Boy meets dyevitza

By ROBERT F. YOUNG
Illustrated by BIRMINGHAM
For the incurable romantics among us, the power of love to conquer everything cannot be overestimated. And so let us read this gentle, pleasant, warm-hearted tale, knowing as we do that the story it tells is very likely impossible, but yet hoping, perhaps, that it could all end this way.
A thrilling news bulletin, dated September 11, 1996, was recently handed to me by an assistant who is too young to remember the star over Moscow, and it is toward him and others like him that the following history is directed. If it resembles fiction more than it does fact, the similarity is wholly intentional, for it is only through fiction that the past can be brought back to life.
When Gordon Andrews first saw the girl, he took it for granted that she was a Venusian—a natural enough assumption in view of the fact that he was on Venus. She was kneeling beside a small brook, humming a little tune and washing out a pair of stockings, and so intent was she on her tune and her task that she did not hear him when he stepped out of the forest behind her. Her bobbed hair was the color of horse chestnuts, and her clothing consisted of gray culottes, a gray blouse, black leather boots and a small gray kepi. The tune she was humming was a passage from Tchaikovsky's Swan Lake .
Thus far, Gordon had taken Venus pretty much in his stride. The data supplied by the Venus probes during the early 60's, while obscure with regard to her cloud-cover, had conclusively disproved former theories to the effect that she lacked a breathable atmosphere and possessed a surface temperature of more than 100 degrees Centigrade, and had prepared him for what he had found—an atmosphere richer in oxygen content than Earth's, a comfortable climate, and a planet-wide sea, unbroken as yet save for an equatorial land mass no larger than a modest island. The data, by its very nature, had also prepared him for the possibility of human life. It had not prepared him, however, for a Venusian maiden on humming terms with Swan Lake . Small wonder, then, that he gasped.