INCONSTANCY
By ROGER DEE
Illustrated by SUMMERS
The trouble with a Martian-Terran romance
is that it has to buck things like tradition.
Up on Mars, when they sing "If you were the only
girl in the world," they really mean it.
[Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from
Amazing Stories January 1962.
Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that
the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]
His first day on Earth promised to be even worse than Mirrh Yahn y Cona had feared when he left Yrml Orise y Yrl, his fiancee, to become Mars' first interplanetary ambassador. The frenetic bustle of Denver spaceport, his ominous spiriting away through screaming hordes of spectators, left him bewildered and uneasy.
Alone in the first brief privacy of his Denver Heptagon apartment, he ideographed a facsimile transmission to Yrml at once. "I long for you already," he said. "And for the serenity of home. Earthpeople are as barbarous and mercurial as their weather."
Babelous decades of taped newsreels and video serials should have prepared him for that inconstancy, but the first-hand reality was appalling. He would gladly have returned home at once, before planetary conjunction's end cut him off for two interminable years, but for the inevitable stumbling-block: Earth had sent an exchange of her own, and Mirrh Yahn y Cona could not back down without disgracing his planet as well as himself.
"Write often," he pleaded, in closing. "That I may take comfort in your steadfast regard even in this simian hurlyburly."