Fugitive From Asteron

by Gen LaGreca

  “No. It seems strange to be the way I used to be.”

  “What is strange about it, Steve?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “You used to care about many things, no?”

  “It all seems odd now, to care so much.”

  “What do you do here all day?”

  “Sometimes nothing.”

  “And do you like that?”

  “It’s okay.”

  “Has Dr. Merrett found a cure, an antidote, for you?”

  “He’s tried, but no. He doesn’t like us to talk about the accident.”

  “Does he pay for your house?”

  “Yes. He gave us a lot of money.”

  “Why?”

  “Just to be quiet while he tried to find a cure. Kate didn’t want publicity anyway, so she didn’t even need the money to be quiet.”

  “And you, what do you want?”

  “Doesn’t matter to me.”

  “Why did Dr. Merrett want you to be quiet?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Do you want a cure? What do you want, Steve?”

  “Whatever they want, Kate and Dr. Merrett.”

  Steve’s eyes stared at me like two fading stars that had lost their energy, then he turned to Kate with the same stare as she called us to the patio.

  Lunch was as artful as the images from the Caldwells’ travel book: fresh foods served on colorful plates against a starched tablecloth, with a bouquet of flowers in the center of the table. The aromas of food and garden blended sweetly with the fresh air as we sat on a shaded patio that overlooked a green hillside. I picked up a delicate fork for an item Kate served, remembering to use my new Earthling table manners for lunch—and trying to forget that another creature stalked me for his dinner.

  After the meal, Kate brought out a tray of home-baked cookies, along with a silver coffee pitcher and white porcelain cups.

  “Steve, would you pour the coffee, please?” asked my hostess.

  Steve lifted the pitcher. Just as he poured the hot liquid into the cup Kate held, the lid fell off, and the coffee scalded her hand.

  “Ow!” Kate shrieked, but Steve kept pouring with a steady hand.

  In an instant, she yanked her hand away, screaming for him to stop, which he did just a moment before I grabbed the pitcher from him. I poured ice water onto my napkin and placed it on Kate’s reddened hand while Steve looked on passively.

  “Steve, get something for the burn, quickly.”

  At her direction, Steve acted without hesitation. From a medical kit he brought in, he applied ointments and a bandage with the assurance of a doctor. Because of the remarkable Earthling medicines, Kate soon sighed in relief as the pain subsided.

  “Steve,” I said, trying to suppress my alarm and ask as calmly as I could, “did you not know that you were hurting Kate?”

  “I was pouring coffee.”

  Kate smiled in understanding, but not before I saw the pain that shut her eyes and made her moan for an instant.

  After the spills were cleaned up and we had taken a few sips of coffee, I thanked Kate for the outstanding lunch and expressed my need to depart, as well as my reluctance to leave them for fear they might need assistance.

  “We’re fine, Alexander. I have doctors I can call in a minute. And I have attendants who stay with us, or with Steve, when I need to . . . get away for a while. So don’t be concerned, but do come back for another visit.”

  When I mentioned that I was going to catch the Cheetah, Kate insisted on their accompanying me to the station. “It’s just a walk away. I know a shortcut through the back roads, and Steve needs the exercise. Sometimes he sits for hours doing nothing, and that’s not good.”

  The afternoon sun in the desert was strong when we left the house. We strolled along a dirt road, with newly built houses placed on either side and more under construction ahead of us.

  “The station’s directly ahead, just past the construction. You can see this little town is adding some new homes,” Kate said.

  Steve walked silently with a neutral expression. “Steve, we’re going to walk Alexander straight to the Cheetah station the short way, and then we’ll walk back the long way, through town, so we can stop for ice cream. Okay?”

  “Okay.”

  Along our path, we saw a neighbor collecting her mail. Kate greeted her, pausing to compliment her garden. While I waited for Kate, I noticed the meticulous care that the people of Clear Creek took with their landscapes. As the neighbor returned to her house and we were about to continue, suddenly Kate and I gasped. Twenty feet before us, Steve was heading straight past a warning sign and into a ditch in the road at the construction site.

