Fugitive From Asteron (23 page)

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.”