I had been back from the Arctic two months and things were going great.  I'd taken a month off work, just sort of kicking around with Sally before I started the 32-story-high rise that Koshima and Robbins were building out on the far end of Wilshire.  They were paying me so well it was almost embarrassing and I had an assistant and a secretary.  I've never had it so good.

     Sally had been after me for years to settle down and stop taking overseas projects and when I got back the last time I broke down and promised I'd stay in Los Angeles.  Still, instead of being at work I was sitting home that Monday morning, daydreaming and wishing the telephone would ring and call me off to another foreign wilderness.

     The music from my headphones helped to focus my thoughts and I realized that I really didn't want the job close to home and I didn't want the forty hour weeks and the fifty week years.  I could feel myself settling into the routine and the next thing I'd be planning how I was going to spend my retirement.  What I really wanted was a shot at the Glory Road.

     Sometimes I wish I'd never read GLORY ROAD.  If Heinlein had taken a vacation instead of writing that story I wouldn't have read the Sunday classified ads compulsively every week for the last fifteen years.  I wouldn't be sitting here writing this note either.

     I've only been back from Dubai for a month and I've just been kicking around with Sally, getting caught up in being together again.  She's used to me going off to build a dam somewhere in Africa for a year or an embassy in some new Asian metropolis.  She's used to it, but she wants it to stop.  She says it's time for me to start working near home, settle down and ease into retirement.

     I told her that forty was too young to retire, but I did take over that high rise.  It's close to home and the best deal I've ever had to boot.

     My own secretary, an assistant to do my legwork, a racket-club membership, and a bucketful of money.  I've never had it so good.

     So why have I been sitting here an hour staring at that silver dagger and re-reading Heinlein's tale for the fifteenth time?  I read it for the first time some fifteen or twenty years ago and since then I've read the classified ads unfailingly every Sunday.

     I kept telling myself that I was just keeping tabs on the job market and who was hiring, but down inside I knew that if I didn't read the ads I'd never see my glory road ad.  Heinlein's hero, Oscar Gordon, read the ad because he was supposed to read it.  I didn't figure I'd be that lucky, but the paper is only a buck on Sunday.  So I've read the ads for years now, telling myself I'd never see mine, but deep down inside always hoping and knowing just what it would say.

               CONSTRUCTION GENIUS WANTED. Travel

               to far-off exotic ports of call. Your experience

               and intelligence are needed in many alien cities. 

               Great pay, poor working conditions, but many

               benefits beyond imagining.  Your ability to build

               anything, anywhere, will assure you an exciting

               new position.

     Maybe I was a little crazy about the Glory Road ad and all, but because of it I got started on overseas construction projects and I've seen more of the world than most people.  I've built a dam in the Andes high above the Brazilian flood plain.  I built a road through the New Guinea jungle, always wondering if there were still headhunters lurking just out of sight, like the native workers thought there were.  I ram-rodded a pipeline beneath the Arizona desert and ten thousand miles and two years later I worked as an advisor in the desert above the Aswan Dam on a project to re-locate an ancient Egyptian burial monument.

     I've worked with hundreds of hard-drinking, hard-working construction workers from Alaska to Zanzibar and still I kept reading the classified ads, searching for my as-yet-undiscovered glory trail.  So a little over a week ago I opened the new Sunday Times to the personal ads.  I never made it past that first ad.

                                    CONSTRUCTION CHAMP

               Glory can be yours. If you haven't found the road

                to glory and wealth, this ad is for you.  We need a

               dreamer with a backbone of iron.  A man to

               remain calm in the face of chaos.  Ready to leave

               today!  Apply in person. 122 N. Bower St., Santa

               Monica, California.

     I thought about my new job and got scared and excited.  I thought about my wife and my promise to work close to home and what she would think of me leaving again and felt weak.  Let me tell you, there's a lot more to being a father and husband than what they tell you in your classes.  There wasn't even a phone number to call and I had my family to think about.  I had my job to consider, too, and I knew there would be problems because I was supposed to start work.  But that was my ad!

