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never returned to the saucer.”
    “But why would they want to implant DNA samples?” Charley asked with her head cocked quizzically to one side.
    Egg threw up his hands. “To create a DNA library? That would be my guess. But I don’t know. Yet.”
    He took a deep breath. “The computer mines the memories of everyone who wears the headband. Your memory is on it, Charley, and yours, Rip. And mine. The computer knows everything we ever learned well enough to recall.”
    Charley’s eyes widened. “Everything?”
    “Everything,” Egg said with finality, “and it records the emotions you had at the time you had the experience.”
    Charley turned slightly green. “I am not sure I want my private thoughts on some machine’s permanent memory.”
    “They are there,” Egg said. “The good news is that you are a wonderful person.”
    Charley laughed nervously. She eyed Rip. “Maybe I should put on the headband and check out your head,” she told him.
    Rip tried to look nonchalant, to hide his embarrassment. “Any time,” he said blithely. “But I’m going to have to think long and hard about whether or not I want to use that thing again.”
    All three of them laughed.
    They were eating a lunch of chicken salad sandwiches when Rip said, “If the saucer people were creating a database here on earth 140,000 years ago, one suspects they returned occasionally.”
    “A database of living creatures,” Egg said thoughtfully, “a database that would be passed along from one generation to the next, a database that would become part of that species’ genome. It would be there until that species became extinct.”
    “No,” Rip said. “It would be there as long as there were living descendants of the database creatures, of whatever species.”
    “Perhaps the Roswell saucer came so the crew could check the library,” Charley said between bites. “Look up a reference, or add to the database. And take samples of flora and fauna and rocks and dirt. Just like our astronauts did on the moon. They must have been taking samples of everything they could find.”
    “It would be amazing if the Roswell visit was the only subsequent visit,” Egg observed, glancing at their faces.
    “Makes you wonder,” Rip agreed thoughtfully. “A hundred forty thousand years is a long, long time.”
    “Not really,” Egg murmured. “And the library could consist of things beside the on-off switches that govern reproduction. The database could consist of computer code that has no effect on the living creature that carries it.”
    “Isn’t eighty percent of most DNA code nonfunctional?” Rip asked with his mouth full.
    “Researchers think that the nonfunctional codes are ancestoral artifacts,” Egg suggested. “No doubt some of them are. But what about the rest?”
    “I wonder if humans carry a portion of the database,” Charley mused.
    “You’re going to explore that computer some more this afternoon,” Rip said to Egg, without even looking at him.
    Charley giggled. She didn’t do it often, but when she did she brought a wide smile to Rip’s face.
    Egg tried to shrug off the comment. “Maybe,” he acknowledged.
    This time Rip and Charley both laughed.
    *   *   *
    The president was meeting that afternoon with the secretary of state and the national security adviser when an aide slipped him a note. This is what it said:
    The FBI says the Cantrells and Charley Pine are at Egg Cantrell’s farm in Missouri. Their telephones are apparently out of service. Three saucer sightings have been reported to the U.S. Air Force. They are being checked out.
    The president read the note, put it facedown on the desk, then picked it up and read it one more time.
    He was worried. Saucers flying around again, the media in full cry … What in the name of heaven was going on?
    He picked up the note again, took a pen and wrote on the bottom, Why did World Pharmaceuticals pay to salvage the Roswell saucer? and passed the note back to the