No cameras. No gift shop. No littering or trespassing or whining. What kind of tour is this? I thought.
"He predicted 'a new Golden Age of fair cities, of new laws and new machines,'" Tonia was saying, "'of human capabilities undreamed of, of a civilization that has conquered matter and Nature, distance and time, disease and death.'"
He'd imagined the same kind of future I'd imagined. I wondered if he'd ever tried selling his ideas to farmers. Which brought me back to the job, which I'd managed to avoid thinking about almost all day.
Tonia came and stood across from me, holding on to the center pole. "'A poor country kid, poorly educated, unhappy with his whole environment, longing for something else,'" she said. "That's how Jack Williamson described himself in 1928." She looked at me. "You're not going to take the job, are you?"
"I don't think so," I said. "I don't know."
She looked out the window at the fields and cows, looking disappointed. "When he first moved here, this was all sagebrush and drought and dust. He couldn't imagine what was going to happen any more than you can right now."
"And the answer's in a drugstore window?"
"The answer was inside him," she said. She stood up and addressed the group. "We'll be coming into Portales in a minute," she said. "In 1928, Jack Williamson wrote, 'Science is the doorway to the future, scientification, the golden key. It goes ahead and lights the way. And when science sees the things made real in the author's mind, it makes them real indeed.'"
The tour group applauded, and the bus pulled into the parking lot of the Portales Inn. I waited for the rush, but nobody moved. "We're not staying here," Tonia explained.
"Oh," I said, getting up. "You didn't have to give me door-to-door service. You could have let me out at wherever you're staying, and I could have walked over."
"That's all right," Tonia said, smiling.
"Well," I said, unwilling to say goodbye. "Thanks for a really interesting tour. Can I take you to dinner or something? To thank you for letting me come?"
"I can't," she said. "I have to check everybody in and everything."
"Yeah," I said. "Well..."
Giles the driver opened the door with a whoosh of air.
"Thanks," I said. I nodded to the old couple. "Thanks for sharing your seat," and stepped down off the bus.
"Why don't you come with us tomorrow?" she said. "We're going to go see Number 5516."
Number 5516 sounded like a county highway and probably was, the road Jack Williamson walked to school along or something, complete with peanuts and dirt, at which the group would gaze reverently and not take pictures. "I've got an appointment tomorrow," I said, and realized I didn't want to say goodbye to her. "Next time. When's your next tour?"
"I thought you were just passing through." "Like you said, a lot of nice people live around here. Do you bring a lot of tours through here?"
"Now and then," she said, her cheeks bright red. I watched the bus pull out of the parking lot and down the street. I looked at my watch. 4:45. At least an hour till I could justify dinner. At least five hours till I could justify bed. I went in the Inn and then changed my mind and went back out to the car and drove out to see where Cross's office was so I wouldn't have trouble in the morning, in case it was hard to find.
It wasn't. It was on the south edge of town on Highway 70, a little past the Motel Super 8. The tour bus wasn't in the parking lot of the Super 8, or at the Hillcrest, or the Sands Motel. They must have gone to Roswell or Tucumcari for the night. I looked at my watch again. It was 5:05.
I drove back through town, looking for someplace to eat. McDonald's, Taco Bell, Burger King. There's nothing wrong with fast food, except that it's fast. I needed a place where it took half an hour to get a menu and another twenty minutes before they took your order.
I ended up eating at Pizza Hut (personal pan pizza in under five minutes or your money back). "Do you get a lot of tour bus business?" I asked the waitress.
"In Portales? You have to be kidding," she said. "In case you haven't noticed, Portales is right on the road to nowhere. Do you want a box for the rest of that pizza?"
The box was a good idea. It took her ten minutes to bring it, which meant it was nearly six by the time I left. Only four hours left to kill. I filled up the car at Allsup's and bought a sixpack of Coke. Next to the magazines was a rack of paperbacks.
"Any Jack Williamson books?" I asked the kid at the counter.
"Who?" he said.
I spun the rack around slowly. John Grisham. Danielle Steel. Stephen King's latest thousand-page effort. No Jack Williamson. "Is there a bookstore in town?" I asked the kid.
"Huh?"
He'd never heard of that either. "A place where I can buy a book?"
"Alco has books, I think," he said. "But they closed at five."
"How about a drugstore?" I said, thinking of that copy of Amazing Stories.
Still blank. I gave up, paid him for the gas and the sixpack, and started out to the car.
"You mean a drugstore like aspirin and stuff?" the kid said. "There's Van Winkle's."
"When do they close?" I asked, and got directions.
Van Winkle's was a grocery store. It had two aisles of "aspirin and stuff" and half an aisle of paperbacks. More Grisham. Jurassic Park. Tom Clancy. And The Legion of Time by Jack Williamson. It looked like it had been there a while. It had a faded fifties-style cover and dog-eared edges.
I took it up to the check-out. "What's it like having a famous writer living here?" I asked the middle-aged clerk.
She picked up the book. "The guy who wrote this lives in Portales?" she said. "Really?"
Which brought us up to 6:22. But at least now I had something to read. I went back to the Portales Inn and up to my room, opened a can of Coke and all the windows, and sat down to read The Legion of Time, which was about a girl who'd traveled back in time to tell the hero about the future.
"The future has been held to be as real as the past," the book said, and the girl in the book was able to travel between one and the other as easily as the tour had traveled down New Mexico Highway 18.
I closed the book and thought about the tour. They didn't have a single camera, and they weren't afraid of rattlesnakes. And they'd looked out at the Llano Flatto like they'd never seen a field or a cow before. And they all knew who Jack Williamson was, unlike the kid at Allsup's or the clerk at Van Winkle's. They were all willing to spend two days looking at abandoned shacks and dirt roads—no, wait, three days. Tonia'd said they'd gone to the drugstore yesterday.
I had an idea. I opened the drawer of the nightstand, looking for a phone book. There wasn't one. I went downstairs to the lobby and asked for one. The blue-haired lady at the desk handed me one about the size of The Legion of Time, and I flipped to the Yellow Pages.
There was a Thrifty Drug, which was a chain, and a couple that sounded locally owned but weren't downtown. "Where's B. and J. Drugs?" I asked. "Is it close to downtown?"
"A couple of blocks," the old lady said. "How long has it been in business?" "Let's see," she said. "It was there when Nora was little because I remember buying medicine that time she had the croup. She would have been six, or was that when she had the measles? No, the measles were the summer she ..."
I'd have to ask B. and J. "I've got another question," I said, and hoped I wouldn't get an answer like the last one. "What time does the university library open tomorrow?"
She gave me a brochure. The library opened at 8:00 and the Williamson Collection at 9:30. I went back up to the room and tried B. and J. Drugs. They weren't open.