Fugitive From Asteron (13 page)

“But . . . but
do you not want people who are sometimes unsure, people who can follow
instructions and . . . obey?”

He raised his eyebrows and moved
his eyes around my face suspiciously. “Say, what if I told you that you needed
to get a perfect score on this test in order to be a space pilot? Would you
have done anything differently?”

I did not know how to answer.
Should I admit to being dishonest or stupid?

“Well, would you?”

“I . . . uh . . .”

“Show me.” He swung the screen
around to me.

I changed the mistakes back to my
original answers, then rotated the screen to face Mykroni, who had been
watching me the entire time. He examined the results.

“That’s better. A perfect score!
You took out the errors and left the intelligence. The only mistake you made
here today was in thinking I don’t want intelligence. If you think that, I
can’t put you in a spacecraft.” He stared at me to stress his point.

I tried to quiet the dark voice
that lived inside me, warning me of dangers. I thought of Kristin’s speaking
against the mayor and contradicting her flight instructor. Earthlings were not
driven by obedience. “I will correct my mistake.”

“Can you?”

“Yes.” I was trying to convince
myself as much as Mykroni.

With suspicion lingering on his
face, he got up. “Let’s see if you can fly.”

Mykroni took me to a room that
contained a large flight simulator, along with a small control panel near it.
Our slim bodies formed two long gray shadows on the solid white exterior of the
device as we walked up to it. He sealed me inside, where I sat in a life-sized
cockpit with a full array of flight controls. He sat at the console outside,
setting parameters for the device. First he had me perform a variety of basic
maneuvers. The simulator moved in all degrees of flight motion, corresponding
to the controls I engaged, and the scenery on monitors imitated what I would
expect to see out the windows in an actual flight. Then the cockpit bounced and
the scenery whirled as Mykroni killed an engine, shook me with severe
turbulence, set fire to my craft, and put me inside a meteor shower. In each
crisis, I scrambled to resolve the problem. The enactments were so vivid that
my pulse raced and muscles tensed as if the disasters were real. After I had
managed to rescue the craft and crew during a string of these calamities,
Mykroni finally stopped the simulator and let me leave the cockpit. I emerged
with my legs weak and my mind spent from the nightmarish experience, only to
find Mykroni smiling for the first time, a wide grin across his face.

“Let’s go up now,” he said simply.

He took me to the company’s
airfield, where to my amazement I saw several of the aircraft I had flown on
Asteron, or rather I saw advanced models of planes I had flown. I went up with
Mykroni in one of them. I took off and landed several times. I flew upright and
inverted, high to the ground and low to the ground. I performed turns, loops,
rolls, and spins of every kind. Mykroni called instructions to me, and I
executed them. In several cases he had me climb at a certain distance per
second to a specific altitude, then level off. When I finished, he checked my
performance to see if I had met the requirements without overshooting or
falling short.

Mykroni explained that although a
plane could fly itself in automated systems, the intelligence and skill of a
human pilot remained irreplaceable. Under MAS policy, humans were active in
flying, as well as in overseeing, supplementing, and overriding automatic
flight when necessary, especially in difficult or unexpected situations.
“That’s why we teach you to do everything,” he said. I nodded, eager to learn
all I could.

He talked about how precision
flying was important for docking and rendezvousing in space. Because I had
learned this kind of flying on Asteron, I could execute precision maneuvers in a
whole host of situations. Mykroni posed many questions for me to answer,
dazzled me with his own superb flying skills, and taught me new ways to harness
the tremendous power of my ship to serve my will. We talked constantly, my
words spilling together to keep pace with the many insights and questions that
this master teacher stirred in me. I resolved to learn the Earthlings’ speech
contractions, because I was impatient to talk faster and say more.

When we finished, Mykroni jumped
down from the plane, the sun catching strands of his yellow-brown hair, his
face smiling, his lean body looking much younger than his years. He stroked the
fuselage as though it were a prized animal.

“She makes you want to kiss her
sometimes, doesn’t she?” he said.

