Fugitive From Asteron (20 page)

“Could you look up his records for
us, Joe, if you please?” said one of the spies, who seemed to know his manners,
although he had never wasted them on me.

“Let’s see,” the clerk said. I
heard the light taps of his fingertips on a screen. “He’s in unit 11, the one near
the end of the cul-de-sac. J. White. That’s his name.”

I had decided to rent without
Kristin’s help, so I could give a phony Earthling name. I had chosen a common
one that I had found in an electronic directory of Rising Tide’s residents,
which I had looked through in the rental office while waiting to check in. There
were dozens of people in the area with the surname White whose first names
began with
J
.

“What does the
J
stand
for?” One of the spies asked.

“Don’t know. He didn’t say.”

“And what other information do you
have on him?”

“Hmmm. None.”

“None?”

“As I recall, when he rented, he
said he was in a hurry and he would come back later to fill out the rest of the
information, but I guess we both forgot about it. He put a month down in cash,
so I didn’t complain.”

“Do you have another address on
him?”

“No.”

“An employer’s name?”

“Nope.”

“Anybody else in that room?”

“Nope.”

“Any visitors or callers?”

“Not that I know of. Say, is this
guy dangerous?”

One of the spies laughed. “Now,
don’t go getting alarmed, Joe. We just want to talk to him.”

“Well, I don’t know if he’s home,”
said the clerk, “but I’ll call the apartment for you.”

“Oh, don’t trouble yourself,” said
the other spy. “We’ll just walk down there and see if he’s around. Hey, got a
key for us, Joe?”

“Not without a search warrant, of
course,” replied the clerk, surprised.

“Of course,” said the spy, laughing
the matter off. “If we need one, we’ll come back tomorrow with it.”

Of course,
I thought,
hunched in the foliage,
Feran’s spies will be back with some kind of
permission—a warrant—to search my apartment.
That would happen just as
soon as I gave Feran kisses! I knew the spies would be inside my door within
minutes. But I would not be there, nor would any piece of information that
could link me to the name
Alexander
or to MAS. After I had received
Feran’s first message, I removed from my apartment anything having to do with
my Earthling identity and job. And I had never worn my work clothes, with their
MAS emblems, outside of the company. Kristin had never been here, because out
of caution, I had not invited her.

I was
safe
. I would wait
until the spies headed toward my apartment, and then I would disappear from
this complex forever. The spies would get a new wardrobe—
my
wardrobe,
the animals!—but they would not get me, I thought.

“We’d appreciate it if you didn’t
mention us to Mr. J. White, if you happen to see him. Do you think you can do
that for us, Joe?”

“Sure, guys. Anything I can do to
cooperate. But what’s this kid done?”

“We don’t know. ES wants to locate
him, that’s all.”

“
Earth Security
? You mean
this isn’t a local matter?” The clerk’s voice sounded grave. “Does it involve a
threat to the . . . 
planet
?”

“Hey, take it easy, Joe.”

“Is this guy a . . . spy?”

“Like we said, we just want to talk
to him."

As I huddled in the bushes outside
the window, I suddenly realized I would
not
be safe at all! I would
not be able to vanish into the night and never come back. I
had to
get
into my apartment. Before we left work that day, Kristin had given me a small
bundle of flowers. When I came home to dress for dinner, I dropped the flowers
in a glass of water in the kitchen. There was a card with the blossoms, a handwritten
note from Kristin, that in my haste
I had left there unread
. The
tension that curled like a snake around my stomach now squeezed it into a knot.
Surely that note would contain her name!

Before these thoughts were fully
formed, I was racing along the backyards of the row of dwellings on one side of
the courtyard. As I peered out to the street between two of the units near
where I lived, I could see the spies reach the entrance of my home. I would
have to destroy Kristin’s card because her name must not appear before Feran
and Coquet! I would have to get to the card before they did, but they were
already at my unit.

