Fugitive From Asteron

by Gen LaGreca

  “Kristin, as soon as Feran gets the sunbeam and the suit, he will either kill us, which I am hoping for, or make us into robots, along with the rest of the people on Earth.” I studied her face, its expression revealing nothing.

  “Shut up and move—now! This game is over,” Feran said to me.

  “I’ll get the suit, Daddy.” From where she stood with Feran in front of her red plane, she walked back toward the electric plane behind it.

  As I reached the field, I looked at Kristin. What would she do? Would she make a catastrophic mistake with far-reaching and irrevocable consequences for us all?

  “Kristin! You must not—” I began, but a beam from Coquet’s mouth tore my sleeve, barely missing my skin and threatening to blow off my arm the next time.

  “Be quiet, Alex!” she said sternly. “Just put that thing down in front of my father and keep still.”

  “Thank you, darling,” said Daddy, gloating at me.

  Kristin could act, but I could only stare at Coquet. I would have to trust my girlfriend. I followed Kristin’s instructions and dropped the sunbeam gently at Feran’s feet.

  There it stood, a metal box, about two feet high, two feet wide, and one foot deep, resting on feet of the same metal. I now understood its assembly. All of the metal sheets were lined with flexite. The top of the box had a circular piece of metal, about six inches in diameter, which was sealed to the same metal surrounding its rim. On the side near the top was a large ring-shaped steel pin. Over the pin, protecting it, was a plastic covering. Inside the box was a miniature particle accelerator and a sample of Zamean matter. Pulling the pin, I now knew, would start the accelerator, producing the harmful Zamean beam. The metal circle would unseal and slide open, leaving a hole on top. Then the powerful beam would shoot out of this opening, travel to the ionosphere, and from there propagate around the world like a rippling ray.

  “Let’s see. I hope you weren’t foolish enough to tamper with something you knew nothing about.” Keeping Coquet poised at me, Feran bent to inspect the sunbeam. “Well, now, it looks just fine to me.” He smiled. The more pleased he looked, the closer I was to death.

  Kristin reached into the electric plane for the purple flexite suit. “Here it is, Daddy.”

  Walking toward Feran, she stopped as she passed her plane, its engine humming steadily. With Feran’s eyes on me, and mine on her, Kristin did something that summoned me to high alert: She blinked at me with one eye.

  In a flash, she raised her arms and shoved the flexite suit into the engine at the rear of the fuselage. With a whoosh, the suit was sucked into the running blades of her plane and chopped to bits. The engine made a piercing screech as it expelled the last remains of the suit in a puff of purple vapor. In utter astonishment, Feran turned to see what had happened. Instantly, I lunged at him, snapping Coquet out of his hand. Then I was pointing the weapon at Feran’s head!

  “Imbecile female!” snapped Feran in his true voice of pure hatred. “And I was going to spare your life so you could be my servant!”

  The suit had jammed the engine, leaving the three of us in dead silence. I winked back at Kristin, who was now smiling broadly. Then I turned to Feran.

  “Back off,” I demanded. Feran moved a few feet away from the sunbeam. “Now which of Coquet’s buttons did you use on me? I will activate that same one until I figure out which of the others will kill you.”

  Coquet, now securely in my control, buzzed impatiently, drooling to attack him. This was surely the first time anyone had ever held the upper hand over Feran, and I wondered how brave he would be in meeting the fate he had so cruelly inflicted on countless victims. I remembered how Reevah and others had met their end, with their heads high, with the quality the Earthlings called pride stamped indelibly on their faces to the end. How would Feran meet his demise?

  He fell to his knees, trembling pathetically before me, unable to conceal the stark terror that gripped him.

  “Wait! Do not shoot!” he squealed. “You cannot destroy me! If you kill me, you kill the people of Asteron. The deed I came here to perform is for my people!”

  “Even if your deed saved Asteron from starvation, it would still be evil if it produced just one Steve Caldwell—if it destroyed the mind of just one person.” I turned Coquet’s little throat until the button I wanted sat directly under my finger.

