Son of the Stars

by Raymond F. Jones

“The poor kid,” murmured Anne.

  “This would be a nice story, if you could print it.”

  Dan shook his head. “Nothing doing on that angle.

  The boss wired that the story had to stay killed until the military gives a release on it.”

  “We’ve got to find Clonar,” said Anne. “He just can’t be left to roam. Maybe he’s given up hope to the extent that he would simply go on until he dies of exposure. I don’t think he has heart enough left in him to go on fighting,”

  “That sure fixes things up good,” muttered Ron. “This is all we needed.”

  “And I guess it makes it my fault,” said Anne. “I should have let you go ahead this morning.”

  “No. You did the right thing. Even if it would have prevented this, what I was doing wouldn’t have been right.”

  “Does the guy know how to use a telephone?” said Dan.

  “I hope he doesn’t try to strong-arm anybody to get some funds 1”

  Anne got out of the car. “I’d almost like to ask your mother to put me up for the night, Ron, just in case Clonar does show up, but I guess the folks would draw the line there. Give me a call if anything comes up, won’t your

  “Sure will. And thanks a lot for—today—Anne. I won’t forget it.”

  “Can I give you a lift, Dan?”

  “No thanks. That’s my car across the street. Promise you’ll give me the word, too, if anything breaks. Some day this story is going to be off the ice, and I want to be the first to crack it with all the detail I can.”

  “I will. Thanks for the dope.”

  Ron drove off into the darkness, his headlights swinging through the familiar streets.

  This was home, he thought. No matter how far he went or how long he was away, this would be home and he could always come back to it. He thought of Clonar, roaming these streets that were not home, and never would be home. He felt sick for the things that had been done to his friend.

  He turned a corner and moved down his own street. As he did so, he noticed a headlight in his rear-view mirror, one that had come around the same comer. At the end of the block he made a quick turn. They were following him.

  This made it certain that Dan’s suspicions were correct. The authorities suspected he might have a rendezvous with Clonar. He wondered if he could shake them.

  He cruised slowly and at random about a number of blocks, turning corners at each one. The sedan was following half a block behind. Near a corner, he speeded up gradually, widening the distance between him and the other car. Then, around the corner, he gunned the motor hard. He whipped the silver car into a dark alley halfway down the block and turned off the lights. In a moment the sedan sped past and he could see the outline of two uniformed figures. He grinned faintly to himself.

  After a moment he backed from the alley and went down the street in the opposite direction and wound his way back to his own street and his own house. Passing the corners, he saw that the entire block was covered. At each intersection there was a car parked by the curb, with uniformed figures watching. Clonar wouldn’t have a chance if he tried to reach the house.

  His father was already home, reading the paper in the living room when Ron entered.

  “I thought you’d beat me home.”

  “Anne and I had dinner in town, and we saw Dan on the way home.”

  “You made a good impression on the Senator. He liked the way you told your story. Something may come of it, although I’m afraid it’s going to be a long haul. Even he feels pretty strongly that the military are justified in holding Clonar.”

  “Hadn’t you heard? Clonar escaped from the hospital.”

  George Barron dropped the paper. “Escaped! No—I hadn’t heard.”

  Ron told him what Dan had said, and about the spotters around the block.

  “The crazy, darn fool!” said George Barron. “What did he have to do that for? Where can he expect to go?”

  “I don’t know, Dad, but something’s got to be done to find him. He won’t be able to survive long just running loose like that. It’s like being turned loose in a jungle, to him.”

  George Barron was suddenly quiet and thoughtful. “Unless he does know very definitely what he’s doing and where he’s going—”

  “What do you mean?”

  “If our suspicions of his motives were correct, it could be that he has a rendezvous with another of his own ships.”

  “Dad! No!”

  At that moment the phone rang in the hall. Mrs. Barron answered it, and then she came into the room.

  “It’s for you, Ron. I wasn’t sure you had come in. It’s General Gillispie. He wants to see you. Says it’s very urgent.”

  Chapter 14 In Hiding

  It was almost nine o’clock when Ron’s mother answered the door and ushered General Gillispie into the living room, where Ron and his father were reading.

  They rose as the General came in. “Have a chair,” said Mr. Barron. “Do you wish to see Ron alone?”

  “No, not at all. I shall be happy to have you and Mrs. Barron hear what I have to say, if you wish. And also to have you express your opinion.”

  He sat down and looked at Ron. “Since you deliberately evaded our men this evening, you are aware, I presume, of Clonar’s escape. I want to ask you, point blank: Do you have Clonar, or know where he is?”

  Ron shook his head. “I knew of his escape. It irritated me being trailed. But I don’t know where he is. I would like him found just as much as you would.”

  “Good. Then we can count on your help?”

  “What kind of help?”

  “You are the only one who has any influence at all over Clonar. We would like you to go on a network radio broadcast and make a plea for him to return to you.”

  “He’s not likely to after today. But does this mean that his story is to be released at last?”

  “Not at all. Clonar will be addressed as if he were another human being and nothing will be indicated of his flying saucer or his alien origin. I will give you a little speech to deliver, making a plea for him to return. No one else will think anything but that we have a hospital patient who has run away.”

