Tomy and the Planet of Lies Read Free Page B

oppressive. Position: still 126 kilometers to the Iranian border in the desert of Baluchistan. Throughout the whole day, we had not seen a single vehicle apart from ourselves on the road.
    Marc’s face was swollen, his eyes rimmed with red. Sweat was pouring out of every pore, but despite the heat, he was shivering. It was clear that he had some kind of fever: he coughed and wheezed like someone with some kind of lung disease. I vaguely recalled something about dust allergies so I moistened a cloth with mineral water and wrapped it around his mouth and nose. I drove on with Marc sitting next to me wrapped up like a mummy, occasionally gasping and coughing, but it was hard work. One kilometer after the next. The massive, blazing gold disc of the sun sank slowly down behind a massive sand dune and suddenly the heat relented. Our position was now 98 kilometers from the Iranian border. Marc’s condition still had me worried, however. We decided to call it a day. We would spend the night here and give Marc’s immune system a bit of a chance to regenerate. It would have been foolish to try to carry on anyway. The sand drifts don’t show up well in the headlights.
    This was the incredible night when Tomy came into being. Marc and I will never be able to forget the events of that night. It all began with Marc’s chattering teeth and from a fever. He got himself some medication to reduce fever and some antihistamines from our onboard first aid kit and washed them down with generous amounts of mineral water. To give him enough room to lie down properly across the front seats of the car, I made myself a bed on the roof, the rear seats being packed full with our equipment.
    Occasionally a cool desert breeze wafted through the night, blowing fine dust into my eyes, ears, nose, and mouth, penetrating the warmth of my woolen blanket. I looked up at the starry skies above me, the way they only appear in the middle of a desert. Clearer and brighter than any planetarium, those strange, heavenly bodies seemed so close that I could simply reach out and grab them. Despite being numb with fatigue, I stayed awake. Below me, Marc still coughed. Every movement he made was amplified by the car’s suspension across the chassis. Sometime after midnight, I finally dozed off, but woke again around an hour later shivering with the cold.
    I stared at the glittering jewels of the night sky and began to daydream. Somewhere out there, in the endless expanse of space, spaceships would be zooming around from planet to planet, bringing post and strange wares from bizarre worlds to distant outposts of the Milky Way, perhaps there would even be wars between planets or solar systems. Maybe even now information was flashing between the constellation of Pleiades and the planets of Polaris, our North Star. We human beings, we microscopic mites down below, don’t have the slightest inkling of it all. Never had I seen the constellation of Lyra so clearly as in this night. I knew that its main star, Vega, was fifty times brighter than our sun, but on this night, for the very first time, I could clearly make out its blue coloration with the naked eye.
    I wondered how many planets might be in orbit around Vega. I recalled that Lyra was famous for its double-double star, an absolute rarity in our galaxy. Astronomers believe that the possibility of life in a double star system is very slight, if not non-existent, as the constant radiation from the binary suns would make the emergence of life impossible. But what makes them so sure about it? Maybe life forms have evolved under quite conditions than we can imagine. Maybe… maybe… maybe there are solar systems with binary stars populated by gaseous intelligent beings, maybe they don’t even need space ships to travel the unimaginable distances between the stars. Maybe there is so much that is so completely different to what we assume. I would give my life to be able to fly out into the