Michael was going to be flown out on one of the smaller saucers, a fifty-foot transport, that was resting on its four hydraulic legs with its exit door tilting down from the base to form a short ramp to the ground. Though in many ways more advanced than the saucers inherited from Wilson at the time of the takeover of his colony, its means of flight and underwater movement was essentially the same, being powered by a highly advanced electromagnetic propulsion system that ionized the surrounding air or sea, combined with an electromagnetic damping system that aided its lift and flight capabilities. The bodywork, Michael knew, was made from an electrically charged magnesium orthosilicate so minutely porous that it managed to be essentially waterproof while ensuring, in flight, an absolute minimum of friction, heat and drag. The raised transparent dome was uncovered and Michael could see the crew inside,

  preparing for take-off. Had it not been for that uncovered dome and the ramp, the saucer would have looked seamless, a gigantic whitish-grey metallic egg that had been moulded miraculously in one piece.

  In fact, the saucer, like most aircraft, had been made in separate pieces and the divisions between them were indeed there, but joined together so precisely as to make them virtually invisible.

  'That's a beautiful sight,' Michael said, meaning it, as he and Brandenberg stopped at the foot of the ramp.

  'It depends on how you look at it,' Brandenberg said. 'When I see the saucers, even our saucers, I tend to think of Wilson and that does much to mitigate their beauty for me . . . But I know what you mean.

  Now, are you sure you're ready?'

  'Yes,' Michael said, adjusting the straps on the rucksack that contained everything he would need in the World, including his 1000-MB notebook, new identification and plastic cards for financial and other transactions.

  Having spent the last three days in almost total isolation, not allowed to go back and see his family, wired into an interactive multimedia system with 3-D sound and wraparound vision that had pumped into him everything he needed to know about one Michael Johnson, the person he was to impersonate should he be interrogated by the cyborgs or anyone connected to them, Michael felt that he was now ready to make his way in the World, dangerous though it might be.

  I don't think you could teach me anything else before I go out there,' he went on, 'so I'm pleased to go now.'

  Good,' Brandenberg said. 'No point in saying that we're all depending on you; I'm sure you know that already.'

  Michael grinned. 'Yep.' Any message for your folks and Chloe?'

  'Yes. Tell them that I'll be back without fail and I'll bring them the key to the United States. Tell them I

  love them.'

  I will,' Brandenberg said. Then he sighed and looked up the ramp at the open doorway leading into the flying saucer. He

  looked back at Michael and held out his hand. 'Good luck,' he said.

  They shook hands, then Brandenberg stepped back to let Michael enter the saucer.

  Nodding silently in acknowledgement, trying to still his excitement and stay cool, Michael went up the short ramp and found himself in a brightly lit white-painted hallway, completely featureless, but with a low, dome-shaped ceiling and a corridor curving away to his right. To his left was a white-painted steel door that was obviously blocking the 'end' of the same completely circular corridor that, Michael knew, ran around the outer perimeter of the craft, just above what would soon be a revolving disc-shaped lower wing.

  As there was no other way to go, Michael entered the corridor to his right. The instant he did so, he heard a bass humming sound and turned back to see the short ramp lifting off the ground and moving obliquely back up into the side of the sloping fuselage, locking into it so tightly that the joins around its edges could not be seen, making the wall once more look perfectly seamless.

  Impressed by the precision of the construction, Michael continued along the curving corridor, which likewise appeared to be seamless and was certainly featureless, containing no windows on either side.

  In less than a minute, however, he came to a doorway, located on the inner side of the corridor, and found himself looking into the central cabin of the craft, clearly the control room, that had about a dozen reinforced viewing windows around its circular wall and a dome-shaped ceiling of heat-resistant reinforced Perspex, giving the crew a 360-degree view from any part of the flight deck. This was the same transparent dome that Michael had seen from outside.

