travelogue

Adventure came late—at thirty-two, if the detail matters—into the diffident life of Wesley Filburn, but with all the fictional improbability of the wistful little fantasies he wrote for his living.

It called, in a voice Wesley failed at first to recognize because he had long ago given up listening, just when he least expected it—when he was walking one late April afternoon along the rocky banks of Sampson's Creek, temporarily blind to the drowsy mountain charm of the place while he mulled over an inconsistency that niggled at his current plot-line.

There was this utopian little planet, he mulled, that circled the major sun of a binary star named Aldhafera (no other star would do; the name Aldhafera was perfect, too laden with the romance of the starways to surrender) upon which his space-roving protagonist was to discover his true self—and the glory of the One Love inevitable to every such spacefaring gallant—by destroying his ship and so making it impossible to betray Her people's unspoiled paradise to his own grasping mechanical culture. The rub was, and Wesley was too honest to dismiss it unresolved, that any world circling one primary of a double star would very probably be something less than a paradise. Caught between two such stellar furnaces, it was more likely to be a slag-shelled inferno of heat and desolation.

Still, if one sun should be very small or nearly spent, there might be no problem at all. It might even offer fresh background detail as a novel sort of moon, shedding living light upon an already exotic setting. He'd have to check further on Aldhafera, though he doubted that his scanty astronomical texts would supply his want.

The call, too strong for a bird's piping yet too slight and musical for even a child's voice, drew him back from Aldhafera to the banks of Sampson's Creek.

It was a child after all, but an improbably tiny one.

She floundered in a pool deep enough to drown even an adult, so manifestly helpless that Wesley plunged instantly to her rescue without arguing his own inability to swim. He had a briefest glimpse of hair floating like a small silver cloud about a frightened elfin face with enormous lilac eyes; then the icy pool received him and he was splashing mightily to keep his own head above water.

Momentum took him near enough for the child to grasp his sleeve. The rest, the immemorial emergency of learning to swim the hard way, was up to Wesley.

He made it, not because he was capable of meeting such a challenge at a moment's notice but because the bank and safety were after all only a few feet away. His frantic paddlings brought the two of them out, to lie panting and dripping side by side in the welcome heat of sunlight.

When he had recovered enough to sit up, Wesley examined his find with more amazement than satisfaction.

The child was smaller than any child could be, he thought, and turned out with a fragile perfection more doll-like than human. Her hair was drying rapidly to look more like spun platinum than like silver; her dress, a mothlike wisp that changed color with mother-of-pearl iridescence, seemed not to have been wet at all. There was a belt of slender metal links about her tiny waist, caught with a flattened oval buckle the size of a pocket watch.

Her lilac eyes, more blue than purple now with the shock gone out of them, looked up at him wonderingly.

"Are you hurt?" Wesley asked. The child winced from the sound and he lowered his voice, feeling like an ogre before such fragility. "Can you talk yet?"

He reached out to help her and she caught his thumb with both tiny hands and stood knee-deep in grass that barely covered his own ankles.

Her voice was as high and clear as a sleigh-bell. "Clellingherif," she said, as if that unintelligibility settled everything.

Wesley considered her unhappily. It was not Adventure yet; he saw only that he was saddled with a lost child who looked like a pixie and who talked like a bird, and that he would very probably lose the rest of his afternoon getting her off his hands.

He tried again.

"Where do you live?" It was so unlikely that her parents might have moved to Sampson City, with its insular aloofness and its once-a-day train, that he dismissed the idea at once.

Second thought heartened him briefly. "Are your parents staying at the inn?"

The "inn" was a rambling, seedily genteel resort catering mainly to retired couples and trout fishermen. He owned a half interest in it and lived there with his Aunt Jessica, who owned the other half and controlled both, and Miriam Harrell, who taught sixth grade at the Sampson County school and nursed a determination to become Mrs. Wesley Filburn. If the child's parents were new guests of his Aunt Jessica's, his problem was solved already.

It was not so simple. The child fingered the oval buckle of her belt, shaping a curious suggestion of pattern.

"Mitsik Clellingherif," she said.

She caught Wesley's thumb again and as quickly as that they were no longer on the banks of Sampson's Creek.

They were in a place that Wesley, for all his experience at contriving the unlikely, could not have dreamed up in a month of trying. It was essentially a room, not large yet seemed to extend indefinitely, that looked at first glance like a conservatory for exotic plants and at second like a library stocked with tables and files and endless shelves of books. There was a sprinkling of what might have been furniture, with here and there an erect oval that could have been either mirror or crystal screen.

The whole was scaled to a diminution that made Wesley feel like Gulliver in Lilliput, and through it breathed a barely perceptible scent somewhere between honey-suckle and crushed mint.

The man and woman who came out of that improbable background seemed to Wesley's dizzied senses hardly taller than the child who held his thumb, but their resemblance to her was as unmistakable as their serene air of having the situation completely in hand.

The girl's mother took her away, making admonishing birdlike sounds. The father, as if aware of Wesley's wavering control, gripped his thumb in turn and led him to an open expanse of soft-rugged floor large enough to hold them both.

