Son of the Stars

by Raymond F. Jones

  “Plenty. Send the girls in to help me later. Dad and I are going out for a ride. We’ll bring some pop when we come back.”

  “O.K. Thanks, Mom.”

  Anne waited by the stairway to the basement play room. “Maybe I shouldn’t have brought them over,” she said as she saw his glum appearance. “If you want, I’ll get them out early. I thought maybe you’d like a little company that speaks your language tonight.”

  “It’s O.K., Anne. I’m glad you did. I’ve been wearing my chin on my chest all day. I called Gillispie and told him I’d proceed with his dirty work tomorrow. Want to come along?”

  She nodded as they descended the stairs. Stan had the record player going and his arm around Agnes. George and Paula were going through the record cabinet.

  Ron and Anne sat down on the sofa. Stan paused in front of them. “George got his Mercury engine for his rod today. He says he’s really going to show you the back of his wheels.”

  Ron grinned with little humor. “He’s welcome to try any time he thinks he can do it.”

  “You hear that, George?” said Stan. “Ron’s offering you a race already.”

  “Next summer,” said George. “It will take me the rest of the year to get that engine rebuilt.”

  “And you’ll be in the Army before you get that thing running,” said Ron.

  “Ain’t that the too-beautiful truth? If I can get in the Air Force I’m going to find out how to make a jet engine out of some stovepipe and secondhand plumbing and put one of them in my rod.”

  “Say, I wonder what they’ll do with Clonar?” said Stan suddenly.

  Anne snorted. “No use wondering.” Then she told them the plan Gillispie had proposed, and the censorship on the news story. The others drew up chairs and sat near while the record player continued unnoticed.

  “What would you guys have done?” said Ron. “Anne thinks I shouldn’t have knuckled under.”

  “I don’t know about that,” said Stan. “I’ll bet ninety-five percent of the people in the whole darn world would have done the same thing.

  “Everybody knows the trouble is the greediness and selfishness of humanity. Everybody knows that people ought to let neighboring nations and families five in peace. Everybody knows its the lack of brotherly love, that’s preached so much and lived so little.

  “But nobody has tried to find out why men are greedy. Nobody has tried to discover why nations swallow littler nations. Nobody has explored the problem of why men have no love for other men.

  “You can’t take such problems to men like Gillispie, who is a military man and who is trained to think in military terms.”

  “Yeah, you’re right,” said George. “People have been saying the same things over and over for the last ten thousand years and still haven’t found out why men are full of hate and greed.”

  Paula said, “All of you ought to take a class from the new biology prof, Mr. Pearson. He says the whole trouble is that the preachers have studied man as he ought to be, and the biologists have studied him as an animal. He says what we need is somebody to study man as he is, and why he is. Neither as an animal nor a little tin god in the rough. Just plain man.

  “He says our generation can have all the thrill of jet flight at four thousand miles an hour, and the possibility of going to the Moon before we’re grandmas and grandpas, but for a real thrill of exploration anybody ought to take up a study of what goes on inside the human skull. That’s totally unexplored territory to date, he says. When we find out what goes on in there, we’ll be able to use jet engines for going to the Moon instead of smashing each others’ cities. I think he’s right. He’s almost convinced me to go into biology and philosophy and general semantics when I go to J.C. next year.”

  “That’s all fine,” said Ron. “I agree heartily with Mr. Pearson, and the rest of you. But what about Clonar? We’ve still got him on our hands.”

  “You’re making too much of this situation, I think,” said Stan. “You’re not going to hurt Clonar. If he’s on the up and up, it will be all right.”

  “That’s the way I’ve been telling it to myself, but Anne doesn’t agree. And I can see her point very well. As I read in a book somewhere: It’s the principle of the thing.”

  “And as I read,” said Paula, ” let your conscience be your guide.”

  “But in order to preserve our future contacts with Clonar I have to compromise with my conscience.”

