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.