Saucer: The Conquest Read Online Free PDF Page A

that France had been and could be in the future. He had fought with all the will and might of Charlemagne to make it happen. His vision, optimism and refusal to take no for an answer had triumphed in the end.
    The real reason for the French space program, or indeed any space program, was that the challenge was there. The moon was there; Mars was there; the stars beckoned every night. Charley Pine believed that people needed dreams, the larger the better. Our dreams define us, she once told Rip.
    What a contrast the dreamer Pierre Artois was, Charley mused, to the modern Americans. Somewhere along the way they had lost the space dream. Space costs too much, they said. NASA had morphed into a petrified bureaucracy as innovative as the postal service. These days Americans fretted about foreign competition and how to save Medicare—and who was going to foot the bill. Rip once remarked that the current crop of penny-pinching, politically correct politicians would have refused to finance Columbus. Watching Artois, Charley knew that Rip was right.
    The press conference was a photo op and nothing more. One of the American reporters asked about the fare-paying passenger Artois had agreed to take to the moon, one Joe Bob Hooker, who rumor had it was paying twenty-five million euros for his round-trip ticket. “This is a profit-making venture,” Artois responded. “He paid cash.” He refused to say more about his passenger.
    “Your wife has preceded you to the moon, has she not?”
    Ah, yes—true love on the moon. No fool, Pierre knew the media would play this story line like a harp. He glanced longingly at the ceiling, then said simply, “We will soon be together. I have missed her very much.” He touched his left breast and added with a straight face, “She is the best part of me.” Charley Pine nearly gagged.
    After a few more one-liners for television and a pithy comment or two for the newspapers, Pierre led his crew off the stage.
    Soon they began the suiting-up process, some of it filmed by a cameraman with a video camera. Then the crew boarded a bus for the two-mile journey to the spaceplane, which sat on the end of a twelve-thousand-foot runway. The bus had to travel a hundred yards or so on a public highway, one lined with the curious and small knots of protesters with signs. Apparently even the Europeans couldn’t do anything these days without someone complaining, Charley thought.
    She found herself beside the American passenger, a stout man in his fifties. “You the American woman?” he asked.
    Hooker’s color wasn’t so good.
    “That’s right.”
    “Glad you’re going. Nice to have somebody to speak American to.”
    “Right.”
    “’Bout had it up to here with the frogs.”
    “They kept you busy, have they?”
    “Like a hound dog with fleas. You can really fly this thing?”
    “No. I’m a Victoria’s Secret model that Artois hired when he found he couldn’t afford the real Charlotte Pine.”
    Hooker gave her a sharp look and said nothing more.
    After a glance out the window she concentrated on lowering her own anxiety level. This is just another flight, she told herself, just like all those flights in high-performance airplanes she made in the air force. More precisely, like those saucer rides with Rip Cantrell.
    She was thinking of Rip when the spaceplane came into view. Jeanne d’Arc. She had explored every inch of the craft during training and spent several weeks in the simulator, yet the sight of the ship sitting on the concrete under the floodlights, ready to fly, caused a sharp intake of breath.
    She was really going to do it.
    She was going to the moon!
    Yee-haa!
    I hope Rip is watching on television!
    • • •
    He was watching on television, of course. Due to the time difference, it was early evening in America when the live coverage began. A dozen scientists crowded around the television in the living room of the Missouri farmhouse with Egg and Rip.
    “It’ll be okay,” Egg