: Travelogue by Aycock Roger D - Science fiction; Short stories; Human-alien encounters Fiction; Science fiction Authorship Fiction

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Release date: November 19, 2023

Original publication: New York, NY: King-Size Publications, Inc, 1956

travelogue

She seemed to be so much smaller than any child would be, turned out with a fragile perfection more doll-like than human....

Adventure came late--at thirty-two, if the detail matters--into the diffident life of Wesley Filburn, but with all the fictional improbability of the wistful little fantasies he wrote for his living.

It called, in a voice Wesley failed at first to recognize because he had long ago given up listening, just when he least expected it--when he was walking one late April afternoon along the rocky banks of Sampson's Creek, temporarily blind to the drowsy mountain charm of the place while he mulled over an inconsistency that niggled at his current plot-line.

There was this utopian little planet, he mulled, that circled the major sun of a binary star named Aldhafera upon which his space-roving protagonist was to discover his true self--and the glory of the One Love inevitable to every such spacefaring gallant--by destroying his ship and so making it impossible to betray Her people's unspoiled paradise to his own grasping mechanical culture. The rub was, and Wesley was too honest to dismiss it unresolved, that any world circling one primary of a double star would very probably be something less than a paradise. Caught between two such stellar furnaces, it was more likely to be a slag-shelled inferno of heat and desolation.

Still, if one sun should be very small or nearly spent, there might be no problem at all. It might even offer fresh background detail as a novel sort of moon, shedding living light upon an already exotic setting. He'd have to check further on Aldhafera, though he doubted that his scanty astronomical texts would supply his want.

The call, too strong for a bird's piping yet too slight and musical for even a child's voice, drew him back from Aldhafera to the banks of Sampson's Creek.

It was a child after all, but an improbably tiny one.

She floundered in a pool deep enough to drown even an adult, so manifestly helpless that Wesley plunged instantly to her rescue without arguing his own inability to swim. He had a briefest glimpse of hair floating like a small silver cloud about a frightened elfin face with enormous lilac eyes; then the icy pool received him and he was splashing mightily to keep his own head above water.

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