Chapter 29

Even though my home was massive, it was getting crowded as hell. I could hardly wait for my sons to turn fourteen so they could take up some of my slack in the bedroom department. At this point, I didn’t even know how many companions I had. Even though I desperately wanted to relieve myself of some of them, I was always told it would be looked upon as an insult to the leaders of the contributing worlds and their families if I were to either refuse or try and get rid of any of the companions I was given.

I must have complained loud enough because the Consensus finally did something about it. We had been talking for some time about whether we could take a planet that was originally uninhabitable, and turn it into a life-sustaining environment. The Consensus decided to try it with 0X9, a relatively midsize planet without any useful qualities what so ever. Although they told me about the experiment in passing, the Char didn’t see fit to require my assistance, or even keep me abreast of their progress until after they had already finished with it.

I started to feel unappreciated and out of the loop. That was when they surprised me by renaming the planet Covington and declaring it the new home for me and all of my companions.

The main house on the planet was both spacious and luxurious, with over two dozen individual bedrooms, and that didn’t include the master suite which was easily large enough to fit three full -sized automobiles. What made this house so great is that it was surrounded by thousands of single -bedroom apartments individually assigned to each of my companions.

This was the perfect layout. I could choose whether to have multiple or single partners every night and not have to worry about tripping over everybody in the process.

Best of all, there was plenty of room to expand my collection of women, which seemed to be growing almost on a daily basis. I still had far too many companions with whom to contend, but at least I could get away from most of them for a while in our new home, though I was still counting the days to when my male offspring turned fourteen. At my urging, my father and his buddies became frequent visitors to my compound. I even started wondering if my old pal Zack and his gang ever found their way off Earth before it was attacked and, if they did, would they be up for a little visit to reminisce about the old days and maybe help me out a little bit.

My popularity had become so universal that I probably couldn’t go anywhere on any planet without being recognized. I was treated like a king most of the time.

While the inhabitants of all the other planets seemed to worship the ground I walked on, the people of Earth barely tolerated me. I supposed they were still pissed off about the whole “using them as a target for the Vermin” thing. That, I learned, was coupled by my inventing a device to multiply natural resources. Several of the political powerhouses, making their way back to Earth after the Vermin were defeated, wanted to use the planet’s resources as a means of gaining power over the Consensus, but I completely blew that plan out of the water with my invention. Even though they had to pretend to be happy about my solving many of the galaxy’s natural resource problems, they still harbored a serious grudge against me.

By the time the Char had finished restoring all the affected planets to livable conditions, I was informed that I was simply too popular to be hiding away in some research lab, even if that’s where I felt I could do the most good.

Now that the worlds had opened up to interplanetary trade, it became more important than ever to establish a centralized governing body. Although I had no real political aspirations, my desires were overruled by the hordes of people who practically demanded that I take office. We worked out a compromise where I officially held the highest position available but, in reality, was nothing more than a figurehead most of the time, only voting when there was a tie between factions of the Consensus governing body.

This meant that, while I was required to be present during the sessions, I was still free to concentrate on my experiments. I had many ideas I wanted to explore that would only be put on hold indefinitely if I was a prominent participant in the political dynamics.