Хосе Гомес - A Planet for Rent

I do not wish to return to Earth.

I’m tired of being a puppet. Tired of being alone. Tired of being a freak, of being the precious songbird that is never allowed to leave its cage.

When a delegation of xenoid scientists were visiting the handful of non-secret areas at the Center for Physics and Mathematical Studies, I left my labs with Lieutenant Dabiel’s help. I was dressed in a maintenance man’s overalls and had disguised my features with some handy plastiflesh makeup, which the lieutenant himself applied to my face. And I was carrying a duster and a water bucket, like a regular janitor.

While the group of scientists from other worlds was listening attentively to the guide’s explanations of a device, which I had created myself, for replacing material walls with stable force fields at minimal expense, I struck up a conversation with one of the Cetian physicists.

I already knew that the 309th Conference would be held in Ningando, and my relative command of Cetian allowed me to whisper a few corrections into the Cetian ear of my conversation partner, a tremendous improvement over the arid cybernetic translation that he’d been listening to.

Intrigued and astonished to find such knowledge and such a command of his highly complex language in a simple janitor, the scientist, whose name was Jourkar—you can verify it, if you so desire—was soon engaged in a hypertechnical dialogue with me.

I told you earlier that I generally don’t do well with abstractions and theories, but on that occasion the subject was my own device, so…

In under a minute, Jourkar had focused the attention of about three quarters of the delegation on me. Meanwhile, the guide—who didn’t recognize me in my janitor’s uniform and plastiflesh prosthetics, thank heaven—was probably wondering what sort of dirty jokes the mop monkey was telling the xenoids.

His surprise must have gone through the roof when I risked everything, turned on the device, and gave the scientists a demonstration. Luckily for me, that left him so speechless that nearly a minute went by before he tried notifying his supervisors what was happening over his vocoder. The interference generator in my pocket kept his personal communicator from working, of course.

It was another half a minute before he decided he should leave us and run to find some Planetary Security people to inform them of the irregularity. Then, not by mere luck, but by careful arrangements on Dabiel’s part (although we were friends, this cost me a good few thousand credits), a couple more minutes went by before he located them.

That gave me more than enough time to remove my disguise, reveal my real face to the xenoid scientists, and put on the finest demonstration I could.

Once the device was running, in a matter of seconds I constructed a small room that floated half a meter above the floor without touching it. Its walls were pure force fields, not a milligram of matter. And when I concluded my “energy bricklaying” job and stabilized the whole system vibrationally, it was consuming scarcely more energy than a pocket flashlight.

And by fiddling with the topological properties of the Moebius strip and Klein bottle, I even made it so the space inside my “building” was almost twice the size classical Euclidean geometry declared it should be.

Astonished by that display of talent (all modesty apart), Jourkar and the others were of course thrilled to immediately offer me an official invitation to the 309th Conference. And they promised to bring all possible pressure to bear so the appropriate terrestrial organizations would understand how extremely important if was, if they did not want to mar their relations with the rest of the galaxy, to let me attend the event without any hindrance or obstacles.

Then I said goodbye, destroyed my force-field room, tossed the overalls and the duster into the empty bucket, left it in a corner, and got back to my labs… twenty seconds before the alarm went off throughout the Center.

Lieutenant Dabiel and several nanocameras (whose existence I had been aware of almost since they were installed, and which I easily had set to record on a closed loop) vouched for the fact that I hadn’t left my work desk for a single instant.

They still can’t understand what really happened that day.

The heads of the Center understood it even less when the invitation arrived a month later. Jourkar and the others had gone to great pains to keep their promise. The holovideo they sent bore so many priority marks and codes that it wasn’t an invitation so much as a virtual command to the government of Earth to allow me to attend the event… or take the consequences.

All the Center officials came to interrogate me. Various leaders from Planetary Security, too, and not just from the Special Section.

How had the xenoids learned of my existence and the work I had done, in spite of the curtain of strict secrecy with which they had surrounded me? Needless to say, I knew nothing.

And I continued knowing nothing when they analyzed my brainwaves, curve by curve, while repeating their questions. Neurology isn’t one of my fortes, but I had prepared myself far in advance for that test. I found it trivial to construct a brainwave-congruent nanointerferometer and manipulate it with a sublingual control pad to keep them from suspecting anything.

Though they suspected me anyway. Wouldn’t you have? It doesn’t make much sense for a human scientist to attend an elite astrophysics event if he won’t be able to talk about anything he sees there afterward… and in fact, nothing of the sort had ever occurred before in the field of astrophysics. When humans get invited to scientific events outside the solar system, it’s usually for sociology, psychology, or, much more often, history.

But the invitation was so imperative, they had to put on their bravest face and grant me permission to travel to Ningando.

Not that they gave up easily. I knew from the outset that I wouldn’t be traveling alone, that an entire human delegation would accompany me, though at an astronomical cost.

I arrived with a huge entourage. Seventy percent were secret agents from Planetary Security responsible for keeping an eye on me, who don’t understand a word of what’s being said here; the other thirty percent are mediocre physicists responsible for explaining it to the agents as best they can, as well as to make sure I don’t reveal any of the secrets that they aren’t even in on themselves. At least the physicists are thrilled with everything they’re seeing, though they don’t understand much more than the agents do and they hate acting like scientific policemen. They probably don’t even care that their memories will be blocked by your people before you let them return to Earth, and will almost certainly be erased by our Planetary Security when they get home.

All the while I concealed my joy over the successful unfolding of my plan under my habitual mask of bewilderment and confusion in the face of the unknown. It didn’t take much effort: ever since I arrived in the astroport I’ve been completely terrified.

I didn’t open my eyes once during the entire trip from the shuttle to the orbiting hypership. I had undertaken the greatest adventure of my life, risking everything. And even though I could change my mind at the last moment, something inside me was whispering, “Alex, there’s no turning back now.”

When I got to Ningando, I knew I had won. With Jourkar’s help, it was easy for me to elude my guards and come here. Now… it all depends on you. There. I’ve laid all my cards on the table.

I don’t plan to return to Earth, and that’s my final word.

“What induced you to come here and request honorary Cetian citizenship, please?”

First of all, I’d like to make it very clear that I’m not the best suited to testify objectively as to the policies of the terrestrial government toward their scientists. Because I’ve never been considered a “real scientist.” I don’t have a degree from any university. Just a few postgraduate diplomas. And the people who gave them to me were almost always more eager to learn from me than to teach me.