"What are you doing there?"
I looked up frightened. I saw a big, heavy-set, fleshy man, with dark rings around his eyes looking down at me. The early afternoon sun was bright behind his head, and made it hard for me to look at him. He was a head taller than me, and seemed gigantic. But then I was only fourteen years old, and perhaps he wasn't so big as he seemed.
I was protected by a Flick Field, so he probably couldn't hurt me. But I was startled. And embarrassed too. He had caught me sneaking through this back yard. Looking at the tool shed.
"I was just cutting through on my way back from school," I said. "I didn't mean any harm."
I looked around at the weedy back yard, at the gray, weathered wooden tool shed, trying to see which way I could run if he attacked me. I really didn't want him to realize I was protected, although no one would believe him if he told them about it.
"This isn't the first time you've been here," he said.
I looked at him more closely. I didn't remember seeing him before. I had been sure that no one had seen me on my previous visits.
"I always go through here on my way from school," I said. That wasn't true. If he'd been watching me he'd realize I was lying. "I mean, sometimes," I corrected myself.
He took a step toward me. I took a step back. Was he going to attack me?
He stopped. He looked at me for a long time. Finally he asked, "How good are you in Science?"
I wasn't sure how to answer that. Although I was only fourteen, my knowledge of science was far beyond that of the average earthman. I remembered reading once that a few hundred years before earthpeople had gone to college to learn long division: at age fifteen. The things I knew most earth college graduates wouldn't know.
"I guess I'm pretty good," I answered. There were probably a lot of things they learned in school I didn't know. I would have to be careful.
"I have some interesting electronic equipment in my tool shed which I could show you," he said. "Why don't you come in with me. I have lots of interesting things."
Now I looked at him. Is he a pervert, I thought. Trying to get me into his tool shed for who knows what? Why should he think I'd be interested in his tool shed? But then I remembered that each time I had come through here I had been examining his tool shed, testing it with equipment hidden in my clothes.
"I think I'd better be going home," I said.
"Where is that?" he asked.
"About five blocks from here," I answered, pointing north, away from where I knew the school was.
"Maybe a little farther?" he asked. "Like five light years?"
I opened my mouth, startled. Then I decided to make a joke of it. I laughed. I wanted to make him think I thought that was a very silly joke.
All the while we had been talking, he had been slowly advancing toward me, and I had been backing up without realizing it. Suddenly my foot backed into a piece of pipe on the ground. I turned and saw that my back was close to the tool shed.
"Your force field won't help you here," he said. "I've nullified it. Our equipment detected your field weeks ago, and we've been working on a nullifier ever since."
I looked down at the telltale on my shirt. It was blinking, indicating I was trapped. Not only was my field nullified, but I was surrounded completely by a large Flick Field which came out from the ends of the tool shed in a half circle and now enclosed both of us in it.
"Just knowing something can be done is often all you need to spur you to find out how to do it yourself," he said. "Of course, I didn't work alone. A lot of others at the University have helped me."
The worst thing that could have happened had happened because of me.
I've blundered terribly, I thought. I've done enormous damage to my people. What will happen to me when I get home?
He pushed me to the side and opened the tool shed door.
"You might as well come in," he said. "I'll show you what we have."
He walked in before me, turning on a light switch as he did. A weak electric bulb illuminated the shed yellowly.
I walked by him and looked at a work bench with some make-shift electronic equipment on it, printed circuit cards, half-open metal cases with wires running around them, power supplies, a computer screen and keyboard on one side. It looked pretty amateurish and old-fashioned.
He locked the door behind him. "The tool shed is soundproofed," he said. "No one outside is going to hear anything or know anything."
He grabbed me and twisted my arm around my back. I struggled, but I was only fourteen years old and he was big and I couldn't stand against him.
Within moments he had shackled my hands to the back of the table so that I was bent over the table, face down. He pulled my pants down. My pants fettered my feet.
My heart was beating rapidly. "No," I said.
He reached down and tied my feet together with a quick motion with a strong rope.
The shackles held me bending over the table with my bare buttocks exposed.
Before I could think to pull my body up onto the table, to protect myself with my legs, he had grabbed my tied feet, and tied them to the lower bar of the table near the floor.
"Tell the people who sent you that we don't like spies," he said. I felt a terrible sharp pain in my buttocks which brought tears to my eyes. I twisted my head around to look back, and saw him holding a long, thin flexible wooden stick. He raised the stick in the air.
"Tell them not to send children to do a man's job," he said. Another stroke of the stick fell across my buttocks. My body jerked. I felt as if an explosion had taken place in my brain.
"Tell them that for hundreds of years your flying saucers have been spying on us, and that it's time they stopped," he said. Another stroke of the stick, and I cried out.
"Tell them that we've grown up. That we expect to be treated like adults," he said. He laid several more strokes across my buttocks. Tears ran down my cheeks. Even my father had never beaten me like this.
"Tell them that the next visitors we expect are an official delegation, of adults, to negotiate with us as equals," he said.
I waited for another stroke. He was unshackling my hands. He disconnected my tied feet from the bar at the base of the table.
I shuffled around so that my buttocks would not be facing him, so that he couldn't hit me again. I looked at him, my teeth clenched with pain. I touched my painful buttocks with my hands, and felt swollen lines where the stick had hit.
"You will tell them what I told you?" he asked.
"Yes," I said, through clenched teeth.
He untied my feet. I pulled my pants up.
He opened the door, and gestured for me to go out.
I walked shakingly out of the tool shed and back into the afternoon daylight. The sunlight pained my eyes through the tears.
I walked slowly down the streets toward the edge of the small University town, feeling the pain in my buttocks with every step. As I walked people came out of their houses to the streets and looked at me.
It was a long walk. As I reached the outskirts of town, I heard a radio announcer's voice from somebody's house saying something about "flying saucers." Did everybody know of my presence here? Did anyone else know of my humiliation?
I walked back to the place in the fields where I had left my flying saucer invisible. It was now visible a long way off.
People were standing around it, well-dressed people, not country people. As I approached I saw people coming out the entrance to my saucer.
When I stood among them, they looked at me hostilely, but no one spoke to me. I heard someone say behind my back, "What kind of people would send a young boy to be a spy on another planet?"
I moved toward the entrance, and the people moved aside to let me go in.
I climbed painfully in, closed the entrance behind me, and flew back to my home planet to tell my father what they had told me.
I smoothed my Royal robes and leaned back in my throne. I looked around me, at the gold covered ceiling, at the brilliant diamond chandeliers, at the intricate, hand-woven tapestries on the walls, depicting celebrated scenes in Empire history.
Opposite me was the famous tapestry showing the President of the United States kneeling before me and kissing my feet.
I looked down at my son the Prince, who sat beside me in his little throne.
"That's why my father enslaved the Earth," I said, completing the story which my son so loved to hear.
"I don't understand," he said. "Only because one scientist beat you so cruelly?"
"On the contrary," I answered, as always, "my father laughed at me. He said that I had been beaten Royally, and that I deserved every stroke."
How my son loved to hear the story of my beating on Earth! I saw him looking over at the finely carved Royal Paddling Horse by the side of the hall. Hanging next to it was the ancient Royal Paddle, with which generations of Princes, myself included, had been punished at Kingly request.
"No, my son. We enslaved the Earth for one reason and one reason only.
"Because they said they were our equals. And they were not."