Fugitive From Asteron (31 page)

Just then Chuck’s gun fired, but
not at me. He fired at a target by the dugout behind me. Then I heard another
shot and saw Chuck fall, blood oozing from his chest, his gun dropping to the
ground. I turned to see a man gripping a gun, blood dripping from the side of
his head. He was leaning over the roof of the dugout from the first row of
seats. It was Mykroni.

I reached for Chuck’s gun. When the
weapon had fallen to the ground, a small object rolled out of an electronic
panel on the handle, startling me. It was a black metal cone. Suddenly I
remembered Feran’s remark that Earth has things not seen on Asteron. I had
never seen the black cone before. Or had I? Quickly, I put the object back into
its groove in the gun and reassembled the weapon. Then I aimed it at Feran and
Chuck. I knew that the protective presence by the dugout was also holding my
enemies at bay.

Kristin ran to assist Mykroni. She
grabbed a handkerchief from her pocket and pressed it against his head wound to
stop the bleeding. “Mykroni, this man is
not
my—” she began, but
Mykroni motioned for her to be quiet.

Feran switched to his Earthling
voice. “Mykroni! I’m so glad you’re here, my good friend. But you shot the wrong
man! Your son tried to save my life just now. You see, the new guy you hired is
the spy ES is looking for. He’s from Asteron.”

“Of course Alex is from Asteron. I
knew that when I hired him. I saw the scars on his neck. I recognized the
accent in his speech. I could tell he was a military pilot, a skill he couldn’t
have learned on Cosmona because it doesn’t have an air force.”

“Then I should be angry at you for
breaching our company rules. Regardless, I’m still relieved you’re here. Now,
if you’ll make the spy drop his weapon”—Feran gestured to the sunbeam—“I’ll
retrieve the property he stole.”

“Not so fast,” said Mykroni,
pointing his gun at Feran. “Since you got back from your trip, I’ve been trying
to tell you why I broke the rules for Alex, but you’ve been too busy to see me.
When I found out ES was looking for Alex, I told you I had to discuss an urgent
matter that could involve someone’s life, but you were still too busy to see
me. Now, that didn’t compute. Charles Merrett would have made time for a matter
that involved a person’s life. A minute ago you were speaking with a different
voice, one I remember from a time long past. It was the voice of a ruler’s son
and second-in-command, a young man of great cruelty, a man I fled from.”

Chuck was lying on the ground. His
drooping eyelids sprung open as he realized the score had changed. “Hey, Dad, I
thought this was Uncle Charles. You mean—”

“I overheard enough, so save your
lies. When you grudgingly came to my office today after I once again demanded a
payment schedule for my loan, then you suddenly got a phone call and left, I
began to feel as if I’d been had again. I saw you get in your plane with the
suits from Charles’s secret project and a weapon sticking out of your pocket. I
wondered what you were up to, so I followed you here. I brought this weapon that
I keep in my plane. It’s one I’ve never used. You know, I bought it when you
were a kid, when there’d been a rash of kidnappings in Rising Tide. I bought it
to . . . protect you. . . .”

Mykroni’s head fell onto the
dugout. Kristin pressed her handkerchief, now blood-soaked, against the wound more
tightly. He struggled to raise his head, intent on having his say.

I gestured to Feran to move away
from the sunbeam. As he backed off, I moved toward it and stood like a guard at
its side. I held Chuck’s gun on Feran, ready to pull the trigger, waiting only
for Mykroni to finish releasing the last of the words that seemed to have been
bottled up under pressure for a long time.

“When you made a mess of your life,
I shielded you from the results of your own chosen actions. I gave you a job
servicing a spacecraft, which you didn’t deserve, and you almost . . . caused . . . a
crisis.”

Mykroni’s eyelids were shutting.

“I’ll get an ambulance!” Kristin reached
for her pocket phone, but he grabbed the device from her hand. She tried to
grab it back, but he would not let go.

“I need to make a call first,” he
said, turning back to Chuck.

“I bailed you out again with a job
in Housekeeping, where I see now that your motives crossed the line from
laziness and resentment to something . . . very different.
I knew it was wrong to pander to your vices. That was my big mistake. It wasn’t
healthy for you to be needy . . . and helpless. It wasn’t right
for you to act recklessly and expect me to save you from the consequences. Now,
for the first time, you’ll lie in the bed you made, traitor!
I
will be
the one who turns you in.
I
will be the one who has you arrested for
high
treason
!”