  Having been thoroughly trained in flying-saucer technology and flight skills, he recognized from the intricate control panels, in which small lights of many colours were flashing constantly on and off, the standard hardware for a normal airliner, including

  switch panels, pitch-trim controls, autopilot-engage switch, inertial navigation, navigational radio selector, weather radar, radio equipment, intercom switches, a highly advanced brand of ADF

  (automatic direction finder), computer selection switches, and an unusually small but exceptionally powerful computer that controlled most of the flight deck functions and could be activated by an electronic 'voice' composed of minute vibrations transmitted at varying speeds and frequencies.

  However, the flight deck did not contain such standard aircraft controls as thruster-reverse lights, nose-gear tiller, speed-brake handle, or even brake-pressure or aileron-and-rudder trims, as these were not required for the unique propulsion systems of this kind of craft.

  Though relatively small and, from what Michael could see, relatively unsophisticated in comparison with the great so-called 'mother ships', this transport craft actually possessed a variety of large and small CAMS (Cybernetic Anthropomorphous Machine Systems) or metal arms with remote-controlled claws, which were used to scoop up exotic marine life and a wealth of normally unavailable minerals from the ocean bed and the soil of Earth. It could also release and receive much smaller saucers, a mere metre in diameter, that could be used as radar-blocking devices or, with their electronic 'seeing' and

  'hearing' capabilities, as advance 'scouts', sending back details of any other aircraft in the vicinity. They could also make the engines of other aircraft and even automobiles malfunction; and they were, as well, capable of stunning or hypnotizing human beings with their flickering strobe lights. Those dangerous lights, used extensively in Wilson's day, had not so far been used by the aircrews of Freedom Bay.

  Because the transport saucers were almost completely computer-automated, the aircrew in this case

  consisted of only two men, captains Arnold Jessup and Des Clinton, both in their late thirties, both wearing open-necked shirts and blue coveralls. Jessup was the first pilot while Clinton was there as the navigator

  and to stand in for Jessup should something disabling happen to him, such as a stroke or heart attack.

  Otherwise, the saucer was run by a computer system that could not only maintain itself but could also, in most cases, repair itself.

  When Michael entered the flight deck, both crewmen turned to face him.

  'Captain Jessup,' Michael said by way of greeting, nodding with a smile first to one man, then to the other. 'Captain Clinton. Good to see you both.'

  'Hi, Michael,' Jessup said. 'Good to see you. All set for the trip?'

  'I think so,' Michael said.

  'You think so?'

  'I know.'

  Jessup grinned. 'We're taking off in a couple of minutes, so you'd better strap yourself in.'

  'Here,' Clinton said, indicating the rucksack on Michael's back. 'Let me take that. You can't sit in a chair with that on your shoulders and you have to sit in a chair. You can have it back when we drop you off.'

  Michael nodded agreement, slipped the straps off his shoulders, then handed the valuable rucksack to Clinton and watched him put it into a locker. He then followed the others by strapping himself into a vacant seat at the control panel. Even as he was doing so, the saucer throbbed with a bass humming sound, almost an infrasound, then vibrated slightly.

  Instantly, the lower wing-plates began to spin around the static central dome, at first slowly, then more rapidly, and the saucer, swaying slightly from side to side, lifted a few metres off the landing pad. As the saucer hovered in the air, now bobbing gently like a cork in a mildly turbulent sea, its circular wing plates rotated ever more rapidly until they became no more than a silvery-white blur with a pulsating whitish glow, or corona, around their rim, and the saucer began its steady, vertical ascent.

  Simultaneously, two meniscus-shaped sections of what looked

  like white steel, but which was actually magnesium orthosilicate like the fuselage and wings, slid up from the bottom of the Perspex dome to fit into each other at the top, forming an umbrella-shaped protective covering and blocking out the sky. At the same time, rectangular plates of magnesium orthosilicate slid down to cover the many windows, turning the inside of the cabin into a perfectly sealed, apparently seamless whole that offered no outside view of anything whatsoever.

