When he completed that conversation and had the telephone back on its cradle, he smiled benignly at Petty Officer Third Class Hennessey. Truly, the darn sailor was a genius.
“Want another drink?” he asked Hennessey.
“This is mighty fine bourbon, Mr. President,” the sailor from Oklahoma said, nodding. They taught you how to drink in the navy.
“Let’s hope the aliens don’t eat us all,” he said to Hennessey, raising his glass.
“Amen to that,” the sailor replied.
* * *
The four travelers stood on the ledge watching as the saucer ghosted away across the canyon. Black as it was, it soon disappeared into the gloom. Charley had programmed it to fly several hundred miles north into Utah on the antigravity rings before using the rockets to climb into orbit.
When the saucer disappeared, the cold seemed to seep ever deeper into their clothes. Adam Solo sagged. Egg and Charley helped him into the cliff house.
The first thing we need, Rip thought, is a fire. Searching the old Anasazi ruin, he found three pack-rat nests, which would make nice kindling. He still needed wood to burn. Part of the ancient cliff dwelling had collapsed, and the round poles that had held up floors were still there.
He dragged two inside and arranged them so the ends would catch in the fire, which was soon burning fairly well and giving off warmth. The room they were in had obviously been used for fires in times long past; the ceiling was blackened. A hole high in the wall acted as a chimney.
Rip found four cans of soup in the food bag, cut the tops open with his knife and put them beside the fire to heat up.
They arranged Solo on a sleeping bag by the fire. Egg used a spoon to feed him soup. With it down, he went to sleep.
The others ate their soup, sharing the spoon, and crawled into sleeping bags around the fire. All were asleep within minutes, except for Egg, who lay there in the firelight listening to the others’ deep-sleep breathing, thinking about falling toward certain death with Rip holding his hand. He was still coming down from the adrenaline high.
He had never before been so close to death. The fear washed over him again and again … and yet, thinking about it now, he had been ready.
I’ve had a good life, he told himself. To have a nephew like Rip, to have shared the saucer adventure, to have met all these extraordinary people, well, I’m truly blessed.
With that thought in his mind, he dropped off to sleep.
* * *
An exploration of the ledge in the early dawn the next morning showed how isolated the old cliff dwelling was. The Grand Canyon was spread out before them. The ledge they were on was perhaps fifty feet long and twenty feet deep at the widest point. Soot from ancient fires blackened the sloping stone over their heads and the walls of the stone house.
Rip found a water source, a place where water trickled from a soft formation. This morning the little stream was frozen due to the overnight temperatures, but later this morning it should flow again. So they had water. A dab of food to eat, water to drink and wood to burn. They could last a few days here. Until Solo’s people arrived, anyway. No doubt the National Park Service would get peeved if they ever figured out he had burned these old logs from the Anasazi ruin, but that was a problem for another day.
Looking to the right and left along the ledge, it was obvious there was no easy way to access the cliff dwelling. Rip estimated they were perhaps fifty feet below the top of this mesa, which Solo said was an island, separated from the South Rim by a thousand-foot-deep chasm. No doubt there were handholds in the cliff that would allow you access to the top, if you knew where they were and had absolutely no fear of heights.
The ancients had climbed here from below, along a trail now completely overgrown except for the last forty feet or so. Rip looked it over in the early morning light and thought he could descend it if he had to. Had to real bad. He figured Charley could too, but not Uncle Egg. Nor Solo in the condition he was in. So they had to stay put.
He rebuilt the fire with another pack rat’s nest and shoved the old logs deeper into the blaze. Soon the warmth filled the main room.
They would be safe enough here, for a little while, Rip reassured himself. However, Adam Solo had taken a turn for the worse.
He looked physically older, and his color wasn’t good. The bullet holes were still leaking. His wound would have killed any normal man; of course, Solo wasn’t normal. Still, this one might have been one too many. His pulse was steady yet weak. His breathing was okay, between fits of coughing, which brought up blood.
“You’ve been here before?” Egg asked after taking Solo’s pulse.
“In the thirteen hundreds. A family still lived here. I was starving. They took me in.”
“Starving?”
“War between the tribes. Apaches were tough, fierce warriors.”
Solo fell silent, his eyes examining the stone room they had laid him in.
“I thought your body could repair itself,” Rip whispered.
“Nothing lasts forever, Rip.” After a bit, the voyager between the stars added, “Pretty proud of you last night, son. I’ve seen a great many men in serious straits; you are right up there with the best. I’m proud to have known you.”
Rip was embarrassed. “Is there anything we can do for you?”
“Leave me alone with my memories.”
So they did. Rip, Charley and Uncle Egg sat on the ledge and watched the sun rise.
“I was pretty scared when I fell off the saucer,” Egg admitted to Rip and Charley.
“Me too,” Rip said.
“But you jumped after me.”
“I figured Charley would save us. And she did.”
“What if she couldn’t have?”
“Unc,” Rip said with a big grin, “you and I would now be going over our accounts with St. Peter. Gonna have to do that sooner or later anyway.”
