“Why don't you just take the day off?” he said.
“Yeah, thanks,” I said, and hung up and went back downstairs.
There was a dried-up old guy at the desk now, but the word must have spread. “You wanna see something really interesting?” he said. “Down in Roswell's where the Air Force has got that space alien they won't let anybody see. You take Highway 70 south—”
“Didn't anybody famous ever live here in Portales?” I asked. “A vice-president? Billy the Kid's cousin?”
He shook his head.
“What about buildings? A railroad station? A courthouse?”
“There's a courthouse, but it's closed on Sundays. The Air Force claims it wasn't a spaceship, that it was some kind of spy plane, but I know a guy who saw it coming down. He said it was shaped like a big long cigar and had lights all over it.”
“Highway 70?” I said, to get away from him. “Thanks,” and went out into the parking lot.
I could see the top of the courthouse over the drylooking treetops, only a couple of blocks away. It was closed on Sundays, but it was better than sitting in my room watching Falwell and thinking about the job I was going to have to take unless something happened between now and tomorrow morning. And better than getting back in the car to go see something Roswell had made up so it'd have a tourist attraction. And maybe I'd get lucky, and the courthouse would turn out to be the site of the last hanging in New Mexico. Or the first peace march. I walked downtown.
The streets around the courthouse looked like your typical small-town post-WalMart business district. No drugstore, no grocery store, no dimestore. There was an Anthony's standing empty, and a restaurant that would be in another six months, a Western clothing store with a dusty denim shirt and two concho belts in the window, a bank with a sign in the window saying NEW LOCATION.
The courthouse was red brick and looked like every other courthouse from Nelson, Nebraska, to Tyler, Texas. It stood in a square of grass and trees. I walked around it twice, looking at the war memorial and the flagpole and trying not to think about Hammond and Bisbee. It hadn't taken as long as I'd thought because I hadn't even been able to get in to see the buyer, and Hammond hadn't cared enough to even ask how it had gone. Or to bother to look up his contacts in Tucumcari. And it wasn't just that it was Sunday. He'd sounded that way the last two times I'd called him. Like a man getting ready to give up, to pull out.
Which meant I should take Cross's job offer and be grateful. “It's a forty-hour week,” he'd said. “You'll have time to work on your inventions.”
Right. Or else settle into a routine and forget about them. Five years ago when I'd taken the job with Hammond, Denny'd said, “You'll be able to see the sights. The Grand Canyon, Mount Rushmore, Yellowstone.” Yeah, well, I'd seen them. Cave of the Winds, Amazing Mystery House, Indian curios, Genuine Live Jackalope.
I walked around the courthouse square again and then went down to the railroad tracks to look at the grain elevator and walked back to the courthouse again. The whole thing took ten minutes. I thought about walking over to the university, but it was getting hot. In another half hour the grass would start browning and the streets would start getting soft, and it would be even hotter out here than in my room. I started back to the Portales Inn.
The street I was on was shady, with white wooden houses, the kind I'd probably live in if I took Cross's job, the kind I'd work on my inventions in. If I could get the parts for them at Southwest Agricultural Supply. Or WalMart. If I really did work on them. If I didn't just give up after a while.
I turned down a side street. And ran into a dead end. Which was pretty appropriate, under the circumstances. “At least this would be a real job, not a dead end like the one you're in now,” Cross'd said. “You've got to think about the future.”
Yeah, well, I was the only one. Nobody else was doing it. They kept on using oil like it was water, kept on using water like the Ogalala Aquifer was going to last forever, kept planting and polluting and populating. I'd already thought about the future, and I knew what it was going to be. Another dead end. Another Dust Bowl. The land used up, the oil wells and the water table pumped dry, Bisbee and Clovis and Tucumcari turned into ghost towns. The Great American Desert all over again, with nobody but a few Indians left on it, waiting in their casinos for customers who weren't going to come. And me, sitting in Portales, working a forty-hour-a-week job.
