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at
all…”
    “If I want to?! If I want
to?!”
    “Quite. Quiet, Mr.
Kaella.”
    “What after the interview? Tell me
already!”
    “Then I will open my door to you
and allow you to come in, Mr. Kaella.”
     
    “It’s a pity that he is so shy and
intimidated, and he doesn’t dare knock. Boy, what I would do to
him.”

Chapter 15
    That night the new president of
Earth, Erivan, did not sleep either. As soon as he went to bed he
lay on his side and tried to go to sleep. But it didn’t work, he
was too excited.
    “Finally…” he thought, raising his
large body and leaning back on the arched backboard, “…finally…
after twenty-five years of being vice president.”
     
    During that period he had also held
the office of President, on several occasions, when Kaella would
get angry enough and stopped being surprised that these grown men
were taking their function of president seriously, and they would
start thinking on their own and making decisions.
    Then under order from Kaella,
Erivan would eliminate the incumbent President, making use of media
campaigns and court cases, and in line with the Constitution he
would take his place pending early elections, and after that he
would again retreat to the position of vice president. Into the
shadows of the loyal guardian of Humane Capitalism.
     
    But this time it wasn’t so. And it
would never be again. In the past several years Erivan had been
under a lot of stress and it took its toll on his health, because
Kaella did not take his warnings seriously. From time to time
Kaella would not even read his reports on Pascal Alexander’s
activities and would tell him that he was exaggerating. Alexander
had succeeded in creating a strong Non-Consumer movement. They had
taken power in entire cities and on all the continents. They had
taken factories, started their own production of goods.
     
    When he realized Alexander’s
strength, Erivan stopped realistically and truthfully reporting to
Kaella. It was probably his smartest, one might even say his
ingenious decision. He allowed Alexander and the Non-Consumers to
produce their own weapons and waited for the right opportunity. He
waited for the moment when Kaella would no longer have any choice
and when he would have to chose to finally put an end to the
Non-Consumers. This sixty-two percent support for Alexander, which
Erivan had shown to Kaella only now, on the eve of the elections,
had finally sobered up the old and naïve ruler. He accepted the
proposal for them to carry out an assassination of Xing, when he
goes tomorrow by car to give his election speech, here in Capital
City, and to blame the Non-Consumers for it.
     
    And he had done well to have
already killed the Xings. Zodiac, the pilot of the stolen
Non-Consumer plane, told him that their rockets were not a hundred
percent accurate. If the first projectiles were to miss or only
graze the presidential car, one of the Xings might run out and
escape. Why should he take such a risk if the family was within his
reach the entire time?
     
    “Now it’s really enough, Mr.
President,” Erivan said to himself out lout, smiling because of the
“Mr. President”. “Don’t torture yourself with things that are no
longer important. Rest. Starting tomorrow numerous statesman and
wartime duties await you as President and Supreme Commander of the
Inspectorate.
     
    He got up out of bed and went to
the bathroom. He got a box of sleep medication from the cabinet,
took one pill, greeted himself in the mirror with a dignified bow,
and returned to bed.

Chapter 16
    “What am I doing?” thought Pascal
Alexander, removing his forehead from the window. “I’m watching
footage as though I don’t know what I will say tomorrow? After all
these years I don’t know what I will tell the people?
    “Well I won’t tell them anything
more! Let them kill me tomorrow! I want them to kill me. Please,
Kaella, don’t steal the elections, kill me… please. If you won’t,
let your son kill