Minister Faust by From (html) (best ereader for pdf txt) 📗

His bright eyes blinked onto mine, glittering in the lamplight like two big drops of Windex. “Well, I…you know, I never actually…I mean, nobody’s ever asked me that before.”

“Wally, I want to show you something, if I may.”

Drawing him over to my desk, I selected some images on my computer while he stood behind me.

“When you resigned, I was very worried about you and your processing of these recent experiences. Because I hoped we’d continue our sessions, I asked Gagarina Girl to search through some of Hawk King’s galactic records for me—do some astronomical detective work, if you will. And she’s come up with some very interesting results.

“It appears that you’ve been a bit off regarding the location of Argon, which you always said had been here,” I said, pointing to the screen. “But if we look here, we get an entirely different story.”

A high-resolution image of an alien world appeared, a Christmas tree of a planet with thousands of tiny lights, like fireflies orbiting a foolishly wrapped and rotting Yuletide ham.

“You…you’re sayin…that’s Argon? It’s still there? No, that dun’t…now wait, ma’am,” he said, breaking into a relieved grin, “the light to take this photograph cain’t travel faster than the speed of…of light! Which means this image is from before Argon exploded.”

“But Wally, Hawk King invented the Khu-Kheperi imaging technology that makes these photographs possible. This is a picture of Argon as it looks today. And this,” I said, clicking farther, “is a picture of the capital city, what you’ve always called Nietchion.”

I clicked open an image of a giant tower shaped like a man hefting two massive weapons of indeterminate use.

“And this, assuming Gagarina Girl’s translation is correct, is the Citadel of Galactic Security. And if we take a closer look,” I said, clicking again, “on the top floor, in the office on the side facing us, is a man who looks like an older version of you, drinking what looks like a mug of something hot, what with the steam coming off the top, and he’s dropping in something and stirring—perhaps an Argonian low-calorie sweetener of some sort, since he’s in such good shape. And there, on the desk behind him…let me bring up the magnification, yes, a nameplate, which the translation says means Jobuseen-Ya, Director of Argonian Security, and right there on the side of the desk, that’s a holograph of what seems to be him, a wife, and two grown boys and a girl.”

I looked back up over my shoulder.

Before I could see his face, Wally W. Watchtower had turned around; he was trying to muffle the snuffling sounds he was making.

Pulling his expandocape out of his jacket and tying it around his neck, he began flying slowly around the room at less than walking speed. His cape was drooping sadly at his sides like the jowls of an aged hound dog; tears dropped from his face like that hound dog’s melancholic slaver.

The Icon Trap had imprisoned Wally with even greater power than I had realized, but with a twist: the icon splintering Omnipotent Man’s psyche into fragments was made of two persons fused into one dominating demon of disapproval: Jobuseen-Ya, and Festus Piltdown III.

The Inner Abandoned Child

Wally, please, it’s better to talk this out.”

“Why bother?” he said, flying snail-speed laps around the room. “Argon never was under no threat! You done jess proved that! M’daddy jess wanted to get ridda me! Like tyin up a big ol sack fulla kittens an droppin em in a dirty ol’ creek!”

“Now, Wally,” I said, rotating in my chair so I could keep him in sight, “Earth isn’t exactly a ‘dirty old creek,’ and your father didn’t kill you, now did he? Maybe originally he thought there really was a threat.”

He turned to look at me. “So why didn’he try an get me back, then? You know what he did do, though?”

Distracted, Wally made a low-speed collision with my fig tree, knocking it over. “Aw, pig-snickers,” he said, surveying the dirt. “Sorry bout that.”

Before I could coax him into sitting with me, Wally was in flight again, but he hadn’t made it five yards before he hit the floor like a pelican flying into the engine of a DC-10.

I rushed to help him into a chair. It was like trying to lift a sack of bowling balls. I asked him to tell me about his father.

“That ol’ bossy such-an-such!” he choked. “You know what he left me? This here cube,” he said, producing a glinting black box no bigger than a large sugar cube. “Had it since I was hip high to a mule, when I was a kid growin up in Mannsfall, Kentucky, and confused as all jolly on accounta I couldn’member anything bout who I was before age eight. But I had this here necklace, see, which Ma and Pa said I was wearin when they found me in th’swamp. An when I got older an walked to An’ar’tica—”

“You walked to Antarctica?”

“Yeah, an this here box started tellin me how our planet’d been destroyed an how the box was the sum a m’daddy’s intelligence an it was gon guide me throughout m’life in his stead.”

He shook the device in his closed hand, next to his ear, as if he were about to shoot craps. “Even has Daddy’s voice,” he said.

He opened his hand, gazed. “But all this durn thing ever did was insult me. ‘Karojun-Ya, how can you be so stupid?’ an ‘Karojun-Ya, you failed again, liver-brains’ an all that kinda guff.”

“Do you think…maybe that’s why you put up with Mr. Piltdown’s insults?”

He fixed his eyes on me again.

“Because the whole world calls you a hero, yet you let Festus talk to you like that constantly, as if you’re worthless.”

“I don’know.”

“How did all your father’s comments make you feel?”

“I don’know.”

“Did they make you happy?”

“I don’know.”

“When you swore at Mr. Piltdown and then electrospat him across the room, do you think that in some part of your mind you were spitting at your father? Was that