'Whatever is in that ledge now was there when the sand covered it.'
'So it would seem.'
'Playing it safe?'
'It looks as if the thing is embedded in the stone, but…' Soldi picked up another rock shard and examined it closely. He hefted it thoughtfully as he gazed at the face of the cliff.
'Give me your guess. How old is this rock?'
Soldi took his time before he replied. 'Anywhere from a hundred thousand to a million years old,' he said finally and tossed away the rock. He grinned. 'Doesn't make sense, does it?'
'Don't guess it does.'
Three hours of vigorous, sweaty work with the jackhammer under the desert sun uncovered a curved expanse of metal fifteen feet long. It protruded from the raw stone at least three feet. The structure seemed to be a part of a perfectly round circle, one with a diameter of about seventy feet.
The four men squatted, touching the metal with their hands, examining it with their eyes.
Amazingly, the surface seemed unmarred. Oh, here and there were a few tiny scratches, but only a few, and very small. The dark metal was reflective yet lacked a patina. The water that had percolated through the stone for ages apparently had affected the metal very little. 'Assuming the metal was in the stone,' Dr. Soldi muttered.
'Excaliber,' Rip said as he wiped his face.
Bill Taggart didn't understand the reference.
'The sword Arthur pulled from the rock… Excaliber was its name.'
'Whatever this is,' Dutch remarked, 'it isn't going to make us kings.'
'It's going to take us a couple days to hack this thing completely out of the rock,' Bill Taggart said gloomily. 'The ledge is thicker back there, so the going will be slower. Maybe we ought to just leave it here. Forget about it.'
'So what the hell is it?' Dutch Haagen wondered.
'That's obvious, isn't it?' Rip said. 'I thought you three were sitting here like store dummies because you were afraid to say it. The damned thing is a saucer.'
'A saucer?'
'A flying saucer. What else could it be?'
Dr. Soldi closed his eyes and ran his hands across the metal, rubbing it with his fingertips. 'Two days. Whatever it is, we'll have it out of the rock in a couple of days.'
'Are you trying to tell us that this thing we're sitting in front of is a spaceship?' Bill Taggart demanded.
'Yeah,' Rip Cantrell said with conviction. 'Modern man didn't make this and put it here. Ancient man couldn't work metal like this. This is a highly engineered product of an advanced civilization. That's a fact beyond dispute.'
'I don't believe in flying saucers,' Taggart scoffed. 'I've seen the shows on TV, watched those freaky people from the trailer parks say they saw UFOs in the night sky while the dogs howled and cats climbed the walls.' He made a rude noise. 'I don't believe a word of it.'
Rip was beside himself. 'It's a saucer, Bill,' he insisted.
'Bet it ain't. Bet it's something else.'
'What?' Professor Soldi asked sharply.
The next day they got to the cockpit. It was in the middle of the thing, at the thickest point. The canopy was made of a dark, transparent material. When they wiped away the sand and chips, they could stare down into the ship. There was a seat and an instrument panel. The seat was raised somewhat, on a pedestal that elevated the pilot so he — or she or it — could see out through the canopy.
'It is a saucer!' Rip Cantrell shouted. He pounded Bill on the back. 'See! Now do you believe?'
'It's something the commies made, I'll bet,' Taggart insisted. 'Some kind of airplane.'
'Sure.'
When he finished with his video camera, Professor Soldi eased himself off the ship, climbed down the ledge, and found a shady spot beside the Jeep where he could sit and look at the thing.
He sat contemplating the curved metal embedded in stone. After a bit the other three men joined him in the shade and helped themselves to water from the cooler.
'There hasn't been a discovery like this since the Rosetta Stone,' Soldi said softly. 'This will revolutionize archeology. Everything we know about man's origins is wrong.'
'You're going to be famous, Professor,' Bill Taggart said as he helped himself to the water. Soldi gave him a hard look, but it was apparent that Bill meant the words kindly.
'Shouldn't we be taking more pictures or something?' Rip asked Soldi. 'Something that will prove we found it buried in the rock?'
