travelogue

                             By ROGER DEE

               She seemed to be so much smaller than any
               child would be, turned out with a fragile
               perfection more doll-like than human....

      _Roger Dee returns to these pages with the story of Wesley
  Filburn--diffident, gentle, dreaming Wesley Filburn--whom it seemed
  life had passed by, until something strange and wonderful happened
  to him over on Sampson's Creek, and Wesley became aware of new and
  wonderful worlds--particularly wonderful Sonimuira! A new life had
                                begun!_

           [Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from
                   Fantastic Universe December 1956.
         Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that
         the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]


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:

    _This one just made it, as see the seedy stipend. Can you come up
    with something fresher in the way of alien settings?_

                                                               _Henry._

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:

    _Great stuff; background so convincing I dammed nearly believed in
    it myself. Shoot me another._

                                                               _Henry._

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:

    _The Turlak job went like a collector's item. They're screaming for
    more. Can do?_

                                                               _Henry._

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."