Just thinking about the fall made Egg’s heart thud powerfully. Another dose of adrenaline. He had looked death in the face, yet lived to tell the tale. This morning that seemed a good thing. There was more life to be lived.
The three of them watched the sunlight chase the shadows from the great canyon, watched the colors change, watched the extraordinary eternal panorama as the earth spun on its axis, just as it had done since the dawn of time. Snow on the rims … an early winter morning in the greatest canyon on earth.
Meanwhile, inside the stone room by the fire, Adam Solo had a conversation with the captain of the starship. He told him who he was, when he was marooned on this planet, who he was with; he informed the captain of his many adventures as fast as he thought them and told him the starship exploration landing team should go to Washington, the White House. Washington is the capital of the United States, the largest, most advanced economy on the planet, and a democracy. That is the best place for diplomacy with the people of this planet, who live in over one hundred eighty nations in every stage of economic and moral development.
Solo also informed the captain that Egg Cantrell, Rip and Charley had a saucer and access to another, which was now parked above the lawn of the White House.
I may not be alive when you arrive, Solo added. Rip and Egg Cantrell and Charley Pine are people you need to talk to. They are brave, wise and compassionate. In my thirteen centuries on this planet, I have met few who are their equals.
15
Adam Solo lay inside the ancient cliff dwelling watching the sunlit sky through the window, which was just a hole in the stone wall. His wound pained him greatly, yet he was thinking about the people he had known here. It was so long ago … and they were of course long dead. Dead for almost seven hundred years.
There had been a man and his wife, and kids, and the wife’s mother, and several young men from the tribe who had yet to find wives. In this place they had planned their lives, their future, their children’s future. They were safe here from the nomads who would have killed and robbed them. Safe. On this tiny ledge facing this great canyon.
>
There was food if they worked hard to get it, water was accessible. Survival was the challenge. What more did men need?
Indeed. What does anyone need but people to love and cherish, food, water, clothes and shelter?
The Indians had lived their lives, loved, raised children, passed on what they knew and surrendered to their own mortality eventually, when enough years had passed, leaving another generation to carry on … and a generation after that, and so on.
Solo knew that was the way of life. The way of life wherever it was found in the universe.
So he lay on a sleeping bag trying to ignore the pain, thinking of these things and of those people who had lived here whom he had known. Remembering.
Ah, I have too many memories, he thought. Too many people who have gone on before me, leaving me here to struggle and try to survive. And in the end, I was shot by a fool who saw the glimmer of a big reward. Those Indians who lived here, the Vikings, the Iroquois, the white settlers who tried to wrestle a living from the land and so often failed, what would they have thought of the Internet? Of flying saucers? Of starships?
Most of those people had been happy, like the Indians who had lived in this house overlooking the Grand Canyon. Happy! They had been contented with their lives in a way he had never been.
He had always been searching for a way home. For a way back to the life he had once known. Oh, he had tried. Tried to be as content as the people around him. Tried to be content with a good hunt, a good crop, or with rain when the fields needed it. Tried, but it was never enough.
Now as he lay in pain, trying to ignore it, he thought about being content. Somehow that great gift had escaped him. He had never been content. Never accepted life on its own terms. Always he wanted to escape from this savage planet. Wanted a starship to rescue him.
What a fool he had been! A fool!
He had everything life had to offer for hundreds of years, over a thousand, over half a hundred earth generations, and hadn’t appreciated it.
He could hear Egg and Charley and Rip talking outside. They were worried about him!
Adam Solo began weeping.
Soon he drifted off to sleep.
He awoke when Charley Pine tried to gently roll him over to check the wound below his right shoulder blade.
“Sorry,” she muttered and rolled him over anyway. She took the sodden bandage off, left the bit of rag in the exit wound and used one of Rip’s old tee shirts as a body bandage.
When she rolled him back onto his back, her face was drawn, pale. “You’re still bleeding,” she said. “No doubt internally too. You really need a doctor that can pump you full of platelets.”
“Too big a risk,” he muttered.
“Don’t be such a cynic.”
You know as well as I do what might happen if a DNA sample from me fell into the wrong hands. The people of this planet aren’t ready for knowledge like that. They aren’t politically, ethically or morally ready. When they are, they’ll get there by themselves.
“You’re dying. You know that, of course.” It was a flat statement, not a question.
I should have died a hundred times already. I’m ready for what comes next. If anything.
“Christ, you are a cynic!”
I’ve seen many people die. It’s as natural as going to sleep. I don’t fear it.
“So what was your closest escape from the grim reaper?”
Adam Solo thought about that, sorting through the memories. Finally he told her, It was a cattle drive, bringing a herd up from Texas. Crossing the Canadian my horse got into quicksand. I threw a rope at something on the bank—I forget what—and missed. The horse struggled and sank and I tried to get off and got trapped. If I had gone down with the horse I would have died. I knew it. My body’s ability to repair itself would have counted for nothing. Then a friend of mine rode up and threw me a rope. He dragged me out. His name was Billy Vance, and he was nineteen, a young nineteen, full of himself.
“So you made it.”
Yeah. Lived to die another day.
“So what happened to Billy Vance?” Her face was serious, pensive, as she tried to understand.