  Being already in the air, the saucer did not follow the customary two-stage pattern of flying saucer lift-offs: instead, it made a tentative vertical ascent to what Michael judged to be about sixty metres, hovered for a few seconds, then climbed abruptly to a high altitude, almost certainly just below the stratosphere. There it levelled out sharply, before shooting suddenly, horizontally, to the north, heading for the Weddell Sea and the South Atlantic Ocean.

  Though Michael knew this was happening, he didn't feel a thing because the saucer was utilizing a gravity shield that came on automatically when required. For this reason, once the saucer was in proper flight, he and the others, now needing no protection against G-forces or decreased outside air pressure, were able to release their safety belts and move about the flight deck without fear.

  Michael crossed immediately to Captain Jessup who was now taking command, speaking his instructions into the pinhead microphone strapped to his throat as part of a communication system that

  also included a covert ear piece for receiving. His spoken instructions were being converted by the computer into an electronic language understood by the saucer's control console, which would react accordingly. When he had given the computer its latest instructions, he turned and grinned at Michael.

  'Enjoying it?' he asked.

  Yes, but it's a pity we can't see outside.'

  You can when we slow down,' Jessup replied. 'When we're

  entering United States air space. I can open the shutters then.'

  'When will that be?' Michael asked.

  'About an hour,' Jessup told him. 'We're flying over the Antarctic Circle, the Falkland Islands, Brazil and Guyana, across Haiti and the Bahamas, then on to the east coast of America, descending over Newport News, coming down in Virginia.'

  'We'll do that in an hour?'

  'You can bet on it,' Jessup said.

  'Do you think we'll get through without being seen?'

  'I think so,' Jessup said.

  In fact, they had only been flying for about half an hour, which placed them approximately over Rio de Janeiro, when the saucer's radar screens showed the blips of other moving objects. Checking the flight characteristics, Clinton was able to ascertain that the blips indicated large objects flying too quickly to be normal aircraft — in other words, they were cyborg flying saucers.

  'Nothing to worry about,' Jessup said. 'We know what frequency their radar works on, so we're using a frequency that renders us invisible to them. They'd have to eyeball us to know we're here and we'll never get that close to them. Bless the wonders of science. Nevertheless, we'd better take evasive action just to be sure.'

  Even now, in mid-flight, with Jessup talking the saucer into ascending and descending repeatedly, making sheer, abrupt turns of the kind that would once have seemed impossible, there was, for Michael, absolutely no sensation of movement. However, when Jessup opened the shutters around the circular wall as they flew across the Bahamas, thus obtaining a 360-degree view without breaching the upper protective covering of the dome, the saucer was still flying so fast that all Michael saw was what appeared to be a rapidly whipping, frantically spiralling tunnel of shimmering white light streaked with silvery blue, a vertiginous well of brightness that gave no indication of what direction they were actually flying in: up, down or straight ahead.

  It was, of course, the latter. Flying at a speed far beyond that

  of sound, over fifty miles up, on the very edge of space, the saucer appeared to be blasting through the very sky itself, into another world, a great white sheet tearing open to reveal a vast azure sea that instantly convulsed and turned purple, then, just as abruptly, being exactly the same sky, filled up with the dazzling radiance of a gigantic sun. Miraculously, the moon and stars then appeared, clearly visible even in the middle of the day, rendered so by an upper atmosphere so thin that even dust particles could not exist there.

  Perhaps just to please Michael, Jessup slowed down to hovering speed when directly over Bimini, in the Bahamas. This location could be seen both as a densely packed collection of glowing dots on the radar screen and as it actually was on the TV monitor wired to a high-powered aerial camera. What the monitor was showing was, in fact, a photomosaic of the western end of the Bermuda Triangle where

  the Gulf Stream flowed northward between Florida and the Great Bahama Bank and, in the exact middle of the picture, Bimini itself, monochrome on the screen but actually a ravishing tapestry of green and blue streaked with so-called 'white water' containing sulphur, strontium and lithium which often made it glow eerily.

