by Gen LaGreca
The senator’s final word reverberated through my mind, leaving no room in my awareness for anything else. The band began to play a stirring melody, but I was only dimly conscious of it. I do not know how long I stood at that spot in the shade of the hangar, staring vacantly into space.
Finally, I felt someone shaking me by the shoulders.
“Alex. Hey, Alex,” Frank Brennan was saying. “Are you okay? You look stunned, like you just got bopped on the head.”
“I feel okay, Frank,” I whispered, barely able to find my voice, astonished by the revelations I had just heard.
“What are you doing all the way out here by yourself? Everybody wants to shake hands with the Gold Streaks. And you missed all the publicity shots the media took of your team. Don’t you know you’re a celebrity, man? And all the food’s down there. The hot dogs are going fast.”
“I have no appetite right now.”
“I’m glad I found you. I want to tell you something, Alex. Last night, after I left you, I went through everything again in my mind. There was something that happened just before Dr. Merrett had the security windows installed.”
I stared at Frank intently.
“It made the news at the time but died down soon after. It was a private matter that Dr. Merrett was very quiet about, and he gave no statements to the media. It never got recorded on my calendar because it was something personal that happened to him. A few weeks before he changed his office windows, a thief broke into his house, a thief that I don’t think was ever caught. I don’t know if it connects at all with security at MAS, but something very bad happened. You see, during that robbery, Dr. Merrett’s wife was killed.”
Chapter 18
“Alex, what are you doing here? Is the sun too much for you?”
Kristin’s perfume refreshed the stale air in the hangar where I stood. After Frank had left, I called her on my phone, asking that she come here.
“I’m sorry you didn’t get to be in the team pictures, Alex. We looked all over for you. I called, but you didn’t answer your phone.”
“Kristin, I have to talk to you!”
She stretched her arms, and she pranced about like a fawn ready for play. “And I have to talk to you too! I have to tell you that I think your flying was terrific and our demo was thrilling!” She looked at me, her freckled face lit by both a childlike joy and a sensuous smile. “Will you let me take you out for your birthday? There’s a restaurant on the beach where we can dance outside and watch the waves. Alex, it’ll be enchanting!”
“Kristin, I cannot.” How could I tell her that I must not see her as long as Feran was alive? If the Earthlings’ medicine kept people going for 150 years, Feran had about a hundred left.
“I’ll bet you’re worried about Mykroni’s checklist. It’s a holiday, and besides, you can’t work on the night of your birthday.”
She paused for my agreement, but I could not give it.
“Were you planning to go to MAS tonight, Alex?”
“No.” How could I tell her that I must not go back there until I could celebrate Feran’s funeral?
“Oh, I know—you thought you could meet my dad tonight, because I told him I had a boyfriend.”
I grabbed her arms and shook her urgently. “Kristin, do not tell anyone I am your boyfriend! Swear to me you will not!”
The smile vanished from her face. She whispered, crestfallen. “Don’t you want to be my boyfriend?”
“No! I cannot be!”
She looked at me aghast. “I thought you were . . . my . . . boyfriend.”
“You must not use that word anymore!”
She pushed me away sharply. “Maybe you really are what you say you are. Maybe you’re some kind of creature that’s not human like us at all, a creature that doesn’t feel anything. Maybe you’re just . . . empty . . . inside!”
I pulled her body against mine. Her arms flew up to punch my chest. But I easily restrained them behind her with one hand while I squeezed her tightly with the other, pressing my mouth hard on hers the entire time. Her futile cries were muffled by the force of my mouth, and her desperate resistance was reduced to a quiver by my grip. Finally, I lifted my head to look at her.
“Be quiet, Kristin, unless you want me to remind you, right here, that such capacities as I do have are enough to make you feel human!”
Her eyes flashed over me excitedly before she could stop herself, daring me to carry out my threat. Too distraught to consider the matter, I released her. She stood staring at me, her face no longer angry but injured. Her eyes became glistening ponds about to overflow.
“If you make love to me on Wednesday, then tell me you don’t want to know me on Friday . . . it hurts. It makes me want to hurt you.”
“Kristin, I am in danger, real danger! And as long as you have any dealings with me, you are in danger too! I will not have that!”
“Now, Alex, you must be imagining things again.”
I remembered how much I had wanted to say certain things to someone, but our time had run out. “Kristin, if I have to go away . . . suddenly, I want you to know that I will come back. If I am . . . alive . . . I will come back for you, because you make my life so . . . joyful.”
Her face softened. She curled her arms around my neck. “Alex, what are you saying? I can’t imagine why you’d think you have to go away, and I can’t imagine how crushed I’d be if you did. Tell me,” she whispered, her hands holding my face. “Tell me what’s bothering you. I helped you with the other problem, didn’t I?” She smiled playfully. “Maybe I can help you again.” Then her smile tightened to a look that was earnest, almost solemn. “I want to help you, because you’re not . . . empty inside. You’re as not-empty inside as anyone I know.”
