The Winds of Marble Arch and Other Stories (40 page)

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 white-haired man older than the Disney World couple, middle-aged 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. “…he 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 un-air-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 auto-biography,
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.”

The 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.”

“Oh, but to have a chance to live in the same town with Jack Williamson,” Tonia said. “To run into him at the supermarket, and maybe even get to take one of his classes.”