The Winds of Marble Arch and Other Stories

by Connie Willis

  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.

  “From 1960 to 1977, Jack Williamson was a professor at Eastern New Mexico University, which we’re coming up on now,” Tonia said. The bus pulled into the college’s parking lot and everybody looked eagerly out the windows, even though the campus looked just like every other western college’s, brick and glass and not enough trees, sprinklers watering the brownish grass.

  “This is the Campus Union,” she said, pointing. The bus made a slow circuit of the parking lot. “And this is Becky Sharp Auditorium, where the annual lecture in his honor is held every spring. It’s the week of April twelfth this year.”

  It struck me that they hadn’t planned very well. They’d managed to miss not only their hero but the annual week in his honor, too.

  “Over there is the building where he teaches a science fiction class with Patrice Caldwell,” she said, pointing, “and that, of course, is Golden Library, where the Williamson Collection of his works and awards is housed.” Everyone nodded in recognition.

  I expected the driver to open the doors and everybody to pile out to look at the library, but the bus picked up speed and headed out of town.

  “We aren’t going to the library?” I said.

  She shook her head. “Not this tour. At this time the collection’s still very small.”

  The bus geared up and headed west and south out of town on a two-lane road. “New Mexico State Highway 18,” a sign read. “Out your windows you can see the Llano Estacado, or Staked Plains,” Tonia said. “They were named, as Jack Williamson says in his auto-biography, Wonder’s Child, for the stakes Coronado used to mark his way across the plain. Jack Williamson’s family moved here in a covered wagon in 1915 to a homestead claim in the sandhills. Here Jack did farm chores, hauled water, collected firewood, and read Treasure Island and David Copperfield.”

  At least I’d heard of those books. And Jack had to be at least seventy-nine years old.

  “The farm was very poor, with poor soil and almost no water, and after three years the family was forced to move off it and onto a series of sharecrop farms to make ends meet. During this time Jack went to school at Richland and at Center, where he met Blanche Slaten, his future wife. Any questions?”

  This had the Deadwood tour all beat for boring, but a bunch of hands went up, and she went down the aisle to answer them, leaning over their seats and pointing out the tinted windows. The old couple got up and went back to talk to the fat guy, holding on to the straps above his seat and gesturing excitedly.

  I looked out the window. The Spanish should have named it the Llano Flatto. There wasn’t a bump or a dip in it all the way to the horizon.

  Everybody, including the kids, was looking out the windows, even though there wasn’t anything much to look at. A plowed field of red dirt, a few bored-looking cows, green rows of sprouting green that must be the peanuts, another plowed field. I was getting to see the dirt after all.

  Tonia came back to the front and sat down beside me. “Enjoying the tour so far?” she said.

  I couldn’t think of a good answer to that. “How far is the ranch?” I said.

  “Twenty miles. There used to be a town named Pep, but now there’s just the ranch…” She paused and then said, “What’s your name? You didn’t tell me.”

  “Carter Stewart,” I said.

  “Really?” She smiled at the funniest things. “Are you named after Carter Leigh in ‘Nonstop to Mars’?”

  I didn’t know what that was. One of Jack Williamson’s books, apparently. “I don’t know. Maybe.”

  “I’m named after Tonia Andros in ‘Dead Star Station.’ And the driver’s named after Giles Habibula.”

  The tall guy had his hand up again. “I’ll be right back,” she said, and hurried down the aisle.

  The fat guy’s name had been Giles, too, which wasn’t exactly a common name, and I’d seen the name “Lethonee” on Tonia’s clipboard, which had to be out of a book. But how could somebody I’d never even heard of be so famous people were named after his characters?

  They must be a fan club, the kind that makes pilgrimages to Graceland and names their kids Paul and Ringo. They didn’t look the part, though. They should be wearing Jack Williamson T-shirts and Spock ears, not Disney World T-shirts. The elderly couple came back and sat down next to me. They smiled and started looking out the window.

  They didn’t act the part either. The fans I’d met had always had a certain defensiveness, an attitude of “I know you think I’m crazy to like this stuff, and maybe I am,” and they always insisted on explaining how they got to be fans and why you should be one, too. These people had none of that. They acted like coming out here was the most normal thing in the world, even Tonia. And if they were science fiction fans, why weren’t they touring Isaac Asimov’s ranch? Or William Shatner’s?

  Tonia came back again and stood over me, holding on to a hanging strap. “You said you were in Portales to see somebody?” she said.

  “Yeah. He’s supposed to offer me a job.”

  “In Portales?” she said, making that sound exciting. “Are you going to take it?”

  I’d made up my mind back there in that dead end, but I said, “I don’t know. I don’t think so. It’s a desk job, a steady paycheck, and I wouldn’t have to do all the driving I’m doing now.” I found myself telling her about Hammond and the things I wanted to invent and how I was afraid the job would be a dead end.