We made it to Dodge; the owner sold the herd and paid us off. I talked Billy into going with me to Colorado to hunt for gold, and he agreed. But on our last night in Dodge he caught a gambler cheating at cards and called him on it. The gambler got a bullet into Billy and two into me. Billy died and I didn’t. A month later, when I recovered, I went to Colorado by myself.
“You’ve buried a lot of friends.”
More than I care to remember.
“What happened to the gambler?” she asked.
He didn’t make it. Billy and I each got a slug into him. Took him a long week to die. They buried him with his marked deck.
“We need to bring the saucer back and get you to a doctor.”
No.
She crawled through the low door and went back out onto the ledge above the kiva. A good woman, he reflected. He hoped Rip realized just how good. Maybe he did. That Rip … he was a lot like Billy Vance. Billy with the wicked smile and crooked teeth and terrific thirst for life. Billy Vance, dead of a gunshot wound to the gut at the age of nineteen, but game all the way.
Solo lay thinking about those days long ago, about the American West and the Indians he loved and longhorns and thunderstorms, blistering hot endless days on horseback, nights of exhausted sleep and the cow towns at the end of the trail. Thinking of the men. Companions for the trail of life. If only he could do it all again, see all those men and women he had known and loved through the centuries one more time, hear their laughter and voices …
He had been so blessed. Adam Solo knew that. That fool who stole the saucer long ago and marooned Solo on this savage planet had done him a great favor. The thought gave him peace.
* * *
“We need a panel of experts,” P. J. O’Reilly had told the president. “A panel of experts will give the public the assurance that you are talking to the right people, getting yourself fully informed.”
“Experts in what?” the president had asked skeptically.
“Oh, you know, whatever. Experts are experts, people with degrees from out of town. It’s a PR thing. Keep the Joe Six-Packs calmed down.”
The president groaned inwardly. He was certainly a master of listening to bullshit and making appropriate noises, but he doubted if he would get any light at all from any group O’Reilly could assemble. Another waste of time. Yet he was politician enough to appreciate that O’Reilly had a point. The art of politics is to appear to be leading, even when groping in the dark. Petty Officer Third Class Hennessey from Oklahoma had nodded sagely, so the president had reluctantly agreed to an audience with some “experts.”
Now, as he faced the hastily summoned group, he was tempted to make some excuse to dismiss them, but refrained. The White House photographer was snapping pictures, and the mouthpiece, the press secretary, was standing against the wall, ready to spin the event for the media in the White House Press Room.
O’Reilly introduced the delegation. There was a philosophy professor from Harvard, an astrogeophysicist from the University of Houston, a scientist from NASA and two women from the National Science Foundation who had been looking for intelligent life in the universe for some years now, at government expense, with no results to show for their efforts. The president was tempted to ask if the women had checked in Washington but held his tongue. There was also some guy who wrote bestseller science fiction, none of which the president had ever read. He was famous, though. Even the guy from Harvard smiled warmly at him. All were duly introduced, and all had something to say.
The president listened carefully.
The experts agreed, more or less. The aliens would be more technically advanced than we are and would have high moral and ethical principals. Very high. They would not be eaters of flesh. Would not be here to conquer and enslave. Would be very “progressive,” according to the Harvard philosopher. Since th
at was a loaded political term here on this little round rock, in this day and age, the presidential eyebrows rose a fraction of a millimeter. The chief executive glanced at Hennessey, whose face was deadpan.
“What about weapons?” the national security adviser asked. O’Reilly had let him attend this soiree, the president thought sourly.
Well, of course the aliens had weapons. The Sahara saucer and the Roswell saucer both had antimatter weapons; technological progress being what it is, no doubt the coming alien delegation had death rays of some sort to protect themselves from monsters and predators and dragons on whatever planet they happened to visit.
“Dragons?” said the national security adviser.
The president glanced at Petty Officer Hennessey, who had one eyebrow raised. The president had always admired people who could do that. He had tried for years but couldn’t.
“Who knows what forms of life other planets in the universe might contain?” the science-fiction writer asked rhetorically, warming to his subject. “They must be prepared. We must assume they are; ergo, superior weaponry.”
The universal nods of affirmation from all the experts silenced the national security adviser.
Ergo, indeed!
When O’Reilly finally ushered the experts out, the president asked the petty officer what he thought.
“These aliens are just sailors. Kind of like Christopher Columbus’ guys. They fly starships because it pays fairly well, but the brains are back on the home planet, wherever that is. These guys didn’t design and build the starship or figure out how to fly it. They will be just a bunch of average Joes. You’ll see.”
The president felt reassured. With Amanda there at the great event, he didn’t want anything to go wrong. His wife and daughter would never forgive him. Of course, there was the future of the human species to consider too: Aliens, First Contact, and all that.
The experts had agreed unanimously: The future of the humanity, indeed, the future of the whole planet and every species on it, hinged on how he, the president, handled this first meeting with the representatives of an advanced civilization with unknown but extraordinary capabilities. After all, voyaging between the stars … “Not to put any pressure on you, Mr. President, but facts are facts.”
Saucer: Savage Planet Page 17