I quickly arrived at my back door,
where I heard the stealthy movements of the spies at the front. Rather than
break in, they were being careful to pick the door lock silently to avoid
arousing the guard and to take me by surprise, if I were inside. This kept them
stalled outside for a few moments as I pressed my remote electronic key to open
the back door and slipped soundlessly into the kitchen. In the darkness I grabbed
Kristin’s card just as the spies entered through the front door. I thought I
could feel the air whisk as they moved swiftly through the living room and
bedroom.

I heard one of them whisper gruffly
in his real voice, “He is not here.”

Before they reached the kitchen, I
slipped out the back and ran, with Kristin’s card torn into pieces inside my
mouth, ready to swallow if they seized me. I glanced back and saw the spies exit
the kitchen and begin searching the yard. When I was a safe distance from them,
I removed the soggy papers from my mouth and pieced them together:

“To the Alexander from another
world who brings a promise to me. Kristin.”

Chapter 15

The hum of the train’s engine sounded too soft for the
powerful vehicle I was riding. The train’s speed melted rows of buildings
outside my window into one brown smear. I was on the local commuter line called
the Cheetah, a caravan of cars painted tawny in color with round black patches
to match the coat of the Earth feline that provided inspiration for the train’s
name. After eluding the spies, I had raced to the Cheetah station and hopped on
the first train leaving Rising Tide in order to find new lodging elsewhere. As
I sat in my seat, my fascination with this feat of Earthling engineering gave
me a brief reprieve from my worries.

Because it had no wheels and did
not touch a track as it ran, the Cheetah looked more like a plane than a train.
Propelled at the brisk clip of five hundred miles per hour, this bullet of a
train enabled rural dwellers to commute to city jobs quickly. Disembarking
passengers moved into a compartment called a cub, which was a small, rapidly
accelerating and decelerating car that attached to the side of the main train,
then separated from the Cheetah as it approached a station. This allowed people
to exit from the cub without the Cheetah ever having to slow down for station
stops. After the Cheetah passed a station, another cub that had picked up
passengers gained speed and attached to the main train, bringing the new people
onboard and collecting others for exit at the next stop. Like everything on
Earth, the ride was coated with pleasure and convenience. For an extra coin, I
had my choice of food, movies, music, and more.

I reached into my pocket for my new
electronic device, a recent purchase that Kristin had selected for me and
insisted I get. “It’s a phone,” she explained as she programmed her phone
number into it, “but it’s much more than that. Everything you ever wanted to
know about anything is accessible through this thing.” I had no idea what she
meant about the object’s greater capabilities, because where I came from,
everything I ever wanted to know about anything was
in
accessible. With
my days jammed with activities, I had not yet explored my new purchase. Now was
a good time to begin.

I turned it on and called up a
feature that gave me a trove of information about the cities and towns in the
area where I was traveling. I was able to learn about furnished apartments
available for rent along my route. I quickly selected a place for my new
lodging in a secluded town one hundred miles from Rising Tide, which was a mere
12-minute ride on the Cheetah. I counted the money I had carried with me that
evening. Thanks to the affluence of my new life on Earth, I had enough funds to
rent a small furnished apartment and to buy a few articles of clothing and food
until my next payday. When my stop was the next one, I walked through the train
to the place where the cub was attached. I stepped in and watched it disengage
from the Cheetah and, seconds later, pull into the station and come to a stop.

Despite my new town being far from
a large city, I found abundant choices in restaurants, shops, and lodging. Why,
I wondered, in a place where nothing was provided for free, was everything so
readily available? And why, in a place where everything had been provided for
free, had nothing been available? I wondered, but I had no time to discover the
answer.

After renting a furnished apartment,
I slept for a couple of hours. Then, too unsettled to sleep longer, I took the
Cheetah back to my workplace.

The rocket sculpture was still
bathed in its nighttime spotlight when I reached the quiet grounds of MAS. At four-thirty
in the morning, the buildings were sparsely lit, and only a few vehicles dotted
the parking lots.

A notice posted at the entrance
announced the closing of the plant tomorrow, Friday, for the holiday of Reckoning
Day. Tomorrow also marked a week since Feran began hunting for me in Rising
Tide, as well as my twenty-third day on Earth. And because Kristin had insisted
that I must have a birth celebration, she used my estimate of my age in Earth
time to declare Reckoning Day as my twenty-second birthday. With Kristin
planning my birthday and Feran my funeral, I figured I would have some type of
ceremony in either case.

