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Ebook has 144 lines and 8783 words, and 3 pages

"This is a permanent relay point," Clelling told him. "Our agency's galactic transporter has been here for centuries of your time."

There was more, but none of it was clear to Wesley later. It seemed only seconds before he was standing again on the banks of Sampson's Creek, perhaps a hundred yards upstream from the pool from which he had fished Mitsik. But the sun hung lower over the mountains and the birds were choosing perches for the night; he had been "away," Wesley estimated, for something over an hour.

It did not occur to him until he had walked back to the inn, and discovered in the walking that he had left the Aldhaferian booklet behind, that he might only have dozed during his stroll and dreamed it all. The dampness of his clothing reassured him--and disturbed his Aunt Jessica and Miriam--without eliminating that doubt.

Still later came the grimmer thought that he might even be losing his sanity. He worried about that, too upset to finish the Aldhaferian story he had begun, for a week.

Then the mail brought his first travelogue.

Charlie Birdsall, the rural carrier, blew his horn at the gate and handed over the sealed manila packet along with a letter from Wesley's literary agent. Charlie was a friend from high-school days and a perennial bachelor who found Wesley's future appalling.

"Got a circular from some tourist bureau," Charlie said. "And a letter from that agent fellow in New York. Letter's got a check for forty dollars in it."

He shook his head darkly at Wesley's worn look. "Fellow, you better get squared away before your lid slips. You can't write that wild stuff of yours and stand off two women at the same time. When're you going to learn?"

Wesley hefted his packet wistfully, wanting the privacy of his room but reluctant to offend Charlie by rushing off.

"I have to write," he said. "And as for marrying--maybe Aunt Jessica is right. Maybe a man wasn't meant to live alone."

Charlie snorted. "How wrong can you get? Look, a bunch of us are having a poker sit and beers tonight at Landon's service station. Why not come down with me, Wes?"

Wesley begged off. "Work to do, Charlie. I haven't turned in much material lately and my agent is getting impatient."

"When you wake up some morning on a leash," Charlie said, "don't say I didn't warn you." He put his car into gear and departed.

In his room, Wesley opened the letter first. There was a check for forty dollars, as Charlie had said, and a terse note from his agent that said:

Wesley reserved answer until the packet was opened and his first brochure scanned.

"I can now," he said.

His eyes filled and his hands shook with the beauty and the wonder of it. The folder was like the one he had examined at Clelling-Herif's way-station, but with a difference; here colors and perspective had been rescaled to suit his familiar values, and the exposition was in beautifully lucid English.

But he lacked the nerve, and knew it--how ever to explain it all to his Aunt Jessica?--and settled on the brochure as compensation in itself. It solved his difficulties with Aldhaferian story before he had finished the first two pages. The second planet of Aldhafera's major twin was precisely what he had needed for his space-rover's utopia, but with innovations wonderful to behold.

Its dominant race owned a corner on pleasant privacy that put Swift's Laputans, with their magnetic flying island, to shame; this world was dotted with air-borne masses of tiny, gas-filled aerophytes which multiplied after the fashion of coral polyps to build personal estates of any size from a few acres to whole square miles. On these luxurious clouds, in sylvan groves and orchid gardens and dew-bright dells, lived a benevolent race of humanoids further advanced in the gentle art of keeping the peace with one another than humanity was ever likely to be.

Below lay an ocean world dotted with green-and-coral archipelagoes, inhabited by a satisfactorily savage species of non-humanoids whose evolutionary line had worked the flotation principle into its own makeup. These monsters prowled fiercely upon the waters, following after the cloud islands in the perennial hope of discovering one low enough to plunder.

The contrast, for Wesley's purpose, was perfect. His hero could land on a floating preserve, forcing it down by overload. There was occasion for a first-class battle with the water-walkers in which he could rescue his One Love at least twice, and a crashing denouement in which the argonaut atoned for his injury by blasting his ship away tenantless under robot control, so saving the day for all concerned and making it forever impossible to betray Her people to his own.

Above all Wesley had at hand a wealth of detail, of color and atmosphere unarguably convincing because it was true, that offered him the idea-lode writers dream of. Ordinarily the most cautious of workmen, Wesley flung himself into such an orgy of creation that the Aldhaferian epic was reorganized, written and rewritten within three days.

For Wesley, the wordage was tremendous. It ran to novelet length, and it was all good.

"Damned good," said Wesley, who was more given to mailing his manuscripts in fear and trembling than in confidence.

That confidence waned during the succeeding week when Charlie Birdsall continued to drive past the inn with nothing more encouraging than a wave of the hand. Miriam grew more intent in her attentions as Wesley spent less time at his writing. His Aunt Jessica, gauging his ebbing resistance, put the first of her matrimonial trumps on the table.

She cornered Wesley one morning just after Miriam had driven away to school in her coupe.