  I leaped toward him, yelling, “Stop! Steve, stop!”

  He halted when he heard me, so curling my arm about his waist an instant later and pulling him back from the ten-foot drop was unnecessary.

  “Steve, darling, what on Earth were you doing?” Kate’s voice was barely a whisper.

  “Walking straight to the Cheetah station the short way.”

  I turned away to spare Kate from seeing the wave of pity that washed across my face. I heard her sigh wearily. When I looked at her again, she was reaching into her purse for an object.

  “Now I didn’t want to do this, but I think it’s best if I do, Steve. No one will notice it if we walk close together and you stay by my side. Okay, dear?”

  “Okay.”

  Kate placed a harness over Steve’s head, pulled his arms through it, and tightened it around his chest.

  “And we’ll take the back roads home again. We don’t need ice cream today.”

  She clipped a strap to the back of the harness, holding the other end in her hand.

  “Okay, Stevie?”

  “Okay.”

  I was stunned into silence.

  Chapter 20

  While I waited for the Cheetah, I gazed at the town of Clear Creek lying beyond the station platform. Deep in thought, I barely noticed the sights of Earthling life that usually fascinated me: the attractive houses, the well-dressed people, the lively children, the green-velvet lawns, the abundant harvest of beauty and pleasure that could sprout only in the serenity of an untrampled field. Instead, I saw a destroyer.

  Would Feran be interested in Steve Caldwell’s injury? Would a mosquito be interested in a ready supply of its favorite beverage—human blood? Steve Caldwell’s fate was exactly what Feran had planned for me when he sentenced me to undergo the calming probe, the vile brain surgery to sever the fibers of my sovereign will. Would Feran be interested in the ultimate calming probe, whose blade conveniently misses the brain’s areas controlling knowledge and skills while it cuts away only the areas controlling self-direction? He surely would have a use for an injury that leaves a person unable to choose between lunch and no lunch, between a lifetime of practicing medicine and a lifetime of doing laundry, between harming human skin or protecting it, between reviving a heart or letting it die—until someone directs him. Such an injury would leave people unable to focus on work, romance, music, or travel—unable to act, even to protect their own lives—without direction from someone else.

  On Asteron, injured Steve Caldwell would be seen as the ideal person. Feran taught that obedience was good. Who could be more obedient than a man who had no ideas or passions of his own? A man who took no action of his own? A man who moved by the direction of others and was paralyzed without it? I thought of Steve standing at the edge of the ditch and heard a senator at an airfield tell why the old ways were banished: People were no longer captains of their own lives. Would Feran, the supreme meddler, be interested in a person ready and waiting to wear a leash?

  I needed to know more about what happened to Steve, so I turned on my mobile device as I boarded the cub that took me to the Cheetah. Soon I was on the main train, feeling the smooth hum of an engine under my seat. I raised the device close to my face, gave it a few oral commands, and soon found local news stories that had occurred almost
three years ago in the month of January. I located an article about Mrs. Merrett’s death, but it contained fewer details than I had learned from Kristin.

  The article described the theft of documents, with no mention of a specific report or a prior laboratory accident. The story quoted the police as saying the matter was under investigation, but no details were given. A few briefer mentions appeared in the following days, but officials named no suspects and gave no further information. Typical of the private manner that seemed characteristic of him, Dr. Merrett was reported as in seclusion, unavailable for interviews, and having no comment. His wife’s funeral was a family affair with no media permitted and no photographs released. The only picture that appeared was one taken at the crime scene, with Mrs. Merrett’s body covered by a sheet as it lay by the fireplace of her husband’s home office. I searched further back in time but uncovered no stories of the laboratory accident or the injury to Steve Caldwell.