How could I reveal my situation, especially with my habit of imagining dangers and with her animosity toward my homeland? Even the senator’s astonishing story of the Meddlers could not explain the personal antagonism Kristin felt toward Asteron. I could not trust something in her that I did not understand.
“Kristin, you can help me. You said that for two people to have closeness, they must talk to one another about important things. The other night I told you something upsetting to me. Now I have to ask you about something painful to you.”
She looked at me, puzzled.
“Tell me about your mother’s death.”
“My mother?” Her eyebrows arched in astonishment. “What does she have to do with you being in danger?”
“Your mother’s death has something to do with Project Z, does it not?”
“No, nothing. You know Project Z doesn’t exist anymore, yet it’s like a bogeyman—that’s something unreal that scares people. It’s what Project Z is: a bogeyman! First, my father has been upset ever since he canceled it. He didn’t come to see me fly today. . . . For reasons I can’t imagine, he missed my show. You know he taught me to fly when I was nine. I wanted him to see me—” Her voice broke. I drew her closer, and she rested her head on my chest. “I hardly ever see him anymore. Now for some strange reason, you’re afraid of Project Z, and you say you’re going to go away suddenly. My mother left me suddenly!” A few warm tears seeped through my shirt.
“Kristin, you and I are both in danger. Your father may be too.”
She looked at me once again, not understanding. I ran my fingers over her cheeks to clear away the fallen drops.
“Now tell me what happened to your mother. There was a robbery of some kind? Was that what prompted your father to set up a security system for your home?”
“Alex, I can’t imagine how any of this can be connected to you at all, but I’ll tell you. It’s not a secret.” She looked at me earnestly. “Maybe the more you know, the more you’ll understand, so you’ll see you’re not in any danger.”
I led her to a bench inside the hangar. We sat in the shadow, concealed from the events outside, hand in hand.
“Next January will be three years since I lost my mother. I was eighteen when it happened. That night I went out
with my parents and Mykroni and his wife to a dance performance, a ballet. The five of us liked the ballet, so every year my father got us season tickets—that means we go to all the different programs staged for the year.
“That afternoon my father called my mother to say he’d be late. A report he was waiting for had just arrived, so he planned to stay at the office, skip dinner, and read it. My mom reminded him of the ballet, which he had forgotten. He didn’t want to miss it, so he decided to bring the report home to read.
“When he got home, he locked the report in his office safe. As we left for the theater, he programmed the fireplace in his office to start later, before we were to arrive home, so he’d come back to a warm fire. You see, he planned to read the report after the show, and that January night the weather was perfect for using the fireplace—a chilly Friday during a cold spell.
“Now, my mom’s back was bothering her that night. Quick Fix told her she needed to see a doctor, which she was going to do. Anyway, the pills Quick Fix gave her wore off during the performance, and it was painful for her to sit up, so at the intermission, she decided to go home to bed. My father wanted to leave with her. I remember how troubled he was that she was in pain. But she made light of the matter, insisting that he stay. He had set aside his work specially to see the performance, she said, so she didn’t want him to miss the rest of it. Finally he agreed, reluctantly. We both kissed her good-bye. We didn’t know we’d never . . .
“We think that when she got home, Mother must have heard noises from Father’s office, because she went in there.” Kristin struggled to keep her voice steady. “We found that she had been . . . strangled . . . in a struggle with a thief who was stealing my father’s report.”
“What was in this report?”
“It was an investigation my father ordered into an accident that had occurred at MAS a few weeks earlier. My father had been studying unusual rocks from the planet of a star in our galaxy. During an experiment, a lab technician was exposed to the new material and suffered an odd injury. I don’t know much about it, except that the technician was somehow incapacitated. My father was very upset—and tight-lipped—about the injury. He vowed he would search for an antidote for whatever substance had injured the worker.”
I nodded, following Kristin’s story.
“In addition to the insurance MAS carries for workers injured on the job, my father paid the employee’s family a lot of money. He was fond of the technician, so maybe that’s partly why he wanted to give them something extra, but there was another reason. In return for the money, he asked the family not to make any public statements about the matter.”
“Why would your father want to keep the accident a secret?”
“I don’t know. But in general, companies don’t like bad publicity. My father surely wouldn’t have wanted to have a big news splash about how MAS discovered a strange new substance that harmed someone.”
“Did the injured employee die?”
“No. He’s still alive. He lives with his wife in Clear Creek; that’s a desert town a little over a hundred miles east of here.”
“What kind of injury was it?”
“I don’t know. He was found on the floor of the lab by his co-workers. I was in school and didn’t work at MAS yet, so I didn’t hear much about it.”
“You told me that Earth’s doctors can fix anything.”
“This was something they couldn’t fix.”
“And did your father find an antidote?”
“Not that I know of.”
“What is the technician’s name?”
“Steve Caldwell.”
“Did the thief get the report?”
The question provoked fresh pain for Kristin. I put an arm around her shoulders.
