Chapter Twenty-Six
“That’s No Meteorite”
Joseph felt something wet and warm on his face. He recognized the sensation even before he opened his eyes. “Percy!” he whispered, as he grabbed him around the neck and they wrestled off the beanbag onto the floor.
Sharianna opened her eyes to see the ceiling of the barn displayed on the view screen. “We’re home,” she sighed, with both feelings of relief and a hint of sadness, simultaneously.
Joseph stopped wrestling and looked around at the view screen. “We must have gotten here sometime in the night. I guess we made it.”
“Where’s Mom and Dad?” asked Sharianna, as she went up the steps and made her way toward the back door of the control room. Joseph and Percy followed her. As they passed the captain’s chairs, Joseph glanced at the princess clock on the console. It read: 9:47.
As they entered the cargo bay, the first thing that Joseph noticed was the meteorite. Instead of being the brownish black color from yesterday, it now appeared to be more orange. The coloration seemed to follow the texture of the meteorite. The high spots were blacker, while the low spots blended into a rusty orange color.
“It’s pretty; I guess the colors were revealed as the moon dust fell off of it,” whispered Sharianna softly, trying not to wake up Mom and Dad, as she looked at the gray dust on the floor around the meteorite.
Percy planted a great big slobbery kiss, or rather a lick, across Mom’s face from her chin to the tip of her nose.
“Ugh, Percy!” exclaimed Mom, as she immediately awoke and wiped her lips on her sleeve. “What did you let him do that for?” asked Mom, as she looked at Joseph.
“I didn’t know he was going to do it,” Joseph replied, laugh-ing.
Percy then turned his diabolical attention on Dad, who was still sleeping.
Dad awoke with a start as the enthusiastic dog leaped on top of him.
“Look, Dad, how pretty the meteorite is.” Sharianna looked at the meteorite again and was even more impressed with the change. She stepped over and put her hand on the meteorite. “It feels warm,” she observed.
“It almost glows,” added Joseph.
“After I get a nice hot bath, I’m going to town for some groceries; who’s coming?” asked Mom.
“Me,” Sharianna replied.
“I’ll come,” offered Joseph.
Dad declined the invitation: “I think I’ll stay and start fixing the hole in the side of the barn. How about a hand, Joseph?”
“I’ll stay and help you, Dad,” offered Sharianna.
“While you are out, stop off and get a gallon of paint for the barn,” suggested Dad.
By the time Mom and Joseph got back from shopping, Dad and Sharianna had the repairs to the barn well under way.
“Guess what we saw on the way to town?” asked Joseph, as he handed Dad the paint.
“I don’t know. What?” queried Dad.
“A great big army truck set up with a whole bunch of satellite dishes and twirling radar antennae.”
“Do you think they are still looking for us?” asked Sharianna.
“I’m sure they are,” concluded Dad. “I’m sure glad we came in last night along the back roads.”
“They must have thought we were a truck,” theorized Mom.
“They may not have even been scanning the surface at all, because they were looking for an unidentified flying object, right?” reasoned Joseph.
Sharianna interjected: “We may not be so unidentified anymore. A lot of people have seen the robot: the pilots and the stewardess, the astronaut on the space station, the Chinese military, the Koreans, a lot of people in Tokyo, both U.S. and Russian subs, the salvage ship’s divers, and the harpooners on the whaler.
“Just more tabloid fuel,” commented Joseph.
“Nevertheless, I think we had better keep the robot hidden for a while,” cautioned Dad. “Here, give me a hand nailing up the rest of these boards.”
Suddenly, Joseph remembered the safe. “What about the safe?” he asked, excitedly.
“Sharianna and I already got it out, by using the engine hoist. It’s over there.”
The rusty old safe lay on its back on the floor near the welding torch.
“I didn’t want to wait for you, but Dad said that Mom would want to see it opened up,” Sharianna informed Joseph.
“Well, what are we waiting for?” asked Mom eagerly.
“Do you want to do the honors?” asked Dad, as he handed the torch to Joseph. “Let’s start by cutting off the hinges; then we can try prying the lid up.”
The metal popped and spattered as the rusty scale on the safe resisted melting. Joseph turned off the torch and grabbed the sledgehammer to bang off the thick scale. Once the scale was knocked off, the torch cut easily through the remaining metal.
Dad got two large crowbars off the wall and handed one to Mom.
“Pry it up,” instructed Joseph, as he lifted his welding hood. “Careful, it’s still hot.” Mom and Dad pried up on the hinge side of the door. Joseph grabbed a chisel and a hammer from the drawer and tapped it into the crack opposite of the hinges, pushing the door with the locking pins away from the jamb. The heavy old plate of iron slid, and then clanged to the floor, revealing the contents of the safe.
Mom gasped in disbelief.
Dad let out a whoop of excitement.
“Joseph, please go get the scale out of the bathroom,” Mom asked breathlessly.
“And a calculator,” called out Dad, as Joseph went tearing out of the barn toward the house.
