The Visitor Read Free Page A

answered.
    Nervous, Tak wondered what her options were. She turned to the pilot in the craft next to her and gave him her most attractive smile.
    Captain Duncan could hardly believe his eyes. A strikingly attractive woman had just descended from altitudes where only space craft could tread and was now gliding toward Earth, no helmet or even a headset on-- and she smiles ?
    “What’s going on?” Burkett demanded.
    “She’s smiling.”
    “ What ?” he nearly shouted.
    “Smiling, sir.”
    “You order her down!”
    “I don’t think she has a radio, sir. She isn’t wearing a headset.”
    “Then you motion her to come down!”
    “Sir, she’s in a gliding craft. She appears to be descending by gravity alone and traveling with the prevailing winds. Since she’s already coming down, I don’t think she can come down any faster.”
    “Then you make sure she follows you.”
    Duncan put up his hand and motioned for her to follow him.
    “What is she doing now?” Burkett asked.
    “Still smiling.”
    Tak heard that on her radio, which was monitoring their frequency. She had to make a decision and quickly. Abort the mission or go on? She could thrust out into space and call for the starship or stay and try to complete her mission. At any rate, Kansas appeared to be out. Perhaps the next the next large land mass known as Europe would do.
    “Computer, find a sparsely populated area well within the land mass called Europe and plot a course. Engage the thruster.”
    The roar of the powerful thruster overshadowed everything else. The shuttle was soon traveling at seventeen thousand miles per hour while still in the atmosphere, and then it went up and east, leaving the Earth.
    “My God!” Duncan gasped. “Did you see that?”
    At NORAD, Hight could see the shuttle image on his screen. It was traveling at a tremendous speed, climbing, and leaving the continental United States. “That couldn’t be the glider you were pacing, could it?” he asked Duncan sarcastically. “A glider at seventeen thousand miles an hour?”
    “It’s some kind of rocket,” Duncan said.
    “No shit. I have it on our satellite heading over the Atlantic toward Europe. We can switch to another satellite and see if we can pick it up in Europe. We should be able to trace it there, if all goes well. This used to be written up as a UFO, but we should report this to Homeland Security. This is some sort of new vehicle we have never seen before that can travel at hypersonic speeds. Not even our experimental hypersonic rockets can fly anywhere close to that speed. This could be a real threat. But from who?”
    The government people, who were there for the test, looked to Colonel Burkett for an explanation of what had just happened.

    ***

    In space, the computer shut down the thruster.
    “Have you set up the new landing spot?” Tak asked it.
    “Yes,” it answered.
    Her screen showed the landing spot on the section of the map called Europe. The area was on the dark side of the planet but the computer showed the land mass clearly.
    “Select a spot in a remote area, as far as possible away from any large cities.”
    She figured that seemed like a good possiblity to land without being noticed.
    “Acknowledged.”
    The computer selected a spot from its mapped topography, showing it on the shuttle screen. It displayed the topography of the landing spot, the weather there, and other factors needed to make a perfect glide slope. It also displayed calculations of the weight of the shuttle as decreased by use of fuel to land in Europe, gravity of the earth, speed at all times, drag of the atmosphere at all relevant altitudes, effects of the known and measurable winds, and the incidental gravitational pull of the sun and the moon. It had the ability to determine if it was not on the calculated course of glide slope and to make corrections.
    The selection was on the pasture of a farm. A lush, green field presented itself within eyesight range ahead. It was