  “But wait! Wait! You must listen to the truth!” On his knees, he locked his hands together, pleading for his vile life. “It is unfair for one planet to have all the food and wealth. The rich Earthlings must help the poor Asteronians.” He pointed a finger to the sky as if issuing a proclamation, while still begging on his knees. “I am a liberator, not a killer!”

  “Slavery is liberation. Plunder is justice. The ugly is the beautiful. The bad is the good,” I said. “Just as you hid your hideous face behind Dr. Merrett’s handsome one, you hide your depraved soul behind a mask you call the greater good. But I will pull it down before I end your foul life. You cannot be content to plant your own garden and leave others to do the same, because then they would be free of your intrusion and you would be of no importance. Your perverse standing comes from trampling the gardens of others. But you will not crush the most prized of all orchids, the human will!” Impatient to end the matter and feeling no thrill at the prospect of torturing him, I reached for the button on Coquet’s throat that I thought would kill swiftly. “Good-bye, Feran.” I aimed the petulant mouth of Coquet at the head of her master. I pressed—

  “Look out, Alex!” Kristin screamed.

  I did not get to push the button, because at that moment someone shot the weapon out of my hand, splattering the innards of the prized Coquet into a jumble of circuitry at my feet!

  Chapter 26

  Kristin gasped in shock, but I showed no surprise, only a greater understanding of the whole vile scheme, when I saw the man with the gun in the stands behind first base: Chuck Whitman.

  “Imbecile!” shouted Feran to the person who had just saved his life. “You were supposed to shoot the man, not the weapon. Not my Coquet!”

  “I shot exactly what I aimed to shoot. Why hit a guy who’ll make a great servant when the new order’s established?” Chuck carried a large shoulder bag, opened at the top, with a shiny purple material visible inside. “One of our men called to tell me everything.” Chuck spoke with great self-importance, as if he were in charge of the operation. “Then I got a signal from the sensor that he landed here,” he said, looking at me contemptuously. “I landed my plane in the parking lot, jumped a fence into the stadium, and went to check things out. I brought some flexite suits with me too.”

  “Bring them down here at once, and we will proceed with our business!” barked Feran. He had shed Dr. Merrett’s kind voice and now spoke in his real voice of anger and malice.

  Waving his gun in my direction, Chuck slowly walked down the steps to the field from about two dozen rows up in the stands. Feran inched closer to the sunbeam.

  “Chuck!” Kristin was aghast, her voice barely audible. “You mean you’re on his side?” She pointed to Feran.

  “Whose side should I be on? On the side of privilege when I don’t have any privileges? On the side of the landlords who own all the land and demand rent from the rest of us poor slobs? On the side of the companies that control all the jobs and fire anybody they please? On the side of my father, who has lots of money but won’t shell it out to help his own son? Or should I be on this guy’s side?” He pointed to me with the barrel of his gun. “The new pilot my father brags about. A guy who comes here from nowhere and gets a sweetheart job that’s gonna launch a whole new business. My father picks him for the maiden voyage, which’ll get all the publicity and make his career for him in six stupid months! And he gets the girl everybody wants, a girl with great looks and a direct line to the top boss. Should I be on his side, when he gets things handed to him that others only dream about?”

  “Alex didn’t just dream about being a pilot, and then sit around
and do nothing,” said Kristin. “My father didn’t just wish for a business, and then whine for somebody to give him one. Your landlord didn’t just want land, and then wait for somebody to drop a building in his lap. How do you think people get to be what you call privileged?”

  “Spoken just like my father,” replied Chuck, looking down at us on the field.

  “Commander Whitman, why do you stop to chat with these insurgents? We have the sunbeam, so we can eliminate them at once. Shoot them and bring me the weapon and suit—now!” screamed Feran.

  Anyone on Asteron would have instantly complied with a command from Feran. But the supreme ruler’s directive to an Earthling, even one who was a loyal supporter, carried nothing like the same force. Chuck did not move swiftly as Feran commanded. His eyes flashed with a strange excitation. He slowly took a step down, then another, and then paused, as if he was savoring the moment like a rare wine, lingering on it, intoxicated with it. The chatting pleased me too. It was the only tool we had for stalling Feran. I decided to engage Chuck in further discussion.

