Saucer Read Free Page A

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 still 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