I remembered a superior with
vicious eyes who had seen me kiss my aircraft, and then had ordered a
punishment that almost killed me.

As Mykroni brushed one hand along
the plane, he pointed to me with the other, his eyes sparkling with excitement.
“You’re the one who made her look so good. You’re a crazy kid, and I hope to
hell you don’t kill yourself, but you did one fine job up there, Alexander.
You’re going to do damn well in a spacecraft.”

I stared at him incredulously,
realizing for the first time how much I wanted . . . needed . . . to
hear the note of encouragement in a teacher’s voice.

To clear me for space travel Mykroni
arranged for a physical exam and fitness test, which I easily passed. I had an
anxious moment when I was brought to the Human Resources Department for a
background check on arriving aliens. Kristin had neglected to mention this! But
because Cosmona was at war and there was confusion about who made passage on
the refugee ships and how to locate their records, a check of my background could
not be made at the time. I was told that Mykroni was alerted to this matter and
that he waived the requirement.

When I was taken back to his
office, I sat facing the man who could offer me a life. The wooden desk between
us was bare of any papers or other objects, as if his sole concern was with me.

“Alex, we start space pilots at
five dollars a week in gold. That’ll get you a nice place to live, plus a fair
amount of extra cash. I’ve got a contract to service a mining operation in the
asteroid belt between two planets in our solar system, Mars and Jupiter, then
to transport the materials to colonies on Mars. It’s too expensive to keep
mining and shipping materials from Earth when we can readily obtain them from
the mineral-rich asteroids and extract them more economically in the
environment of minimal gravity. Mining from space makes it so much easier to
set up colonies there, so this project is very important to the future of space
exploration. And it’s important in establishing a completely new business
operation for MAS in asteroid mining.”

I looked at Mykroni intently,
following every word.

“You’ll need to learn all the
systems on the spacecraft and to work through all the simulators, and then I’ll
send you out with our spaceships for field training. This training program
would normally take a year, but the mining contract has to start in half that
time. If you can be ready in six months, there’ll be a bonus of twenty-five
dollars, and you can be my pilot on the first ship out to the asteroids.”

I nodded eagerly at the prospect.

He leaned across the desk, lowering
his head so that he peered at me from under his eyebrows. “There’s one
condition. You must promise me you’ll never again make an intentional mistake.
You’ll never again do something you know is wrong for the sake of what you
think will please me. You’ll never again think I’m so base as to want to be
surrounded by inferiors. You’ll never again try to hide your intelligence. As a
space pilot, you’ll have many lives and a fortune in equipment in your hands.
For that, I need a man who thinks, not a robot who obeys. Which will you be,
Alex?”

He paused for my answer.

“I will be a man, for I do prefer
that option.”

“I believe you on your preference,
but can you promise to act on it?”

“Yes. . . . Now
I can. Yes.”

He studied my face, weighing my
response. “Okay, Alex, the job’s yours. I’ll have Kristin give you a tour of
the department. A quick one, mind you, so don’t dillydally. I want you back
here to discuss your training schedule before the day’s over. Then first thing
tomorrow you’ll—oh, excuse me, I’m jumping ahead. I forgot to ask if you accept
the offer.”

I thought of the man in the crate
and the words he had uttered when I gave him water. At the time, I thought
those words were useless, but now I knew I had been wrong about them.

“Well, Alex, what do you say?”

“I say . . . thank
you.”

“Then we have a deal?”

“Oh, yes.” The words seemed too
small in exchange for my life. I felt a need to say more, to do more, to give
expression to the most noteworthy moment I had ever lived. But how? I extended
my hand. “Should we grip hands?”

“We definitely should, son.”

The last word astonished me!
Meanwhile, I squeezed Mykroni’s hand with a force that could crush, were it not
balanced by his own strong clasp.

