There was a tour bus in the Inn's parking lot. NONSTOP TOURS, it said in red and gray letters, and a long line of people was getting on it. A young woman was standing by the door of the bus, ticking off names on a clipboard. She was cute, with short yellow hair and a nice figure. She was wearing a light blue T-shirt and a short denim skirt.
An older couple in Bermuda shorts and Disney World T-shirts were climbing the stairs onto the bus, slowing up the line.
"Hi," I said to the tour guide. "What's going on?"
She looked up from her list at me, startled, and the old couple froze halfway up the steps. The tour guide looked down at her clipboard and then back up at me, and the startled look was gone, but her cheeks were as red as the letters on the side of the bus.
"We're taking a tour of the local sights," she said. She motioned to the next person in line, a fat guy in a Hawaiian shirt, and the old couple went on up the steps and into the bus.
"I didn't think there were any," I said. "Local sights."
The fat guy was gaping at me.
"Name?" the tour guide said.
"Giles H. Paul," he said, still staring at me. She motioned him onto the bus.
"Name?" I said, and she looked startled all over again. "What's your name? It's probably on that clipboard in case you've forgotten it."
She smiled. "Tonia Randall."
"So, Tonia, where's this tour headed?"
"We're going out to the ranch."
"The ranch?"
"Where he grew up," she said, her cheeks flaming again. She motioned to the next person in line. "Where he got his start."
Where who started to what? I wanted to ask, but she was busy with a tall man who moved almost as stiffly as the old couple, and anyway, it was obvious everybody in line knew who she was talking about. They couldn't wait to get on the bus, and the young couple who were last in line kept pointing things out to their little kid— the courthouse, the Portales Inn sign, a big tree on the other side of the street.
"Is it private? Your tour?" I said. "Can anybody pay to go on it?" And what was I doing? I'd taken a tour in the Black Hills one time, when I'd had my job about a month and still wanted to see the sights, and it was even more depressing than thinking about the future. Looking out blue-tinted windows while the tour guide tells memorized facts and unfunny jokes. Trooping off the bus to look at Wild Bill Hickok's grave for five minutes, trooping back on. Listening to bawling kids and complaining wives. I didn't want to go on this tour.
But when Tonia blushed and said, "No, I'm sorry," I felt a rush of disappointment at not seeing her again.
"Sure," I said, because I didn't want her to see it. "Just wondering. Well, have a nice time," and started for the front door of the Inn.
"Wait," she said, leaving the couple and their kid standing there and coming over to me. "Do you live here in Portales?"
"No," I said, and realized I'd decided not to take the job. "Just passing through. I came to town to see a guy. I got here early, and there's nothing to do. That ever happen to you?"
She smiled, as if I'd said something funny. "So you don't know anyone here?" "No," I said.
"Do you know the person you've got the appointment with?"
I shook my head, wondering what that had to do with anything.
She consulted her clipboard again. "It seems a pity for you to miss seeing it," she said, "and if you're just passing through . . . Just a minute." She walked back to the bus, stepped up inside, and said something to the driver. They consulted a few minutes, and then she came back down the steps. The couple and their kid came up to her, and she stopped a minute and checked their names off and waved them onto the bus, and then came back over to me. "The bus is full. Do you mind standing?"
Bawling kids, videocams, and no place to sit to go see the ranch where somebody I'd probably never heard of got his start. At least I'd heard of Billy the Kid, and if I drove over to Fort Sumner I could take as long as I wanted to look at his grave. "No," I said. "I wouldn't mind." I pulled out my wallet. "Maybe I better ask before we go any farther, how much is the tour?"
She looked startled again. "No charge. Because the tour's already full."
"Great," I said. "I'd like to go."
She smiled and motioned me on board with her clipboard. Inside, it looked more like a city bus than a tour bus—the front and back seats were sideways along the walls, and there were straps for hanging onto. There was even a cord for signaling your stop, which might come in handy if the tour turned out to be as bad as the Wild Bill Hickok tour. I grabbed hold of a strap near the front.
The bus was packed with people of all ages. A white-haired man older than the Disney World couple, middle-aged people, teenagers, kids. I counted at least four under age five. I wondered if I should yank the cord right now.
Tonia counted heads and nodded to the driver. The door whooshed shut, and the bus lumbered out of the parking lot and slowly through a neighborhood of trees and tract houses. The Disney World couple were sitting in the front seat. They scooted over to make room for me, and I gestured to Tonia, but she motioned me to sit down.
She put down her clipboard and held on to the pole just behind the driver's seat. "The first stop on today's tour," she said, "will be the house. He did the greater part of his work here," and I began to wonder if I was going to go the whole tour without ever finding out who the tour was about. When she'd said "the ranch," I'd assumed it was some Old West figure, but these houses had all been built in the thirties and forties.
"He moved into this house with his wife, Blanche, shortly after they were married."
The bus ground down its gears and stopped next to a white house with a porch on a corner lot.
"He lived here from 1947 to ..." She paused and looked sideways at me. "... the present. It was while he was living here that he wrote Seetee Ship and The Black Sun and came up with the idea of genetic engineering."
He was a writer, which narrowed it down some, but none of the titles she'd mentioned rang a bell. But he was famous enough to fill a tour bus, so his books must have been turned into movies. Tom Clancy? Stephen King? I'd have expected both of them to have a lot fancier houses.
"The windows in front are the living room," Tonia said. "You can't see his study from here. It's on the south side of the house. That's where he keeps his Grand Master Nebula Award, right above where he works."
That didn't ring a bell either, but everybody looked impressed, and the couple with the kid got out of their seats to peer out the tinted windows. "The two rear windows are the kitchen, where he read the paper and watched TV at breakfast before going to work. He used a typewriter and then in later years a personal computer. He's not at home this weekend. He's out of town at a science fiction convention."
Which was probably a good thing. I wondered how he felt about tour buses parking out front, whoever he was. A science fiction writer. Isaac Asimov, maybe.
The driver put the bus in gear and pulled away from the curb. "As we drive past the front of the house," Tonia said, "you'll be able to see his easy chair, where he did most of his reading."
The bus ground up through the gears and started winding through more neighborhood streets. "Jack Williamson worked on the Portales News-Tribune from 1947 to 1948 and then, with the publication of Darker Than You Think, quit journalism to write full-time," she said, pausing and glancing at me again, but if she was expecting me to be looking as impressed as everybody else, I wasn't. I'd read a lot of paperbacks in a lot of un-air-conditioned motel rooms the last five years, but the name Jack Williamson didn't ring a bell at all.