As my mind whirled with the problem
that consumed me, I opened the door to my office and entered the narrow canyon
of bookshelves that held the colorful manuals and electronic devices of my new
life.

At my desk, I called up on my
computer the memo that Dr. Merrett had sent to his employees announcing the
cancellation of Project Z. I had already read this document, which was
accessible to everyone at MAS. Now I reread it, wondering if there was a clue I
had missed. The legend at the top noted that Dr. Merrett wrote the memo two
months ago, on a Sunday in late August, and the computer sent it to all
electronic mailboxes at MAS the next morning. It read:

Today I decided to cancel Project Z.
There will be no delivery of its product tomorrow as scheduled, or at any other
time, because I have just dismantled it. Because MAS has spent considerable
time, effort, and resources on developing Project Z, I know that my sudden and
unexpected action calls for an explanation. I can say only that a grave
problem, which plagued me from the beginning, and which I had confidence would
be solved by the time of product delivery, remains unsolved. In light of this,
I have decided that I cannot release to the world a new invention with
far-reaching and irrevocable consequences.

Because MAS is now in breach of its
contract, we are required to return all payments received for our work on
Project Z and to pay a significant cancellation penalty. This means MAS will suffer
a temporary, but quite serious, financial setback. I deeply regret any layoffs
that will result. I will diligently be seeking new ventures to replenish our
revenue stream, and those of you whose departments are affected by the slowdown
will be given first priority when we are hiring again.

I stared at the memo on my screen.
From the little I knew of Dr. Merrett, the communication seemed typical of him.
It was in plain text, with no fancy formatting, images, or videos. I was struck
by the difference between the simple memo before me and the mode of
communication of my former leader. Whereas Feran coated his messages with honey
to hide their true meaning, Dr. Merrett spoke directly, absent any sweet words
to soften the truth. Whereas Feran’s fiendish portrait was stamped on all
directives and hung in every room of every Asteronian building—with penalties
for people who did not dust and maintain the images—I had seen Dr. Merrett in
only two pictures, both with him busy at work and unaware of being photographed—one
in which he wore a helmet and was coming out of a cockpit, and another with him
on a ladder and with his head poking inside an aircraft’s engine in a hangar.
Whereas Feran was consumed with power, Dr. Merrett seemed consumed with work.
Of all the contrasts between my homeland and my new planet, I wondered if the
difference in its leaders was the most startling of all.

I leaned back, pondering the memo.
What did it mean? What was developed under Project Z? An invention. What kind
of invention? One with
far-reaching
consequences. But many projects at
MAS had far-reaching consequences. For example, my own project in the asteroid
belt had consequences that would affect the future direction of space
exploration and mining. Dr. Merrett’s invention also had
irrevocable
consequences. But my going to the asteroid belt also had irrevocable
consequences, because I could not undo my trip once I made it. It seemed as if
another word should be added to Project Z’s far-reaching and irrevocable
consequences for them to disturb Dr. Merrett, a word he had neglected to
mention:
dangerous
.

I sighed. What did I know? Feran
had a protective suit in his spacecraft that linked him to Project Z. This
project involved an invention whose effects were dangerous and irreversible.
Could an Asteronian spy have found out about the invention? But how, if the
plant and project were under tight security, and if no one could access the computer
files or spy through his office windows on the one man who knew all the details
of the project? Could Feran have wanted the invention? But why? Even if Feran
had learned of the invention and wanted it, Dr. Merrett himself had dismantled
and destroyed it. Was it not out of Feran’s reach now?

I rubbed my eyes as if trying to
make them focus more clearly on an answer to these riddles, but all I could
picture were Feran’s spies closing the distance between him and me. Did I dare
tell Kristin my story? I remembered the look of hatred, so startlingly out of
place in her eyes, when she spoke of Asteron. If I told her the truth about my
origin, could she turn against me?