  Ron was shaking his head as the General finished. “I have made a break with all such deceptive plans. I want to keep it that way.”

  The General sighed. “All right, Ron. But you understand we will continue to search, and Clonar will eventually be found. But the longer he is loose, the more likely he is to get into trouble. If he attempts to steal for money or for food, he is likely to end up getting killed. Neither of us wants such a thing to happen.”

  “As far as I am concerned, there is no point in returning Clonar to the same conditions of imprisonment from which he escaped,” Ron said slowly.

  “And so—?”

  “I’ll help get him back if I can write my own speech in my own way. “I’ll give the entire story. To get him to return, I’ll promise him that he can come to the house and be unmolested by guards, that he will have access to his ship and your technicians will leave it alone except as he permits.”

  The General smiled faintly. “When you drive a bargain, you use a pile driver, don’t you? You must have learned some of the courtroom techniques of your father. But I am sorry that I am not yet in such a desperate position that I need to bargain on those terms.”

  “I am only asking what you or I would want if we were in the same position,” said Ron.

  General Gillispie turned to George Barron. “Have you no influence with this young man to persuade him to be a little more reasonable?”

  “I’m sorry,” said Mr. Barron. “I rather feel that he is not being unreasonable. I will admit, and I have discussed it with Ron, that I feel a definite fear of the possibility that Clonar’s race means harm. But I don’t know—none of us does. I feel that we should find out. But I am entirely out of sympathy with the manner in which you have handled this entire affair. I oppose the imprisonment of this person, and your custody is imprisonment, and I op
pose the confiscation of his ship. Your department has acted contrary to all concepts of human right and dignity.”

  The General sat in silence a moment as if his thoughts had turned inward. His voice was low when he spoke. “That’s quite an indictment, Mr. Barron. In all sincerity, I hope it is not true, and that someday I can persuade you it is not.

  “There are times when I have to ask myself, however, if my behavior is the kind you accuse me of.

  But I lived through the long years of the Battle of Britain and had a place in seeing that it was not lost. There are millions like me who lived with treachery so long that we can never forget it. We can never forget the depths of evil that can be in men who look, externally, no different from ourselves. Sometimes, I try to warn myself that there are other things to look for. Maybe I fail. My profession is to await treachery and crush it. If my zealousness sometimes treads upon justice, I hope I may be forgiven, for the pursuit we are in is too desperate to count each step. “Good night, gentlemen.”

  Ron lay awake for a long time that night wondering if he could have done any more. Wondering if his demands could have been any less. He knew they could not. He tried to understand the General’s words, and they were frightening. He almost felt sorry for Gillispie, who lived in a world where no stranger could be trusted. But wasn’t it the world they all lived in?

  He could not—or dared not—find the answer to that at this moment.

  There was no word of Clonar the following day or the next. The guards maintained their posts around the block containing the Barron home. Through Dan, Ron and Anne kept in touch with the progress being made by the police in their search. Alarms were spread nationwide on the chance that Clonar might have hiked by car or freight train to some other section.

  It was almost a week before Ron heard from General Gillispie again. He called on the phone in the afternoon.

  “You win,” he said, and Ron detected a heavy note of weariness in the mans voice. “Clonar has not been found. If he is not dead, I think our last hope of finding him is an appeal from you. We can arrange radio time as soon as you are ready.”

  Ron could hardly believe his ears, but he kept his voice steady. “Thank you, General. Thank you very much. I know you have Clonar’s welfare at heart.”

  He was given ten minutes out of a news broadcast on a national hookup. It was to be a five broadcast made from one of the local stations that same evening.

  With Anne’s help he spent the rest of the afternoon preparing the script. Dan received clearance so that his scoop was ready for release and the story could be on the streets within minutes after the broadcast. Ron gave him a copy of his script.

  “You had better let me check it for libel,” Mr. Barron said jokingly when Ron emerged from the lab with the completed script. “You may have let your enthusiasm run away with you.”

  He scanned it closely as Ron handed it over, and then nodded approvingly. “That’s a good job, Ron. It says about everything that needs to be said.”

  Ron’s mother wanted to go to the studio with him, but George Barron insisted that they stay behind, understanding Ron’s reluctance to have anyone present except Anne.

  As seven o’clock approached, he was in the studio alone with Anne. Through headphones, he heard Jack Sparkles, a world news reporter in Los Angeles, taking the first five minutes with his customary news. Waiting for his cue, Ron was thankful for the years of experience before his own microphone of his amateur radio station. Even so, he felt just a moment’s uneasiness at the thought of the magnitude of the audience before him.

  Then abruptly, the reporter was saying: “And now tonight I wish to turn my microphone over to a young man who has had a unique experience in history, who wishes to ask your help on a problem, the like of which has never been faced by anyone before. I give you Mr. Ronald Barron,”

  Then Ron heard his own voice speaking: “Good evening, ladies and gentlemen. The story of the flying saucers is true. I have seen one of these ships and walked through its corridors. I have seen the people of its crew. One, who survived the crash of this ship, has lived in my house.”

  In careful detail, he outlined the entire story, describing Clonar, and relating the treatment he had been given.