  He looked at the circle of faces as they talked some more, and he let his mind recede, scarcely hearing what they said. They didn’t have an answer for him any more than he had for himself, he thought.

  He wondered if all such problems were insoluble. He wondered just what the word “principle,” used so glibly by teachers and visiting speakers, really meant.

  At ten o’clock he heard his mother and father returning. Mrs. Barron came down the stairs with a couple of cartons of pop bottles in her hands.

  “Isn’t anybody hungry?” she exclaimed. “I thought you would have cleaned out the kitchen by now.”

  “We’ve been chewing the fat so hard we didn’t get hungry,” said George. “But now that you mention it—”

  When they left at eleven, Stan arranged to drop Anne at her home. Ron promised to call for her early on the way to the hospital next morning.

  His leg felt much better after another night’s rest. As he backed the car out of the driveway in the morning, Pete jumped into the seat.

  “Not today,” said Ron. “We might be gone too long for you to sit out in the car.”

  Pete got out with apparent regret, as if somehow he understood that his guardianship over Clonar had been taken away.

  The air was cool, for it had rained during the night, and the sky was mottled with wind-torn clouds. Ron breathed deeply of the fresh, moist air.

  Anne was waiting in front of her house. She looked as fresh as the sky itself in her white tennis skirt and blue sweater, and with a ribbon holding back her hair. She seemed to have lost the dour unhappiness that yesterday’s incident had caused.

  “You look perky this morning,” said Ron.

  “That’s the way I feel. How’s the old wooden leg? Have you had Doc look at it again?”

  “I’ll have to see him sometime this afternoon. Clonar may take up most of the day. What’s in the basket?”

  “Fried chicken. He said they didn’t give him food like he had at your house. I thought maybe he’d appreciate this.”

  They drove in silence most of the way, not trying to talk against the rush of wind past the cowling.

  As they entered the hospital room, Clonar looked up with pleasure and excitement. He had been sitting up in a chair trying to puzzle over a magazine. His bandages were gone, with the exception of a small patch over his left eye.

  “Ron! I thought they weren’t going to let me see you any more.”

  “Not me. I beat them over the head until they let me come back. How have they been treating you?”

  “All right, except for asking a lot of fool questions I wouldn’t answer. That seemed to make them mad. I’d like to get back to your house.”

  “We’re working on that. Maybe we can make it soon. I was sorry about the wave generator. Isn’t there any way in which it can be rebuilt?”

  “I am the one who should be sorry,” said Clonar, “because of the danger and accident I caused you.”

  “My leg will be all right. The generator is the important thing—is it hopeless?”

  “As far as I know. It’s possible that if I could get back to the ship I might find instruments and instructions I never knew were there. But I think not. I was familiar enough with those things so that I would have known about it if they were there.

  “Anyway, they evidently aren’t going to let me back into the ship. I don’t understand it, Ron.”

  “Well get back—somehow. I wish you could take me through it and tell me about it. I wish you could tell me something about the engines that were destroyed. You mentioned it w
asn’t the primitive kind of atomic power we use that drove them.”

  Looking at Anne’s face, Ron felt as if struck by an electric shock. She understood that this was the opening of his effort to give Gillispie the information he wanted.

  Clonar’s face brightened with interest. “I can tell you a great deal about it,” he said. “In training for the flight, we had to be able almost to take a ship apart with our bare hands and put it together in the dark. But I’m afraid we’ll have to build up a greater technological vocabulary before we can get very far.

  “From what you have told me, I understand your engines operate on what we term the first level effect. My own utilize a so-called third level effect. There is an intermediate stage which we use for the prime generators of power. This is done by causing wave packets to—”

  “Stop it!” exclaimed Anne suddenly. “Stop it, Clonar! Don’t say any more about it It’s all a trick!”

