“Two men and three women were in the saucer. They didn’t come to colonize. They came to implant DNA samples in living creatures.”
Rip recovered his voice first. “Why?”
“That I don’t know. Nor do I know what happened to them. They arrived … searched for a suitable place to land and found it beside a stream in a meadow with trees on the surrounding hills. Then the pilot took off the headband.” Egg gestured futilely. “That’s all I know. Apparently they never returned to the saucer.”
“But why would they want to implant DNA samples?” Charley asked with her head cocked quizzically to one side.
Egg threw up his hands. “To create a DNA library? That would be my guess. But I don’t know. Yet.”
He took a deep breath. “The computer mines the memories of everyone who wears the headband. Your memory is on it, Charley, and yours, Rip. And mine. The computer knows everything we ever learned well enough to recall.”
Charley’s eyes widened. “Everything?”
“Everything,” Egg said with finality, “and it records the emotions you had at the time you had the experience.”
Charley turned slightly green. “I am not sure I want my private thoughts on some machine’s permanent memory.”
“They are there,” Egg said. “The good news is that you are a wonderful person.”
Charley laughed nervously. She eyed Rip. “Maybe I should put on the headband and check out your head,” she told him.
Rip tried to look nonchalant, to hide his embarrassment. “Any time,” he said blithely. “But I’m going to have to think long and hard about whether or not I want to use that thing again.”
All three of them laughed.
They were eating a lunch of chicken salad sandwiches when Rip said, “If the saucer people were creating a database here on earth 140,000 years ago, one suspects they returned occasionally.”
“A database of living creatures,” Egg said thoughtfully, “a database that would be passed along from one generation to the next, a database that would become part of that species’ genome. It would be there until that species became extinct.”
“No,” Rip said. “It would be there as long as there were living descendants of the database creatures, of whatever species.”
“Perhaps the Roswell saucer came so the crew could check the library,” Charley said between bites. “Look up a reference, or add to the database. And take samples of flora and fauna and rocks and dirt. Just like our astronauts did on the moon. They must have been taking samples of everything they could find.”
“It would be amazing if the Roswell visit was the only subsequent visit,” Egg observed, glancing at their faces.
“Makes you wonder,” Rip agreed thoughtfully. “A hundred forty thousand years is a long, long time.”
“Not really,” Egg murmured. “And the library could consist of things beside the on-off switches that govern reproduction. The database could consist of computer code that has no effect on the living creature that carries it.”
“Isn’t eighty percent of most DNA code nonfunctional?” Rip asked with his mouth full.
“Researchers think that the nonfunctional codes are ancestoral artifacts,” Egg suggested. “No doubt some of them are. But what about the rest?”
“I wonder if humans carry a portion of the database,” Charley mused.
“You’re going to explore that computer some more this afternoon,” Rip said to Egg, without even looking at him.
Charley giggled. She didn’t do it often, but when she did she brought a wide smile to Rip’s face.
Egg tried to shrug off the comment. “Maybe,” he acknowledged.
This time Rip and Charley both laughed.
The president was meeting that afternoon with the secretary of state and the national security adviser when an aide slipped him a note. This is what it said:
The FBI says the Cantrells and Charley Pine are at Egg Cantrell’s farm in Missouri. Their telephones are apparently out of service. Three saucer sightings have been reported to the U.S. Air Force. They are being checked out.
The president read the note, put it facedown on the desk, then picked it up and read it one more time.
He was worried. Saucers flying around again, the media in full cry … What in the name of heaven was going on?
He picked up the note again, took a pen and wrote on the bottom, Why did World Pharmaceuticals pay to salvage the Roswell saucer? and passed the note back to the waiting aide.
It was an hour before dawn in the mountains of western Montana when a large black saucer came drifting down the valley just a hundred feet above the ground. In the meadow near the lake, the saucer came to a stop in a hover and the gear snapped down. The saucer settled gently to the ground.
Adam Solo exited the saucer through the belly door, carrying a backpack in his hand, and duckwalked out from under it. He stood silently, listening and looking as his eyes adjusted to the near-darkness. A chill wind blew from the west, swirling down off the peaks, but the sky was clear. Looking up, Solo saw the Milky Way, a billion stars flung like a ribbon across the sky. The moon was down, so they looked extraordinarily bright.
After a long moment, Solo climbed up on top of the saucer. In seconds it rose gently from the ground and the gear came up. As Solo balanced himself on the sloping deck, the saucer moved slowly out over the lake, then gently submerged itself until only the top was above water.
In seconds the refueling door opened and water began pouring into the saucer’s tank. Air came out of the tank in burps and bubbles. The starlight was just sufficient for Solo to monitor the progress of the refilling and to ensure no foreign objects floated into the swirl of water entering the refilling port.
When the water ceased to swirl and all the air bubbles had stopped, the door of the refilling port closed and the saucer rose slowly from the water, inch by inch.
Solo directed it to land again in the meadow. The landing gear snapped down and the saucer came to rest within inches of the spot where it originally landed. Solo carefully climbed from the saucer and stood in the grass with his hand on the curved leading edge.
Without conscious thought, his hand gently caressed the leading edge, running back and forth as his fingertips felt the cool, dark surface while he looked around in all directions, waiting.
Is the water tank full?
Yes.
Finally, satisfied that there were no people about, no witnesses, he slapped the saucer as if it were a horse and said aloud, “Go.”
The saucer would be safe in orbit, out of the reach of everyone on earth who wanted it, except, of course, Solo, who could summon it back whenever he wished. If he wished. He wondered if he ever would.
He turned his back on the machine, picked up his backpack and walked away as the saucer rose several feet from the grass. He turned around in time to see the gear coming up as the saucer began to move forward.
In a swirl of dead grass and dirt, it began rising from the earth, accelerating slowly, and turned to an easterly heading. It was several hundred feet high, heading east up the valley, when he lost it in the blackness.
Solo looked around again, then began walking around the lake to the south. There should be a road over there, he thought, and a camping area. Perhaps there were people.
He had just reached the dirt road when far to the east, near the crest of the peaks, the saucer’s rocket engines ignited. The light reached him well before the sound. Rising slowly, then faster and faster, the saucer roared into the night sky.
Now the sound washed over him, a deep throaty rumble, impressive with its power.
Solo watched the rising fireball until it disappeared behind the highest peak. He waited for his night vision to return as the thunder of the engines faded.