Britt was silent for a moment, contemplating the end of his cigar.
"And, of course, you're curious about the conflicting stories that are spread around the system," he suggested. "Well, there was a woman, Mr. Peache, but I'm afraid what occurred has nothing to do with your theory."
West o' Mars (said Britt) represents a dream I have cherished, I think, since boyhood. I think the seed of the dream must have been sown when I saw the early newsfilms of the dome-cities on Luna and Mars.
The dream drove me to study architecture. Man was expanding swiftly into space and my primary interest was in extra-terrestrial design. I faced a bright future.
But twenty years ago, when I met Dori, the realization of West o' Mars seemed farther away than it had in boyhood. An architect's draftsman is paid well but not lavishly, and you can imagine what sort of wealth was required to build a place like this, forty million miles from Earth.
My trouble was, I was in a hurry. My weakness was, I knew that the turn of a card or the roll of the dice could double my weekly salary. It could but, of course, as often as not it didn't. Consequently, I might be rich for a day, only to go hungry for a week.
It was during one of the hungry periods in 2060 that I attended a meeting of the Astronaut Club for the sake of my stomach. I was living then in Huntsville, the Alabama spaceport city, and it was for business reasons that I belonged to the Astronaut Club.
The food was fair, the speeches dull. I was little interested in the entertainment that was to follow, but I wanted to finish my cigar and coffee. The entertainment, it turned out, was Dori.
Her father came out of the wings first, a consumptive old man with a shock of unkempt gray hair. In the center of the table he laid a small rubber ball, a coin and a pair of dice.