"Sit down," he said in unexpected sleigh-bell English.

Wesley sat, and realized finally that Adventure had come.

It had come to him, he discovered, because the child—Mitsik—had not visited a world with fish before. The fascination of a sunning trout in Sampson's Creek had proved too much for her small caution; maneuvering for a closer look had tumbled her into the pool, and her transporter unit did not work under water.

His rescue had placed her parents—the father's name was Clelling and her mother's Herif, explaining her cryptic pipings—under an obligation that seemed to demand fulfillment. It was something like letting a genie out of his bottle and being granted a wish, except that Clelling and Herif were no sort of djinni and their capacity for granting wishes was strictly limited.

"A travel advisor's work is more interesting than profitable," Clelling said. "But be assured that we shall offer as much as lies within our means."

Embarrassed, Wesley made deprecating sounds. "I don't really want payment. I'm more interested in knowing how and why you're here."

The information was readily given. Clelling, completely telepathic among his own kind and nearly so with humanity—as witness his instant grasp of English—anticipated Wesley's questions with answers that left him dizzier than before.

"The galaxy is a more populous place than you imagine," Clelling said. "And civilized to a degree beyond your comprehension. Transportation and trade among so many differing worlds is a complex business occupying the attention of millions. My wife and I deal in travel for pleasure—we are what you would call tourist agents."

A vision of seeing Aldhafera at first hand electrified Wesley. "You're selling star trips here? On Earth?"

Clelling denied it with regret. "Your world has been under observation for years by a galactic ecological group in upstate Pennsylvania, but you are not ready yet. Economic and social stabilization, and elimination of war, must come before you can be admitted as a culture."

Wesley sighed and Clelling made hasty correction.

"Under the circumstances, that ban need not apply to you. We can offer help too with the information on galactic conditions you need to lend authenticity to your writing."

He went to a file that nestled between two feathery flowering shrubs and drew out a glossy folder that glowed in three-dimensional illustration as if lighted from within.

"Aldhafera," Clelling said.

Wesley took it almost reverently. The binary suns of Aldhafera did have planets—not one, as he had postulated, but five—capable of supporting life. The minor sun was negligible and all but extinct, furnishing precisely the exotic moon he had been considering when he first heard Mitsik piping in her pool.

"It's priceless," Wesley said. The text was undecipherable, but the photography so perfect that his eyes misted and refused to leave it. "It more than repays me."

Anxiety dimmed his rapture. "You did mean that I could keep it, didn't you?"

Clelling looked abashed. "Of course. It's only a sort of tourist travelogue.... I'll select a group of them dealing with worlds that might interest you and see that our local outpost makes up English translations. They will be mailed to you as they are completed."

His wife appeared out of the shrub-and-file background, leading a chastened Mitsik, and stood beside him. Her fair head was hardly even with the seated Wesley's shoulder.

"We mustn't leave Sonimuira out of the group," she said. Her lilac eyes laughed with an inner, private amusement. "He'll like Sonimuira."

"Out of this group we can offer you one physical visit to the world of your choice," Clelling said. "Each brochure will have round-trip tear-off coupons attached. Bring them here when you have decided where you will go."

"If I have the nerve," Wesley said. The prospect dazzled him until he remembered his Aunt Jessica. "You'll still be here?"

"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.

He fingered the round-trip coupons at the bottom of the last page. "To see a place like that," he said reverently. "If I only had the nerve...."

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."

Miriam was a competent manager; he could picture her without strain with her rimless spectacles clamped firmly on her adequate nose, meager lips set while she totted up their assets. Miriam was an inch taller than himself and a year or two older, but such details, his Aunt Jessica was fond of saying, mattered a fig or less. It was the heart that counted.

"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?"

"The announcement was in yesterday's paper," Charlie told him.

Miriam had wasted no time, Wesley thought. Confound it, you'd almost think she was deliberately burning his bridges behind him by making the thing public before he could reconsider.

Charlie startled him further.

"Maybe you know what you're doing, at that," Charlie said cryptically. "Maybe you're keen enough to know a good deal when you see one, after all."

He put the car into gear and paused with a foot on the clutch. "So busy talking I nearly forgot I had another one of those tourist ads for you. What did you do, join a vacation club?"

"In a way," Wesley said. "I won't have a chance to use it, though."

"Tough," Charlie said, and drove away.

To distract resentful thought Wesley turned to his Adventure again, forgetting in the fascination of his third brochure that, for him, doom rhymed with June. The locale this time was a planet called Porizinia, circling Alpha Bootis—Arcturus. No life existed upon the surface of Porizinia because of her primary's tremendous heat, but the subterranean world below was something else again. The planet was largely igneous and so translucent, clear enough to let Arcturus light with fairy luminescence the endless labyrinth of caverns and tunnels that made up a nether environment all their own.

The maze was filled in its lower levels with a buried ocean that ran in crystal tides past coral shoals where mermaid autochthons sunned themselves in the filtered glow and sang siren songs to enchant visitors. Those sections passable to air-breathers were carefully designated. Wesley, fingering the round-trip coupons at the end of the brochure, was startled to find himself eaten with the desire to see the place at first hand.