  “At least three years ago you knew of Feran, perhaps through his spies or the groups who support him on Earth. You were sympathetic to his ideas, to his wanting an inroad to Earth to establish an order that he no doubt promised would provide you with everything you dreamed about. You gave Feran that inroad. Angered by being fired from Space Travel and knowing that MAS built new inventions and weapons, you spied on Dr. Merrett from your new office in Housekeeping to see if you could get back at a company where you had suffered a humiliating failure. You seem to like hurting others. You kept Frank Brennan from getting a promotion he deserved, and you provoked your staff, causing the best workers to quit. Would you not also want to hurt your father, Dr. Merrett, and all of us whose success stirs resentment in you?”

  Far from looking ashamed, Chuck grinned brazenly, as if I were presenting him with a medal.

  “I was sore, all right, when my own father canned me. And Uncle Charles wouldn’t override him, either. Yeah, I looked around for some compassion, which I sure enough didn’t get from my own kind. I found a group that sympathized with me, a group that wanted to right the wrongs here, to knock down the high-and-mighty and put everybody on an equal footing.”

  I knew Feran trained spies. Now, listening to Chuck, I knew where he sent them and why. “So you joined this group, Chuck?”

  “I went to a few meetings. When I mentioned where I worked and my father’s job in top management, they took a huge interest in me. They treated me like I was really somebody. They approached me to do a job for them, a super-important job. For the first time, I was sought out. I was needed. I was a kind of . . . hero . . . to them. And I discovered I was damn good at the assignment they gave me. It was easy to spy on a fool—to look through a window, to plant a camera. Uncle Charles never suspected anything. What a dupe!”

  Kristin bristled.

  “I got a real charge out of that. You could say I found my calling—and, man, did I hit on a mother lode for them.”

  “Commander Whitman!”

  “Hold on.” Chuck moved his wrist and the gun now pointed at an outraged Feran.

  “So it was you,” I said, hoping to keep Chuck talking while I tried to figure out what to do next. “Before Dr. Merrett installed the security windows, you read files off his computer screen from your office across the way. You learned of Steve Caldwell’s accident and its implications. You told Feran about the report Charles Merrett was expecting on the cause of Steve’s injury. But when the report arrived, you saw Dr. Merrett print a copy and leave the office with it, instead of reading it on his screen. You knew the Merretts were going out that evening because they had tickets with your parents for the ballet. You told Feran that a printed copy of the report could be found in Dr. Merrett’s home office. That fancy phone you bought, which I heard you tell your father was for contacting the lunar cities about a job, probably makes calls to Asteron too.”

  Chuck’s grin widened and he laughed outright, raising his head arrogantly. Although he shifted his weapon back to aim at me, Chuck was in no hurry to kill someone who was acknowledging his perverted feats. Indeed he was eager to brag about the only job he had ever excelled at. He slowly strutted down the steps as if the seats about him were filled and the crowd was cheering. He looked as if he wanted to take a bow.

  “So you did not care that your action led to Mrs. Merrett’s murder?” I asked.

  “She complained about her back before. Why didn’t she see a doctor like she was supposed to? Why didn’t she let go of Uncle Charles’s report instead of fighting for it? Nobody told her to foil our plans. That was her choice, not mine!”

  “You bastard!” Kristin’s face reddened with contempt.

  “Eliminate the enemy!” ordered Feran. “Shoot them!”

  “Cool your heels,” answered Chuck. He again pointed his weapon toward Feran, and the supreme ruler was silenced.

  “After Dr. Merrett installed the security windows in his office, you altered Dustin’s programming so you could plant a camera to snoop,” I said. “It was you who found out the nature of Project Z. You were the only one outside the inner circle who knew that Project Z was undertaken to build a weapon from the substance that harmed Steve Caldwell’s brain. You provided the way for Feran to steal a device he could not produce himself.”

  Chuck beamed as if I were toasting his prowess.

