She flashed him a grin, lifted the saucer and snapped up the gear as she started the ship moving. Turned to align it with Egg’s grass runway, got it accelerating with the antigravity rings and lit the rockets. The acceleration came on with a heavy push. The nose came up, and up and up. In about forty seconds nothing could be seen through the heavy canopy except high, thin cirrus clouds and patches of blue sky. A minute later they left the cirrus behind, and the sky began to darken as the atmosphere thinned.
Hello, Ms. Pine. The voice in Charley’s head startled her. For a second she thought it was Solo, but of course it couldn’t be.
“Hello, yourself,” she replied.
I am the communications officer of the starship over your planet. I wonder if I might access your computer to learn if there are any biological threats that we should take precautions for.
She tried to pick up an accent, a gender indication, something, but it wasn’t there. The message was more a thought than a voice. “We have more bacteria and viruses than you can imagine,” Charley said. “We don’t even have names for all of them.”
Precisely. No doubt Adam Solo left a great deal of information on the computer of your saucer that would be of interest to us.
“Access away,” Charley said.
Thank you.
When the voice didn’t say anything else, she gave Rip and Uncle Egg the gist of the conversation.
“Let’s hope they all don’t drop dead of something, like the Martians did in War of the Worlds,” Egg remarked.
“Well, Solo didn’t, and he was probably exposed to every bug and virus on the planet in his thirteen hundred years here.”
Egg and Rip stood on each side of the pilot’s seat and stared out the canopy at the earth and clouds below and the stars in the dark sky above.
“A saucer has gotten airborne from Missouri, Mr. President,” the aide said. “The FAA says Charlotte Pine is the pilot. She filed a flight plan with the White House as her destination.”
“A flight plan?”
“Yes, sir. The FAA demanded a flight plan, they said.”
“God bless the FAA.”
The aide thought that reply sarcastic and took her leave. Petty Officer Third Class Hennessey watched her go. She was kinda cute, he thought, not for the first time. He had hit her up for a date last week and had been refused. He had gotten the impression that enlisted men were beneath her notice. Oh, well.
First Granddaughter Amanda and three of her school chums came running into the room. The Secret Service had always let her roam at will when she visited, a freedom she took full advantage of now that she had a dozen of her school friends here to share the arrival of the starship delegation.
The secretary of state eyed the kids without affection. This meeting with the aliens was going to be diplomacy of the first order of magnitude, and he suspected kids arcing around would only complicate things. He worried about protocol, about crowd control, about communications with the aliens …
“Just how did the aliens communicate with us?” he asked the president.
“Comm won’t be a problem,” the elected one said evasively, to P. J. O’Reilly’s disgust. The president had merely given him a handwritten memo about a message he had received from the aliens, told him to pass it to the press and refused to answer questions about it. The Great One was playing his cards close to his vest, as usual.
Except for the kids, everyone was nervous — you could see it in their faces and body language. Well, everyone but the sailor, O’Reilly noted. He looked as if he were patiently waiting for an order to weigh the anchor — just another great navy day.
O’Reilly wandered into the hallway, which was packed with cabinet secretaries, undersecretaries, deputy secretaries, assistant secretaries and agency hoohahs high and low from all over the government. More officials stood around the conference room swilling Kool-Aid, nibbling stale cookies, nervously chewing their fingernails and watching two televisions.
The air was electric with anticipation and excitement both inside the White House and out in the streets, which one announcer said contained over a half-million people within ten blocks of the Executive Mansion in all directions. The National Guard was helping D.C. and federal police with crowd control. People with heart conditions had been warned to stay home because getting emergency vehicles through the crowds would be problematic, at best. Loudspeakers had been set up so the crowd in the streets and parks could hear the words of the diplomats as they were spoken on the White House lawn.
The kids swooped in and raided the cookie plates. They each took a handful, then scampered off, giggling and whispering and laughing outrageously. They almost knocked down the assistant secretary of defense for roll-on-roll-off (RORO). A Supreme Court associate justice spilled his Kool-Aid down a D.C. schoolteacher’s dress when a kid body-blocked him.
Suddenly a whisper shot through the crowd. Rip Cantrell’s Sahara saucer was just five minutes away. The crowd began to surge toward the doors. The kids cleaned the last of the cookies off the plates and, using their elbows, wormed their way through the adults.
O’Reilly was back at the Oval Office by then. He heard the secretary of defense say to the president, “All the brains in the executive and judicial branches are here. If the aliens plan to decapitate the government, it won’t take much of a bang.”
“If that’s their goal,” the president shot back, “they can do it by merely giving O’Reilly three martinis. Everyone else is just window dressing.”
The Oval Office crowd swarmed out and swept the chief of staff along with them.
The weather was perfect for early November: temperature in the sixties, sunlight diffused by high cirrus, and just enough of a breeze to stir the flags, of which there were many.
Charley Pine brought the saucer down the Potomac at the published speed of planes approaching Reagan National Airport, and at the Washington Monument told the approach controller she had the White House in sight. She banked the saucer and let the computer fly the approach. The saucer hovering over the lawn was immediately visible. She decided to land beside it.
The crowd began to roar as the saucer came into sight. From hundreds of thousands of throats, an inarticulate babbling noise rose so loud that the dignitaries and kids and teachers and television crews on the White House lawn behind their crowd control ropes had trouble hearing each other speak. Still, they all shouted at each other and pointed, adding their voices to the hubbub.
The saucer came on with only a tiny growl from the rockets, which fell silent crossing Constitution Avenue. Now it rushed toward the mansion silently, swiftly, growing larger and larger. It seemed to be traveling much too fast, but the more acute observers noticed that the angle of attack was high, so the speed bled off quickly. The saucer came to a dead stop beside the Roswell saucer, one hundred feet in the air. The landing gear came down; then the saucer with Charley Pine at the controls settled slowly until it was completely at rest.
The hatch in the belly opened; Rip Cantrell dropped out. He turned to give Charley Pine his hand, which she seized and held on to as they made their way out from under the ship. They did it gracefully, even though they had to stoop. Egg Cantrell dropped down, closed the hatch and waddled out ungracefully.
The crowd went nuts, clapping and shouting. The president and Amanda came walking over. As the president shook Rip’s and Uncle Egg’s hands in turn, Charley swept Amanda off the ground in a bear hug. She still was hugging Amanda when she shook the presidential appendage.
Petty Officer Hennessey led the group back into the White House and straight down the hallway to the Oval Office. This time it was just the president, Amanda, Hennessey and the Missouri trio.