Fugitive From Asteron

by Gen LaGreca

  With the drive containing Project Z’s files in my watch, I opened the conference door a sliver to peer out, hoping to find the hallway clear so I could exit. But just then the elevator door opened, depositing the guard and Feran’s spies in the hallway!

  They walked to the end of the hall where the kitchen was located, and they stopped to speak to the two people inside. I could not leave the building while the spies were in the hall. Instead, I kept the door opened a slit to observe them and listen.

  I saw the spies flash badges as phony as their smiles. Their friendly Earthling voices seeped through the crack in my door as they greeted the staff members and then engaged in a bit of small talk. The employees remained in the kitchen, but I could hear them as they responded to questions. One of the spies explained his purpose there and gave them a description of me. The other held up a photo of me, probably the one they had shown the clerk at my apartment complex. I hoped the scrawny, half-starved creature I had been on Asteron was unrecognizable to the employees, as it had been to the clerk. But that was not the case.

  From inside the kitchen, I heard one of the employees reply, “You know, he looks a bit like the guy who passed by here a little while ago.”

  “Oh? Which way did he go?” asked one of the spies.

  “Toward Dr. Merrett’s office.”

  “This way, officers,” said the MAS guard.

  I shut the door as he escorted the spies straight toward me.

  Which door would they use to enter—Margaret’s in the reception area or the conference-room door where I stood? I returned to Dr. Merrett’s desk, positioned in between the two rooms with the doors, and I waited for what seemed like an eternity.

  Then I heard an electronic beep coming from Margaret’s area and the door unlocking there. I raced into the conference room and slipped silently out from there while the guard led Feran’s spies into the reception area.

  Chapter 22

  I took the stairway on the opposite side of the hallway to avoid passing the kitchen, and I sped out the building and off the company grounds, rapidly putting distance between me and Feran’s spies. I reached for my pocket phone to make the most important call of my life.

  Kristin answered! “Hi, Alex.”

  “Where are you, Kristin?”

  “Home. Say, it doesn’t sound like you. . . . Alex, what’s wrong—”

  “Is your father there?”

  “He’s here.”

  I breathed the greatest sigh of my life as I heard the two most comforting words ever uttered. “I’ll be right there. I must speak to him. The matter is of the greatest urgency. He is not about to go out, is he?”

  “No, he’s here, and he’s not going out.”

  I walked rapidly along the side streets toward Kristin’s house nearby. The people in vehicles driving by me, the pedestrians walking along, the man with his dog, the woman with a briefcase—every face I saw—looked like a spy from Asteron. I tried to calm myself. In a few minutes I would be safe. I would have help. The protective arms of Planet Earth would enfold me like a blanket. I would be relieved of the burden of concealing from a destroyer the most deadly weapon of destruction ever conceived.

  I knew before I had seen its diagram that the cargo I had carried to Earth was the sunbeam. I wondered how Feran had gotten it, but that did not matter. The only thing that mattered now was getting Charles Merrett safely to the sunbeam so he could take possession of it. I imagined an armed escort of Earthling officers protecting us, an impenetrable force that Feran would not dare challenge. Then when the sunbeam was secured, I would give Feran’s description to Earth Security and have him caught. After attending to these matters, I might even celebrate my birthday with Kristin after all!

  I now understood the puzzling events that had occurred on Asteron on the day of my escape. I realized that the entire fleet of spacecraft being readied at Feran’s Space Center was coming to Earth. Feran was transporting his troops for an invasion. When I loaded cargo on his spacecraft that day, the maps I saw on his computer screen were of Earth, pinpointing the strategic areas of interest to him: food production, aircraft, power supply, communications, military headquarters. The names of Asteron’s military officers written under these facilities were those of the unit leaders assigned to them. As Feran released the sunbeam on Earth, the Asteronian officers would be en route. Because the prison experiments showed the beam’s victims responding to instructions given remotely, Feran’s officers would have been able to achieve control from their spaceships, commanding the irradiated populace to relinquish Earth’s broadcasting networks, military command posts, and other facilities even before the troops landed.