I backtracked and went the other way. I didn't run into any other dead ends, or any sights either, and by 10:15 I was back at the Portales Inn, with only twenty-four hours to kill and Billy the Kid's grave looking better by the minute.
There was a tour bus in the Inn's parking lot. NONSTOP TOURS, it said in red and gray letters, and a long line of people was getting on it. A young woman was standing by the door of the bus, ticking off names on a clipboard. She was cute, with short yellow hair and a nice figure. She was wearing a light blue T-shirt and a short denim skirt.
An older couple in Bermuda shorts and Disney World T-shirts were climbing the stairs onto the bus, slowing up the line.
“Hi,” I said to the tour guide. “What's going on?”
She looked up from her list at me, startled, and the old couple froze halfway up the steps. The tour guide looked down at her clipboard and then back up at me, and the startled look was gone, but her cheeks were as red as the letters on the side of the bus.
“We're taking a tour of the local sights,” she said. She motioned to the next person in line, a fat guy in a Hawaiian shirt, and the old couple went on up the steps and into the bus.
“I didn't think there were any,” I said. “Local sights.”
The fat guy was gaping at me.
“Name?” the tour guide said.
“Giles H. Paul,” he said, still staring at me. She motioned him onto the bus.
“Name?” I said, and she looked startled all over again. “What's your name? It's probably on that clipboard in case you've forgotten it.”
She smiled. “Tonia Randall.”
“So, Tonia, where's this tour headed?”
“We're going out to the ranch.”
“The ranch?”
“Where he grew up,” she said, her cheeks flaming again. She motioned to the next person in line. “Where he got his start.”
Where who started to what? I wanted to ask, but she was busy with a tall man who moved almost as stiffly as the old couple, and anyway, it was obvious everybody in line knew who she was talking about. They couldn't wait to get on the bus, and the young couple who were last in line kept pointing things out to their little kid—the courthouse, the Portales Inn sign, a big tree on the other side of the street.
“Is it private? Your tour?” I said. “Can anybody pay to go on it?” And what was I doing? I'd taken a tour in the Black Hills one time, when I'd had my job about a month and still wanted to see the sights, and it was even more depressing than thinking about the future. Looking out blue-tinted windows while the tour guide tells memorized facts and unfunny jokes. Trooping off the bus to look at Wild Bill Hickok's grave for five minutes, trooping back on. Listening to bawling kids and complaining wives. I didn't want to go on this tour.
But when Tonia blushed and said, “No, I'm sorry,” I felt a rush of disappointment at not seeing her again.
“Sure,” I said, because I didn't want her to see it. “Just wondering. Well, have a nice time,” and started for the front door of the Inn.
“Wait,” she said, leaving the couple and their kid standing there and coming over to me. “Do you live here in Portales?”
“No,” I said, and realized I'd decided not to take the job. “Just passing through. I came to town to see a guy. I got here early, and there's nothing to do. That ever happen to you?”
She smiled, as if I'd said something funny. “So you don't know anyone here?”
“No,” I said.
“Do you know the person you've got the appointment with?”
I shook my head, wondering what that had
to do with anything.
She consulted her clipboard again. “It seems a pity for you to miss seeing it,” she said, “and if you're just passing through…Just a minute.” She walked back to the bus, stepped up inside, and said something to the driver. They consulted a few minutes, and then she came back down the steps. The couple and their kid came up to her, and she stopped a minute and checked their names off and waved them onto the bus, and then came back over to me. “The bus is full. Do you mind standing?”
Bawling kids, videocams, and no place to sit to go see the ranch where somebody I'd probably never heard of got his start. At least I'd heard of Billy the Kid, and if I drove over to Fort Sumner I could take as long as I wanted to look at his grave. “No,” I said. “I wouldn't mind.” I pulled out my wallet. “Maybe I better ask before we go any farther, how much is the tour?”
She looked startled again. “No charge. Because the tour's already full.”
“Great,” I said. “I'd like to go.”
