Voyagers III - Star Brothers Read Free Page B

getting richer instead of poorer. Yet people still turn to drugs. Bitterly the old Sikh realized that global economic growth provided a larger market for the forbidden pleasures. The wealthier the world becomes, the more people can afford to play with narcotics. How the gods must weep at our folly.
    Is there no end to it? he asked himself. Will fools and devils always attempt to make themselves rich by crushing the lives of their brothers and sisters?
    The old Sikh got up slowly from his chair and walked to the window, where the port of Larnaca gleamed in the high Mediterranean sun, white and clean and prosperous. The streets were crowded with businessmen and women striding along purposefully, while others ambled more casually through the shaded shopping arcades. Down on the docks, laborers worked half-naked and sweating. How many of you, Bahadur asked them all, would sell your futures for the chance to make illegal millions?
    Too many, he knew. There were always more, every year, every generation. Selling their souls to the path of evil.
    He went back to his comfortable old chair and sat slowly in it, scarcely noticing its groan beneath his weight. Still, he thought, there are other young men and women who join the Peace Enforcers, who dedicate their lives to the path of righteousness.
    Bahadur was glad that younger men and women were willing to take up the challenge, to bear the burden that he had borne almost all his long life. For a moment his memory flickered back fifteen years to Africa and the day he had met Keith Stoner. A strange man, mysterious, powerful in spirit. Bahadur smiled and leaned his head back and closed his eyes. His last thought was of Stoner.
    When his aide found Bahadur dead, the smile was still on the old Sikh’s face.
     
    Paulino Alvarado knew there was trouble when he saw little Ramón racing down the village street as fast as his nine-year-old legs could carry him, straw hat clutched in one hand, face red with exertion.
    “Soldiers!” Ramón bleated. “Soldiers coming to the village! I saw them from the hilltop! Coming up the valley road!”
    A lightning bolt of fear hollowed Paulino’s chest, took the air from his lungs. Throwing down his half-smoked cigarette, he leaped up from the chair on which he had been sitting, his mouth suddenly as dry as the Moondust he had taken only half an hour earlier.
    The village looked perfectly normal. Perched on a hillside at the base of the Andes, it looked down on la ceja de selva , the edge of the tropical rain forest, the valley where once coca had been cultivated to the exclusion of all other crops. Its one curving street was quiet in the late morning sunlight. The houses, built of solid stone from the mountains, stood silent and enduring as they had for centuries. A few women in black shawls gossiped idly by the well in the square. Children played up by the church yard. Most of the men were in the fields with the yellow tractors and other implements the Peace Enforcers had given the village.
    And soldiers were coming up the valley road.
    What we are doing is not illegal, Paulino repeated to himself. There is no law against Moondust. But he remembered his father’s bitter anger when he had first brought the strangers into their village.
    “They will bring ruin down on our heads!” his father had warned.
    “But Papa,” Paulino had replied, “this is not like growing coca. All these men want is a place where they can manufacture their pills.”
    “The soldiers will come and kill us all!”
    Paulino had gotten very angry with his father and called him terrible names. There was money to be made, much money, more money than the whole village had ever dreamed of. More money than Paulino had ever seen in his entire twenty-three years of life. Money enough to buy a beautiful new automobile and an apartment in the city. Money for women and good restaurants.
    But his father saw through him. “I labored all my life so that you could go to the university