  “‘I had no future,’” she said. “Jack Williamson said that at this year’s Williamson Lecture. ‘I had no future. I was a poor kid in the middle of the Depression, without education, without money, without prospects.’”

  “It’s not the Depression, but otherwise I know how he felt. If I don’t take Cross’s job, I may not have one. And if I do take it—” I shrugged. “Either way I’m not going anywhere.”

  “Oh, but to have a chance to live in the same town with Jack Williamson,” Tonia said. “To run into him at the supermarket, and maybe even get to take one of his classes.”

  “Maybe you should take Cross’s job offer,” I said.

  “I can’t.” Her cheeks went bright red again. “I’ve already got a job.” She straightened up and addressed the tour group. “We’ll be coming to the turnoff to the ranch soon,” she said. “Jack Williamson lived here with his family from 1915 till World War II, when he joined the army, and again after the war until he married Blanche.”

  The bus slowed almost to a stop and turned onto a dirt road hardly as wide as the bus was that led off between two fields of fenced pastureland.

  “The farm was originally a homestead,” Tonia said, and everyone murmured appreciatively and looked out the windows at more dirt and a couple of clumps of yucca.

  “He was living here when he read his first issue of Amazing Stories Quarterly,” she said, “and when he submitted his first story to Amazing. That was ‘The Metal Man,’ which, as you remember from yesterday, he saw in the window of the drugstore.”

  “I see it!” the tall man shouted, leaning forward over the back of the driver’s seat. “I see it!” Everyone craned forward, trying to see, and we pulled up in front of some outbuildings and stopped.

  The driver whooshed the doors open, and everyone filed off the bus and stood in the rutted dirt road, looking excitedly at the unpainted sheds and the water trough. A
black heifer looked up incuriously and then went back to chewing on the side of one of the sheds.

  Tonia assembled everyone in the road with her clipboard.

  “That’s the ranch house over there,” she said, pointing at a low green house with a fenced yard and a willow tree. “Jack Williamson lived here with his parents, his brother Jim, and his sisters Jo and Katie. It was here that Jack Williamson wrote ‘The Girl from Mars’ and The Legion of Space, working at the kitchen table. His uncle had given him a basketmodel Remington typewriter with a dim purple ribbon, and he typed his stories on it after everyone had gone to bed. Jack Williamson’s brother Jim…” she paused and glanced at me, “owns the ranch at this time. He and his wife are in Arizona this weekend.”

  Amazing. They’d managed to miss them all, but nobody seemed to mind, and it struck me suddenly what was unusual about this tour. Nobody complained. That’s all they’d done on the Wild Bill Hickok tour. Half of them hadn’t known who he was, and the other half had complained that it was too expensive, too hot, too far, the windows on the bus didn’t open, the gift shop didn’t sell Coke. If their tour guide had announced the wax museum was closed, he’d have had a riot on his hands.

  “It was difficult for him to write in the midst of the family,” she said, leading off away from the house toward a pasture. “There were frequent interruptions and too much noise, so in 1934 he built a separate cabin. Be careful,” she said, skirting around a clump of sagebrush. “There are sometimes rattlesnakes.”

  That apparently didn’t bother anybody either. They trooped after her across a field of dry, spiny grass and gathered around a weathered gray shack.

  “This is the actual cabin he wrote in,” Tonia said.

  I wouldn’t have called it a cabin. It hardly even qualified as a shack. When I’d first seen it as we pulled up, I’d thought it was an abandoned outhouse. Four gray wood-slat walls, half falling down, a sagging gray shelf, some rusted cans. When Tonia started talking, a farm cat leaped down from where it had been sleeping under what was left of the roof and took off like a shot across the field.

  “It had a desk, files, bookshelves, and later a separate bedroom,” Tonia said.

  It didn’t look big enough for a typewriter, let alone a bed, but this was obviously what all these people had come to see. They stood reverently before it in the spiky grass, like it was the Washington Monument or something, and gazed at the weathered boards and rusted cans, not saying anything.

  “He installed electric lights,” Tonia said, “which were run by a small windmill, and a bath. He still had occasional interruptions—from snakes and once from a skunk who took up residence under the cabin. He wrote ‘Dead Star Station’ here, and ‘The Meteor Girl,’ his first story to include time travel. ‘If the field were strong enough,’” he said in the story, “‘we could bring physical objects through space-time instead of mere visual images.’”

  They all found that amusing for no reason I could see and then stood there some more, looking reverent. Tonia came over to me. “Well, what do you think?” she said, smiling.

  “Tell me about him seeing ‘The Metal Man’ in the drugstore,” I said.