  Chapter 13 Escape

  Clonar stared at her as if he could not believe or understand what he heard. “What do you mean, Anne?” Ron sat as if frozen. “I’m sorry, Ron,” murmured Anne. “I had to say it.” Her face was lowered against her hands and she was close to tears.

  As Ron started to speak hesitantly, the door burst open with a confusion of sound. A guard strode in. “Visiting hours are over,” he said. “You’ll have to go now.” He stood stiffly behind them, waiting for them to arise. They got up slowly from the chairs and stood looking down at Clonar.

  “I’ll explain what Anne meant next time I see you,” said Ron.

  Wide-eyed, Clonar’s face was drained of color. “I think I understand now. I think I know what you meant, Anne.”

  Then they were gone, followed by the guard who bluntly closed the door behind them.

  Down the hall, they were ushered into a carpeted office. General Gillispie was waiting for them there.

  “I didn’t expect you so soon,” he said. “How did it go?”

  “It didn’t. It washed out.”

  “I told Clonar,” said Anne. “I told him what you were trying to do.”

  “I see,” said Gillispie slowly. “I see—”

  “Anne did what I should have had guts enough to do myself,” said Ron. “She pulled us out of the deal completely. That’s all there is to be said.”

  “I’m afraid there’s a great deal more that needs to be said. Perhaps the only part you’ll be interested in is the fact that you will not be permitted to see Clonar again until this entire affair is settled one way or another.

  “Clonar is to be regarded as an element of national security. He will be under complete military guard from now on, until disposition is made of his ship, and until we determine his own status.

  “That is all. And may I say personally that, while your devotion to honesty and aboveboard transactions is commendable, your judgment needs a great deal of modification before it can be said to have approached maturity.”

  Ron hesitated at the door, trying to control the rage that surged within him, recognizing that this man stood between Clonar and freedom, and exercised much control over Ron’s own life as well. He permitted himself a final statement.

  “If you will pardon me, sir,” he said, “that, too, is a matter of opinion.”

  As they got in the car and drove from the hospital, Anne’s eyes were downcast and she was depressed.

  “Did you mean what you said, Ron?” she said at last. “Did you mean you forgive me for what I did?”

  He patted her hand. “I meant it, Anne. I would have done it myself if I’d had the guts. I’m proud of you. I don’t know where we go from here, but it’ll come out in the wash somehow, and when it does I’ll be able to look Clonar in the eye, thanks to you.”

  Her face brightened as she turned toward him, and her eyes were glistening.

  “I’m glad you feel that way—but I wonder what does happen next?”

  “It’s out of our hands. We’ve done all we could. We’ll have to wait until Gillispie gets through with Clonar, but I hate to think of the third degree he’s going to get.”

  “You should have seen him crying yesterday because he was lonely and homesick. They’ll either break him down or make him so bitter toward Earthmen that he’ll be twisted for the rest of his life.”

  “Not if he’s the stuff we think he is. Well get him straightened out afterwards. Right now, our hope is Dad, and the pressure he hoped to be able to get through the Congressmen for civilian custody of Clonar and the ship. Maybe Dan has been able to get some pressure put on through the AP, too. We’ll see. This has got to crack soon. It can’t go on forever.”

  As they approached town, Anne said, “I almost forgot about your leg. I was going to suggest a game of tennis this afternoon. I guess a little crocheting is about your speed.”

  “Not so’s you’d notice it. I’m going to work on the components I got from the ship. Gillispie must have forgotten them or he’d have made me turn them over to him. I want to check their electrical characteristics, as long as I’ve got my hands on them. Want to help?”

  “We’d better stop at my house and let Mother know.”

  As they drove up, Anne’s mother was on the porch. She came quickly toward the car. “Your father called and left a message, Ron,” she said. “He wants you to come to his office as soon as possible. Senator Clausen is there.”

  “Good gosh! Let’s go! Thanks, Mrs. Martin.”

  “Wait—what about lunch?”

  “We’ll have some downtown. Maybe we’ll take the Senator to lunch.”