Mykroni tried to place a call on
Kristin’s phone, but his hand fell limply and the device slipped to the ground.
His head dropped as Chuck’s eyes again closed. They were both unconscious.

I released a string of bullets at
Feran as he zippered the flexite suit and threw on the hood in one furious
motion. I shot him in the head, in the heart, in the chest, in the stomach—but
he did not fall. Within one startling second, he walked into the bullets and
grabbed the gun from me. He was gloating. Feran knew something I had not: Bullets
bounce off flexite.

Laughing wildly, convulsively, his
crazed eyes bulging, Feran slipped his finger into the trigger. I plunged to
the ground. His gun blasted, and I felt a burning sensation as blood spurted
from my arm. Then he whirled to face Kristin, who was now behind him, shooting
at him with Mykroni’s gun. I yelled for Kristin to get down. She dived to the
ground, but not before Feran grazed her shoulder. Her blouse reddened with
blood.

Throughout everything, we heard
fits of diabolical laughter muffled by the flexite visor. Feran was too excited
to shoot more accurately and too absorbed with another task he relished more
than dealing with us. Kristin and I remained motionless on the ground,
pretending to be more seriously wounded, so he would not shoot again.

Sealed in the flexite suit, Feran
approached the sunbeam. He pulled off the protective plastic covering from the
pin. With his flexite-gloved hand curled like a claw, his fingers encircled the
ring-shaped pin that activated the device. He yanked the pin out of the
machine, throwing it high in the air, crying madly, his voice reverberating
through the stands:

“One people, one will! Planet
Earth!”

Chapter 27

The sunbeam hummed. The aperture on top opened. An
electronic display panel slid out from the slot where the pin had been removed,
flashing in red lights:
STARTING
.

The pleasant electronic voice of a
female informed us: “Ten seconds to emission.”

The sunbeam stood in front of
Feran, while I lay a few feet to his side and Kristin lay behind him. Her face
lit up with an idea. She crawled on her stomach, inching closer to him.

“Six seconds to emission.”

Gesturing, Kristin described her
plan to me. I nodded my agreement. As she crawled closer to the purple-suited
legs, I readied my body for what was to come.

“Two seconds to emission.”

Feran laughed wildly, waving his
arms high in the air in victory.

From behind him, in one swift move,
Kristin wrapped her arms around his feet and pulled them off the ground. Feran
fell over the sunbeam just as I flew on top of him. I pulled up his flexite
visor and pressed his face into the hole in the machine. The hood around his
face had a rim that adhered to the visor with a sticky strip of purple metal. I
now used that flexite rim to make a tight seal between the visor and the
zametron, with Feran’s unprotected face in the hole. I pressed down with the
full force of my strength to keep him in this position.

“Emission of Zamean beam will begin,”
said the electronic voice. The word
EMISSION
now flashed in red on the screen.

“How will we stop this thing,
Kristin? It will explode if the beam is trapped!”

Just then the machine started
shaking, and its soft voice said: “Pressure buildup. Aperture blocked.” The
display panel changed to flash the word
DANGER
at us.

“I put files from Project Z on your
plane’s computer.” I told her my password to unscramble the encrypted data and
read the documents.

“I’ll search the files for how to
stop this thing!” Kristin cried, as she ran to her plane. “The engine’s jammed,
but the computer will work on battery.”

I gasped at Kristin’s last word,
suddenly remembering something of immense importance.

“Danger. Countdown to explosion.
Ten . . . nine . . .” The voice of the
zametron continued.

Still pressing Feran’s face tightly
on the machine, I reached one hand under it. The metal feet raised the box just
enough for me to grope for something in a slot on the bottom.

“Eight . . . seven . . .”

I found it! I curled my fingers
around the object.

“Six . . . five . . .”

I tugged at it.

“Four . . . three . . .”

I yanked it out.

The sunbeam became still, the
humming and shaking stopped, the electronic display went dark, and the voice
inside no longer spoke to us. Then the aperture closed shut. Feran’s face
receded into the flexite headpiece, whose rim I still pressed tightly on the
machine. Then in a flash, I slammed Feran’s face visor down, sealing him in the
suit.

