Fugitive From Asteron (27 page)

Despite the lack of hard evidence
to justifiably blame Asteron for the crimes committed in Dr. Merrett’s home, the
possibility of the Zamean beam getting into the hands of my vile homeland still
troubled Dr. Merrett and the officials. For that reason, they launched a
project.

This led me to documents describing
the formation of Project Z. I called them up on my screen and read feverishly.

Project Z’s customer was Earth’s
military, a force formed from an alliance of nations to handle their mutual
self-defense. The project’s purpose was to create a compact device to generate
the Zamean beam and then aim it at a target, producing a military weapon called
a zametron. The official name for the undertaking, known to the insiders, was
Project Zametron. The code name was Sunbeam.

I looked at a file describing the
purple-colored protective suits used in the project, one of which sat in
Feran’s spacecraft. Experiments showed that the Zamean beam did not penetrate a
material called flexite, a substance that, like lead, blocked harmful
radiation. But unlike lead, flexite was lightweight, was flexible, and could be
made into clothing. So the Project Z area was lined with this substance and
everyone inside the area wore flexite suits.

Project Z had Dr. Merrett’s full
commitment. He said in a memo: “If there’s any chance that Asteron is making
this weapon, Earth, of course, will produce the first and best one. This is
essential for our self-defense.” But he had one great concern: “The sole
purpose of the sunbeam is to disable the enemy, allowing us to capture its
rulers and military without shots fired or lives lost. The purpose is
not
to create a population of zombies. Such a thought is more reprehensible than
war itself. We must find an
antidote
that can be administered
immediately after the perpetrators are captured, to free the innocent civilians
from the sunbeam’s grip. The sunbeam is not intended to induce a permanent
subhuman state in a population but only a temporary anesthetizing effect to
achieve military victory. Any other purpose would pose a threat to all human
life. I will make this weapon only on the condition that an antidote also be
developed, so the sunbeam can be used as I have specified.” Because Earth’s alliance
of governments shared Dr. Merrett’s concerns, they agreed to finance both the development
of the zametron and its antidote.

The weapon that Dr. Merrett and his
team produced surpassed his expectations. They designed a compact device
capable of creating enough Zamean beams to irradiate the entire planet of
Asteron. Incredulous, I read the sentence twice.

In the weapon, an accelerator would
generate the Zamean beam. Then this beam would propagate through the air like
radio waves. It would be sent to the electrically charged ionosphere and be
reflected back down to the ground and up into the ionosphere again, back and
forth, traveling at nearly the speed of light and propagating completely around
Asteron within seconds. As the particles propagated, they would lose some of their
energy, so that after forty-eight hours, the beam would dissipate completely
and the threat of radiation would disappear. All of this would be accomplished
using a small sample of Zamean matter contained in a weapon that was a
miniature particle accelerator. As Charles Merrett concluded, “With no battles,
no destruction of physical material, and the immediate surrender of the entire
population, the lightweight, portable sunbeam is the ultimate military weapon
of all time.”

But I saw from his memos that a
great concern troubled Dr. Merrett: “While we made the sunbeam to use against
Asteron, that planet is so similar in size and atmosphere to Earth that with
minor modifications, the very device we made, if it fell into their hands,
could be used against us.” His fears intensified when repeated attempts to find
an antidote failed. In a memo to Earth’s military alliance, Charles Merrett
insisted on waiting for the antidote before he could in good conscience deliver
the sunbeam. The reply from the military assured him of additional funding as
needed to continue work on the antidote but sternly warned him that its
interpretation of their contract required delivery of the weapon in the
meantime. A dispute arose: The military demanded the weapon, and Dr. Merrett’s
lawyers confirmed that the contract he had signed supported the military’s
claim.

Then suddenly, just when the
sunbeam was completed and ready for delivery, Dr. Merrett reneged. He wrote a
memo to his inner circle announcing his decision to break the contract. This
memo, containing the first mention of the cancellation, was written on the same
Sunday two months ago when he dismantled the invention. So apparently, no one
in the project’s inner circle knew of his decision beforehand. The memo stated:

As president of MAS, I have decided
that I cannot deliver the sunbeam without a suitable antidote. Since I was
overconfident of finding one, I didn’t adequately address the contingency that
we would fail and that I would be in violation of the contract. MAS will have
to take quite a financial hit for my action, but nevertheless I am canceling
the contract.

Stunned by the tragic loss of my wife
and the unthinkable implications of the report being stolen, I now believe that
I acted too hastily in accepting the contract for Project Z. After all, there
never has been any evidence that Asteron is producing the sunbeam. Our sensors
on Planet Zamea tell us that no one has ventured there, and the supply of its
rock remains untouched. Our surveillance of Asteron reports no signs of new
weapon production. And I think that a regime such as the one heading up Asteron
couldn’t preserve a mind capable of making the sunbeam from the fragments of
the report it got, if it stole the document.

Charles Merrett told the inner circle
of Project Z the same thing he told his employees, that he could not release
his new invention to the world because it had “far-reaching and irrevocable
consequences.” But he added an extra phrase for the insiders: “dire
consequences for the human race.”

I leaned back in my chair and rubbed
my eyes, releasing for a moment the hold that the monitor had had on them for
the past half hour. I thought that I finally understood why Dr. Merrett had
been reported to be so upset since he had canceled Project Z.

I leaned forward again, determined
to learn more. I tried to access the technical data and mechanical drawings of
the sunbeam. But they were off limits to me. Accessing them required an
additional level of security that I did not have. I tried, nevertheless, to get
a picture of the zametron. As I maneuvered through various files, searching for
an image or sketch of the device, I thought of the things I urgently needed to
tell Dr. Merrett, things that would intensify his worries, because Feran had
stolen secret information from Project Z and was now here on Earth stalking me
for a—something on the screen made me gasp.

Then a glance out the window gave
me another start. Escorted by an MAS guard and about to enter the building were
two men whose business suits looked too civilized for their sly faces. They
were Feran’s spies!

I could not delay my next task an
instant. I knew I had become too engrossed and stayed too long. I could
understand what had happened to Steve when he got too excited and forgot
danger. Would I too suffer far-reaching and irrevocable consequences for my
lack of caution? Would Earth suffer? I could not let that happen, so I got
ready to leave immediately. By the time these thoughts formed in my mind, I had
copied the Project Z files available to me onto my pin drive, being careful to encrypt
the data and to protect it with a password only I knew. Then I turned off the
computer. There was a lot more information I had not yet absorbed that I wanted
to return to later—if I was still alive.

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.