Free The Winds of Altair by Ben Bova

eyes lit up. "You're coming with me!"
    "No," Amanda said, tossing the bag on the bed and heading for the alcove where the sink and shower stood. "I am going to St. Louis, in America."
    "What?"
    "I have signed up for a star mission. I am leaving this Earth far behind me."
    "You can't be serious!"
    "I have signed the contract. My plane leaves in three hours."
    "You're upset. Your brother's death . . ."
    "I had nothing to do with it!" she shouted. Tossing her few toiletry articles onto the bed beside the travel bag, Amanda said, "I signed up for the star mission a month ago. I want nothing of your revolution."
    "But you must!" Keno insisted, his voice suddenly going high, pleading. "It is your duty."
    "No. Not my duty. My brother saw it as his duty and what did it earn him? Martyrdom. He'll be more useful to you dead than alive, won't he, Keno?"
    The tall black man said nothing.
    "Someday you will be President of Congo. I fully believe it. You will be President whether I am with you or not, because being President is all you want out of life. You don't need me to help you."
    "I will be President because the people need me!"
    "You will be a tyrant, just like the tyrants you seek to overthrow."
    "No! Never!"
    Amanda almost smiled at him. "Keno, you are so naive about yourself. You truly believe that you will lead our people to greatness. How? With what? The few natural resources we possess are almost worthless, now that the world gets its raw materials from the asteroids. The land is poor. The people are ignorant, hungry, and diseased. What greatness can they achieve? Only the building of more splendid palaces for their leaders. You will make a great president for them; you will have the most splendid palace of them all. Be sure to put my brother's statue out front, where the village farmers can see it when they come to visit their President."
    He scowled in anger for a moment, but fought to control himself.
    "You are running away," he said.
    "Yes. I admit it."
    "And you call me naive."
    "I am running away to a new world, a clean world, where we can start afresh, where ignorance and poverty will never exist because we will build this world right , from the beginning."
    Keno shook his head. "You are a fool."
    "Am I? Millions of people will be settled on this new world, once we have prepared it for colonization. And those of us who go there first, who do the work of preparing it, will own that world. We will be landlords of whole continents, Keno. Not the princess of a few thousand fly-infested villagers—I will be the queen of a new land."
    "The world government would never . . ."
    Amanda stuffed her last remaining items into the bag's side zipper pocket. "Not a queen literally, of course. I will not rule the people. I will merely lease them the land they farm. I will become very, very rich. I will be free to do as I choose, without even the obligations of a queen to tie me down."
    "So you think."
    "So I know!" she flashed.
    Grasping her wrist to force her to look at him, Keno said, "Don't you understand what the world government is doing?"
    "Colonizing the stars," she said.
    "Yes, but how? By enticing the strongest and brightest men and women of our generation to leave Earth and go out into space."
    "What's wrong with that?"
    "They are getting rid of our generation's natural leaders," he bellowed. "They are buying you, and all the others like you, with promises of doing good for the poor while at the same time stuffing your own pockets with gold."
    "No . . ."
    "Yes!" Keno insisted. "Don't you think that the tyrants your brother and I struggled against are not part of this monstrous scheme? They want strong young leaders such as you to leave the Earth . . . leave it to them, the old, corrupt tyranny of the old, corrupt generation."
    For half a minute Amanda stared into Keno's blazing eyes. Finally she disengaged her wrist from his hand, bent down and zippered the travel bag shut.
    "Even if what you say is true, I am still going to