  “You told Feran the delivery date of the completed sunbeam. You arranged to meet him the Sunday before delivery to help him as he impersonated Charles Merrett. You were to help him find his way around MAS. You did not come in that Sunday to reorganize a supply closet, as you told Frank Brennan you would. You came to meet Feran so you could steal the sunbeam. It was Feran, posing as Charles Merrett, who let you into the Project Z area.

  “But you did not get the sunbeam in one piece. You did not know it in advance, but Charles Merrett had just disassembled the invention. So you had to take the pieces out in boxes, which you said you were bringing to the compactor, but which you really managed to take to Feran’s spacecraft for reassembly back on Asteron. By then you knew the project had been canceled, so it was plausible to say you were destroying the parts; that way no one would wonder what had become of them.

  “Would the real Charles Merrett have left a secured area with the pieces of a top-secret weapon, without a security escort, to go to a compactor? And would the real Charles Merrett have shared his intentions with a guard? Mike, the security guard, told me that such behavior was unusual for Charles Merrett. Mike did not know that it was Feran who brought those pieces out of the Project Z area with you. And it was Feran who promoted you to special assistant to the president for new project development, because Feran needed you close by to instruct him on how to impersonate Charles Merrett. And besides, the time had come to collect more money for the services you were performing on Feran’s behalf, so why not get a raise and have MAS pay for your espionage?”

  “You’re damn right. He owed me plenty!” Chuck shot an angry look at Feran.

  “But apparently you had not collected enough money to support your habits. You still needed to borrow more from your father.”

  “He got maxed out too.” Chuck gestured to Feran with his weapon. “Said I had to complete my assignment first, and then I’d get more.”

  “Enough!” Feran demanded. “Commander Whitman, eliminate the traitor and come to me at once!” With Chuck’s weapon oscillating between him and me as its target, Feran seemed hesitant to jump him.

  “Relax,” said Chuck. He was now on the field and strolling toward us.

  Then Feran tried a new tack, in a calmer voice. “Now, you just bring me the suits, and stay clear of the traitor as you walk.”

  “Stay away from him, Chuck. You will certainly be zapped too,” I warned, but Chuck did not listen.

  “Chuck, what are you doing?!” cried Kristin.

  I turned to watch Chuck as he walked toward Feran.

  Once Ch
uck was near him, Feran made his move. His eyes bulging, he scowled and stormed Chuck, pulling the bag from his shoulder. He also grabbed for the weapon, but he backed away when Chuck aimed it at him.

  “You insisted that I make you president of MAS, give you Charles Merrett’s home, and give you your father and the traitor”—he pointed to me—“and Frank Brennan as your personal servants, and you demanded an allowance that could run an entire Asteronian city, and you tell me to relax? Do you think there is no price? If I am to provide you with all the things you want, then I am the one who calls the plays! Now, shoot the insurrectionist!”

  While he was speaking, Feran had removed one of the flexite suits from the bag. He had worked it over his feet and legs when he paused to point to me, in case Chuck was uncertain who it was he should shoot. I stood, my back now to the dugout, eying the sunbeam, a mere few feet from Feran.

  “Chuck! The suit—” I warned.

  “Shut up!” Chuck replied. He turned to Feran. “You didn’t say anything about killing people.” He complained. “We were just supposed to zap them with the beam, so they get . . . agreeable, that’s all.”

  “Imbecile!” barked Feran. “You are like all the other useful idiots before you who claimed to support my ancestors. ‘We never meant to do that,’ they would stammer when one troublesome group or another had to be eliminated,” he exclaimed. His hands and arms were now inside the protective suit, with the hood hanging at the shoulders. He reached for the garment’s zipper.

  “Once that suit is sealed, you too will be zapped!” I cried to Chuck.

  “Hold it.” Chuck cocked his gun at Feran. “Hold it right there.”

  Feran dropped his hands to his side.

  “There are two worlds, Commander Whitman. Choose—mine or theirs! Choose a world in which you are a supreme commander, where you have subjects to do your bidding, where everything is provided to you for free and you are protected, or choose a world in which you have to stumble about alone and afraid, a world in which you are nothing. If you choose my world—if I am the one who provides for your sorry life—then you must do what I require. Choose!”