Charley Pine reflected. The fire burned well, fed by dry wood that burned quickly, the cave was reasonably warm, and the sleeping bags were comfy. Before she drifted off, she checked her companions, who were all snuggled up in their bags. Uncle Egg snored softly.
On the far wall of the cave, in the dim reflected firelight, beyond the dark, ovoid shape of the saucer sitting on its landing gear, she could just see the outline of the Viking ship.
She was studying its shadow on the cave wall when she drifted off to sleep.
Petty Officer Hennessey wasn’t the only person on the planet to connect two orbiting saucers with the possible arrival of a mother ship. People tweeted about the possibility; then it went viral on Facebook and the other social networking sites. Within minutes, the possibility became a certainty and everyone everywhere knew everything about it and was absolutely sure. After all, we’re wired up now.
The world’s population was a bit nervous. As the minutes ticked by, they became more nervous. Visions of alien space fighters zapping everything, ten-foot-tall green predators with spiderlike mandibles catching and gobbling folks, starvation, anarchy, chaos and civilization in ashes flashed through the collective mind. The possibilities went from the triple-digit cable channels to the network news shows and the world’s front pages as fast as fingers could type, which was almost at the speed of light.