  With Earthlings drowsy and compliant because of the beam, Asteron’s commanders could appear on computer screens and other receivers, giving directives to their obliging victims. All key leaders of Earth’s countries and industries could be under the power of the Asteronian fleet before it ever hit the atmosphere. Feran could even orbit the Earth for two days, free of the beam, so he could remove the flexite suit while waiting for the radiation to dissipate. In a mere forty-eight hours after Feran activated the weapon, when the Zamean beam was no longer a danger, Asteron’s troops would land.

  I understood now why Feran connected his cargo to the starvation in Asteron. He was going to use the sunbeam to transform Planet Earth into a giant slave camp to serve Asteron. Feran was going to end starvation and poverty on Asteron by looting the Earth. He was going to ravage the human spirit.

  That was his plan, I realized, as I reached the flower-lined walkway up the hill to Kristin’s house. On the lawn I saw a sight more comforting than an Earthling mother’s arms: two planes, representing the two people who would help me. The bright red plane with the customary fuel engine was Kristin’s, and the new, gray-toned electrical one had to be her father’s. My only assignment was to calmly explain the entire matter to the one man who could rescue us all from Feran’s grip.

  Kristin recoiled when she answered the door and saw my face. “Alex! What’s wrong? You look . . . desperate.”

  “Kristin, I must see your father at once! Is he still here?”

  “He’s here.”

  I sighed in relief.

  “But he’s working in his office. I can’t interrupt him. What’s this all about?”

  “I will tell you everything later, Kristin. But I cannot delay telling him. I assure you he will see me immediately. Tell him it concerns the sunbeam.”

  “Alex, what on Earth—”

  I pushed past her. “Then I will tell him myself. Where is his office?”

  “Wait, now. I’ll tell him. Wait just a minute, okay?”

  Kristin entered a room at the end of a hallway. Impatient beyond measure, I could not contain myself enough to manage courtesies. I sped down the hall and into the room myself.

  There, sitting behind the desk, a man gasped incredulously at the same moment I did. It was Feran.

  Chapter 23

  Before he could recover from the shock of seeing me, I leaped over the desk, bent his neck back, and towered over him, a triumphant grin on my face. My reflexes were quick, and I had the advantage. I grabbed a crystal vase of flowers, no doubt placed on the desk by his loving daughter. I raised it high in the air, tumbling the flowers and splashing cold water into our faces. With a fierce new strength, I aimed the vase directly at his head. I curled my other hand like a claw around his throat. My mind was wild with visions of golden hair swaying on a scaffold and a strangled body under a sheet by a fireplace. I would now have my own theater of justice, and every muscle in my body burned for it!

  But Kristin’s reflexes were also quick. She threw herself over the stunned figure sprawled on the chair, covered his head with her own, and shrieked at me: “No! No! Alex, don’t!”

  I managed to stop the falling vase a mere inch above Kristin’s head, and I dropped it on the desk. I grabbed Kristin roughly and sent her crashing against a bookcase, causing a shelf’s worth of volumes to flap t
o the floor. I grabbed the vase and raised it again over Feran’s head, but it was too late. He had already opened a desk drawer, and I was looking straight into the obscene mouth of his prized weapon, Coquet.

  That mouth was a toothless cylinder of bluish metal, pursed at the end like lips stretched into a perpetual snarl. Coquet’s tongue was a long strip of steel that jutted out viciously at the press of a button, spitting rays and beams of torture. Glowing buttons sparkled like jewels about Coquet’s neck. Feran’s hand caressed her throat lovingly while her circuitry purred and hummed, waiting impatiently for her prey.

  I dropped my arm slowly, letting the vase fall to the carpet. I eased my grip on Feran’s throat. I backed away from malicious eyes that were unmistakably Feran’s, as I heard a soft voice with an Earthling accent that sounded nothing like the accent I knew, “Don’t try anything.”

  While he pointed Coquet at me, he stood up, pressed a button on his pocket phone, and then spoke to someone who was no doubt one of his spies: “I’d like to inform you that our visitor from Asteron is my daughter’s boyfriend.”

