The Star

The Star

by Lanier Thomas (aka 'Doc' Thomas)

Pain. He struggled up to consciousness through deep wells of throbbing pain. He was like a man underwater too long and reaching for the surface too far away. His head agonizingly throbbed in the bleak darkness of returning consciousness, making him feel sick to his stomach. Something was wrong and with a great effort he forced open his eyes at last, gasping at the piercing agony the bright light brought to them. Next, he became aware of the heat. He was lying face down and something was causing his body to overheat. The sun, high in the sky, was beating down upon him. Something within him made him understand through the blurriness of his mind that he needed to move and find shelter.

His head was clearing a bit. He was...Dawson...Dawson Horn, United Planets Marshal. He was the territorial marshal for Sector Four. Remembering that brought it all back to him in a rush. He was trailing a fugitive named Stone on the Blakemore Bernal Sphere. He had found the man after a time consuming search through the twenty-five thousand inhabitants. He spotted the man and followed him into a vacant lot in an alley behind some warehouses. The man he was after met three other men. Just as Dawson stepped out to arrest him the men had been ambushed, but he never saw who shot them. He was shot, too, he realized. Reaching up, he gingerly felt his scalp. It was damp with drying blood. How bad the wound was, he didn't know and was scared to find out. The hyper fast bullet seemed to have cut the scalp and given him a severe concussion, but as far as his probing fingers could tell it had not penetrated his skull. Still, wounded or not, he had to move. With a great effort he pushed himself into a sitting position, intending to look around, his head pounding even more, if possible. The movement and the pain in his head had an immediate reaction on his stomach. He leaned over and wretched, adding to his misery. Once that was finished, he tried to look around, again.

He was sitting on a mound of trash, obviously illegally dumped by some small ship or other. There was a body close by and beyond it he could see three more. Lifting his gaze he saw he was on an arid or perhaps semi-arid plain. It wasn't a grassland and it wasn't sandy desert. It was something between, with vegetation of a desert shrub type that needed little water and dry patches of tan grass-like plants. Overhead, the sky was a dusty blue, turning orangish along the edges. He knew this was likely from dust in the air. Struggling to his feet, he stood swaying and he noticed blue mountains in the distance. How far off they were he couldn't tell in the crystal clear air that made everything seem closer than they were in reality. Heat waves were beginning to form as the sun climbed higher and became hotter blurring the desert landscape a little.

He noted that he still had his badge and gun, so moving carefully, he looked through the trash heap. The other men, including the one he had intended to arrest, were very dead and full rigor had set in. He had probably been unconscious for several hours, then. There was no food or water to be found in the trash heap. It must not have been from a large ship or there would have been more discarded food and drink containers. He found a discarded red bioplastic bottle containing a liter of blended fruit juice which was barely past the expiration date. It's bright label promising the goodness within. Opening it, he found it wasn't spoiled. He took a cautious sip and closed it, again. He wanted to chug the whole bottle; he needed to drink it. Instead, he took a sip only and the liquid in his mouth and throat was agonizingly good. He knew better than to take a big drink until he found out if there was a water source and he controlled himself with an iron will.

There was a rusty brown rocky outcropping about a hundred meters away that offered shade, so he made his way over to it and found a place two meters off of the ground. It was a sort of hollowed out place under an overhang about two meters deep where the sun never shined and it was much cooler inside. He climbed inside the shady retreat, grateful for the relief from the heat.

*

In the blackness of his dream or vision, his mind didn't know which, he saw three men. They were dressed in ancient middle eastern fashion. They followed a star westward across a semi-arid landscape and it seemed to move before them like no natural star could move. They didn't know their destination. They simply followed where the star led.

He jerked awake, realizing that he must have passed out, again. It was now late evening and the last of the light was dying. He had been unconscious for hours. His full consciousness made him aware of something else. He was hungry. He hadn't eaten in hours, maybe a whole day. He had to do something, but on this wide planet, what to do? He had no idea which planet he was on or where he was on the planet. Getting to his feet, his head was still pounding, but it seemed a little less. He walked out onto the level plain below. Looking up at the sky, he had no reference to know which direction was North or South. He looked at his communicator on his left arm, which had been ruined by a blast from a handheld energy weapon, he got no help there. He couldn't even call for help. He turned around and was suddenly stopped in his movements. There, low on the horizon, just above the mountains, was a very bright star. It out shown everything else in the sky. He felt drawn to it, somehow. With no other direction to go, he started walking, following the star.