  I kept returning to the picture taken at the crime scene. A few gold embers still burned in the fireplace amid a mass of black charred paper that looked as if it would crumble at the slightest touch. Among the residue were a few white spots that looked like small patches of paper that had escaped the flames. I saved a copy of the photo on my device. Then it was time to enter the cub that would take me to my destination—the one place where I could collide head-on with Feran’s spies.

  It was four o’clock in the afternoon when I arrived at MAS. I noticed several vehicles in the parking lots, a sign that some staff members were working on Reckoning Day. But surely Feran’s spies would not choose a holiday, when the MAS plant was only sparsely populated, to interview employees in search of their prey. They would delay their arrival until the next workday, Monday—I hoped. Nevertheless, I must get in and out of here as quickly as possible.

  I entered the building that to me was grander than any palace from the Caldwells’ travel book. I walked across the lobby, past the relics of Earth’s early rockets and the block of metallic letters that boldly announced the building’s name and my own lifelong yearning: SPACE TRAVEL. As I bypassed the elevators for the stairway and climbed the steps three at a time, I hoped that the building where I had restarted my life would not be the place where I lost it.

  I reached the second floor and headed toward a lab equipped with the software to magnify my crime-scene photograph to its best resolution. When the lab door automatically slid open to admit me, it grated against its track just as the dangers of going in grated against my nerves. Several computer workstations were laid out on a long counter, and I seated myself at the one closest to the window. I opened the window, then oriented my stool toward it for a quick jump out into the shrubbery below if necessary.

  I loaded the crime-scene picture on my terminal and brought Dr. Merrett’s home office into view on my screen. In the fireplace, I counted four white spots of uncharred paper, which appeared to be remnants of the laboratory report. I zoomed in on the first one. The resolution of the picture was not fine enough for me to decipher the words, even with the automatic adjustments that the software provided, so I tried to improve the image quality manually. I strained to identify letters that stubbornly remained hazy. Just then the lab door slid open, causing me to leap off my stool and almost out the window.

  A lab technician from Space Travel entered and sat at another workstation. “Hi, Alex.”

  “Hi,” I replied, pretending to adjust my stool, as if it were the reason for my sudden move.

  After several more unsuccessful attempts to focus the text, I was forced to accept the limitations of the picture. However, I noticed letters in the white patch above the paragraph of text I was trying to read. It looked like the title of a section in the report, which might be decipherable because it had letters that were in bold and larger than the other text. I zoomed in on the heading and did find more clarity in those letters. But the part I could read was incomplete: “Symptoms of Exposure to Z—.” The rest of the heading was charred, leaving me no clue as to what “Z” was. I searched for other titles, subtitles, or areas with readable print on the page fragment, but there were no more in the first patch of paper. I moved on to the second of the four white patches in the fireplace. It contained nothing I could read. Just then the sliding door jangled my nerves again. I leaned toward the window, my legs tensed to jump, when a second technician entered.

  She sat at another workstation.

  I moved to the third white patch.

  “Did you read the memo that’s going around?” the first technician asked the second.

  “The one about Earth Security?” she replied.

  “Yeah. They’re looking for someone from Asteron. That means a spy, of course.”

  “I heard.”

  The third patch had a heading: “Composition of Za—.” I saw nothing but black soot after the Za. I searched the entire third patch, but there was no other readable text. I examined the heading again, but all of my wishing would not clarify even one more missing letter.

  “Have you spoken to the ES agents yet?” continued the first technician.

  “Nope,” replied the second.

  I focused on the fourth and final page fragment. Scanning its area, I found one heading.

  “Hey, Alex, have you spoken to the guys from ES?” asked the first technician.

  “No. Are they coming today?”

  “Don’t know.”

  I zoomed in on the final heading. It read: “Energy Needed to Produce Zam—.”

  Now I had obtained one more letter from the unidentified word that began with Z, but the name of the substance was still incomplete. I had exhausted the patches of uncharred paper. I could conclude only that the substance Steve found, the thing being studied in the report, had a name that began with Z-a-m.