'We have the videotape,' Bill reminded them.
'If it is a spaceship, then it must have been manufactured on another planet,' Soldi mused. 'Once we examine it, there should be no doubt of that. Where and how it was found will be of little importance.' He held his hands to his head. 'I can't believe I said that, me — a professor of archeology. Yet it's true. For fifty years we've been inundated with UFO photos, most of them faked. The thing must speak for itself or all the photos in the world won't matter.'
'So what should we do?' Dutch asked.
'Do?' Soldi looked puzzled.
Rip gestured toward the saucer. 'Should we keep hammering? Uncover it?'
'Oh, my, yes. Before we tell the world about this, let's see what we have. Is it intact? Is it damaged?'
'What I want to know,' Rip said, 'is there a way in?'
'I'm not a nut,' Bill Taggart announced, 'and I sI'lll don't believe in flying saucers.'
'A spaceship,' Soldi muttered. 'No one is going to believe this. Not a soul.' He couldn't have been more wrong about that, but he didn't know it then. He sighed. 'When this hits the papers, the faculty is going to laugh me out of the university.'
'Perhaps we should keep this under our hats,' Rip Cantrell suggested. 'When we do go public we don't want anyone laughing.'
'I hear you,' Dutch murmured.
Rip looked toward the sun, gauging its height above the horizon. 'We have three or four hours of daylight left, but it's almighty hot and we have only a gallon or two of gasoline for the compressor. I think we have ten gallons at camp.'
'I want to go back to my dig,' the professor said. 'Get some clothing and a toothbrush. We have four five-gallon cans of gasoline, I think. At the rate we're going, my guess is that it will take us another two days to completely uncover this thing.'
I'll drive the professor over to his camp and bring him back,' Rip said eagerly, 'if it's all right with you, Dutch?'
'Sure, kid. Sure.'
'Bring back some food, kid,' Bill called mournfully. 'And don't eat all of it on the way.'
'What's he talking about?' Soldi asked.
'He's a big ladder,' Rip replied curtly.
Rip took Dutch and Bill back to their camp, then drove away with the professor.
'Twenty-two years old, and Rip's a take-charge kind of guy,' Dutch said as he watched the Jeep's dust plume tail away on the hot wind.
'Got a lot of his mother in him, I suspect,' Bill said. 'The kid told me his father was a farmer in Minnesota and died when Rip was twelve. His mother has run the farm ever since. She must be quite a woman.'
'He gets on your nerves, doesn't he?' Dutch remarked.
'A little, I guess.' Taggart shrugged.
Dutch slapped Bill on the shoulder. 'We're going to be famous too, you know. Finding a flying saucer sounds like a new career to me. Maybe they'll stick us on the cover of Time magazine.'
'We'll have to shave, then, I reckon.'
'We'll put the saucer in a parking lot in Jersey City and charge five bucks a head to go through it. We'll make millions. Our ship has come in, Bill.'
Chapter Two
'So whaddaya think, Professor?' Rip asked as they bounced along in the Jeep at thirty miles per hour, at least ten miles per hour too fast for the ancient caravan trail that he was generally following.
'The thing in the rock?'
'The saucer. Yeah.'
'It's too soon to say. I don't recognize the metal, if it is metal. I don't yet have explanations for anything.'
Hans Soldi weighed his words. 'I feel overwhe
lmed. This discovery is unexpected. If it is what it seems to be, the scientific benefits are going to be extraordinary. Think of the spillover from the American space program of the sixties and seventies — this could be many times that big. Ultimately the life of everyone on this planet could be affected.' He released his death grip on the side of the Jeep momentarily to wipe his forehead with his sleeve. 'I just don't know what to think, where to start.'
'We need some other scientists in on this, wouldn't you agree?'
'Of course. Experts in a variety of fields. First, however, I think we should uncover the ship, see what is there, satisfy ourselves that it is what it appears to be. If we even hint to the outside world that we've found an alien spaceship and it isn't, I'll be laughed out of the profession. I won't be able to get a job digging basements.'