  “I submit,” he said, “that the reception we have given to a stranger out of space has been a disgrace to Earth. He came here accidentally and needed help in trying to contact his own people so that he could be rescued. Instead of being given help, he was prevented from using the equipment that might have contacted his companions.

  “Now he has broken from the confinement in which he has been kept. I come to you tonight to ask your help in finding Clonar. Let him know that we are prepared to offer him friendship and freedom, which should have been his in the first place. And if you are listening, Clonar, I want you to know that you are free to come home. Ladies and gentlemen, in this land that boasts of freedom, let us demonstrate that we know how to receive a guest from the stars.”

  He laid the last sheet down and heard the final commercial. He took Anne’s hand and left the studio.

  In the lobby, Gillispie offered a hand. “You really laid it on the line, Ron. For both our sakes I hope it produces results.”

  “I hope so, too, sir, and I think you will find I am not wrong about Clonar.”

  Dan was there and was exuberant. “Boy, what a riot that will stir up, kid. I can just hear the editorial writers sitting down to their desks now. The radio commentators will have hot air enough to keep going for the next three weeks. I’ll bet they have to put an extra man on your mail route.”

  Ron and Anne broke away as quickly as possible and drove toward home.

  “So it’s out now,” said Ron. “I wonder if it will do any good. I wonder if the public will call for Clonar’s scalp—and maybe mine, too, using the same reasoning that Gillispie and Middleton use. Or will they believe what I said?

  “Above all, where is Clonar, tonight?”

  There was no answer to these questions, and Anne attempted none.

  “It was a good speech, Ron,” she said.

  He let her out at her house and drove home. His parents were there with the radio still on.

  “Very nice,” said George Barron. “You made a nice delivery.”

  “Thanks, Dad. I hope it produces the right effect and doesn’t cause too much uproar.”

  They listened for a while longer. Within an hour, the results became apparent. Other commentators devoted large sections of their news time to a discussion of the flying saucer situation.

  Some of them ignored everything that Ron had said and talked in wild language about the saucer menace out of space. Others, who had understood his message, added their own plea for consideration and tempered reaction to Clonar’s presence.

  And then Dan called on the phone. “Boy, oh boy, you ain’t even seen nothin’, yet. By morning there will be four hundred reporters in this town. Every jerkwater rag and farm journal is sending a man to get a first-hand report. You’d better hide.”

  Dan was right. The phone started ringing at five o’clock the next morning. At six, reporters began pounding on the door. Ron gave his story over and over again. They took pictures of him with Pete and the hotrod. And Anne came over to take part in the interviews, also.

  By midmorning the situation was obviously impossible. He took the phone off the hook, and put a note on the door that he would be available for interviews at scheduled periods.

  His mother had long since abandoned the situation and gone to visit friends across town. Ron and Anne took Pete and got in the hotrod after locking up the house.

  “Now—where are we going?” said Ron. “Let’s look for Clonar.”

  “That’s what I call a real bright idea. Exactly where do you propose to look?”

  “Well—I thought of something last night after you left.”

  “What?”

  “Remember the first contact with Clonar?” She looked down at Pete resting between her feet. “Remembe
r what Clonar said about his ability to contact the dog’s thoughts with his own? Just suppose maybe it works the other way, too. What if it were possible that Pete knows right now where Clonar is?”

  Ron looked dubiously at his dog. “It’s the difference between knowing where somebody is because he’s calling to you, and trying to find him when he’s not. Clonar called to Pete, but I doubt that Pete can do that and make Clonar answer.”

  “Where’s Clonar?” said Anne.

  Immediately, the dog raised his head and barked gently. He put his paws on the car door, stretching his great, shaggy body across Anne.

  “Pete,” she said, “is Clonar in the ship?”

  “That’s nonsense,” said Ron. “He couldn’t be there. They’ve gone over that ship with a fine-toothed comb.”

  “I’ll be willing to bet a nickel there are compartments that no one else could find without tearing the ship apart, sheet by sheet. And I’ll further bet a nickel that Clonar is in one of them. Look at Pete!”

  The dog had his head in the wind, and his nose pointed to the distant hills.

  “It’s an idea—a wholly fantastic and impossible one,” said Ron, “but still an idea.”

  He braked to a stop in front of a drugstore and leaped out. “I’ll call Gillispie and get permission to go through the ship.”

  In a few minutes he returned grinning broadly. “He says ‘yes>* Anne. I’ve got a feeling that when this thing is over he’s going to take a liking to me.”

  He ruffled Pete’s ears and pointed to the hills. “Is Clonar up there?”

  The dog barked.

  “I still say it’s impossible, but we’ll try it.”

  By the time they had reached the site of the wreck, Gillispie had radioed to the guards that Ron was to be allowed admittance. He and Anne followed the now familiar trail, Pete loping eagerly ahead, then waiting impatiently while they caught up.

  “We’re giving him too much credit,” Ron insisted. “He knows this is where we first found Clonar and thinks, because of that, we’ll find him here again. It might be that Clonar could force ideas onto Pete, but Pete picking up Clonar’s thinking by himself—uh-uh!”