I stood up to shake the tension
from my arms, to note that Kristin and I had only surface wounds, to see
Mykroni stirring and Chuck breathing. Kristin phoned for an ambulance. Then she
and I looked at each other.

Her shoulder bled, but she smiled.
Her face held no awareness of her pain, only eagerness for joy. “Alex, are you
okay? I don’t think I’m zapped. Are you?”

By my sudden need to feel the lushness
of her body against me, I knew the answer. “I am not zapped,” I said, smiling.

“What happened? What did you do?”

“There are many new things made on
Earth that I never saw on Asteron. I noticed an object in the handle of Chuck’s
electronic gun, a black metal cone. I thought it looked familiar, but I did not
know what it was. Then when you said the word
battery
, I remembered I
had seen a similar cone-shaped object, only larger, underneath the sunbeam.” I
held my hand out to show her a three-inch-long shiny black cone. “Is this the
new Earthling battery strong enough to run your electric planes—and to trigger
the reaction inside this weapon?”

She threw her head back and
laughed. “That definitely is one of our new batteries! You pulled out the
battery and stopped the reaction before the beam could get out and hurt any—”

We both looked at Feran. He was
lying on the ground in his flexite suit, sleeping.

“Feran,” I said, propping him up
and shaking his shoulders to arouse him.

His eyes opened slowly. He looked
at us dazedly, a little grin curling his lips.

“Yes?” he said, his eyes still
drowsy.

“Stand up.”

With the glazed face and sagging
body of a sleepwalker, he slowly rose to his feet.

“How do you feel?”

“Sleepy.”

“Do you remember what you were
before you became sleepy?”

“The supreme ruler of Asteron.”

“Do you still want to be a supreme
ruler?”

“Does not matter.”

“Would you like to try a new way of
life for the people of Asteron?”

“If you wish.”

“I would like you to tear down the
Theater of Justice. Will you do it?”

“Okay.”

“Were you going to invade Earth,
Feran?”

“Yes.”

“Do you still want to conquer
Earth?”

“Does not matter.”

“Get Chuck’s phone.”

With the gloves of the flexite suit
thin enough for him to grasp it, Feran took the phone in Chuck’s pocket and
docilely brought it to me.

“Can this phone call your planet?”
I asked.

Feran examined it. “Yes.”

“I want you to phone your generals
and call off the invasion of Earth, Feran.”

“Okay.”

“Tell them you are coming home with
your Earthling advisors to bring new ways to Asteron.”

“Okay.”

“And keep your visor down and your
suit on. Stay sealed inside until we can quarantine you in the flexite area.”

“Okay.”

While Feran called his generals,
Kristin beamed at me triumphantly. “Alexander, you hit a
home run
!”

I smiled until I could feel the
crinkle lines radiating from my eyes. Then, for the first time, I felt as if a
wave were propagating within me, loosening my face and tightening my stomach.

“Alex, you’re
laughing
!”

I threw my head back and listened
to the strange new sound spouting from my throat and rising into the air like
Alexander’s baseball. My laughter grew louder, until it hit the stands and echoed
back at me. Then it curved around the higher notes of Kristin’s laughter to
form a single song. The pain in my bleeding arm seemed too unimportant to
concern me. Like the fading remnant of a bad dream, all of the pain I had ever
experienced suddenly seemed unreal. I grabbed Kristin in my arms and lifted her
high in the air, all the time laughing fiercely until my mouth ached, my eyes
teared, and my chest burned. I had found the world of Alexander’s promise. At
that moment of my first laughter I knew that every color on the Earthlings’
bright rainbow of expression glowed within me. I knew that I was what Kristin
called a
Homo sapiens
, and that there was nothing more glorious I
could ever hope to be.

Chapter 28

Moments later, while we were still on the field, Mykroni
regained consciousness—and he
did
get to make the call to the
authorities that led to his son’s arrest.

Earth Security began compiling
mounds of evidence for the trial of Chuck Whitman for high treason. With
Feran’s sudden cooperation, his remaining spies, including the one who murdered
Mrs. Merrett, were also captured. Feran would meet the same end, but only after
he completed his new assignment.

