The Last Starfighter

by Alan Dean Foster

  Between the trailers Maggie paused, thoughtful. Granny was leaning out of a window nearby, a thick cigar smoking between her fingers.

  “Granny, have you seen Alex?”

  “Can’t say as I have. That boy’s been kind of scarce here lately.” She gestured with the stogie. “You’re not the only one lookin’ for him, neither.”

  “I heard Mrs. Rogan.”

  “She ain’t the only one.”

  Figures appeared, exiting the Rogan trailer and walking toward Maggie. She recognized several of her friends along with Mrs. Rogan, and one non-friend; Jack Blake. She stood and waited for them.

  “You want to know where Alex is?” Blake was saying as soon as he spotted her, “ask Maggie. She knows. She was with him when he stole my pickup.”

  “He did not steal it,” Maggie shot back angrily. “He borrowed it.”

  “Yeah?” Blake was snarling at her, not the least bit affectionate now. More important things were at stake. “Then where is it?”

  Maggie thought back to the wild chase in the truck and the robot’s little surprise box under the dash and the incinerating heat when the pickup had smashed into the alien assassin’s ship and said nothing.

  “Maggie,” Mrs. Rogan asked in a gentle but no-nonsense voice, “where’s Alex?”

  “Where’s my truck!” Blake yelled, without giving her a chance to reply. “Where’s your boyfriend?”

  Maggie ignored him, wondering that she could ever have found him even slightly attractive, and kept a lid on her temper as she spoke to Mrs. Rogan. It was apparent that no one was going to leave until they got some answers. She’d just have to try and explain as best she could.

  “Mrs. Rogan, it’s like this about Alex. He isn’t . . .”

  The dogs began to howl. All the dogs, not just Mr. President. They were joined by the cats. If Mrs. Edward’s goldfish could’ve howled they would have joined the chorus as well. Suddenly no one was listening to Maggie.

  Outside Otis’s trailer, Mr. President was yowling with puppylike enthusiasm. His master came stumbling out and was about to berate his fool dog when something on the porch caught his eye.

  Oblivious to the fact that he wasn’t wearing anything over his union suit, Otis started for the porch, transfixed by the sight of the rocking, squealing, strobing videogame. Above him, unseen, the weathervane stopped spinning as if shot and all four compass point indicators suddenly bent sharply toward the night sky. Something blew Otis’s sleeping cap off. A descending bright light made him step backward, shielding his eyes. The Starlight Starbright sign on the front of the store was glowing powerfully, bright enough to be read a hundred miles away.

  The falling light came from the underside of something that was lowering itself toward the parking lot. Leaving Mrs. Rogan and her friends from school behind, Maggie started walking rapidly toward the light.

  Other faces appeared at windows and doors as the residents of the trailer park left bed or TV or bathroom to have a look. The commotion was sufficient to penetrate the brightly painted teepee set up in the Rogan yard. Two small occupants emerged to see what was happening.

  “Far out!” said Louis’s friend David. “We been invaded!”

  “Klingons!” shouted Louis gleefully as he started toward the descending shape.

  The spaceship touched ground, silent except for a deep internal humming. Maggie recalled the Beta’s warning words. This might be another assassin, bolder than his predecessors. But she couldn’t keep herself from moving slowly toward the faintly glowing ship.

  The logo emblazoned on its side looked like the one the Beta had described to her, but she couldn’t be sure. She was cautious, but hopeful. Setting down in the midst of a hundred witnesses, primitive or not, didn’t seem like the ZZ-Designate’s style.

  A voice called to her. “Maggie?” Otis, standing in front of the store. She ignored him.

  Something was descending from the belly of the spacecraft, a lift of some kind. Mutterings rose from the growing crowd of curious onlookers. They stood there by the store in their underwear and bathrobes, and watched as a creature stepped off the lift and walked toward them. It wore a peculiar suit and helmet. Its outline looked human enough.

  Then it stopped in front of Maggie and removed its helmet.

  “Alex!” Her face lit up as brightly as the ship’s landing lights. “Alex, is it you? Is it really you?” She took a step toward him, hesitated. “Or should I open you up to check?”

  He grinned down at her, a familiar, warm, guileless grin. “Nothing in here but us organics, Maggie.”