She smiled and motioned me on board with her clipboard. Inside, it looked more like a city bus than a tour bus—the front and back seats were sideways along the walls, and there were straps for hanging onto. There was even a cord for signaling your stop, which might come in handy if the tour turned out to be as bad as the Wild Bill Hickok tour. I grabbed hold of a strap near the front.
The bus was packed with people of all ages. A whitehaired man older than the Disney World couple, middleaged people, teenagers, kids. I counted at least four under age five. I wondered if I should yank the cord right now.
Tonia counted heads and nodded to the driver. The door whooshed shut, and the bus lumbered out of the parking lot and slowly through a neighborhood of trees and tract houses. The Disney World couple were sitting in the front seat. They scooted over to make room for me, and I gestured to Tonia, but she motioned me to sit down.
She put down her clipboard and held on to the pole just behind the driver's seat. “The first stop on today's tour,” she said, “will be the house. He did the greater part of his work here,” and I began to wonder if I was going to go the whole tour without ever finding out who the tour was about. When she'd said “the ranch,” I'd assumed it was some Old West figure, but these houses had all been built in the thirties and forties.
“He moved into this house with his wife, Blanche, shortly after they were married.”
The bus ground down its gears and stopped next to a white house with a porch on a corner lot.
“He lived here from 1947 to…” She paused and looked sideways at me. “…the present. It was while he was living here that he wrote Seetee Ship and The Black Sun and came up with the idea of genetic engineering.”
He was a writer, which narrowed it down some, but none of the titles she'd mentioned rang a bell. But he was famous enough to fill a tour bus, so his books must have been turned into movies. Tom Clancy? Stephen King? I'd have expected both of them to have a lot fancier houses.
“The windows in front are the living room,” Tonia said. “You can't see his study from here. It's on the south side of the house. That's where he keeps his Grand Master Nebula Award, right above where he works.”
That didn't ring a bell either, but everybody looked impressed, and the couple with the kid got out of their seats to peer out the tinted windows. “The two rear windows are the kitchen, where he read the paper and watched TV at breakfast before going to work. He used a typewriter and then in later years a personal computer. He's not at home this weekend. He's out of town at a science fiction convention.”
Which was probably a good thing. I wondered how he felt about tour buses parking out front, whoever he was. A science fiction writer. Isaac Asimov, maybe.
The driver put the bus in gear and pulled away from the curb. “As we drive past the front of the house,” Tonia said, “you'll be able to see his easy chair, where he did most of his reading.”
The bus ground up through the gears and started winding through more neighborhood streets. “Jack Williamson worked on the Portales News-Tribune from 1947 to 1948 and then, with the publication of Darker Than You Think, quit journalism to write full-time,” she said, pausing and glancing at me again, but if she was expecting me to be looking as impressed as everybody else, I wasn't. I'd read a lot of paperbacks in a lot of unair-conditioned motel rooms the last five years, but the name Jack Williamson didn't ring a bell at all.
“From 1960 to 1977, Jack Williamson was a professor at Eastern New Mexico University, which we're coming up on now,” Tonia said. The bus pulled into the college's parking lot and everybody looked eagerly out the windows, even though the campus looked just like every other western college's, brick and glass and not enough trees, sprinklers watering the brownish grass.
“This is the Campus Union,” she said, pointing. The bus made a slow circuit of the parking lot. “And this is Becky Sharp Auditorium, where the annual lecture in his honor is held every spring. It's the week of April twelfth this year.”
It struck me that they hadn't planned very well. They'd managed to miss not only their hero but the annual week in his honor, too.
“Over there is the building where he teaches a science fiction class with Patrice Caldwell,” she said, pointing, “and that, of course, is Golden Library, where the Williamson Collection of his works and awards is housed.” Everyone nodded in recognition.
I expected the driver to open the doors and everybody to pile out to look at the library, but the bus picked up speed and headed out of town.
“We aren't going to the library?” I said.
She shook her head. “Not this tour. At this time the collection's still very small.”