He rejected the impulse partly because he knew the outcry his Aunt Jessica and Miriam would set up and partly because he understood it for what it was, an instinctive groping for an escape from the catastrophe of June.

It was better in any case to wait, he decided, recalling the near-impish look of Herif when she had promised that he would like the Sonimuiran travelogue. What, he wondered, was Sonimuira like?

Before the Porizinian story was finished he had another note from his agent:

Enclosed was another check that would have made Wesley drunk with triumph but for the knowledge that June was only three weeks away.

The Porizinian story was mailed. Another brochure arrived, and another; life became a predictable routine; half labor, half escape. Wesley wrote and dreamed and talked briefly over the gate with Charlie Birdsall. Now and then, too tired to sit longer at his typewriter, he sat on the verandah at night with his Aunt Jessica and Miriam.

They did not press him now because their victory was won and their laurels assured. May dwindled away, quiet as a candle; Wesley's account fattened in the Sampson City bank; his agent promoted an anthology of his later stories and suggested a novel.

Wesley, in his room, laughed hollowly. Success, now that it had come, had an ashy taste.

The Sonimuiran booklet arrived on the twenty-fifth of May. A newly-envious Charlie Birdsall passed it to him over the gate, and a bombshell of disillusion with it.

"Have to admit I figured you wrong all these years," Charlie said. "You do know a good deal when you see it. Glad to see you making the most of it, Wes."

Wesley hefted his packet. "What do you mean?"

"You know what I mean," Charlie said. "When Miss Jessica retires you'll really have it made, with Miriam looking after the inn while you pull in big money writing."

He stretched his underlip with thumb and forefinger and let it snap back. "It could be as good for a man with a job like mine, if he had a half interest in a place like this to begin with. I'd jump at it just like you did."

Wesley was amazed and chilled. "You'd marry for convenience?"

"Sure," Charlie said. "There's no percentage in this romance stuff."

He went on in sudden confessional candor: "Most women figure it the same way. I know Miriam does—she tried to hook me when I first got my job with the post office, but the odds were all hers and I wasn't having any. That was before you came to room with your aunt—and why do you think she picked the inn here, anyway? Miriam's not getting any younger and she's looking out for herself. I'm glad to see you've got brains enough to do the same."

"Well," Wesley said. There was nothing to add to it. "Well."

"Well, I better go," Charlie said, and did.

In his room, Wesley sat with his unopened packet in his hand and thought gray thoughts.

It was one thing to plod dutifully to doom because of loyalty to his Aunt Jessica and an unwillingness to hurt Miriam, but another matter entirely to be maneuvered into a selfish solution of their problems. Miriam wanted security, however obtained. His Aunt Jessica wanted retirement with the income that would continue to roll in as long as the inn remained under Miriam's capable hand. The two of them had arranged it all between them as calmly as they might have made up a grocery list.

"Sucker," Wesley said. "If there were a way out—"

Because there was none he let it drop and opened his latest brochure.

The planet of Sonimuira circled a star listed as Beta Aquilae, Alschain. Details of distance and placement meant nothing to the electrified Wesley; what did register was that Herif, in venturing that he would like Sonimuira, had made a galactic understatement.

One look sent Wesley headlong to town in his Aunt Jessica's car. Returning an hour later, he ripped his small armful of travelogues to pieces and—except for one page that fell behind his desk—burned them in the backyard incinerator.

Then he disappeared in the direction of Sampson's Creek.

It was not until the middle of July, when the estate was settled and Miss Jessica Filburn was securely domiciled with her sister in California and Charlie Birdsall and Miriam had married and moved into the inn, that any light was shed upon Wesley's going. Then Charlie, in moving out Wesley's desk to furnish a new guest room, found the final page of the Sonimuiran booklet and set up a cry that brought Miriam, dust-capped and aproned, on the run.

"This is where Wes went," Charlie said.

Miriam pored without comprehension over the lone page. "How do you know?"

"He got these folders all along from some vacation club," Charlie explained. "Must have paid his passage in advance, because this one had tear-off tickets at the bottom.... Where else would he go?"

Miriam sniffed critically at a picture showing a smiling bevy of girls disporting themselves against a lush semi-tropical background.

Charlie took back the page. "Can't tell where the place is, but it says here that the climate is about like Samoa's, that there's no trade or industry and that the population—get this!—is ninety-four and six tenths female. Even Wes should do all right for himself there."

"He'll be back," Miriam said. "He can't stay long in a place as expensive as that."

Charlie snorted in disgust. "Would he come back after having Judge Talbot draw up a paper leaving his bank account to Miss Jessica and his half of the inn to me, and then disappearing with nothing but a bathing suit and a pair of sun glasses?"

"He could still come back," Miriam said stubbornly.

An irregularity at the bottom of the page caught Charlie's eye and settled the issue.

"He can't, either," Charlie said. "He didn't tear out his return ticket."