  She jumped into his arms, staggering him. “It is you! Alex, Alex, Alex . . .”

  “Maggie.”

  They kissed, and that was enough to bring the crowd of gaping onlookers shuffling close: Mrs. Rogan, Granny, Elvira, Clara . . . all of them, all talking at once.

  “Alex, is that a real spaceship? . . . Did’ja meet aliens? . . . Where’d you get it, Alex? . . . Now what’s goin’ on ’round here? . . . What’s this all about? . . .”

  And lastly, pushing through the others, “Where have you been, Alex Rogan?” his mother demanded to know.

  “Out,” he said automatically. Standing with his arm around Maggie, he tried to explain the impossible.

  “Take it easy, everybody.” They settled down to listen. He took a deep breath and spoke to his mother. “I’ve been on another planet, Mom. Helping the Rylans and the other good aliens, protecting the civilized galaxy from the bad aliens.” He gestured over his shoulder. “That’s my gunstar . . .”

  “Like from the Starfighter game?” Louis wanted to know.

  “That’s right, little brother. See, aliens put the game here on Earth and on other worlds to find people who qualified as Starfighters, to help defend the Frontier against Xur and the Ko-Dan armada. Just like the game always said.”

  “Wow!” Louis said expressively.

  Otis pushed forward, Jack Blake close on his heels.

  “Well, then, if you were somewhere out there, who was it broke my antenna trying to put it up?”

  “Yeah, and stole my truck!” Blake said accusingly, though much subdued.

  “. . . And ruined my stove . . . and wrecked my plumbing . . . cut my ’lectric . . .!” other voices inquired.

  Alex made shushing motions with his hands. “That was a Beta Unit, a duplicate of me. A robot.”

  “Aw, I knew it all along,” Louis insisted. He looked past his brother, suddenly pointed. “Hey, what’s that?”

  The lift was descending again. On it stood a tall, alien shape. The adults in the crowd drew back fearfully, but they had to pull their children along.

  “A monster!” one of the women shouted.

  “Monster?” murmured Grig as he stepped off the lift and started toward Alex. “Indeed.”

  “Go easy on ’em, Grig,” Alex asked him. “Remember, they’re just immature primitives. Like me.”

  Grig nodded, stopped short of the crowd.

  Granny was trying to push her way forward, clutching her old shotgun. Alex hastened to cut her off.

  “Wait! Put down the shotgun, Granny. Everybody, come back. I want you all to meet Grig. My best friend.”

  The children were first, breaking away from their parent’s paranoid grasp to crowd unhesitatingly around the alien’s long legs. Urged on by shame and curiosity, their elders timidly joined them.

  “Grig,” said Alex brightly, “I’d like you to meet Mr. and Mrs. Boone . . . that means they’re mated . . . Elvira, Otis . . .”

  He led Grig down the impromptu reception line. “And this is Granny, and Maggie, of course.” Grig nodded, shook hands with each in turn before they stopped in front of the young female. She regarded him with a lopsided smile.

  “Er, hi . . .”

  “Remember the English I taught you,” Alex murmured to him. “There are no translator buttons here.”

  Grig nodded and took Maggie’s hand. The crowd murmured. Grig made an effort to smile in the hum
an manner and said, with perfect diction, “Charmed.”

  Louis once more pushed his way to the fore and began doing strange things with his fingers. Grig found this puzzling, which was not surprising since he hadn’t seen the movie Close Encounters of the Third Kind.

  But he recognized the resemblance immediately. “And you must be Louis. I’ve heard good things about you.” He bent to shake the small hand, marveling at the softness of the flesh, so different from his own.

  Louis stepped back, eyeing his hand as though it had just magically materialized on the end of his wrist, and turned to his friends.

  “Hear that, you slimes? I’m famous!”

  Mrs. Rogan was next. She eyed Grig warily.

  “And this is my mom,” Alex said.

  As Alex had instructed him, Grig took Mrs. Rogan’s hand. But instead of shaking it, he bent and put his lips to the dorsal side. A peculiar custom, though no more so than half a hundred he’d acquired in his travels.