  “Asteron!” Kristin screamed.

  “Imbeciles!” barked Feran into the phone, with a telltale crack in the smooth voice, like a fissure in the ground just before a quake. “Kristin, dear,” he said, his voice steadying, “you told me that your boyfriend is a fellow named Alex who just appeared one morning on our lawn, and that you got him a job at MAS. But you neglected to tell me he was an alien.”

  Kristin stared from me to him. “But . . . but Daddy. You were too busy. You didn’t give me a chance.”

  “I guess I have been busy lately, dear,” he said apologetically. Then he returned to his phone call. “I think his spacecraft landed by my house. Search the vacant lot across the road, and call me back as soon as you locate the ship. I want to enter it myself.” Then his voice cracked again: “There’s been enough bungling of this matter!”

  As Kristin’s eyes widened in confusion, mine narrowed in clarity. The moment I had seen Feran behind the desk, I had known the answers to the remaining questions that puzzled me.

  “Alex . . . ? Daddy . . . ? What’s this all about?” Kristin asked incredulously.

  While aiming Coquet at my head, Feran reached into the desk drawer for another object familiar to me.

  “You call him Daddy?” I shouted. “This is Feran, the supreme ruler of Asteron, the planet of corpses. Did your daddy ever have a weapon like that, Kristin? Did he ever keep handcuffs in his desk? These things come from Asteron. I know them well, because I have encountered them many times.”

  “What? Alex, are you really from . . . Asteron?”

  “I am from the place where evil disguises itself as good, ugliness as beauty, and a demon as your father.” I turned to the loathsome eyes that never left me. “You dare not kill me until you get the cargo, so I can speak the truth. You stole from Charles Merrett the zametron built for Earth’s military as the ultimate weapon of all time, the weapon made to unleash the Zamean beam that injured Steve Caldwell’s brain, the weapon Charles Merrett called the sunbeam and made under Project Z, but he decided he could not deliver it because he had found no antidote.”

  I could see Kristin’s confused gaze moving back and forth between Feran and me. I had to get as much of the story out as possible, so she would know the truth and somehow foil his scheme.

  Feran held out the cuffs. “Put these on him, Kristin.”

  “But . . . but Daddy, what’s this all about? That can’t be necessary. That . . . hideous . . . weapon can’t be necessary!”

  “He tried to kill me. You saw that yourself. He’s the spy from Asteron, the man Earth Security is looking for. Oh, he changed his appearance, all right, but he didn’t fool me. I recognized him from a picture ES showed me. Now we have to hold him until they get here. Okay, honey?”

  Kristin did not reply.

  “Look, this guy came to Earth. He took advantage of you to get a job at MAS. And he stole a weapon from me, a dangerous weapon I must retrieve!”

  “Why would he come here today looking for you if he stole something from you and knew you’d report him to the authorities?”

  “He wanted to . . . gain my confidence so he could steal more secrets.” Feran hesitated, groping for a story to satisfy Kristin. “But when he . . . saw that I recognized him . . . he knew he had to kill me. I’m sorry, honey. I know you were taken in by him. I know he toyed with your feelings and hurt you. But he’s working for the people who killed your mother! Now put these on him!” He rattled the cuffs impatiently.

  Kristin seemed to be searching our faces for an answer, standing motionless as if unable to move toward her father or toward me.

  “Oh, Kris! You don’t see it, yet, do you?” Feran shook his head, sprinkling a little affection into his impatience, no doubt following a recipe he had learned. Then he told me to put my hands behind me. Pressing Coquet into my back with one hand, he used the other to snap the cuffs shut on my wrists.