Did I dare tell Mykroni or Dr.
Merrett my story? If spies masquerading as officers of Earth wanted me for
questioning, whose side would my employers take? On Asteron everyone knew the
officials were corrupt and no one trusted them. On Earth, however, people
respected their officials, a view truly shocking to me. Because the power of
Earth’s civil authorities was tightly confined, their potential for corruption
and cruelty also seemed limited. Why would anyone want to bribe the officials,
when they controlled none of the citizens’ businesses or personal affairs? What
peaceable citizen would be afraid of an officer’s cruelty when the police had
no power even to search an apartment without a warrant? Even if Mykroni or Dr.
Merrett believed I did nothing wrong, they could nevertheless turn me over to
Feran’s spies, thinking that those men were civilized Earthling officers who
would release me when I explained my innocence. And besides, I thought
guiltily, why would my employers side with me after I had lied to them about my
homeland?

Did I dare go to the authorities?
With Feran’s spies impersonating Earth’s officials, how could I? How far had
his spies infiltrated their ranks? Because seeking help from Kristin, my
employers, or the authorities was fraught with danger, I decided against it. I
would first try to learn more on my own.

I rose from my chair and slipped
into a port in my watch a small electronic cylinder called a pin drive,
containing a program I needed. Then I left my office to commit my worst breach
of the trust given me by the people who had welcomed me into their world.

Ever since I had seen the flexite
suits at MAS and learned about Project Z, I knew it would come down to this,
and I had prepared for it. A few days ago, I had feigned losing the personal
password I used to access the computer terminal in my office. I called our
systems administrator for help. Jill Thomas had arrived in my office to assist
me. She spoke competently and had a cheerful face, which gave me hope that she
would be helpful without also being suspicious.

After instructing me on the need to
commit my password to memory and avoid this problem in the future, Jill installed
a program on my computer to retrieve the code that would unlock it. On the
screen flashed the words
Code Cracker
, introducing the program in an
impressive graphic display that suggested the software was what the Earthlings
called a commercial program, available to the public. Many such programs were
used at MAS.

Code Cracker employed an incredible
array of dictionaries and algorithms to search for the exact combination of
letters, numbers, and special symbols that formed the password. It bypassed the
computer’s operating system and was able to test millions of password
possibilities per second. As Code Cracker was running, I tried to gain
information about it.

“Tell me, Jill, are there no security
screens on my computer to resist such an attempt to unlock it?” I asked.

“Oh, absolutely,” she replied. “There
sure are safeguards on your computer against cracking a password, but the
software to bypass them keeps getting more and more sophisticated. What I’m
using here is the latest program, and it does the trick most of the time.”

After Jill’s various manipulations
and attempts, the program did indeed come up with a code it presented on the
screen. “Does that look about right to you, Alex?”

“I think that may be it!” I already
knew that the result she had arrived at was indeed correct.

She tried the code and was able to
unlock the computer and pull up my files. While working, she elaborated on what
she had done. “Code Cracker doesn’t let you see anything new. It just retrieves
your password so you can see what you already were able to access.”

“Okay.”

“I should also mention that the
program doesn’t crack other codes you may use, only your password. For example,
if you buy things from this computer, Code Cracker won’t give you the separate
codes you use to access your customer accounts. And if any directories or files
require an additional log-in, you’ll have to supply it.”

“Do any of the systems here use
biometrics?” The matter interested me more than my casual tone revealed.

“We use fingerprints, DNA, and
retinal patterns in some cases. But they can be cracked too, and some people
find it intrusive to have to give that kind of information, so we don’t require
it on their personal terminals.”

With her work completed, Jill uninstalled
the Code Cracker program. Before leaving she gave me pointers on picking a good
password, and then commented: “Most people here are pretty relaxed about
security—too relaxed, if you ask me.”

After Jill had left, I visited a
store in Rising Tide that sold these kinds of programs, and indeed I found Code
Cracker on the rack. Here was a program of great power—and it was available to
any person who wanted to buy it. Just as I marveled at the openness of Earth
and the power and reach of the average person here, I felt a stab of pain at
the thought of taking advantage of this wholesome environment by planning to do
something . . . unwholesome. I bought the program and
learned how to use it. Now, a few days later, I carried it on the pin drive in
my watch.