"It's high time you stopped mooning around with the stars, Wesley Filburn," his Aunt Jessica said, "and took stock of yourself. You're thirty-two years old, you've no income except the miserable dribble you get from your wild stories and you've no more responsibility than a wild goat in the hills. It's time you settled down."

Wesley might have protested his independence, but his lifelong conditioning had left him too little to discover. His Aunt Jessica had brought him up from childhood after the death of his parents, who had owned his half of the inn before him; he owed her a great deal for her care and affection, as he had been told often enough to remove any lingering doubt, and the least he could do now was heed her wiser counsel.

"I'm too old and worn to keep the inn as it should be kept," his Aunt Jessica went on firmly. "I'm ready to retire and live with my widowed sister in California, but I can't go until you're safely settled with someone who will see that you take care of your own interests. You couldn't deny me the comfortable retirement I've earned, could you?"

Wesley couldn't. It occurred to him that his Aunt Jessica was only fifty-five and that her retirement had been provided for out of the net proceeds of the inn--it had always taken his share to meet expenses--but he put the ungrateful thought away guiltily. Aunt Jessica had earned her retirement while he idled, too busy spinning dreams to attend to his trust. If he had had no Aunt Jessica to turn to--

"It's simple enough," his Aunt Jessica said. "I'll move in with my sister as soon as you are married. Miriam is an excellent manager; the two of you should have a comfortable thing of it, the tourist trade holding up as it is."

"I suppose you're right," Wesley said. "You usually are."

"All that's needed," his Aunt Jessica finished, "is telling Miriam. Will you, or shall I?"

Some spark of repressed independence made Wesley mutter, "I'll tell her."

It was not really necessary, he found when he sat with Miriam on the verandah that evening and looked down over the slope of mountains toward the handful of lights that marked out Sampson City. The weight of his decision weighed on him so heavily that Miriam, who was nothing if not decisive, took the initiative.

"Your Aunt Jessica is planning to retire and live with her sister in California," she said. "Can you run the inn alone, Wesley?"

"I doubt it," Wesley said. He knew he couldn't; there were too many prosaic but vital details, too many procurings and disbursings for his dreamer's nature to cope with. "I was thinking that maybe you--"

"Of course I will," Miriam said. She peered in the gloom, saw his tension and contented herself with patting his hand. "I'll resign as soon as school is out in June. We'll be married, and I'll look after things when Miss Filburn goes to her sister's. Is that the way you want it, Wesley?"

Wesley wondered if it was. The spring darkness below and beyond the inn was warm and alive, vibrant with the tantalizing nebulous promise that had led him on like a will-o-the-wisp all his life without once revealing itself. The romance of strange places never seen and never to be seen called powerfully, a tocsin so familiar that his response was as much nostalgia as longing.

His Aunt Jessica joined them on the verandah, saving any need of further talk unnecessary. He had an impression, instantly rejected as unworthy, that she had been listening behind the screen for the outcome of his proposal.

"It's all settled, Miss Filburn," Miriam said comfortably. "Wesley and I are going to be married in June."

The second brochure arrived next morning, again, coincidentally, with a letter from Wesley's agent. Terse as ever, the note said:

With it came a check that left Wesley faint with disbelief.

The second travelogue advertised a world vastly different from Aldhafera's utopia. The system was Alpha Geminorum, Castor--a visual binary subdivided into spectroscopic doubles, presenting a four-sun family revolving in pairs about itself, a cosmic madhouse that gave precarious shelter to only one inmate.

That planet, called Turlak, was unique in the galaxy. Caught at a focal point between its various primaries, it suffered every extreme of heat and cold, of grinding glacier and roaring volcano. Approach or retreat of an ascendant sun could double a visitor's weight or levitate him; the air itself rushed from hemisphere to hemisphere in a continuous demoniac hurricane.

The possibilities were unlimited.

Out of them Wesley contrived for an exploring party to crash under Turlak's freakish gravity, for a beautiful girl ecologist to be snatched from the ship by the perpetual hurricane and for the expedition's handsome young hydroponicist to rescue her. Because there were no convenient inimical life forms on Turlak, Wesley threw in a couple of logical menaces in the way of red-hot lava serpents and bat-winged flying crocodiles whose natural element was the rushing wind.

The following week saw this thumbnail synopsis turned into another novelet, less idyllic but more hectic than the first. He handed it over, weighed and stamped and sealed with scotch tape, to Charlie Birdsall on the morning of the first Monday in May.

Charlie eyed the flat packet with respect. "Looks like you're getting the range," he said. "Wes, if you turn 'em out regular like this for the price that last one brought, you've got it made."

He squinted appraisingly when Wesley made deprecating sounds. "I'd keep it quiet if I was you, though. Miriam will want to renovate the inn after you're married, maybe add a new wing."

Wesley stiffened. "How did you know?"

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