Lying in jumbled disarray, with deteriorating record books and documents, were many solid gold ingots. And even more, larger bricks that looked kind of black.
“What are these?” asked Sharianna, as she hefted one of the black bricks.
Dad took the chisel that Joseph had used to open the safe, and scraped the brick. A shiny streak of metal was revealed: “Silver. It tarnishes when in contact with salt water.”
As they began to empty the safe, they also found a number of gold coins and antique silver dollars interspersed with coins of varying denominations. Mom reached in and picked up a deteriorating leather pouch; opening it, she discovered a stack of both silver and gold certificates, still damp, but intact.
Joseph returned with the scale and set it on the floor and they began to stack the gold ingots on it.
Dad took the two large nuggets from the ancient American mine in Canada off the workbench and placed them on the top of the pile.
Mom looked at the scale incredulously.
“Hey, eighty-seven pounds. That’s how much I weigh,” commented Sharianna.
“Oh, my goodness,” whispered Mom, as she sat down on the floor next to the scale and looked at Dad. “How much is gold worth right now?” she asked, in a soft whisper.
“About seventeen hundred…per ounce,” answered Dad, in an even softer whisper.
“How many ounces in a pound?” asked Sharianna.
“Sixteen,” Mom replied.
Joseph still held the calculator. “Let’s see, eighty-seven pounds, times sixteen ounces per pound, equals: one thousand three hundred and ninety two ounces. Multiplied by…how much?” asked Joseph, looking at Dad.
“Seventeen hundred.”
Joseph typed in the numbers, “One, seven, zero, zero. That equals…”
Sharianna looked at the calculator and they read the numbers in stereo. “Two million, three hundred and sixty six thousand, and four hundred dollars!”
“And that doesn’t count the silver and the coins, or the paper money,” exclaimed Mom, in delighted disbelief.
“I’ll bet these coins are collector’s items too,” declared Joseph, as he picked up some of the gold coins.
“We’re rich, aren’t we?” concluded Sharianna.
Suddenly, Percy jumped up from where he had been comfort-ably sprawled on the cool cement of the barn floor and ran toward the robot. Dad had tu
rned the robot onto its side in order to get the safe out easier and it was still in this position. The ankle door was only a couple feet off the floor. Percy leaped through the door and let out a yelp when he experienced the shift in gravity and slid “down” the wall to the floor of the air lock, then charged down the hall toward the cargo area. Joseph was close behind, followed by the rest of the family.
Joseph stood in the doorway and pointed at the large meteor-ite as Dad burst into the room. The meteorite had divided into two hollow halves. It was hinged like a huge interlocking locket. On both halves they could see small blinking lights, almost like LED lights.
“That’s no meteorite!” exclaimed Mom.
Directly above one half, suspended a few inches in mid-air, was what looked like a flat, round, red cushion about eighteen inches across and several inches thick, with a depression in the middle.
“It’s an eggshell,” breathed Sharianna.
On the cushion, cradled by the depression, sat the broken pieces of a beautiful blue-green eggshell, about twice the size of an ostrich egg.
“It must be an alien egg! The meteorite must be some sort of incubation chamber,” assumed Joseph, as he looked around apprehensively for the alien that must have emerged.
“More like a stasis chamber,” commented Sophia. “Who knows how long it sat on the moon.”
Suddenly, the colored lights on the inside of the meteorite went out and the cushion dropped, spilling the remnants of the shell onto the floor.
Percy started sniffing the floor as if he were following a scent. Joseph grabbed him by the collar, and followed him toward the control room.
“I’ll go first,” insisted Dad.
Percy whined as he tried to squeeze past Dad’s legs in the small passageway to the control room, but Joseph held tightly onto his collar.
Dad looked through the doorway, but could see nothing unusual. He stepped down onto the main level with Joseph and Percy by his side and looked over the console, down into the lower observation area. There, curled up on Joseph’s huge beanbag was the little alien.
“It’s some kind of reptile,” assumed Mom.
Sharianna pushed past Mom to get a better view and stood on the top step leading down to the lower level.
“It looks more like a dinosaur, to me,” concluded Joseph. “Maybe a baby T-Rex, or a velociraptor.”
“Sharianna! It might bite!” whispered Mom anxiously.
As Shariana approached, the alien opened its eyes, raised its head and stood up on two legs on the beanbag. Sharianna smiled and reached out her arms. She looked into its large, beautiful, brilliant turquoise-blue eyes. “It doesn’t look dangerous to me.” She moved down the steps toward the alien. “It’s just a baby.”
“Hi there, cutie pie,” she consoled in a soothing, sweet voice.
The alien mimicked her motions, seeming to smile, while reaching out with its arms and making a soft, melodious, crooning sound.
Sharianna picked up the baby alien and cradled him in her arms.
“It’s a baby dragon!” exclaimed Joseph softly, as he saw the wings slowly unfold from the alien’s back.
The End Of The Beginning
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