"Maybe you know what you're doing, at that," Charlie said cryptically. "Maybe you're keen enough to know a good deal when you see one, after all."
He put the car into gear and paused with a foot on the clutch. "So busy talking I nearly forgot I had another one of those tourist ads for you. What did you do, join a vacation club?"
"In a way," Wesley said. "I won't have a chance to use it, though."
"Tough," Charlie said, and drove away.
To distract resentful thought Wesley turned to his Adventure again, forgetting in the fascination of his third brochure that, for him, doom rhymed with June. The locale this time was a planet called Porizinia, circling Alpha Bootis—Arcturus. No life existed upon the surface of Porizinia because of her primary's tremendous heat, but the subterranean world below was something else again. The planet was largely igneous and so translucent, clear enough to let Arcturus light with fairy luminescence the endless labyrinth of caverns and tunnels that made up a nether environment all their own.
The maze was filled in its lower levels with a buried ocean that ran in crystal tides past coral shoals where mermaid autochthons sunned themselves in the filtered glow and sang siren songs to enchant visitors. Those sections passable to air-breathers were carefully designated. Wesley, fingering the round-trip coupons at the end of the brochure, was startled to find himself eaten with the desire to see the place at first hand.
He rejected the impulse partly because he knew the outcry his Aunt Jessica and Miriam would set up and partly because he understood it for what it was, an instinctive groping for an escape from the catastrophe of June.
It was better in any case to wait, he decided, recalling the near-impish look of Herif when she had promised that he would like the Sonimuiran travelogue. What, he wondered, was Sonimuira like?
Before the Porizinian story was finished he had another note from his agent: