Petty Officer Hennessey cleared his throat. The president looked at him with raised eyebrows.
“Perhaps, sir, you could say that you are actually looking forward to the aliens’ visit. That you plan to bring your granddaughter along. I’ll bet she’d get a real charge out of meeting the alien captain.”
The president’s first reaction was that his daughter would never, ever let her daughter within ten miles of an alien. Then again, maybe she could be finagled. His daughter was a nervous Nellie, but his granddaughter, Amanda, who just had her tenth birthday, certainly wasn’t. Heck, she had even ridden with him in a saucer flown by Charley Pine six weeks or so ago, when Charley and Rip were preparing to zip off to the moon to fight it out with the Frenchies and save the world. He would ask Amanda and let her handle her mother. Yeah.
“That,” he told Petty Officer Hennessey, “is a darn good idea. When we get back upstairs, I’ll call Amanda to see if she is up for the adventure.” He skewered O’Reilly with his eyes. “Wish we had some other folks around here doing some serious thinking.”
That comment merely bounced off O’Reilly. He had spent too many years with the president to let the old fart’s jibes bother him. “About the saucer just now reentering the atmosphere after launching from Australia … perhaps an announcement by the press secretary? He’s feeling a bit left out of the excitement.”
“No announcement. Tell that moron if he opens his mouth I’ll throttle him. Tell Space Command to keep the lid on too.”
People nowadays get too much information, the president told himself, and they don’t know what to do with it. He often found himself in precisely that situation.
Just for the heck of it, he flipped a television to CNBC, the business channel. Another rough day on Wall Street. Would the impending alien visit be good or bad for business? Apparently the day traders, speculators, mutual fund managers and mom-and-pop investors couldn’t decide, so the market was going up and down like a pump handle. The richest old crock in America, multibillionaire publicity hound Warren Buffett, gave a two-minute interview. He was buying on the dips, he said. “The world is not coming to an end. People will still need food, clothes, housing and wheels. Plus cell phones, liquor, diapers, pills and all the rest of it.”
The president glanced at Hennessey, who met his gaze and nodded. Yep, more common sense.
Reassured, the president began to feel better. His stomach stopped aching, at least for a moment.
“Mr. President,” P. J. O’Reilly said, in his take-charge persona, “I want to have the photographer take some shots of you at your desk in the Oval Office looking pensive and serious. Somber, but in charge. Thinking deep, complex thoughts, conscious of your moral responsibility for the fate of the world, which you are holding in your two mortal hands. Maybe we could get a couple of shots of you actually looking at your hands. I’ll release the photos immediately. The world will see that you are on the job, managing the alien crisis, like JFK during the Cuban Missile Crisis.”
The president’s eyes rolled back into his head. He fought to refocus on his chief of staff, who looked particularly loathsome today. Perhaps he could offer him to the aliens as a protein snack.
“Okay. Hennessey, come with me. O’Reilly, have someone bring us dinner.”
14
After they refueled from Lake Powell, Charley Pine flew the saucer south through the deepening canyon of the Colorado River. It was a night full of stars, with the moon still down, so she hoped that no one along the canyon would see the black saucer ghosting along at about a hundred knots low above the river. She could see on the computer screen the canyon walls rising vertically on both sides above her vision, so she felt as if she were a little girl tiptoeing along a hallway.
She was perhaps thirty miles below the Glen Canyon Dam when she hit some power lines stretched across the river. She had about a second’s warning — they appeared as thin filaments across her screen — then she hit them. The saucer slipped between them effortlessly, forcing one line over the top and one underneath. A power surge shot through the saucer, and the instrument panel went black.
Charley Pine felt the adrenaline surge through her veins. The Roswell saucer crashed during a lightning storm. Then the computer screens came back to life and all again appeared normal. To her infinite relief, she saw that she was still in the center of the canyon, still level, still in control … Am I in control?
She flicked the stick automatically. The saucer responded, like an obedient dog. Five degrees left wing down, now five right, now level again.
“That was exciting,” Rip said. He was standing beside her.
“That was a lummer,” she told him nervously. “A shot of cold urine to the heart.”
“You live for those.”
“Right. How is Solo?”
I am okay, Charley. Now I need to explain what to do. There is a beach on the north side of the river, perhaps a hundred miles ahead. It is not sand, but erosional debris that washed down a canyon and accumulated for perhaps ten million years. The river won’t move it for a long time. We will land there, get out of the saucer, and get on top of it.
“On top?”
On top.
On they flew, deeper and deeper into the Grand Canyon, with Charley keeping the saucer about a hundred feet above the ribbon of water that stretched like a crooked road on the computer screen before her.
About an hour later she found the ledge. It slanted toward the river but looked okay. She gingerly lowered the legs of the saucer and set it down.
We will need all our supplies. We can remain here until they come.
They.
Until they come.
Charley Pine felt a shiver run down her spine.
Rip opened the hatch and began shoving sleeping bags and sacks through the opening. Egg helped Adam Solo walk over to the hole, sit on the edge and ease himself through; then Rip assisted him out from under the saucer.
“Next time, tell them to put the hatch on top,” Rip told Solo.
“The belly was the cheapest spot.”
When he had Solo out of earshot of Egg and Charley, he asked, “So how are you really doing?”
“I’m dying, I think. Bleeding internally. My body isn’t repairing itself quickly enough.”
Rip took that comment in silence.
“Don’t tell the others,” Solo said. “They have enough to worry about.”
“And I don’t? But I think they already know.”
“Perhaps,” Solo admitted. “When we have our gear unloaded and the hatch closed, have Charley lift the saucer and raise the gear, then lower the ship onto its belly so that we can climb on top. The place we want is a cliff dwelling in the side of a cliff about five hundred feet below the South Rim, about two miles west of here.”
“And when we’re there?”
“Program the saucer to go into a polar orbit that will bring it back over us on every pass.”
There were many things Rip wanted to ask Solo, who was the most unique human he had ever met. Twelve hundred, thirteen hundred years on earth, a youth from a planet in another star system, crossing the interstellar vastness … and yet Rip didn’t want to ask. Perhaps, as Solo remarked once in passing, he had lived too long, experienced too much, left too many loved ones behind.
As Rip watched the saucer descend onto its belly, held level by Charley, he helped Solo climb onto its dry, slick surface. He thought about the past, not about the immediate future.