Three

by Shoshi

“No, it’s going where I want it to go,” he says firmly and quietly.

  They are drowned out now by the cacophony of propulsion devices starting up, propellants flowing, the smell of electricity and other mysterious energies racing through circuits all around them. The space ship starts to move. It turns onto a runway. It flees down the tarmac and takes off, knifing sharply upwards into the planetary blue. Then, instead of following an arrow’s path to faraway Zyllaton, it curves steeply and heads in the opposite direction.

  “What’s this?” says the Inspector. He suddenly feels something he barely understands in himself: an overpowering fear.

  “We are going for a ride, Mr. Inspector,” says Jome. “A last ride to save the Earth.”

  “This is monstrous. I command you to turn this ship around immediately.”

  “It can’t be done. You once told Feena you never lose, but I’m afraid you’ve lost this time,” he says. “To a head without a body.”

  Feena finds herself floating down onto the gentle sands of a familiar beach in the South Pacific---and who is there to greet her but her brother Gailus. He gathers her in for a tearful hug. ‘I couldn’t figure out what had happened to you, Feena, but it’s wonderful, super wonderful to have you back. What’s going on?”

  She fills him in as quickly as she can, especially about the imminent threat of the approaching asteroid, the threat that might be about to destroy them all. She tells him also about her love for Jome and about his determination to sacrifice himself to stop the asteroid. Now they look up at the sky where an unimaginably huge object is shouldering slowly toward the Earth.

  “Oh, Jome, Jome,” she whispers. “What we might have had, what might have been.”

  The Commander still sits on the runway light at the Brazilia airport. The stove-pipe phantom is beside him, fully inflated again, peering through the telescope. It’s not clear how it managed to get its blower hooked up, but it did. The telescope has been there the whole time. “You should have a look at this,” it says.

  The Commander hauls himself over to the eyepiece and sees a spacecraft glimmering golden in the sunlight heading straight for the raw grimy hulk of the slowly tumbling asteroid. “I can’t believe it,” he says in awe. “I think it’s going to smash right into it.”

  “Woweewow, look at that!” cries the freak. They don’t need the telescope to see the enormity of the explosion.

  A seemingly endless cataclysm tears apart the sky in the west. The asteroid crumbles itself into a vast fog of debris as it envelops the Earth in a drawn-out roar. A few large fragments of burning boulders hail down around them. Looking up they see that there is still a chunk of the asteroid left behind in the sky—a great fist of rock that is no longer headed for the Earth but is lumbering off into space. The planet trembles under them and, then, is quiet.

  “We’ve survived, Commander! We’ve survived!” The stove-pipe wraith looks furtively around it. “The whole planet has survived!”

  The Supreme One shakes his head--stunned, unbelieving.

  “What now?”asks the puppet. “What comes next?”

  The Commander very slowly smiles. “I guess I’m supreme no more. But now we all get to try again, to start over---even the matons but the humans especially. This place does belong to them. Let’s hope they get it right this time—or at least more right.”

  “Fat chance,” says the gas pump hoodoo flopping its arms. “You know how they are. Same mistakes over and over.” It yanks about and leans over at a right angle. “I hope they’ll still have gas stations and car washes,” it says. “I mean what am I going to do with myself if they don’t?”

  “What about me?” says the Commander. “What’ll I do in an all new world?”

  “Hey, I’ll pull them into the station,” says the freak. “You can pump the gas. The full service side. It’s easy. I’ve watched them.”

  It sees the Commander lean down to pick up a piece of the asteroid that fell near them. “Don’t touch it, you numbskull! It’s still hot!”

  “Yeah, yeah, stop telling me what to do.”

  The roadside banshee looks at him fondly. “You’re always going to need me, man.”

  At this point I’m going to sign off as your storyteller. I need to honor an historian’s obligation to be truthful, so I cannot vouch for what I’ve been told happened next. What I can vouch for is that it is in the best tradition of human storytelling. And it won’t harm you or anybody else to believe it.

  Besides---why let it end in sadness and sorrow?

  Feena is sitting with her brother Gailus on the sandy beach of their South Pacific island some time after the cataclysm that has saved the Earth. She is uncontrollably sobbing. “You really did love him, didn’t you,” says her brother.

  “I did, Gailus, I did,” she says. “He was so sweet, so great.”

  He smiles.

  “Don’t smile, you jerk. That’s not nice.”

  “Okay, I won’t—but I do have something to tell you. Something you’ve completely forgotten about.” She frowns though her tears.

  “You have an imperative, a wish you haven’t used.”

  “What are you talking about?”

  “Uncle Jebba’s amulet has a wish just for you inside it. Remember? He told you, and you told me.”

  “Yes, yes, I do remember now.” The tiny, rough-hewn lump of gold with its embedded emerald is still hanging on its leather thong around her neck. Giving it to her was the last thing he ever did while he was alive. She grasps it in one hand. “Do you really, really think—?” she asks.

  “Yeah, ask for anything. It’s how he wanted you to use it.”

  A smile lights up her tear-wet face like the sun banishing a storm. She leaps to her feet and runs to the ocean’s edge. Her mouth moves with some whispered words. Everything is wondrously hushed for a stretched-out moment. Then, far down the beach a figure appears walking toward her. She senses something familiar about it, even at this distance, something very familiar. “Yes, yes,” she says, soundlessly mouthing the words, then, shouts them, screams them and runs fast and faster toward the distant figure. He is running toward her waving and waving and waving.

  “Feena!!”

  “Jome!!”

  THE END