'Uh-huh.'
'When we are absolutely convinced that it could be nothing else, then we tell the world.'
'I was thinking about the local government,' Rip said with a glance at the professor. 'The Libyan border is just a few miles north, isn't it?'
Soldi frowned. 'Our dig is in Chad. They issued the archaeological permit.'
'The saucer may be in Libya, Chad, or the Sudan for all I know,' Rip remarked. 'Borders are political — you can't see or touch them. Qaddafi might run us off and confiscate the saucer if he gets wind of this. We've got to get it out of this desert before we say anything to anybody.'
'Let me do the talking at the dig,' Professor Soldi told him.
By evening the following day, the four men had the sandstone completely removed from the top of the spaceship, which was indeed circular in form, with a diameter of a few inches over seventy feet. The top of it seemed to be in perfect condition, although the bottom was still embedded in stone.
'The thing looks like it's sitting on a pedestal in front of a museum,' Dutch remarked.
'That's probably its ultimate fate,' Rip replied, then went back to work clearing the last of the stone from the four exhaust pipes that stuck out the rear. Each of these nozzles was about a foot in diameter.
Arranged around the circumference of the ship, but pointing up and down, were more exhaust nozzles, small ones. These, everyone agreed, must be maneuvering jets, to control the attitude of the ship in yaw, roll, and pitch. The upper ones were packed with sandstone.
Although it was late in another long day, Rip still had plenty of energy. He had ceased asking Professor Soldi questions only when the scientist quit supplying answers.
Soldi was lost in his own private world. He and Bill measured the ship with a tape as carefully as they could. Soldi took notes on a small computer and shot more videotape. He also shot up several rolls of 35mm film.
The archaeologist studied the surface of the ship with a pocket magnifying glass, dripped a bit of acid from the Jeep's battery on one tiny spot, and muttered over the result.
'It's a giant solar cell,' Rip remarked.
'What is?'
'The skin. Put your fingers on it. You can feel it absorbing energy from the sun. And notice how the reflectivity has changed — it seems to change with the temperature, and probably the state of the battery charge.'
The professor gave Rip a surprised look. As soon as the younger man turned away, he caressed the skin with his fingers. A solar power cell, absorbing the sun's energy and converting it to electricity! Of course!
He drew back suddenly, as if he had been shocked. Rip implied that the solar cells were absorbing energy now! Could that be true?
He lay for an hour on top of the ship with a mirror to direct the sun's rays down inside the cockpit like a spotlight. Each of the men joined him there, looking at the seat and controls, the blank dark panels. The cockpit looked like nothing they had ever seen, and yet it was familiar in a way that was hard to describe.
'It's human-size,' Rip remarked.
'Isn't that extraordinary?' Soldi muttered.
Most of the afternoon Soldi spent sitting in the shade tapping on his computer, with long pauses to stare at the ship.
They had found no blemish on the upper skin of the ship and no way in. The skin was seamless.
'The hatch must be underneath,' Rip told Dutch and kept working with the jackhammer. He seemed almost immune to the heat and dust.
Twice the jackhammer slipped when Rip was working close to the ship's skin. The hard steel bit whacked the ship several smart raps. Soldi examined the spots with his magnifying glass and said nothing.
Finally, with the evening sun fully illuminating the ship, Soldi shot two more rolls of 35mm film.
The rock under the ship was difficult to remove. After it was broken up, the shards and remnants had to be shoveled away.
Just before dusk, they managed to clear the first landing gear. It was a simple skid protruding from the bottom of the saucer, held down by what appeared to be a hydraulic ram.
'No wheels,' Soldi muttered and resumed chewing on his lower lip.
'It must land vertically,' Rip Cantrell said.
'So it would seem,'
'That means it must have some other mode of thrust besides the rocket engines to hold it up.'
'One would think so, yes.'
'What kind of thrust?'
'I dig up ancient villages,' Soldi said irritably. 'How would I know?'
