Dawningsburgh

By WALLACE WEST
Illustrated by RUVIDICH
A lean wind wails through the age-old avenues of Dawningsburgh.
Mornings, it brings sand from surrounding hills and scrubs at fresh paint, neon signs endlessly proclaiming the city's synthetic name and street markers in seven languages.
At sunrise it prepares the dunes for footprints of scurrying guided tourists.
When icy night clamps down and the intruders scamper to their hotels, the wind howls as it flings after them a day's collection of paper cups, bottle caps and other picnic offal.
Liars! Cheats! whimpered Betsy O'Reilly as she tossed on the lumpy bed of her third class room and recalled the sky poster that had hypnotized her.
Now, Betsy was disappointed and bored. Slim, pretty, freckled and pert, but ten years older than she wished, she had mortgaged her secretarial salary to engage once more in The Eternal Quest. And, as always, the quest was proving futile. Eligible bachelors shunned Dawningsburgh as they did other expensive tourist traps. The new friends she had made were either loudmouthed, hairy miners en route to or from the orichalcum diggings, or middle-aged couples on tragic second honeymoons, or self-styled emigre artists and novelists intent on cadging free meals and any other favors that lonely females might grant.
But maybe, Betsy tried to console herself, there was something real here; something glamorous that she could find and cling to during the long months back in New York when she would have to subsist on soups and salads in order to pay her debt to Trans-Plan. Mars had been great, the guides insisted. Once, they said, it had even colonized Atlantis. Perhaps, under the sham and away from those awful conducted tours, something was still left that could make her feel a trifle less forlorn.
Betsy jumped out of bed and rummaged in a closet. There it was! A heated emergency garment equipped with plastic helmet, air pack and a searchlight. Required by law but seldom used, since tourists were told to stay off the 60° below zero streets at night.