The bus geared up and headed west and south out of town on a two-lane road. NEW MEXICO STATE HIGHWAY 18, a sign read. “Out your windows you can see the Llano Estacado, or Staked Plains,” Tonia said. “They were named, as Jack Williamson says in his autobiography, Wonder's Child, for the stakes Coronado used to mark his way across the plain. Jack Williamson's family moved here in a covered wagon in 1915 to a homestead claim in the sandhills. Here Jack did farm chores, hauled water, collected firewood, and read Treasure Island and David Copperfield.”
At least I'd heard of those books. And Jack had to be at least seventy-nine years old.
“The farm was very poor, with poor soil and almost no water, and after three years the family was forced to move off it and onto a series of sharecrop farms to make ends meet. During this time Jack went to school at Richland and at Center, where he met Blanche Slaten, his future wife. Any questions?”
This had the Deadwood tour all beat for boring, but a bunch of hands went up, and she went down the aisle to answer them, leaning over their seats and pointing out the tinted windows. The old couple got up and went back to talk to the fat guy, holding on to the straps above his seat and gesturing excitedly.
I looked out the window. The Spanish should have named it the Llano Flatto. There wasn't a bump or a dip in it all the way to the horizon.
Everybody, including the kids, was looking out the windows, even though there wasn't anything much to look at. A plowed field of red dirt, a few bored-looking cows, green rows of sprouting green that must be the peanuts, another plowed field. I was getting to see the dirt after all.
Tonia came back to the front and sat down beside me. “Enjoying the tour so far?” she said.
I couldn't think of a good answer to that. “How far is the ranch?” I said.
“Twenty miles. There used to be a town named Pep, but now there's just the ranch…” She paused and then said, “What's your name? You didn't tell me.”
“Carter Stewart,” I said.
“Really?” She smiled at the funniest things. “Are you named after Carter Leigh in ‘Nonstop to Mars’?”
I didn't know what that was. One of Jack Williamson's books, apparently. “I don't know. Maybe.”
“I'm named after Tonia Andros in ‘Dead Star Station.’ And the driver's named after Giles Habibula.”
Th
e tall guy had his hand up again. “I'll be right back,” she said, and hurried down the aisle.
The fat guy's name had been Giles, too, which wasn't exactly a common name, and I'd seen the name “Lethonee” on Tonia's clipboard, which had to be out of a book. But how could somebody I'd never even heard of be so famous people were named after his characters?
They must be a fan club, the kind that makes pilgrimages to Graceland and names their kids Paul and Ringo. They didn't look the part, though. They should be wearing Jack Williamson T-shirts and Spock ears, not Disney World T-shirts. The elderly couple came back and sat down next to me. They smiled and started looking out the window.
They didn't act the part either. The fans I'd met had always had a certain defensiveness, an attitude of “I know you think I'm crazy to like this stuff, and maybe I am,” and they always insisted on explaining how they got to be fans and why you should be one, too. These people had none of that. They acted like coming out here was the most normal thing in the world, even Tonia. And if they were science fiction fans, why weren't they touring Isaac Asimov's ranch? Or William Shatner's?
Tonia came back again and stood over me, holding on to a hanging strap. “You said you were in Portales to see somebody?” she said.
“Yeah. He's supposed to offer me a job.”
“In Portales?” she said, making that sound exciting. “Are you going to take it?”
I'd made up my mind back there in that dead end, but I said, “I don't know. I don't think so. It's a desk job, a steady paycheck, and I wouldn't have to do all the driving I'm doing now.” I found myself telling her about Hammond and the things I wanted to invent and how I was afraid the job would be a dead end.
“‘I had no future,’” she said. “Jack Williamson said that at this year's Williamson Lecture. ‘I had no future. I was a poor kid in the middle of the Depression, without education, without money, without prospects.’”
“It's not the Depression, but otherwise I know how he felt. If I don't take Cross's job, I may not have one. And if I do take it—” I shrugged. “Either way I'm not going anywhere.”
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