The lighted canopy was no longer visible. For a few seconds Douglas and DeVries could see a glint of moonlight reflecting off the dark upper surface of the spaceship, then they lost it. The saucer disappeared into the night.
“If that doesn’t take the cake! The bastard stole it!” exclaimed Harrison Douglas, and he shook his fist in the direction in which the saucer had disappeared. “I’ll get you, Solo, and I’ll get that ship back. So help me God!”
2
Rip Cantrell, Charley Pine and Rip’s Uncle Egg sat on wooden crates staring dejectedly at the objects arranged on the floor of the warehouse. The stuff looked like junk that had been removed from an abandoned chicken coop. Just what the twisted metal and shattered composite material, if that was what it was, might have been before they were destroyed upon entry to the earth’s atmosphere and eons of submergence in the sea, no one could say.
Egg turned to the other people there, a man and woman from the Australian Archaeological Commission, and an American archaeologist who was there at Egg’s invitation, Deborah Deehring. “It’s hopeless,” he said. “There’s no way to identify the pieces in this condition.”
He nodded toward a schematic that was pinned to a wall. “This is what the computer from the Sahara saucer says the starships looked like then. I don’t know if the design changed or not.” He swept his hand toward the stuff on the warehouse floor. “I can’t identify one piece.”
Rip was an athletic young man of twenty-three years. His life had taken a hard right turn when, as part of a seismic survey crew, he discovered a flying saucer embedded in a sandstone ledge in the Sahara and dug it out.
Charlotte “Charley” Pine, thirty-one years old, had been a civilian member of an air force UFO team that investigated the Sahara saucer, and she was the one who flew it away when armed thugs tried to confiscate it. A graduate of the U.S. Air Force Academy, she had been a fighter pilot, then a test pilot, before resigning from the service. Rip used to refer to her despairingly as “an older woman.” He didn’t do that these days.
Egg Cantrell, Rip’s uncle, was an engineer and inventor. He was fiftyish and spry, with an ovoid shape, hence his nickname, which he didn’t mind. A consummate realist, Egg accepted the world as he found it and tried mightily to understand.
Professor Deborah Deehring was athletic and blond and had huge, intense blue eyes. When she focused those eyes on Egg and smiled, he felt a very curious sensation. He liked the sensation, and Deborah, a lot.
For the past two weeks, Charley, Rip, Uncle Egg and Deborah had stirred through this pile of junk the Australians had found embedded in the Great Barrier Reef. It was, the Australians believed, an ancient starship, perhaps the very one that brought Rip’s saucer to this galaxy 140,000 years ago. They reached this conclusion based on an analysis of the metal removed from the reef, and from the geology of the reef construction, which proved the metal had been there for a long, long time.
However, Egg wasn’t sure that the Australian scientists were right. If this stuff was originally part of a starship, the metal must have been supercooled in space, heated to astronomical temperatures on its trip into the earth’s atmosphere and subjected to a salt bath for over a hundred millennia. Who knows what its original molecular composition might have been? Nor could anyone now recognize the metal. All everyone could agree upon was that it was old and weird. They also agreed that if they were indeed looking at the carcass of a starship, it certainly couldn’t be the one that delivered the Roswell saucer, which crashed in New Mexico in 1947 and had ended up in the Atlantic Ocean.
“We just don’t know how often earth has been visited by extraterrestrials,” Egg said dejectedly. “For all we know, that metal is a million years old. We have no idea how fast saltwater would corrode it.”
The Aussie in charge was a woman, Dr. Helen Colt. She was a no-nonsense salt-and-pepper woman who was rarely seen without her clipboard. The assistant, ten years younger than Colt, was a man named Billy Reese. He was smallish in stature, also a PhD, a thoughtful type given to stroking his jaw and saying little.
Just now he eyed the computer on Egg’s lap, then scrutinized Rip’s and Charley’s faces thoughtfully.
“Your opinion, Dr. Reese?” Colt said abruptly.
“I am defeated,” he replied. “We have found no shells of computers or reactors or advanced devices of any kind, nothing anyone could point to as evidence that we are looking at an artifact of an advanced civilization. Perhaps it is precisely what it appears to be, a twisted, misshapen structural framework someone built and threw into the sea.”
“When?” said Charley Pine. She was a tall, intelligent young woman who looked as if she could handle anything likely to come her way. Today she wore an old air force flight suit and boots, which did nothing to hide her good figure.
“Since we can’t identify the metallurgy, we don’t know,” Reese said slowly, eyeing Charley.
“We really don’t know anything,” Egg said gruffly. He had spent the last few minutes packing the computer into its travel bag, and now he stood, computer case in one hand and headband in the other. “Glad you invited us Down Under to take a look,” he said and tucked the headband under his left armpit so he could shake hands with the two Aussies.
Rip, Charley and Deborah also pumped hands and followed Egg out of the warehouse. Dr. Reese trailed the three of them. He cleared his throat while he was behind Egg, who paused and turned toward him.
“Mr. Cantrell, I can’t help noticing that magnificent computer you have,” Reese said heartily. “I assume it is from your nephew’s saucer?”
“It is,” Egg admitted. Actually he had removed it from the Sahara saucer when Rip first brought the saucer to Missouri. That had been a happy accident. Egg mined the computer for technology; the propulsion technology and some of the other major systems were patented and licensed, and much of the rest of the technology that Egg was willing to share — certainly not all — was placed in the public domain. The results were astounding: Industries throughout the world were investing capital in new plants, processes and equipment, and hiring. The world was entering a new era of prosperity.
“It would be a great service to the cause of science if you would allow me and my commission colleagues to examine it for a few weeks,” said Dr. Reese. “We can promise to return it to you in an undamaged state.”
“Dr. Reese,” Egg began, clutching the computer case in his arms, “I am not ready to allow unsupervised access to this computer.” In the months after he acquired it he had indeed allowed almost unlimited access to academics, but that was before he fully appreciated the information its memory contained. When he finally realized the implications of extraordinary knowledge in unlearned, unethical hands, he had refused access to all but a trusted few.
Colt had joined them, and now she eyed Egg skeptically. “Knowledge that can be verified should be shared with all mankind,” she said. “The only valid ethical position is that scientific knowledge enhances the survival of our species, so the more the better.”
“Perhaps,” Egg readily agreed, still clutching the computer to his chest, with both arms wrapped around it. “Yet perhaps there is such a thing as too much knowledge, knowledge that the human mind — or the public mind, the humanity of which is debatable — is not yet ready to accept for the simple reason that we don’t know enough to give it context.”
“How much of the information on that computer is of that variety?” Colt asked, intent on his answer.
“There is much there that baffles me,” Egg confessed. “I cannot understand much of it. Better brains than mine might, but I doubt it. I think most of the gold that we can use has already been mined.”