  “Oh, I forgot you weren’t with us at the drugstore,” she said. “Jack Williamson sent his first story to Amazing Stories in 1928 and then never heard anything back. In the fall of that year he was shopping for groceries, and he looked in the window of a drugstore and saw a magazine with a picture on the cover that looked like it could be his story, and when he went in, he was so excited to see his story in print, he bought all three copies of the magazine and went off without the groceries he’d been carrying.”

  “So then he had prospects?”

  She said seriously, “He said, ‘I had no future. And then I looked in the drugstore window and saw Hugo Gernsback’s Amazing Stories, and it gave me a future.’”

  “I wish somebody would give me a future,” I said.

  “‘No one can predict the future, he can only point the way.’ He said that, too.”

  She went over to the shack and addressed the group. “He also wrote ‘Nonstop to Mars,’ my favorite story, in this cabin,” she said to the group, “and it was right here that he proposed the idea of colonizing Mars and…” She paused, but this time it was the stiff tall man she glanced at. “…invented the idea of androids.”

  They continued to look. All of them walked around the shack two or three times, pointing at loose boards and tin cans, stepping back to get a better look, walking around it again. None of them seemed to be in any hurry to go. The Deadwood tour had lasted all of ten minutes at Mount Moriali Cemetery, with one of the kids whining, “Can’t we go now?” the whole time, but this group acted like they could stay here all day. One of them got out a notebook and started writing things down. The couple with the kid took her over to the heifer, and all three of them patted her gingerly.

  After a while Tonia and the driver passed out paper bags and everybody sat down in the pasture, rattlesnakes and all, and had lunch. Stale sandwiches, cardboard cookies, cans of lukewarm Coke, but nobody complained. Or left any litter.

  They neatly packed everything back in the bags and then walked around the shack some more, looking in the empty windows and scaring a couple more farm cats, or just sat and looked at it. A couple of them went over to the fence and gazed longingly over it at the ranch house.

  “It’s too bad there’s nobody around to show them the house,” I said. “People don’t usually go off and leave a ranch with nobody to look after the animals. I wonder if there’s somebody around. Whoever it is would probably give you a tour of the ranch house.”

  “It’s Jack’s niece Betty,” Tonia said promptly. “She had to go up to Clovis today to get a part for the water pump. She won’t be back till four.” She stood up, brushing dead grass and dirt off her skirt. “All right, everybody. It’s time to go.”

  There was a discontented murmuring, and one of the kids said, “Do we have to go already?”, but everybody picked up their lunch bags and Coke cans and started for the bus. Tonia ticked off their names on her clipboard as they got on like she was afraid one of them might jump ship and take up residence among the rattlesnakes.

  “Carter Stewart,” I told her. “Where to next? The drugstore?”

  She shook her head. “We went there yesterday. Where’s Underhill?” She started across the road again, with me following her.

  The tall man was standing silently in front of the shack, looking in at the empty room. He stood absolutely motionless, his eyes fixed on the gray weathered boards, and when Tonia said, “Underhill? I’m afraid we need to go,” he continued to stand there for a long minute, like he was trying to store up the memory. Then he turned and walked stiffly past us and back to the bus.

  Tonia counted heads again, and the bus made a slow circle past the ranchhouse, turning around, and started back along the dirt road. Nobody said anything, and when we got to the highway, everyone turned around in their seats for a last look. The old couple dabbed at their eyes, and one of the kids stood up on the rear seat and waved goodbye. The tall man was sitting with his head buried in his hands.

  “The cabin you’ve just seen was where it all started,” Tonia said, “with a copy of a pulp magazine and a lot of imagination.” She told how Jack Williamson had become a meteorologist and a college professor, as well as a science fiction writer, traveled to Italy, Mexico, the Great Wall of China, all of which must have been impossible for him to imagine, sitting all alone in that poor excuse for a shack, typing on an old typewriter with a faded ribbon.

  I was only half listening. I was thinking about the tall guy, Underhill, and trying to figure out what was wrong about him. It wasn’t his stiffness—I’d been at least that stiff after a day in the car. It was something else. I thought about him standing there, looking at the shack, so fixed, like he was trying to carry the image away with him.

  He probably just forgot his camera, I thought, and realized what had been nagging at me. Nobody ha
d a camera. Tourists always have cameras. The Wild Bill Hickok gang had all had cameras, even the kids. And videocams. One guy had kept a videocam glued to his face the whole time and never seen a thing. They’d spent the whole tour snapping Wild Bill’s tombstone, snapping the figures in the wax museum even though there were signs that said, NO PICTURES, snapping each other in front of the saloon, in front of the cemetery, in front of the bus. And then buying up slides and postcards in the gift shop in case the pictures didn’t turn out.

  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, scientifiction, 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.’”