I left my new boss and walked down
the brightly lit hallway. Stretching my neck to glance inside any doors that
were open, I saw the pleasing sights of the Space Travel Division’s workers—a
series of bowed heads so absorbed in tasks that they neglected to look up when I
passed by. I reached an office with a display of flowers on the desk and a
worker eager to see me. Kristin sprang from her chair, and when I told her I
was hired, she clapped and jumped around with a child’s excitement.

As she took me on my tour, a stab
of pain dragged down what were otherwise the lightest steps of my life. On
Asteron, despite the constant refrains I had heard about the duty I owed to all
the people, such a thing never weighed on my conscience. But here on Earth I
felt the pull of an obligation owed not to all but merely to two. How could two
Earthlings tug at me more powerfully than all Asteronians? Why did I understand
only now what it meant to have an obligation?

The thing I owed these two
Earthlings was something that had never weighed me down before, because its
opposite had been a way of life for me.
Can I be honest?
I asked
myself.
Yes
, I thought,
unless I was something else, and that was
desperate
. I knew that I would have to tell the two people who gave me a
life that I had lied to them. But if I told them, I would not have a life.
Feran’s world required constant sneaking, hiding, and lying to survive, but my
new world demanded a different code. When I got rid of Feran—with his vile
threats of torture and death—I would be rid of deceit, I vowed. Then I could
look at Mykroni and Kristin in the same open way they looked at me, tell them
the truth about my origin, and face whatever penalty I must.

I could not think about that now
because Kristin was showing me the superb training facilities that MAS had
developed to produce what she called the best space pilots in the galaxy. She
commented on a series of classrooms we passed: “Our pilots take courses in
mathematics, physics, astronomy, computers, guidance and navigation, and other
subjects.”

We stopped at a laboratory where
scientists were using high-powered microscopes to analyze rocks from space. In
another area I saw large water tanks containing submerged mock-ups of
spacecraft equipment, where astronauts were working in neutral buoyancy to
imitate weightlessness and practice working in spacesuits. We passed simulators
of spacecraft computers and flight decks, where pilots were studying the many
onboard systems. I also saw replicas of complete ships, duplicated with the finest
accuracy, down to the celestial views outside the windows.

I was disappointed when Kristin
told me the tour was finished. I wanted to linger in the hallways, peer into
the rooms, and never leave the building. As we headed toward an elevator bank,
my guide turned to me. “So what do you think of MAS?”

I paused to face the slender female
who was also an ace pilot. My hands softly squeezed her shoulders. “I think you
saved my life by bringing me here.”

“But it’s you who tried to save my
life—three times.”

“But your life was not in danger.”

“Was yours, Alex?” The many hues of
her liquid eyes swept across my face.

“I will not be in danger at MAS. I
am exceedingly pleased to be here.”

“That means you’re happy.”

I looked at her curiously. She was
using a word we did not think of on Asteron, a word I had never applied to
myself.

“I mean that when you say you’re
exceedingly pleased, here we call that being happy,” she explained.

I realized my hands still rested on
her shoulders. I removed them . . . reluctantly.

“I will have to consider that word,
especially when I meet the person who created this superb company, the smartest
and noblest man in the universe—your father.”
And when I expunge from my
life the dumbest and vilest
, I thought. “Mykroni told me that Dr. Merrett
likes to meet the new pilots.”

“He does—usually,” she replied as
we resumed our walk. “But right now he’s busy with other matters. I think he’s
looking for new projects. He’s been preoccupied with business problems since he
pulled out of a contract to deliver a product to a customer. It was a project
he started two and a half years ago. The sudden cancellation of this work has
caused a financial dilemma for the company.”

I had questions about what she
meant, but Kristin patiently explained the unfamiliar terms to me.

“Since the project’s cancellation,
my father hasn’t been himself. Right now he has no time for the space pilots,
or for flying with me, for our gardening, our walks, the dinners we’ve always
enjoyed.” She gazed flatly at the floor.

I thought of the man I had seen on
my walk the previous day, who threw a child high in the air to make her laugh.
“You mean he has no time to be happy with you?”