That planet, called Turlak, was unique in the galaxy. Caught at a focal point between its various primaries, it suffered every extreme of heat and cold, of grinding glacier and roaring volcano. Approach or retreat of an ascendant sun could double a visitor's weight or levitate him; the air itself rushed from hemisphere to hemisphere in a continuous demoniac hurricane.
The possibilities were unlimited.
Out of them Wesley contrived for an exploring party to crash under Turlak's freakish gravity, for a beautiful girl ecologist to be snatched from the ship by the perpetual hurricane and for the expedition's handsome young hydroponicist to rescue her. Because there were no convenient inimical life forms on Turlak, Wesley threw in a couple of logical menaces in the way of red-hot lava serpents and bat-winged flying crocodiles whose natural element was the rushing wind.
The following week saw this thumbnail synopsis turned into another novelet, less idyllic but more hectic than the first. He handed it over, weighed and stamped and sealed with scotch tape, to Charlie Birdsall on the morning of the first Monday in May.
Charlie eyed the flat packet with respect. "Looks like you're getting the range," he said. "Wes, if you turn 'em out regular like this for the price that last one brought, you've got it made."
He squinted appraisingly when Wesley made deprecating sounds. "I'd keep it quiet if I was you, though. Miriam will want to renovate the inn after you're married, maybe add a new wing."
Wesley stiffened. "How did you know?"
"The announcement was in yesterday's paper," Charlie told him.
Miriam had wasted no time, Wesley thought. Confound it, you'd almost think she was deliberately burning his bridges behind him by making the thing public before he could reconsider.
Charlie startled him further.