'Well, Professor, I never saw an airplane like this. No, sir-ree. Did you?'
Soldi pointed at the stone. 'Hammer some more rock out. There's another fifteen minutes of daylight left.'
Just before he quit for the evening, Rip uncovered the first landing light. The material that covered it seemed as hard and impervious as the canopy. Still, through the covering he could see the bulb of a powerful spotlight.
That night they ate dinner sitting on folding camp stools in the circle of light cast by a propane lantern mounted on a pole. 'We have a supply plane from Cairo scheduled in tomorrow afternoon,' the professor told his hosts. The transport landed on unprepared flat, sandy places as if they were a huge paved airfield.
'It would be best if the crew of the plane didn't see the saucer,' Dutch Haagen remarked.
'I think that's wise,' the professor said. 'We have several large tents at my dig. I suggest that after dinner we drive over and get one. We can erect it over the saucer tomorrow morning.'
'Okay,' Dutch agreed. 'And I was thinking that perhaps we should move our camp closer to the saucer.'
They talked about the day's events, about what the ship looked like. They were winding down, watching Rip eat the last of the cooked vegetables as they sipped their coffee, when Rip asked, 'What have we really got here, Doc? Give us your off-the-record opinion.'
Soldi puffed on his pipe as he scrutinized each face. 'It's very, very old. Ancient man didn't make it. That much I am reasonably sure of.'
'Is it a spaceship?' Dutch asked.
'You see, that's the danger of loose language. The thing may fly, probably does — the shape is a symmetrical, saucer-shaped lifting body — but whether it is capable of flying above the atmosphere… ' He shrugged. 'Later, if we can get inside, we'll get a better idea.'
'So who brought it here?'
Soldi puffed slowly on his pipe and said nothing.
'Why did they leave it?'
'I have seen no exterior damage.'
'Where are the people who flew it?'
'People?'
'Whatever.'
Soldi waggled a finger. 'The answers to those questions, if we can find answers, are going to rock civilization.' He nodded in the direction of the saucer, several miles away in the night. 'That thing is going to revolutionize the way we think about the universe, about ourselves. We must be very careful about the words we use because they have enormous implications.' He smoked some more, then repeated the phrase, 'Enormous implications.'
Bill Taggart ran his fingers through his hair. 'Maybe we should have left it in the rock.'
Rip Cantrell looked up at the sea of stars almost within arm's reach. 'We couldn't, Bill,' he sai
d softly. 'We had to dig it out because it's our nature to wonder, to explore.'
'Maybe that's why they came,' Dutch Haagen remarked.
Soldi, Rip, and Dutch were deep in a discussion of the physics of atmospheric entry when Bill Taggart wandered off into the darkness. When he was well away from the light of the camp lanterns, he walked quickly to the supply tent. By the light of a pencil-thin flash, he found the satellite telephone. He opened the dish antenna and turned the thing on.
Bill removed a small book from his hip pocket and consulted it by the light of the pencil flash. He dialed in the frequency he wanted, picked up the telephone like handset, and waited for the phone to lock onto the satellite.
He punched a long series of numbers into the keyboard, waited some more. He looked again at the numbers. That country code, that was Australia, wasn't it?
He heard the number ringing. A sleepy voice answered.
'This is Bill Taggart. Is Neville there?'
'Neville who?'
'Just Neville.'
I'll see. Say your name again, mate.'
'Bill Taggart.'
'Wait.'
Time passed. A minute, then two. Taggart glanced through the tent flap at the three figures sitting in the light near the camp stove. They hadn't moved.
Finally the voice came back on. 'Neville isn't here. Why don't you tell me what you want, mate.'
'I met Neville about eighteen months ago. In Singapore. He mentioned that he would be interested in buying certain kinds of information.'
'That Neville… ' the male voice said noncommittally.
'I have some information to sell. It's very valuable.'
'All information has value. The question is, is it valuable to us? We will discuss price with you after we have evaluated what you have. Sorry about that, but it's the only way we can do business. You have to trust us.'
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