  It certainly had the intended effect. Mrs. Rogan was rendered speechless. Alex had warned Grig that this might be the result, so he resumed the conversation himself.

  “You should be proud of your son, Mrs. Rogan.” He looked past her at the assembled crowd. “You should all be proud of him. He saved the League and hundreds of worlds, including Earth. He is the greatest Starfighter ever. He will teach other potential Starfighters and help us to build a permanent core of citizens ready to insure that such attacks as we have just suffered will not occur again. Their very existence will be a deterrent to future war.” He glanced solemnly at Alex.

  “Which reminds me. We are expected back to begin work. It is time to leave.”

  Maggie frowned. “Leave?”

  “Alex?” said Mrs. Rogan.

  He kissed her gently on one cheek, nodded.

  “I have to, Mom. I promised. You heard Grig. I have a job to do. An important job. And I’m the only one who can do it.”

  She sighed. “I always knew you’d leave here, Alex. I just never wanted to face that moment. I don’t imagine any mother does. Still, I guess it’s not so very different from going off to the University. What are you going to do about your studies?”

  He grinned, waving toward the star-filled sky. Just like his mom, trying to couch the impossible in everyday terms.

  “Somehow spending four years preparing to be a computer technician doesn’t seem quite as important as it once did, Mom. Don’t worry. I’ve got plenty to learn, out there.”

  “Yes, I suppose that you would.” She looked meaningfully toward Grig. “You’ll watch after him, won’t you?”

  He nodded. “It will be a pleasure. I hope only to do one-tenth as good a job as you have done.”

  For the second time that night Jane Rogan found herself speechless.

  “Gee, can I come too, Alex?” Louis wondered, staring worshipfully up at his brother.

  Alex knelt until they were eye to eye. “Sorry, squirt. But I’ll be back to visit, lots of times. You didn’t think I was going away forever, did you? But you can’t come.” He gestured back at the gunstar. “There’s only room for me, Grig, and Maggie.”

  Maggie swallowed. “Me?”

  “Of course.” He took a step toward the gunstar, but she held back, uncertain, and he turned to her again. “Why else do you think I came back? I told you that we’d always be together.”

  “Yeah. Together here, or at school, or in the city. Not . . . out there, Alex.”

  “You always told me you wanted to travel and see faraway places.”

  She didn’t meet his eyes for a moment. “I meant San Diego, or maybe someday New York. This Rylos of yours . . . you can’t even see it from here.”

  “You can’t see New York, but you can see Rylos, Maggie.” He put his arm around her, turned her so they both faced the sky, and he pointed. “There it is . . . right there.”

  “Oh. It’s bright.”

  “You gotta come with me, Maggie. I’ll be back, but I don’t know when. Setting up this training program’s going to be a lot of work, and I promised. Don’t you see? This is our big chance. It’s like Otis said. When it comes, you gotta grab it with both hands and hold tight. I can learn a lot and help a lot of good people at the same time. It’s something I have to do.”

  “What about Granny?”

  Alex gave her a look easily interpreted to mean, “Not that old excuse again,” and she knew that he knew what she really meant. So why continue hiding it?

  “You’re right, Alex. I’m scared of leaving here. I’m scared of leaving this trailer park, for all my big talk about traveling and seeing the world, never mind other worlds. Why can’t you stay? Someone else could start that school.”

  “It’s not just that, Maggie. Don’t you see? I’m not just a kid from a trailer park up there. I’m a Starfighter. I’m the Starfighter, and I’ve got new friends who are counting on me. I can’t let them down. This is . . . Maggie, this is a lot bigger than me, or even you and me. It’s bigger than anything.”

  From inside the ship a voice sounded over a speaker, gentle but insistent. “Alex.”

  He whirled and replied almost angrily, though Grig would know it was only Alex’s frustration speaking. “Just a minute!” A low whine rose as the drive was activated.

  “I can’t talk anymore,” he told Maggie. “Anyway, I’ve said everything. I gotta go.”

  He hugged her hard, forced himself to move on to his mother, to Louis. Then he waved goodbye to the others, the assembled faces he’d known since childhood. They stared back at him reassuringly, solid as the desert, alive with the light from the gunstar.

  He turned and headed for the waiting lift.