  While this task engaged him, I continued. “Now I understand why you had those bandages on your face in Asteron. That was over two Earthling years ago. We thought you had an accident that injured you, but when the bandages were removed, you had a new face. Your old face, with its grotesque nose, drooling lips, and feeble eyes, which we called beautiful, was replaced by the proportional features we called ugly. Then we thought you did not have an accident after all but intentionally changed your face to look more like the aliens you courted, so you could get more aid to feed us. But now I know the real reason for your transformation. After you discovered that Charles Merrett was making a weapon with the Zamean beam, you were making yourself into Charles Merrett. No doubt you two have a similar height and build, so that was your starting point. The rest, you manufactured. Kristin says Earth’s cosmetic surgery is incredibly advanced. Well, Asteron’s surgeons surely came to Earth secretly and were trained here, because there is no modern medicine there, and they replaced your vile face with Charles Merrett’s good one. Unfortunately they could not replace your soul too.” A sudden spurt of blood trickled into my eyes as he tapped my temple with Coquet.

  “Daddy!” Kristin screamed in horror. But she remained frozen in place.

  With my hands now locked in the cuffs and Coquet still aimed at me, Feran walked to a closet, looking for something on the shelf.

  “You changed your face to match Charles Merrett’s so you could get through the security system to Project Z.” I remembered the words of Mike, the guard. “When modern advances make possible better security, they also make possible new ways to breach it. The remarkable surgery on your face may be Asteron’s only contribution to the history of medicine, the perverse distinction of aiding your identity theft to destroy a free world.”

  “Preposterous!” barked Feran. He shot a nervous look to Kristin, wondering what she was thinking.

  “Now I see why you had Dustin plant a camera to read Dr. Merrett’s monitor. I thought you could not access Project Z’s computer files directly, and that may be, but it was not the only reason. You were studying more than files with your camera. You were studying Charles Merrett—the way he moves, the tone of his voice, the clothes he wears, the hairstyle he sports, the people he talks to, the way he runs his business.” I glanced at Kristin but could read nothing from her face. “The way he talks to his daughter.”

  Feran took a rope from the closet and approached me, swinging it gently in his hand, his vicious eyes belying the tame gesture, warning me of other moves he might make.

  “Kristin, did your father really keep an alien weapon, handcuffs, and a rope in his office?”

  “Daddy, where did you get these things?”

  “Quiet, dear. He’s a wanted man, a suspected spy!”

  “You’re not gonna tie him up, are you? Please, Daddy, no!”

  My words spewed out, because I knew I did not have much time. “Feran has to play his part until he gets the sunbeam, Kristin. Then we will all be destroyed. You will not hear
any ‘dears’ from him then. What you will see is a brutality—” Feran’s punch cut me short and knocked me to the floor.

  “Daddy, stop it!” Kristin moved toward me, her arms outstretched.

  “Stay away from him, Kris.” Feran blocked her from reaching me. “Tell him to stop it. You hear him taunting me with his lies. You saw him try to kill me. You heard him say he’s from Asteron. What more do you want?”

  She dropped her arms at his words. But I was determined to reach her with the truth, because she had to find a way to stop him. Feran stooped down, tucked Coquet into his belt, and tied the rope around my legs. He was being exceedingly careful because he realized that all I needed was one chance.

  “Almost three Earthling years ago, you learned of the laboratory accident through your spy at MAS. There were no news stories about it, but the people at MAS knew. They found Steve Caldwell and talked among themselves. That was how you found out. Because MAS makes weapons and inventions, it is an Earthling company you would spy on to find out about just such an event as Steve’s discovery. Then the following month one of your men broke into this home, stole the report on Steve’s accident, and murdered Charles Merrett’s wife. You must have retrieved enough information to know that the Zamean beam that injured Steve’s mind had tremendous potential for evil in the hands of someone like you. But you did not retrieve enough data from the stolen report to produce the beam yourself. Besides, the source of the material to make the beam was being monitored on Planet Zamea, so you could not get at it. You knew about that because you read Charles Merrett’s papers on his computer screen through the camera you had planted with his cleaning robot. And you knew from those papers that Earth’s intelligence was surveying Asteron, so you had to watch your moves. You further knew that Asteron was suspected in the robbery and murder that took place in this house, and that with just one more provocation, Earth would invade. So you were helpless to make your own sunbeam.”