Raymond F. Jones by Planet of Light

Author:Planet of Light
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
Published: 2011-09-05T13:57:17+00:00

He had supposed he would come adventuring, he thought, as he walked away from the Director's quarters. He had supposed he would come adventuring and swashbuckling, perhaps to leap into a Mayan well with Richard Halliburton—or whatever the local equivalent of Mayan wells happened to be. Instead, he was merely at work in his old profession.

He had supposed he could be the gay foreigner moving through alien locales and strange sights and soaking up enough to last his evenings by the fireside for the rest of his fife. He had barely missed being an ordinary two-bit tourist.

He had work to do. Somehow they had to stake out a claim to Earth's proper place in the Galactic Federation. This was adventure. This was the hard, dirty work of adventuring—the cutting out of a place for yourself in an environment hostile and unwilling to receive you. The adventurer was not the glamorous scout who first sighted a new frontier; it was the pioneer who staked the frontier for his own and held it against all encroachment. Pioneering was the only kind of adventure open to him on Rorla.

He reported to the others at dinner. He had no illusions that he had made any major change in Ten-arg's opinion. "But I think I gave him enough of a jolt," he said, "to knock him off his contemptuous pose a little."

"Swell," said Ron. "Now we've got to figure out a way to go over his head—to the next court."

"We're liable to end up in a Rorlan jail," said Mrs. Barron. "I wish you'd quit bothering with it. They don't want us in their snooty club, so why don't we let that be the end of it?"

"There will never be an end of it," said Anne. She had been staring silently into the fireplace, which had been lighted against the evening's chill. Now she looked up to those about her. "There'll never be an end of it, because something has been started we can't stop, like it or not. We aren't citizens only of

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