Under the guidance of his Earthling
“advisors,” Feran returned to Asteron to save his planet. He parceled land to
the people and established private property. He signed a constitution and
created a republic. In an address prepared by his new speechwriters, Feran declared
that he was abdicating his power and that all people were now masters of their own
lives. No longer could any ruler stifle the speech or peaceful actions of
citizens. No longer could any ruler force the will of citizens or seize the
fruits of their labors.

Once they were free to operate, farms
and businesses of every kind started to sprout up, creating the first buds of opportunity
for the people. With its shackles removed, the human spirit began its
reawakening. For the first time in the history of Asteron, flowers started to bloom
there and the people began to sing.

Immediately after our showdown with
Feran at the stadium, when Mykroni was being treated in the hospital, I
explained to him why I had to make an urgent trip to Asteron. He insisted on
coming with me. Disregarding his doctor’s orders, he checked himself out of the
hospital and embarked on a space mission with his head injury still fresh.

Before leaving for Asteron, I told Kristin
and Mykroni how much I regretted having to lie to them about my homeland.

“In this case, we’re glad you did!”
said Mykroni.

“You won’t have to lie anymore to
stay alive, Alex,” said Kristin, affectionately.

On my journey with Mykroni, that
master astronaut let me fly our ship while giving me a memorable lesson in
space travel.

When we arrived on Asteron, I set
about doing the things I had come to accomplish. I brought with me a large
display of Earth’s flowers, dozens of loose blossoms tumbling over each other
in a violent explosion of color and fragrance. I placed them on the stage of
the Theater of Justice. “These are for you, Reevah,” I said to the radiant
vision in my memory. “I found the place with the flowers. It is a place where
you belonged, and a place that lived within me from the first night I held
you.” As I spoke, I saw Feran step onstage with his Earthling advisors. On their
suggestion, before a gathering crowd, he raised an ax and split the scaffold in
two. As it fell, the people cheered.

I also walked through the dusty
halls of the Center of Records to learn the truth about a matter that had long
disturbed me. I wanted to know if I was conceived with Feran’s revolting genes.
But when I reached the Department of Birth Documents, I realized that I no
longer cared. I had shaped my own self through the thing inside me called my free
will. I left the building without ever opening my file.

The most important reason for our
visit involved a precious cargo that Mykroni and I were relieved to find intact
in the underground cavern of Feran’s mansion. We brought it to our spacecraft
for the journey home.

When the lush green of Earth with
its blue-and-white swirls grew large in the window of our spacecraft, I commented
to Mykroni: “You said that Charles Merrett gave you the last name
Whitman
when you understood the meaning of its last syllable. I think I’m ready for a
last name too.” I noted with pride the Earthling contractions that newly sprinkled
my words.

“What name would you like to pick,
Alex?”

“I’d like my teacher to pick my
name, because he seems like something more . . . something
I never had and never knew how much I missed.” Our eyes met in mutual affection.

He threw an arm around my shoulder,
squeezing me fondly. “I’d say you learned the meaning of the very word I did,
so you deserve a last name which reflects that.” And so it was, after a brief
discussion, that I became Alexander Manning of Planet Earth.

After I lowered the craft gently
onto Charles Merrett’s lawn, Mykroni and I jumped down to see Kristin’s eager
face. Then our “extra cargo” alighted from the ship, weak from his confinement
in a dark room with little food, but otherwise healthy. I had remembered
unloading two large boxes from Feran’s spacecraft at about the time he would
have brought the sunbeam to Asteron. One box contained equipment. The other, a
crate with wooden slats, held the man whose face I couldn’t see in the
darkness, the man who gave me the gold coin as my tip for bringing him water
and who said to me: “Thank you, son.” Mykroni and I helped down from our
spacecraft the man from the crate.

“Daddy!” Kristin screamed.

She almost knocked down the man from
the crate as she leaped into his arms. While they clung to each other in a
tender outcry of laughter and tears, I wanted to look away to give them
privacy, but I was unable to do that because I knew that I was part of the
moment. As if thinking the same thing, Charles Merrett stretched an arm around
my shoulder to pull me into their embrace.

