�We�re here!� Tom�s father announced, his voice booming from the ship�s control room, just a few feet down the hall from the rest chamber.
Tom tossed the covers aside and scrambled out of the sleep pod. He dashed across the room, pressed his nose against the glass of the window and stared in amazement at the colors down below.
Autumn on TX-12 was the most beautiful, most exhilarating thing he had ever seen. The majority of the planet was covered with trees, an October blanket of red more vibrant than a Martian sunset, and the ground was an ocean of leaves. With a few of these leaves in his collection, Tom would win the school leaf book contest for sure.
As his father landed the ship, Tom reached back into the sleep pod and grabbed his leaf book. He had fallen asleep while looking at it, the same way he had fallen asleep every night since they�d left two weeks ago on their leaf-collecting expedition, flipping through the pages, staring at the variety of exotic leaves he had retrieved from the six other planets they had stopped at on the way to their destination. But all of them paled in comparison to the leaves he would be getting here on TX-12.
Tom returned to the window and watched as the ship descended, floating slowly to the leaf-covered ground. He felt the ship touch down and stared out the window for a few moments longer, mesmerized by the falling leaves.
Tom�s father appeared behind him. �I know you�re eager to get out there, Lieutenant Thomas, but I think it would be best if I took a look around first, just to make sure it�s safe.�
Tom smiled at the way his father addressed him. Before they�d left Earth, they�d agreed that in order to make the trip more exciting they would pretend they were colleagues on an important mission, rather than father and son.
�Good idea, Captain Carl,� Tom said. He was so excited he could barely sit still, but he knew his father was right. He knew that strolling onto the alien terrain and scooping up the precious leaves might not be that easy. Humans had been to this distant planet only once before. Two years earlier a group of scientists had traveled to TX-12 to collect data for a study on its breathtaking fauna. None of them ever returned. It was only Tom�s father�s job at the space center that allowed them to come here. Without his access to the ship, Tom would be stuck collecting leaves from boring Earth trees like all the other kids.
Captain Carl ruffled Tom�s hair and said, �Get dressed. I�ll be back before you know it.�
Tom put his leaf book down and dressed in a hurry, then sat by the window and waited for his father to return.
He waited.
And waited.
He wondered what was taking so long. He knew his father was probably checking things out thoroughly, being extra safe. Making sure that what happened to those scientists didn�t happen to them. Besides, his father had his blaster pistol. If he encountered a threat, he�d be able to defend himself. Wouldn�t he?
Tom decided to kill the time by thinking about the prize he would win with his leaf book�an all-expense paid trip for him and his family to the new amusement park on Titan, Saturn�s biggest moon. The park was still several weeks from opening, and he would be the first kid from Earth to go. The kids in his class would be so jealous. The same way they were jealous when Tom won the art contest. Of course, it helped that the material he used for his project was a rare crystal his father pilfered from the space center�s research lab, while the other kids were stuck using ordinary Earth resources. But so what if he had an unfair advantage? It wasn�t his fault his family had money and power. Like his father always said: It doesn�t matter how you win, just as long as you do.
Tom looked at his watch. It had been nearly twenty minutes since his father left the ship. He grabbed his leaf book and headed down the corridor. He pushed the exit door open and stuck his head outside, but saw nothing but trees.
�Captain Carl?� he yelled. He waited, hoping to see his father appear from behind one of the trees, or hear his voice acknowledge him from somewhere in the distance, but his only answer was the rustling of crimson leaves as the solar breeze blew through them.
�Dad!� he called again, this time with more urgency. He listened for a moment, then against his father�s advice to stay put, he stepped onto the leaf-strewn landscape of TX-12.
Leaves crunched beneath his boots and floated down around him like glimmering confetti as he plodded off in the direction he�d seen his father go. As he walked, he bent down and picked up the coolest leaves he could find and affixed them to the empty pages of his book, closing the sheet of plastic over them to hold them in place.
As he wandered along, the tree limbs above him stretched overhead to form a canopy, and soon there were so many leaves falling he couldn�t see more than ten feet in front of him. He put his hand out, and a shimmering red leaf landed on his palm. He opened his book to put it inside and noticed that the other leaves from TX-12 were moving under the sticky plastic. He looked closer and saw tiny black legs on the undersides of the leaves, struggling to push free of the pages they were stuck to.
He felt the red leaf in his hand move, and before he could fling it to the ground, it scuttled up his wrist. Tom watched, frozen with horror, as the leaf stabbed his forearm with its sharp, pointed stem and began to suck his blood.
He cried out and swatted the thing off his arm, then clasped his hand over the bite mark to stop the bleeding as the insect leaves continued to float down around him. They landed on his shoulders, his arms, his neck and his head, plunging their blood-sucking needles into his flesh. He looked up, and a leaf landed on the bridge of his nose. He raised his hand to swat it away, but the creature was too quick, and its stem-needle stabbed his eyeball, piercing it with a sickening pop.
Tom screamed and stumbled forward with the leaf-thing stuck to his eye like a living, feeding eye patch. His feet collided with something and he fell sideways, crashing to the ground. He sat up and saw that he had tripped over a large pile of leaves. The leaves, disturbed by the collision, were beginning to move, to scatter, revealing something underneath. And as more of them scuttled away, the thing beneath the pile came into view. First an arm. Then a leg. Then a horrible, sallow face.
Even with the parasitic leaf obstructing his view, Tom could see that the dead man was his father, his pale, limp body completely drained of blood.
Tom screamed and struggled to his feet as the leaves continued to fall and twirl and cling to his skin. He turned to run for the ship, but only made it a few wobbly steps before he collapsed to the ground, dizzy and disoriented.
And as he lay on his back with the shimmering blanket of insects feeding on his small, helpless body, he stared up at the trees, watching the leaves as they continued to fall, thinking that maybe Earth really wasn�t such a bad place to be.
