Nice Girl With 5 Husbands
By FRITZ LEIBER
Illustrated by PHIL BARD
[Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from
Galaxy Science Fiction April 1951.
Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that
the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]
Adventure is relative to one's previous
experience. Sometimes, in fact, you can't
even be sure you're having or not having one!
To be given paid-up leisure and find yourself unable to create isunpleasant for any artist. To be stranded in a cluster of desertcabins with a dozen lonely people in the same predicament only makesit worse. So Tom Dorset was understandably irked with himself and theTosker-Brown Vacation Fellowships as he climbed with the sun into thevalley of red stones. He accepted the chafing of his camera strapagainst his shoulder as the nagging of conscience. He agreed with thedisparaging hisses of the grains of sand rutched by his sneakers, andhe wished that the occasional breezes, which faintly echoed the samecriticisms, could blow him into a friendlier, less jealous age.
He had no way of knowing that just as there are winds that blow throughspace, so there are winds that blow through time. Such winds may bestrong or weak. The strong ones are rare and seldom blow for shortdistances, or more of us would know about them. What they pick up isalmost always whirled far into the future or past.
This has happened to people. There was Ambrose Bierce, who walkedout of America and existence, and there are thousands of others whohave disappeared without a trace, though many of these may not havebeen caught up by time tornadoes and I do not know if a time gale blewacross the deck of the Marie Celeste.
Sometimes a time wind is playful, snatching up an object, sportingwith it for a season and then returning it unharmed to its originalplace. Sometimes we may be blown about by whimsical time winds withoutrealizing it. Memory, for example, is a tiny time breeze, so weak thatit can ripple only the mind.
A very few time winds are like the monsoon, blowing at fixed intervals,first in one direction, then the other. Such a time wind blows near abalancing rock in a valley of red stones in the American Southwest.Every morning at ten o'clock, it blows a hundred years into the future;every afternoon at two, it blows a hundred years into the past.
Quite a number of people have unwittingly seen time winds in operation.There are misty spots on the sea's horizon and wavery patches overdesert sands. There are mirages and will o' the wisps and ice blinks.And there are dust devils, such as Tom Dorset walked into near thebalancing rock.
It seemed to him no more than a spiteful upgust of sand, against whichhe closed his eyes until the warm granules stopped peppering the lids.He opened them to see the balancing rock had silently fallen and lay aquarter buried—no, that couldn't be, he told himself instantly. He hadbeen preoccupied; he must have passed the balancing rock and held itsimage in his mind.
Despite this rationalization he was quite shaken. The strap of hiscamera slipped slowly down his arm without his feeling it. Andjust then there stepped around the giant bobbin of the rock anextraordinarily pretty girl with hair the same pinkish copper color.
She was barefoot and wearing a pa