  Haze filled the air as the ship’s drive disturbed the atmosphere and irritated dust particles swirled above the parking lot. Granny held Maggie tight, saying nothing. It wasn’t her place to. Not this time.

  Finally Maggie looked anxiously into that weathered face. “Granny?”

  The old woman smiled knowingly and ran her fingers through her granddaughter’s hair. Once for luck, and a second time to remember. No reason to cry. Hadn’t Alex said he’d be back to visit? And Alex was a good boy . . . no, not a boy anymore. Alex was a man of his word.

  “Be sure to write, darlin’. Or whatever it is that they do out there.”

  Maggie broke out in a wide smile, fighting back her own tears. Then she turned and ran for the ship, shouting and waving frantically.

  “Alex, wait! Alex!”

  The lift was nearly into the belly of the gunstar, but nearly isn’t all the way. It stopped, lowered to the ground a third time. Alex helped her onto the platform and she knew it was all right as he kissed her tenderly, knew that everything was going to be all right from now on. Because they were together.

  The residents of the Starlight Starbright Trailer Park knew it was going to be all right, too. They watched and sighed, and Mr. Boone surprised Mrs. Boone with a long kiss. A warm feeling spread over them all as they watched the youngsters. Louis expressed the feelings of the prepubescent contingent by making a face and grumbling under his breath.

  The whine from the ship intensified. Otis started shooing the crowd away.

  “Everybody back! Keep your distance. These babies really pack a punch.” I think, he added silently to himself.

  “Must be an optical illustration,” insisted one still-disbelieving resident.

  “Nope,” argued Mrs. Donovan. “It’s a one o’ them UFU’s. I saw one of ’em back in ’58.”

  “Ha!” snapped Elvira. “You been seein’ ’em all your life, Bessie.”

  “Lord,” mumbled elderly Mr. Franklin, “I swear I’ll never touch another drop as long as I live.” Then he remembered the half-full bottle of Jim Beam back in his trailer and added hastily, “After tonight, that is.”

  “I figure we’re a cinch to make the Carson show,” Mrs. Donovan added confidently.

  “I can see the headlines,” murmured Elvira. “ ‘Martians Land at Trailer Park.’ W
e’re famous now, eh, Otis?”

  “Yessir,” he said proudly, watching the ship. “The whole world’s gonna know about it. Starlight Starbright Trailer Park. The place where Alex and Maggie left for the stars.”

  Everyone was staring at the transparent canopy at the forward end of the ship. Alex and Maggie stood there, close against each other, waving and smiling back at them.

  “Spaceships . . . spacepeople . . . oh, I’m so confused!” Elvira murmured.

  Granny came over and put a comforting arm around her neighbor. “Trouble with you, Elvira, is that you’re laggin’ behind the times. You got to look to the future and quit living in the past.”

  “You mean . . .?” Elvira asked worriedly.

  “Yep. No more I Love Lucy reruns.”

  “Oh, Granny!”

  The gunstar rose skyward more quietly than any of them expected, the humming of its drive a muted thrum instead of the fiery thunder of the rockets they’d seen on television. A small figure pushed its way through the rest of the crowd, heading for the mob of kids clustered around the Starfighter video game sitting silently on the general store porch.

  “Hey, lemme in, you guys!” Louis demanded, shoving between the small bodies. “He’s my big brother.”

  “But it’s my quarter,” David protested.

  “I’ll pay you back, Davey.” Louis thumbed the “play” button. A familiar synthesized voice responded immediately.

  “GREETINGS, STARFIGHTER. YOU HAVE BEEN RECRUITED BY THE LEAGUE TO PROTECT THE FRONTIER AGAINST XUR AND THE KO-DAN ARMADA.”

  “Go get ’em, Louis,” yelled David. Around them the rest of the kids pushed for a better view and cheered Louis Rogan on.

  Otis had moved to stand close to Jane Rogan, who was staring silently at the sky while her excited neighbors jabbered behind her.

  “Otis, did I do the right thing? Letting him go back out there?”

  “Course you did, Jane. Course you did. Time for the young’uns to flee the coop. When it’s that time there’s no way you can hold ’em to the hearth.” He grinned softly and put a reassuring arm around her waist. “No way on Earth.”

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