  “Don’t forget where you live!” Anne’s mother called. “It’s nice to see you at home once in a while.”

  “Sometime this afternoon,” Anne called, as the car pulled away.

  “This is the best news we’ve had yet,” murmured Ron. “Senator Clausen is a pretty good Joe. We may get some action. Wonder what he’s doing in Dad’s office?”

  Ron had met the Senator once before when he’d had dinner at their house, but Mr. Barron introduced Anne.

  The Senator was surprisingly thin and the hair of his head was reduced to a few stray threads crossing his bare pate at intervals. As they sat down about the desk, the Senator spread his hands with a precise motion.

  “Your father has given me the gist of this flying saucer thing,” he said to Ron. “At first I was inclined to think it no more than those sensational magazine articles we’ve been reading for some years. I could hardly credit my senses that George Barron would swallow a thing like that. Then just before I left Washington, I got wind that the Air Force had sent its top man in technical investigations, General Gillispie, to Crocker Base. It was too much to be coincidence, so I hurried home a week early.”

  “It’s true enough, sir,” said Ron. “General Gillispie can show you the ship and its crewman.”

  “Let me have your story,” said the Senator.

  Ron related in full detail the entire sequence of events. The Senator listened quietly and without interruption, but with growing astonishment unmasked in his eyes. His face was intensely sober when Ron finished.

  “I’m sure there isn’t much doubt about the truth of what you say,” he said. “I certainly shall call upon General Gillispie. I understand your plea for protection of Clonar, but certainly the military has the right to question him, and to investigate this ship.”

  “It’s not that. It’s the manner in which it’s done, imprisoning him, seizing his ship, treating him like an enemy alien. I can get all the information out of him that they want, but I can’t do it as long as he’s a prisoner.

  “Clonar should be given the rights of any human being, as far as privacy and freedom are concerned. That is little enough to ask for.”

  “It sounds reasonable. I shall see what can be done,” he promised.

  They shook hands. “I’ll see you at home, Ron,” said Mr. Barron. “Thanks for coming by. You, too, Anne.”

  When they left the building they realized with a start that the afternoon was gone
and evening was upon them, “We still haven’t had that lunch,” said Ron. “How about Johnson’s Cafe? We’ll give your mother a call, and tell her we’re still in town.”

  When they finally reached Anne’s home it was dusk. They were surprised to see a familiar figure sitting on the porch beside Anne’s father and kid brother. It was Dan.

  He rushed out as they drove up. “Hi, lads. Have you heard the news?”

  “None that’s good. Do you know any?” said Ron.

  “What would you say if I told you that Clonar had escaped?”

  Ron felt a sudden cold sinking within him. “Escaped? You mean he ran away from the hospital? Where—how did he go?”

  “Look, this is the way it is: When I was in the police station this afternoon, a very hush-hush telephone call came from the VA that one of the patients had escaped. It was said that he was wanted very badly. No name, just a very accurate description that fits Clonar to the last spare finger—only they did omit the six-finger business. They even mentioned that curious fuzzy hair of his. It couldn’t be anybody else. Did you see him this morning? Did anything happen that would make him pull such a trick?”

  “Yeah—yeah, we saw him.” Ron told about their visit.

  “That would be enough to do it,” said Dan. “If he understood what Anne meant, it would knock the last props out from under him. He’d figure his only chance was to take off by himself!”

  “Where in the world would he go?” said Anne. “What would he expect to do?”

  “There are two places he could go,” Dan said. “Undoubtedly, they’re both covered.”

  “Where?” said Ron.

  “Your house and the ship. You ought to stick close to home until he’s found, just in case he tries to make contact.”

  “I don’t think he will, not after what happened this morning. And he wouldn’t try to go to the ship, surely. There’s nothing there except possibly food supplies, and it’ll be doubly guarded after what I did.

  “He must have some other scheme—or else no scheme at all except a desire to get away to be free.”