Saucer Read Free

by the hammer and handed it to the archaeologist. “How old is this, anyway?”
    “Offhand, I could only guess. I’ll get it analyzed.”
    “More than five thousand years old?”
    “Oh, yes. The desert and the ocean came and went through the ages, many times. Time is so…” He flung his arms wide. “We talk blithely of time—as we do death and infinity—but humans have difficulty grasping the enormity of it. Perhaps if we could comprehend the vastness of time we would be able to understand God.”
    Soldi put the piece of sandstone into a pocket. He gestured at the cliff. “This is a windblown deposit, I think. You can see how the wind sculpted the sand as it was laid down.”
    “I thought those designs were made by wind cutting the rock.”
    “I don’t think so,” the professor replied. “The wind made the designs before the sand hardened to stone. After the sand was deposited, it was covered by dirt, probably this red dirt that you see everywhere else. Water and the weight of the dirt transformed the sand into stone. Through the millennia there were repeated periods when the desert encroached. Sooner or later the rains always came again and pushed it back. The desert is winning now, but someday the rains will come again. Everything changes, even climates.”
    “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.
    “Excalibur,” Rip said as he wiped his face.
    Bill Taggart didn’t understand the reference.
    “The sword Arthur pulled from the rock… Excalibur 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