As he walked, Dawson thought about the situation. Verkuyl Stone was a notorious criminal. He was on the most wanted list of fugitives. He had been arrested and was expected to stand trial for the robbery of Solarbank and the murder of the manager. He had help as someone shut down the power grid, allowing the alarms and security devices to be made inoperable. He had killed the manager for no reason other than meanness. He had help escaping custody two days before his trial, as well. That's what put the Marshal's Service on him.

He fell, suddenly, and scraped his knee. The pain just added to what he was already suffering. He sat up and looked at his knee. Bending his head over made the throbbing worse, so he gave it only a cursory glance. Nothing seemed broken, so he struggled to his feet and followed the star.

Thirsty. He was so very thirsty. He knew this was from blood loss from his scalp wound as much as from the heat. He desperately needed a drink of water. It took all of the steel resolve within him not to gulp down the precious juice. He took a small sip and held it in his mouth a while before swallowing it. It went down deliciously and excruciatingly.

He knew he must look like something from a low budget horror movie. His face, head, neck, and shirt were caked in dried blood. He couldn't wash it off and there was nothing with which to cleanse his wound, either. He was grateful that the bleeding had stopped on his wounded scalp and was careful lest he open it up, again. The side of his head had swollen badly, and though he didn't know it, the left side of his face was black from the blood underneath the skin, a large amount of bruising.

Off in the distance he could see an outcropping of rock or something by the light of the rising moon. That was his goal. He wanted to be in the shade by the time the sun came up. He needed water and needed it badly. The mountains he had seen by daylight would be the best place to look. He needed food, too. He didn't know if there were any edible lifeforms on the planet or not. Weary, he plodded on. The air was chilly, nearly cold in the desert night.

The sun rose before he reached the rocks and with it came increasing heat. He was still an hour away, but he finally made it and looked around for shelter. He found a smaller boulder with a much larger boulder fallen on top, forming a sort of pass through cave all of twenty meters long. Looking inside, he didn't see any animals. Before it got too hot, he looked around the area for signs of water, but found none. He went back to the little cave and crawled inside, parched and deeply weary. He was soon in the grips of an exhausted sleep.

*

Three men traveled across the wilderness. It was dangerous going as there were wild animals and even wilder men that could attack them at any time. Added to the weirdness, normal stars did not stay stationary in the sky. They rose and sank with the rotation of the planet. This one was different. It was at the same place in the sky night after night. The unnatural star somehow continued to move before them as they progressed and they followed it without question.

Dawson awoke from his vision or dream, he wasn't sure which it was, very groggily. He needed water. He had nursed the fruit juice, but in this heat it wasn't going to last past the coming morning and then he would be in dire trouble. He waited until the evening came and crawled out. The night before he had lined up some small rocks that pointed in the direction of the star so that he would know his direction when he started to move.

He moved out before the stars were visible. He thought how odd it was that the star didn't move on the horizon, but stayed in the same place in the sky. Soon the night came with its weird noises and there, above the mountains on the horizon, was the star, shining brightly. He followed as it beckoned him onwards.

He had to make the mountains or he was going to die out here in the wasteland. His bones would bleach in the sun and no one would ever know what happened to him. Jen, his Jen, would never know what happened to her husband. Mark and Julie would never know what happed to their father. Plodding on he thought of his family. He met Jen, properly Jennifer, when he was still a beat cop in a medium sized town on Mars. That was long before he joined the Marshal's Service. She was a fireball, small, but very strong. She was full of life and love and it spilled over onto the strangest things. Sometimes it would be a poor man on the sidewalk and she would rent him a hotel room for a night or two and call and have pizza delivered. It might be a stray dog or cat. Their yard was a menagerie of dogs, cats, rabbits, a sheep, even a couple of owls.

He remembered her girl like mannerisms, the way her nose would crinkle when she laughed. He thought about how passionate she was when loving him and he thought about the time she was trying to knock him from the dock into the water and fell in, herself. He laughed at the memory. He remembered proposing to her and how every one of her family members and friends had grilled him as well as any cop could do before they gave approval of him. She had grinned in that sly grin of hers and walked out and left him to all of them.