  'In the Old Age,' Jessup said, 'before we took over Freedom Bay, lots of people saw flying saucers over this area and even, in some cases, rising up out of the sea itself. For years those sightings were explained away officially either as natural phenomena caused by the unusual weather characteristics of the area or as the eerie glowing that comes naturally from the water itself. Then, of course, it transpired that flying saucers were emerging from the Bermuda Triangle — Wilson's saucers — and those bastards are almost certainly still down there, exploring the sea bed. It's a hell of a thought.'

  'We'll put a stop to them eventually,' Michael said. 'That's why you're flying me in there.'

  'Let's hope you succeed,' Jessup responded pragmatically. 'But I wouldn't bet on it.'

  'Bet on it/ Michael said.

  Amused by Michael's youthful confidence, Jessup grinned and turned back to the control console, speaking into his throat mike, giving instructions that would make the saucer take them on to the east coast of America. When the instructions had been given, the saucer ascended vertically about fifty metres, then shot off in a westerly direction, heading for Norfolk, Virginia. With its gravitational shield also functioning as an inertial shield, the mass of the craft in relation to gravity was reduced to a minute fraction of its former value. This permitted exceptional buoyancy for the craft in the atmosphere, extremely high accelerations (so fast, indeed, that the human eye could not detect the saucer's acceleration from its hovering position in the sky and would imagine that it had abruptly disappeared) and the capability of coming to a remarkably fast stop or going into abrupt right-angle turns without harming those inside.

  Given instructions by Jessup and now flying on autopilot, the saucer knew where it had to go. So, approaching the mainland, it stopped abruptly, made a sharp, right-angled turn, then shot off to the north-west, automatically following the topography of the land below by means of a control system that bounced radar-like signals off the ground and back again for instant computer analysis and constandy changing flight directions. Because of this, as well as the weakening and strengthening of the gravitational pull of the Earth when the saucer dropped low enough, it appeared to be bobbing repeatedly as it sped on a horizontal trajectory across Newport News and on to Richmond, Virginia.

  With the shutters still open and the saucer's speed greatly reduced, Michael could look down and see the vast sweep of the Shenandoah Valley with its rich profusion of forests, orchards, and pastures, crisscrossed with rivers, all illuminated in daylight, moving past in a blur far below. However, before he could blink, the Great North Mountains heaved into view, expanding at a breathtaking rate. Then, suddenly, the mountaintops were spread out below and the saucer, which had come to an abrupt halt that

  had not been felt by Michael or the other two crew members, was hovering directly over their drop zone, about five thousand metres above the highest peak, just north of a clearly visible small town that nestled in the emerald-green foothills.

  'Is that Woodstock?' Michael asked.

  'It sure is,' Jessup replied. 'So prepare to land.'

  'What does that mean?' Michael asked.

  'The gravity-damping system will automatically turn itself off before we reach ground level, so you'll

  need to strap yourself in again until we touch down.'

  'Just like driving a car,' Michael said.

  'You got it, kid.'

  The descent commenced as soon as Michael and the others had strapped themselves back into their chairs in front of the constantly blinking control console. At first the saucer vibrated slightly and wobbled a little, its lights flashing on and off. Then, with its circular wings still rotating around the gyroscopically stabilized central fuselage, though now at gready reduced speed, it steadied and dropped vertically, first through the military and civilian flight paths, its radar checking for oncoming aircraft, then through the scattered clouds, and finally all the way down, past the mountain peaks and sheer and shallow cliff faces.

  Though not hindered by normal heat and drag and thus giving off no sonic booms or other noises except for its almost tangible bass infrasound, the saucer, as it reached ground level, was nonetheless creating violent currents of air within a cylindrical zone the same width as its rotating wing-plates, making the grass and plants flutter wildly, noisily sucking up loose soil and gravel, and causing them to whirl in the air. As it reached ground level, swaying gently from side to side, the rotation of its wing-plates slowed gradually and the whitish glow of its electrically charged, minutely porous magnesium orthosilicate, which was ionizing the air surrounding it, darkened to a more normal metallic grey.