Saucer by Stephen Coonts Read Free Book Online

saucer, looking it over, Dutch told Rip, “We should start at the reactor. That is the heart of this thing.”
    “Okay.”
    “You want to help, Bill?”
    “No thanks.” Bill Taggart was sitting in shade smoking a cigar. “You guys are nuts to poke around inside this thing. You have no idea what could be in there.”
    “So we’re nuts.”
    “Soldi wasn’t whistling Dixie.”
    “You don’t have to help.”
    “I know that. And I don’t intend to.”
    “Ease up, Bill.”
    “Dutch, you’re acting the fool. That damn thing has been sealed up tight since Christ was a corporal. You’re breathing viruses that haven’t had a host for a zillion years. Maybe the germs are from another planet, another solar system. God only knows what you’ll catch.”
    Rip grabbed his throat, staggered, made a rasping noise. His eyes bugged out.
    “Stop that, Cantrell,” Bill barked. “You half-wit!”
    Rip made a dismissive gesture at Taggart.
    “Come on, Dutch,” he said. “Let’s look at the reactor.” The youngster climbed into the ship without another glance at Bill, who hadn’t moved from his seat.
    “Hey, Dutch. Look at this. This pipe is marked.”
    Rip held his flashlight beam on a pipe. Dutch studied the markings.
    “Looks like scratches.”
    “Maybe a little. But they’re markings. They’ve marked the pipe.”
    “Doesn’t look like anything I ever saw.”
    “Course it doesn’t. But this proves this thing was made by people, doesn’t it?”
    Dutch Haagen held his flashlight so the beam illuminated the inscription from an angle. “Looks like it’s painted on or something. Maybe etched in.” The symbol on the left was small and elegant. Above it and to the right was a small marking, like an upside-down cone but with no bottom. Following that was another symbol, different from the first, but even with it.
    “Never saw anything like this.”
    “It’s probably a label, telling us what the line carries,” Rip explained.
    “Yeah, kid. That’s a good guess. But I can’t read it. Can you?”
    “Ahh, yes… ‘Bill Taggart is a jerk’. That’s the translation, anyway.” Rip shrugged. “I think they covered this stuff in the sixth grade, but I had the flu that week.”
    “This couldn’t be the only marking. Look around.”
    It took Rip only fifteen seconds to find another marking, this time on a pressure line. This was different from the first set of symbols.
    Over the next half hour they found that almost every line was marked, and many of the symbols seemed to be the same.
    “If we could read these damn marks, we could figure this thing out,” Rip exclaimed.
    Dutch didn’t reply. He continued to look for marks, examine fittings, study everything he saw. After a bit he said, “This piece of gear in front of me looks like a generator. See all these electrical wires coming off it? They go down there, hook into those cable ends.”
    The two men continued to explore. Finally Dutch said, “Well, it looks to me like the generator makes power, which is sent to these circular cables that go around the bottom of the ship.” There were six of these cables, making six concentric rings that circled the bottom of the saucer. “More juice goes into those big buses over there. I’ll bet a nickel those things are circuit breakers or fuses of some kind. From the buses, the juice goes all over the ship.”
    “Antigravity rings?” Rip suggested. “Maybe the big circular cables cut the gravity force lines of the planet?”
    “Maybe, kid. Maybe.” Dutch crawled on.
    In the hour before dark, Rip worked on clearing sandstone from the saucer’s maneuvering ports. He used a small screwdriver as a chisel, pounding on the handle with a hammer. Blowing into the hole cleaned out the shards. The job went pretty fast.
    Rip enjoyed touching the ship, running his fingers over it. The saucer fascinated him. As the sun got lower and lower on the horizon, he found himself sitting, staring at the ship, mesmerized. Who flew