“Yes and no. There were signs that my mother . . . struggled . . . with the thief before she was strangled. He had already opened the safe and must have had the report in his hands when she caught him, because she apparently seized it from him and threw it into the fireplace. Charred pages from the report were found in the fire, so I don’t think anyone ever knew how much the robber actually got and how much was burned.”
“Why would someone want this information?”
“I don’t know.”
“Would your mother have known? Did your father tell her about his work? Did they have closeness?”
She nodded, her face wistful. “They spent many evenings talking in the garden. On Sundays they lingered after breakfast, talking on the patio. My father confided in my mother about everything and respected her advice. My mom acted as if the sun rose and set around that man; she was always interested in any matter than involved my dad. Mother might have known something about the report, because she apparently tried very hard . . . she fought . . . to destroy the papers. Maybe she’d be alive today . . . if she had just . . . run away.”
I asked softly, “Who was the thief?”
“I don’t know. He was never caught. The authorities launched a big investigation, but never arrested any suspects.”
“What kind of investigation?”
“Earth Security got involved—that’s the agency that investigates espionage that threatens the planet as a whole—but neither the authorities nor my dad said much about it. I know only that the man who killed my mother was never found.”
“Was anything else stolen from your house?”
“Just the report.”
“Shortly after the crime, your father tightened security, right?”
She nodded. “Losing my mother was devastating for him. He worried about my safety afterward. He put alarm systems in the house. We had never worried about security before; I used to go out and leave the door unlocked. But after the break-in, I felt . . . uneasy, so I was glad to have the alarms. My father had special windows installed in his office at MAS too, so no one could look in.”
“Did he suspect someone of looking in?”
“Not that I know of. You see, when we had this . . . horrible . . . experience, it made us feel a little paranoid. So I think he just beefed up security in general.”
“And then, a few months after the robbery, Project Z began.”
“Well, I guess so. But what would that have to do with my mother’s death? Do you have any evidence that Project Z had anything to do with my mother’s death?”
“No.”
I wondered if I were imagining some connection, just because one matter occurred soon after the other and both involved extra security. That was not much of a link. However, I now knew that thieves—or spies—obtained information from Dr. Merrett’s home just before Project Z began, and from his office, through Dustin, after Project Z started. I knew that Mrs. Merrett lost her life trying to protect some of this information. And I knew that the supreme meddler, Feran, possessed a flexite suit from Project Z and brought spies to Earth.
“As far as I know, Project Z was just another assignment for my dad; it had nothing to do with my mother’s death.”
“But why was Project Z a secret? It must mean that something was being produced that was dangerous.”
“No, not at all, Alex.”
“Could it have been something for the military? MAS does work for them.”
“Sure, but we do work for a lot of other customers too. Even though we started as an aerospace company, we’re diversified now. Project Z could have been anything. It could have been a hot new product, maybe a vehicle or computer, made for a company that wants to market it before a competitor steps in. Project Z could have been a new consumer gadget, costing a fortune to design. My father could have been bound to secrecy, without Project Z having anything to do with the military or dangerous inventions.”
“Then why would your father say, in his memo to the staff, that he could not release Project Z to the world because it had ‘far-reaching and irrevocable consequences’?”
“I don’t know, Alex. But how could this possibly concern you?”
I grabbed her arms and turned her toward me. I
said gravely, “If I tell you why, your life will be in danger. It already is. You must promise you will tell no one that you are my girlfriend. No one!”
She sighed in the same way she had on other days when I had thought she was in danger and I tried to attack the gardener, her instructor, and then Officer Hodges. She shook her head, her half smile of frustration softened by affection. “Alexander, this is ridiculous!”
“Kristin, please!”
“All right. I have no reason to tell anyone our personal business. No one at work knows I see you, and I like it that way. So okay, I promise. Now do you feel . . . calmer?”
“I have one more question.”
“Oh?”
“Why do you hate Asteron?”
She stared into space in the icy way that she always did at the mention of my vile homeland. She stood up and walked a few steps from me, as if she were crossing back into the past.
“When we found my mother, she was clutching a piece of the robber’s shirt pocket that had ripped off in the struggle. She was also holding a gold coin from the thief’s pocket, an unusual coin I had never seen before. Now, other planets’ coins, if they’re hard currency like gold, are accepted in trade and circulated on Earth, just as ours are used elsewhere. So nothing could ever be proven, we were told, about the thief’s origin just from the coin he had in his pocket.” Bitterness sliced through her voice. “But I know what I think.”
I rose from the bench to stand next to her. “What kind of coin was your mother holding?”
“One side of the coin had a picture of a farmer working in a field behind a mule, with a farm tool hitched between them that I’ve seen only in museums . . . a hand plow.” Her voice rose in disbelief. “Can you imagine a place that keeps people sweating like slaves in a field, a place that’s oblivious to the farming inventions and progress of centuries, and proud of it, boasting of this kind of life by honoring it on a coin? I think the thief came from a place that can’t afford to buy a tractor, much less a robot, to make life easier, but spends its money sending someone on a spacecraft to our world to do us harm.”