"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 autobiography, 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 basket-model 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."