  “I heard the ES agents were supposed to be around today,” commented the second technician, “but it’s after four now, and I haven’t seen them.”

  I felt as if my clothes were stifling me. I pushed back wet strands of hair that were falling into my eyes. I changed the field to focus on the whole of the fireplace contents once again. I examined the image closely. Was there anything I could have missed? One of the embers looked peculiar. I magnified it. I found near the ember a sliver of paper I had missed, a yellowish strip that I had not noticed, similar in color to the gold ember. I zoomed in closer. The small strip of colored paper resembled a tab from a folder. Had Dr. Merrett placed the report in a folder? Had he labeled it?

  The door slid open once more. I tensed like a cat ready to leap.

  “Say, is that report ready yet?” someone called to one of the technicians.

  “Not yet. Give me another half hour.”

  The door closed again. I returned to my image, adjusted more controls, then saw the strip of yellowish paper magnified on my screen. It indeed did look like an index tab to a file folder. I zoomed in further. Handwritten on it in ink was a complete word that I could read clearly. The word was sunbeam.

  I stared at it. That meant something to me. . . . Sunbeam . . . meant something. But what? Had I heard that word used recently? Was it here on Earth? Or maybe— My thoughts wandered across the galaxy to another place and time. I used to think of someone’s hair as the color of a sunbeam. Was I thinking of a young woman with golden hair and a sweet voice singing to me in a place where no one . . . sings?

  Suddenly I knew! I recalled the last time I had loaded cargo onto a spacecraft on my final day in an intolerable place. After the cargo had been secured and all of the preparations for a long journey had been made, I remembered a malicious laugh and a voice saying:

  “When the sunbeam stings, Asteron sings.”

  Chapter 21

  While I pondered these new revelations, I removed all trace of the crime-scene photo from the computer and closed the program I had been using.

  The substance that had injured Steve Caldwell apparently began with the letters Z-a-m. The three headings I could read contained fragments of the word: Expos
ure to Z—, Composition of Za—, and Energy Needed to Produce Zam—. Project Z, of course, began with the same first letter.

  However, there was another name associated with this substance, a name that had been handwritten on Dr. Merrett’s folder and used by Feran. What did this other name signify? Could Zam be the beginning of an official scientific name used in the report, and could sunbeam be a nickname, or code name, for the same material, written on a folder? Earthlings often used short names that pinpointed the essence of things, like Quick Fix, Big Eats, Clean Team, and QuikCode. Sunbeam had the same ring. What essence did it pinpoint?

  I could not yet leave MAS because I had an idea—actually only a guess. But I had to test it. Quickly!

  The lobby of the executive office building was empty when I arrived and entered with my security pass. I raced up the stairs and across the third-floor hallway. Walking past the kitchen, I paused, surprised to find a man and a woman in there eating sandwiches, apparently two staff members working late on the holiday and taking a meal break. I did not know these two employees, which was perhaps why they looked at me curiously.

  “Hi,” I said from the hallway as casually as I could.

  “Hi,” they said together, and smiled.

  I continued toward Dr. Merrett’s office, where the doors to both the reception area and the conference room were shut. Hearing no voices inside and ensuring that no one was in the hallway to see me, I entered the conference room, where I knew the keypad code to open the door. I quietly closed it behind me, and I checked to be sure that no one was inside the inner office or reception area. Then I sat at Dr. Merrett’s desk and turned on the computer. Using the password I had previously lifted with Code Cracker, I unlocked his files. From my seat, I could look out the windows and keep an eye out for anyone approaching the building. A glance at my watch showed it was five o’clock in the afternoon. Surely Feran’s spies would not arrive so late.

  I knew where to look, and I made my way through the various databases and subdirectories until I came upon a folder called, simply, Z. When I tried to enter it, a security window appeared, asking for a further code word, as it had on my previous attempt at a time that seemed long ago but was only yesterday morning. Now I had a word to try for access—the word handwritten on Dr. Merrett’s folder.