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 Moriah 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 had 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.