On the Sunday when Feran had stolen
the sunbeam, the records showed that Dr. Merrett had checked
into
the
Project Z area twice but checked out only
once
. Feran, of course, had
checked in and out once as Charles Merrett. That meant that the real Charles
Merrett had only checked in. My suspicion proved true: Feran had carried Dr.
Merrett out in one of the cargo boxes after drugging him with a shot from Coquet.
Then Feran had taken him back to Asteron to get him out of the way and take his
place. But Feran had not killed him, in case he needed Dr. Merrett’s skill in
reassembling the sunbeam. He would no doubt have tortured Dr. Merrett for that
information, but fortunately, the Asteronian engineers were able to reconstruct
the device themselves, thereby saving their prisoner from undergoing any more
cruelty beyond squalid confinement and mental anguish.

After welcoming her father, Kristin
turned to me. As I held her close, drinking in the sweet fragrance of her skin
and tasting her mouth, the two men were apparently analyzing the matter.

“I see what Alex meant when he said
that he and my daughter have
closeness
.”

“Now I’ve got to juggle the
schedules around to try to get those two in space together,” grumbled my
teacher. “Separating them is harder than pulling apart two attracting poles in
a magnetic field.”

When I released Kristin, I saw the
man from the crate smiling approvingly.

“Daddy, even though the company’s
finances need fixing, I hope you’re not going to bury yourself in work so we’ll
never get to see you.”

“I intend to spend lots of time
with you, honey, beginning with dinner tonight—since we’re all alive to have
dinner together.” His smile vanished as his mind seemed to drop back into the
damp dungeon where he had lived for two months with the terrifying dread that
Feran would irradiate Earth. Then his eyes met mine, and his face took on a
solemn look. “We have someone to honor tonight. We have a special toast to make
to an extraordinary courage that saved us all.”

In a silent pause that felt like a
tribute, the three of them—my new family—looked at me admiringly.

Then Dr. Merrett turned to Kristin.
“And Alex tells me we also have
your
cunning and bravery to thank for
defeating Feran.”

I nodded, adding: “In the end, it
was Kristin who tripped Feran and made him fall onto the sunbeam—and her plan
worked, as you Earthlings say, like a charm.”

Kristin beamed proudly. With her
father’s return, her spirit had lifted. In fact, she looked more radiant and
desirable than ever to me.

“And over dinner I’m going to tell
the three of you about my plans to not just rescue MAS’s finances but to also
expand the company tremendously.” The same face I despised on Feran underwent
the most appealing transformation when it graced the person of Charles Merrett.
His vibrant eyes and broad smile seemed to dance with excitement. “And my plans
for MAS are called
Zamean matter
.”

“What do you mean, Daddy? We don’t
need the sunbeam anymore, do we?”

“We don’t need the
weapon
.
But we sure can use Zamean matter. It’s a revolutionary, clean, untapped, and
abundant source of energy that we can produce cheaper than anything preceding
it! The particle that injured Steve’s brain can be immediately redirected to
interact with Earth’s matter. That way, we’ll get the energy without any of the
harmful radiation escaping. You see, there’s nothing bad about any scientific
discovery when we harness and control it for good purposes. What’s bad is Feran,
or what he used to be before Alex zapped him.”

He turned to me. “You’re smiling, son.”
His eyes seemed to hold a special sparkle when they glanced at me.

“In Feran’s hand even a stone was
dangerous,” I said.

The others nodded in agreement.

“And during my confinement, I came
up with an idea for an antidote to the sunbeam that I believe will work. I want
Steve Caldwell’s mind functioning when I chew him out for taking unnecessary
risks with a life as valuable as his.” Dr. Merrett put his arm around Mykroni.
“You know, we need to talk about an operation to collect the Zamean matter and
to transport it safely. . . .” The two of them walked arm-in-arm
toward the house. “We’ll fix dinner for you kids,” Charles Merrett called back
to us, but we weren’t listening.

My fingers were tangled in Kristin’s
chestnut hair that was the color of Earth tree bark dappled with sunshine. I
swam in her brown orbs with silver sparkles that were the color of Earth’s loam
sprinkled with bits of white sand.

“Kristin, what does it mean when you
feel another’s presence with such closeness that when you’re away from that
person, you can do nothing but ache inside for her?”

“And what does it mean, Alex, when
the sight of someone so completely excites your eyes that they have no vision left
to see anything but him?”

“It means you love me, Kristin.”

“And you love me, Alex.”

With Earth under my feet and
Kristin in my arms, I laughed—easily, freely, lavishly, the way we Earthlings
do.