"When you wake up some morning on a leash," Charlie said, "don't say I didn't warn you." He put his car into gear and departed.
In his room, Wesley opened the letter first. There was a check for forty dollars, as Charlie had said, and a terse note from his agent that said:
This one just made it, as see the seedy stipend. Can you come up with something fresher in the way of alien settings?
Henry.
Wesley reserved answer until the packet was opened and his first brochure scanned.
"I can now," he said.
His eyes filled and his hands shook with the beauty and the wonder of it. The folder was like the one he had examined at Clelling-Herif's way-station, but with a difference; here colors and perspective had been rescaled to suit his familiar values, and the exposition was in beautifully lucid English.
He fingered the round-trip coupons at the bottom of the last page. "To see a place like that," he said reverently. "If I only had the nerve...."
But he lacked the nerve, and knew it—how ever to explain it all to his Aunt Jessica?—and settled on the brochure as compensation in itself. It solved his difficulties with Aldhaferian story before he had finished the first two pages. The second planet of Aldhafera's major twin was precisely what he had needed for his space-rover's utopia, but with innovations wonderful to behold.
Its dominant race owned a corner on pleasant privacy that put Swift's Laputans, with their magnetic flying island, to shame; this world was dotted with air-borne masses of tiny, gas-filled aerophytes which multiplied after the fashion of coral polyps to build personal estates of any size from a few acres to whole square miles. On these luxurious clouds, in sylvan groves and orchid gardens and dew-bright dells, lived a benevolent race of humanoids further advanced in the gentle art of keeping the peace with one another than humanity was ever likely to be.