His kids had graduated college, well Julie, who was the youngest had technically graduated, but the ceremony was still a short time off. He was supposed to retire next month. The Marshal's Service had mandatory retirement at fifty-five years of age, unless one reached the upper levels, which were appointed positions. He had just turned fifty-five and retirement was immediately before him. His wife was making all sorts of plans and his retirement pay as the lead territorial marshal would be substantial. He was afraid he would never get to share his retirement with her.

No! He was going to survive, somehow. He had stopped to rest and finished the last of his juice. Getting up, he put the bioplastic bottle in his pocket and moved on. It soon became apparent he was not going to reach the mountains this night and began to look for a place to get out of the deadly sun. He had grown up in Arizona and knew what he needed to do. There were no rock shelters, but the landscape was changing. Now there were grasses and shrubs with thorns. Those thorns told him there were some sorts of lifeforms that ate the plants around, or there would be no need for defenses. Many of the plants were grayish purplish greenish in color. It was hard to describe. He was nearing the end of his strength when he found what he was looking for. There was a thicket of small trees or shrubs with thickly interwoven grayish green thorny leaves sheltering a small end of a gully. He crawled back inside, deep in the shade to wait out the sun. Soon, his fatigue forced him to sleep the sleep of the exhausted.

*

The three men were moving, again. It was a long journey and many long weeks were already behind them. Onward they moved, tiredly, missing home and family, following the star that beckoned them onwards.

The heat awakened him. It was hot, even in the shade of the shrubs. No wind stirred. His lips were cracked and his tongue felt like a stick in his mouth. He was still sweating a bit, which was a good sign, but he wasn't urinating. Peeking out from his cover he could see no signs of water, anywhere. This gully had all of the marks of water runoff from the infrequent rains, he noted, but it wouldn't do him any good, now. He laid down, again, and tried to rest. His head still hurt and sometimes it was better, but he knew it would get worse as he dehydrated.

In the early evening, as the sun neared the horizon, he climbed out. He lined up with his markers and started walking. The mountains were nearer, but how far he couldn't say. He needed to cover that distance tonight, if possible, or he wouldn't have the strength to look for water. He might not last the night, as it was.

He started on, worrying about his wife. How would she react to his disappearance? It would be devastating. He would give anything to get word to her, somehow. He plodded on, step by step. He fell. It was a long while before he could get up, but get up he did. It was well along in the night and he had been shuffling and stumbling along for hours, but the mountains were much nearer.

He fell again, and this time he couldn't get up. He just wasn't going to make it. He decided that this was as far as he was going. He would just lie here and let the inevitable end come. Then, something iron inside of him arose. He was going to live, somehow. He pushed himself into a sitting position. The star, for the first time, looked lower down in the sky. It seemed nearly on his level in the darkness. He got to his feet and as he moved, he realized the star was still stationary in the sky! A light! It was a light! Light meant humans, it meant rescue!

He stumbled on and the light was nearer. He could see the tall spire of some sort of building with a few smaller buildings around. He tried calling out, but his throat was so dry no sound would come. He fell then, and didn't rise.

*

The three men moved through the darkness, the star guiding them. Then, the star came to a stop over a small house and became stationary. The men unloaded their gifts and walked to the door.

Dawson opened his eyes. He was in a room, in some sort of dwelling. He head felt funny and feeling it found there was a mesh cap of some sort on his head. A bandage. It was a bandage. His clothes were changed, he was clean. His badge and gun were on a chair next to the cot upon which he was lying. His groan as he sought to sit upright brought a rush of feet. A kindly looking man in a black jumpsuit with a white collar came into the room.

"You gave us a scare. You were in bad shape. Here, drink this...slowly or you'll choke. That's it. This is water with essential nutrients. You've had a hard time of it."

"Where am I? I followed a star that lead me here."

"You are at Capital Mining Station 2 on the planet Zabad. We saw you were a marshal and we contacted the Marshal's Service, yesterday. That star that you saw in the sky was the stationary communications satellite in planetary stable orbit. It stays in the same relative position. You say you followed it, here?"

"Yes, I had a dream or vision or something of three men following a star and so I followed it, here," Dawson said to the amazed man. Alive! He was alive! He had made it.

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