Saucer by Stephen Coonts

not wearing a ring, but some women don’t these days.”
    “I’m single.”
    “Live with him?”
    She made a dismissive gesture.
    A gentle breeze stirred her hair. She looked like a fine hunk of woman, Rip Cantrell thought. Pretty old, though. Heck, she must be pushing thirty.
    “So how come you got into that saucer with me?”
    “I didn’t want to see you kill yourself.”
    “Oh, come on. Give me a straight answer. I’m not a kid.”
    She shrugged. “I figured you might try to fly it, and I thought, why not? A girl can only die once.”
    Charley Pine started to laugh, then thought better of it and bit her lip. She got up, picked up one of the cans, set off for the river.
    Rip picked up the other can and trailed after her.
    “So are you in trouble with the Air Force?”
    “I will be, sooner or later. When they find out this thing will fly, they’ll want me to fly it to Nevada.”
    “Where in Nevada?”
    “Area Fifty-one.”
    “That’s the top-secret base?”
    “Yes.”
    “So are you going to?”
    “Can’t take you there, can I? You don’t have a clearance.”
    “They’ll fire you, maybe. Talk Lockheed Martin out of hiring you.”
    Charley grunted.
    On the next trip back up the hill with full cans, Rip relieved Charley of her can. “What do you think we ought to do?” he asked as he poured water into the saucer.
    “We should fly this thing to the States, give it to the Air Force.”
    Rip tilted the can, listened to the gurgling water. When the can was empty, he tossed it in the sand and picked up the other one.
    “No,” he told her.
    “Well, where do you want to go?”
    “I don’t know,” he confessed.
    “This ship is designed to shuttle back and forth between an orbiting mother ship and the surface of a planet. I doubt if it carries enough fuel to operate continuously in the atmosphere.”
    “What are you saying?”
    “This craft is designed to shuttle up and down from the surface, not fly cross-country like an airplane.”
    “Can we safely go into space without knowing how to run the computers?”
    “Don’t kid yourself. There’s nothing we can safely do with this ship except let it sit right where it is.”
    “I don’t want to leave it here and I don’t want to give it to the Air Force.”
    She didn’t say anything to that.
    “I don’t want to let those Aussies have it,” Rip added. “Qaddafi either.”
    “Uh-huh.”
    “I just don’t know,” Rip Cantrell said.
    “Well, we’re going to have to do something. Sitting here on this riverbank is going to attract a crowd before long. And I could use something to eat and something tall and frosty to drink.”
    Finally they got the saucer’s tank full. They could tell by the sound that the tank was filling up. Rip poured water in until it overflowed, then tossed both cans inside the ship. The tank had taken about one hundred and sixty gallons.
    They were sitting in the shade of the saucer, neither of them saying anything, when a small steamer drifted to a stop about fifty yards from the riverbank. It must have been in sight for at least fifteen minutes but they hadn’t noticed it. The small ship was perhaps seventy feet long, with two decks above the waterline, and crammed with people and animals. All the people were looking this way. So many had crowded to this side of the boat that it was listing.
    “Uh-oh!”
    Everyone on the boat seemed to be talking at once and pointing this way. The gabble of voices carried across the water.
    “Do you speak Arabic?” Charley asked Rip.
    “Nowhere near enough to talk to those guys.” Rip stood and dusted off his trousers.
    “Maybe we better get aboard and bop on out of here.”
    “Boy, look at ’em,” Rip said. “You’d think they’d never seen a flying saucer.”
    “Ha, ha, and ha.”
    Rip waved at the mob on the boat. Several waved back, but most just stared. They seemed to be silent now.
    With his hands on his hips, Rip looked around as if he were trying to memorize the