A-Sides

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  No one who knew him would have been surprised that Kenny fell asleep with his new book resting open on his chest, and even less surprised that the fevered dreams behind his brows were traced in the rapid movement of his eyes beneath their sleeping lids.

  He was older in the dream, stocky and strong, pure Captain America oozing from the very pores of his shiny white space suit with the Kenny emblem sewn to the arm. The earth wasn’t even a distant blue speck behind him. It had been left behind by a factor of light years. Bright pinpoints of distant stars appeared through his view port, but they were not the treasure he sought.

  His objective was in sight, filling his viewpoint with its curvature, huge and blackly coruscating, too deep into interstellar space to actually shine from any reflected light.

  Meteors and comets with icy trails whizzed by all around the spaceship, then impacted on the star and rocked it, the explosions jettisoning tons of debris and whirling white geysers of diamond dust that swirled around the spaceship like a cloud of sparkling insects. The craft pitched and weaved, almost crashing into the crystalline surface of the star. The forces of the cosmos seemed to coalesce around him with godly wrath, rebuking him for his discovery.

  Kenny set down on the surface and stumbled out of the craft and onto the heaving terrain. He attached a rope to the surface of the star. This rope was a steel cable as thick as his arm and a drill was attached to the end. Against the massive girth of the star, the thinness of the pitiful cable would have made the width of a human hair look like the mightiest obelisk ever erected on the planet. In the impossibility of the dream state Kenny drilled a hole in the star five miles deep and the cable was secured.

  The dust from the drilling operation coalesced and became a twisting jet, funneling upwards toward another pulsating star overhead. The noise was ear splitting, like a flood-gorged river crashing over a thousand foot waterfall. More meteorites struck the surface of the star and the ground reeled with artillery-like explosions. Kenny staggered back to his spaceship through the flying chunks of star dust.

  He climbed into the cockpit and fired the boosters. They whooshed to life with a flash and roar. The ship rose, paying out miles and miles of cable. A hundred miles, then a thousand. The spaceship shuddered and the rockets began to whine and tremble with strain. They heated from red, to blue, to white, on the verge of melting.

  And incredibly, the star began to move.