A shudder passed over the waiter. "You vill know. Of a most certain,
you vill know. Ze Messenger vill call." The shudder came again. As if
he had already said too much, the waiter hurried away. Ronson turned
back to Jennie Ware. She was sparkling with fury.
"If they think they're going to keep me from seeing Les Ro just because
I'm a woman--"
"Why do you want to see him? He probably isn't pretty."
"Because I want to write a book about him."
"A book--" Ronson's memory suddenly came alive and he remembered where
he had seen her name before. He stared at her, startled and almost
aghast. Back on Earth, this woman was almost a legend. Every tabloid
and every Sunday supplement had carried her picture and stories about
her. The programs beamed to space had carried tales of her exploits.
She had explored the depths of the Venusian jungles, she had ridden
a _dothar_ across half of Mars. When Deep Space Flight One had
blasted off from Pluto, bound for the exploration of deep space,
the news telecasts back to Earth had carried the information that a
stowaway had been discovered and ejected from the ship just before
blast off. No one had been surprised when this stowaway had turned
out to be Jennie Ware. Subsequent rumors had whispered that she had
practically torn Pluto Dome apart because she had been ejected from the
ship. Even the fact that the ship had never returned had not cooled her
anger.
In addition, she was also a very competent author. Ronson had read two
of her books and had admired her deft touch with words and the deep
sincerity that had showed through in even the most hard-boiled and
raucous passages. Unquestionably Jennie Ware was a very unusual human
being.
But in spite of this, Ronson stared at her in growing horror. Her
reputation across the solar system was that of an uninhibited vixen.
Here in this place, where their lives might ride on the blinking of
an eye-lash, or on not blinking it, a temper tantrum thrown by Jennie
Ware--or by anybody else--was the last thing he wanted to see.
A tall figure loomed beside the table. A deep voice asked, laughingly,
"Well, Jim, since you've already met our lady authoress, how do you
like her?"
Ronson looked up, then got up, his hand going out, a grin spurting to
his face. The man standing there, Sam Crick, took the outstretched hand
and grinned back at him.
Crick was tall and lean. His skin was tanned a deep brown, a color that
had resulted from facing all the winds that had ever blown on Mars and
all the sun that had ever shown there. Crick was something of a legend
on the Red Planet. He was the eternal adventurer, the lonely wanderer
of the waste place, the type of human who was always looking for
something that lay just over the edge of the horizon.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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