DAWNINGSBURGH
By WALLACE WEST
Illustrated by RUVIDICH
[Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from
Galaxy Magazine June 1962.
Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that
the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]
A lean wind wails through the age-old avenues of Dawningsburgh.
Mornings, it brings sand from surrounding hills and scrubs at freshpaint, neon signs endlessly proclaiming the city's synthetic name andstreet markers in seven languages.
At sunrise it prepares the dunes for footprints of scurrying guidedtourists.
When icy night clamps down and the intruders scamper to their hotels,the wind howls as it flings after them a day's collection of papercups, bottle caps and other picnic offal.
"Liars! Cheats!" whimpered Betsy O'Reilly as she tossed on the lumpybed of her third class room and recalled the sky poster that hadhypnotized her.
Now, Betsy was disappointed and bored. Slim, pretty, freckled and pert,but ten years older than she wished, she had mortgaged her secretarialsalary to engage once more in The Eternal Quest. And, as always, thequest was proving futile. Eligible bachelors shunned Dawningsburghas they did other expensive tourist traps. The "new friends" shehad made were either loudmouthed, hairy miners en route to or fromthe orichalcum diggings, or middle-aged couples on tragic secondhoneymoons, or self-styled emigre artists and novelists intent oncadging free meals and any other favors that lonely females might grant.
But maybe, Betsy tried to console herself, there was something realhere; something glamorous that she could find and cling to during thelong months back in New York when she would have to subsist on soupsand salads in order to pay her debt to Trans-Plan. Mars had been great,the guides insisted. Once, they said, it had even colonized Atlantis.Perhaps, under the sham and away from those awful conducted tours,something was still left that could make her feel a trifle lessforlorn.
Betsy jumped out of bed and rummaged in a closet. There it was! Aheated emergency garment equipped with plastic helmet, air pack and asearchlight. Required by law but seldom used, since tourists were toldto stay off the 60° below zero streets at night.
Wriggling into the clumsy thing, she tested valves and switches as shehad been instructed. Then she tiptoed out of her cubbyhole, down acorridor and into the hotel lobby.
The room clerk did not greet her with its usual trill. A robot, builton Earth as a "stand-in" for one of the vanished Martians, it hadturned itself off when the last tourists left the dining room for theirbeds. But how lifelike it still looked, balancing on a perch behind theornate plastic desk. And how human too, despite the obviously avianancestry of the race it mimicked. What was it the guides had said aboutthe way in which all intelligent lifeforms so far discovered closelyresembled one another? Why, even artificial Martians made the averagehuman look drab and clumsy.
Betsy circled the overdecorated room like a shadow and pushed againstthe street door. Escaping air whistled through the crack.
"Miss!" squawked the clerk, triggered alive by the noise. "Don't...."
She was outside by then and running through the crazy half-light thrownby Mars's nearer and farther moons.