“Where…?”
“Over here by the landing gear. That’s good enough.”
They zipped both bags together, shed their clothes and crawled in. Thirty minutes later they slipped into exhausted sleep.
Adam Solo stayed in the bar until he was the last man left standing. The women had wandered out hours earlier. He had drunk more beer than any of the Aussies but was apparently unaffected. Four men were passed out on the floor when he drained his mug for the last time. Solo nodded at the bartender and stepped over a drunk on his way to the door.
Outside he paused and looked around to see who was watching in this last hour before dawn. Solo suspected there was a satellite telephone or shortwave radio somewhere nearby, and if so it was absolutely inevitable that news of the saucer’s arrival had gone forth. He wondered just how much time they had before the Australian army or Harrison Douglas and Johnny Murkowsky came charging over the hill.
He heard a voice in his head, speaking breathlessly and quickly. They are here. The saucer is here!
Solo walked the half mile to the saucer and stood looking around. He saw no one except Rip and Charley sound asleep, wrapped together like otters. Solo opened the saucer’s hatch and climbed in.
Egg was stretched out on the back bench seats snoring gently.
Solo pulled the power knob out to the first detent; he heard the gentle hum from the machinery spaces behind him as the computer screens exploded into life. He donned the headset lying on the console in front of him.
Perhaps it was the gentle, barely audible hum from the panel behind him that woke Egg. He realized he was awake and opened his eyes to see Solo’s back partially blocking one of the computer screens. The other two were filled with symbols flashing and dancing, actually three-dimensional holographic displays, constantly changing.
Egg arose and stood. He moved so he could see all three screens. The light reflected from Solo’s face, which was almost in profile. Egg could see his serious expression, concentrating.
His eyes went to the screen. It was as if he were watching a motion picture on fast forward. Some of the images registered on Egg’s retinas: ships, combat, castles, Indian villages, Vikings in helmets, tall sailing ships, World War I combat, factories, perhaps a university …
Solo was transmitting his memories, his report, to the starship. More than a thousand years of life, everything he had learned. On one screen Egg saw formulas dance, squiggling and squirming in constant mutation. On the third were plants, trees, animals, snakes, bugs, beetles, mosquitoes, insects of all types …
After five minutes or so the screens became composed. Two of them faded to dots, then went dark. Only the center screen continued to change, but more sedately. Finally it too went into a rest state.
Solo took off the headset and, for the first time, looked at Egg.
“When are they coming?” Egg asked.
Soon.
The fact that Solo didn’t speak, yet Egg heard his voice, unnerved him. “How soon?” he asked aloud.
Solo seemed to sense Egg’s discomfort and spoke aloud. “They are inside the moon’s orbit, decelerating. These things take time.”
“So do we stay here?”
“Someone has called the Australian government on a shortwave radio. A man. He may be believed, he may not. They may come today, they may not.”
For the first time, Egg realized that Solo didn’t look as he had since he had known him. He looked older. His face was lined; his shoulders sagged.
“How much did you have to drink?” he asked accusingly.
A grin flickered across Solo’s face. “Too much,” he said. “It used to be that alcohol didn’t affect me much. If at all. But tonight…” He sighed and rubbed his face with his hands. “I’m a bit intoxicated. I can feel it.”
Solo looked at his hands in the glow of the cockpit lights. Even Egg could see that they looked older, looked like the hands of a man in his sixties or seventies. Lean, gnarled, scarred, mottled.
Solo drew his hands away hastily.
Time is marching on.
Yes, it is, Egg thought. It does that for all of us.
What a life I’ve had. I want to go home, but that’s ridiculous. My family has been gone for a thousand years. I know none of these people who are coming. None of them know me. They thought I was dead, dead for a thousand years. I am a living fossil, a fossil with too many memories, too many things to regret. Too many dreams that ended in ashes.
“How long can we stay here in Australia?” Egg asked. He hadn’t gotten used to communicating without talking.
Solo threw up his hands. “I don’t know.” He paused. “Rip and Charley need their sleep, and so do I.” He punched in the power knob, turning off the saucer’s machinery. Slowly, carefully, Solo eased himself out of the pilot’s seat. He took several steps over to the bench seats and spread his sleeping bag.
As he crawled into it, Egg asked, “How do you feel about reporting to your people?”
“I don’t know.” He paused. “Mixed emotions. A load off, I guess.”
Egg went to the hatch and looked down. He heard Solo’s voice in his head. They say it’s the journey, not the destination, that is important. But sooner or later, eventually, you get there. Then the journey is over.
Egg lowered himself through the hatch. He sat with his back against one of the saucer’s legs as the stars faded and dawn slowly crept up the sky. He was still there, watching, when the sun finally peeped over the earth’s rim.
13
“Do we really need Adam Solo or a saucer computer?” Johnny Murkowsky asked Harrison Douglas. They were sitting in two First Class seats just behind the cockpit of the Boeing 747 taking them to Australia. Their private army was still sprawled out in the cheap seats aft snoring loudly. “We’re only three or four years from having drugs that alter the human genome; after all, that is all that Solo could tell us. We’re almost there without him.”
“Are you sure?” Dr. Harrison Douglas grumped. “Heck, how do your scientists even know they are on the right track?”
“They are! They are. We’re getting results.”
“On mice! Get real, Johnny. With the secrets from a saucer we could jump a couple of generations of research, leapfrog forty, fifty, maybe even a hundred years into the future. Skip the errors and blind alleys that lead nowhere. What would that be worth?”
When Murkowsky didn’t immediately answer, Douglas pressed. “In billions?”
Space Command saw the starship first. It was merely a blip on a radar used for keeping track of satellites. At first there was some confusion, since the blip didn’t coincide with any known satellite position, and when it quickly became apparent that the blip wasn’t in orbit, alarms sounded. Could it be an ICBM inbound from North Korea or Iran? No.
The duty officer called his superior, a general, who called his boss. The civilian spy in Space Command put in a satellite call to Johnny Murkowsky and got him at 36,000 feet over the coast of Australia.
“A starship, they think. Inbound. Maybe two days out at its present distance and velocity.”
Johnny Murkowsky’s eyebrows went up toward his receding hairline. Holy jumping cats!
“Keep me advised,” he told his spy.
“I am thinking of retiring next month,” the man said. “I’ll need a job that pays a couple hundred thousand a year. Maybe work half a day, three days a week.”