     Bower Street begins and ends in a rundown area of Santa Monica a few blocks off Santa Monica Boulevard.  I started climbing the steps to the second floor, then stopped, wondering what I was doing standing in a darkened, dingy hallway.  I shrugged and started up the stairway, trying to remember if the Glory Road ad had led Oscar to a place like this.  Anyway, it didn't matter because that was fiction and this was real and it was me there at the bottom of the dingy staircase, not Oscar Gordon, figment of Robert A. Heinlein's vivid imagination, and nothing would happen unless I went up and started things going.

     The receptionist was busy talking on the telephone, but she acknowledged me with a wave in the general direction of a pair of twin overstuffed chairs and a glass-topped coffee table which held a wide assortment of magazines. I slouched down in one of the chairs and grabbed a stack of magazines.  That's when I noticed the table didn't have any legs.  It was just hanging there in the air, not moving and definitely not sitting on anything. I ran my hands over and under the table top but couldn't find anything which might be supporting the top.  Playing the cool, calm man of all parts, I ignored the floating table top and turned my attention back to the magazines still clenched tightly in my hands.  The top magazine was a three-month-old copy of Engineering News Review which I had read, so I threw it back onto the table and looked at the second magazine.  I had never read that one.  It was called The Interstellar Construction Update and the lead article was about taktans and their use in large-scale heli-flux applications.   I had never heard of a taktan and after reading the article I still didn't know what one did.

     The third magazine was called The Emery Redsheet and when I opened it I saw right off that it was a listing of large construction projects going out to bid on a planet called Emery.  The monetary sums meant nothing to me, but the descriptions of the work to be performed were as familiar to me as those I had read for years on the pages of the Dodge Greensheet. My pulse was pounding by the time I got to the other magazines.  Every one of them was a trade magazine from some planet somewhere other than Earth.

     Either someone was going to a lot of trouble to play a joke on me or I really had stumbled onto something. I tried to rationalize the strange magazines away as a practical joke. But the glass slab floating in front of me forced me to face the reality of the situation.  Nothing on Earth could float that slab of glass with such impunity.  I was about to face an alien intelligence.

     “Hey!” I shouted to the receptionist.  “Is someone coming or is this all a joke?”  I stood up and started for the door as if I might leave.

     “This is not a joke, sir,” she replied in a mechanical voice.  “My lady Mistress Rodwin will be here in just a moment.”

     “Thanks, I'll hang around for another minute or two anyway.”

     She went back to doing whatever receptionists do behind reception counters when they have an impatient client fidgeting and fussing in the waiting area, and I went back to messing with the magazines and then partially out of curiosity and partially out of boredom I started pushing on the table top.  First I tried leaning with all my weight on one corner to see if I could tip it or make it slump lower, but the harder I pushed down the harder it seemed to float in place.  Next I got down on my hands and knees, and, bracing my feet against the chair, I pushed as hard as I could against the edge of the table.  The chair slammed up against the wall with a crash, but the table remained motionless.

     Unfazed, I crawled under the table and like a puny Atlas I shrugged my shoulders up against the bottom of the table.  I could feel my face turning red with the strain, but the tabletop stayed as it was.  I was crawling out from underneath when a very tall woman, clad in a one-piece jumpsuit, walked into the office.  Her hair was blonde, almost white, but it had a slight bluish tint that was noticeable when the overhead light shined through.  She walked right up to the edge of the table where I was still crouched on my hands and knees and stood looming over me, her hands planted on her gorgeous hips like some female Jolly Green Giant.  She looked at me, then glared at the receptionist and turned away.

     “I thought my instructions were perfectly clear,” she said.  Each icy word seemed to shrink the receptionist another inch lower behind the protection of her desk.  “I do not, under any circumstances, want to be disturbed and be brought to this despicable place again, unless there is a true candidate for me to interview.  This miserable creature, cowering beneath the table---how could you think it worthy of my time?” 

     I realized she was talking about me.  In her arrogance she thought I was hiding from her.  I stood slowly and moved to stand between her and the door.

     “Perhaps your receptionist wasn't mistaken this time,” I said, drawing my body straight, so that my 6'1” frame stood almost eye to eye with this haughty blonde. My hand was on the doorknob behind me.  I'm not sure if I was thinking of running or keeping her from leaving.  With an imperious waving motion she attempted to shoo me aside.

     “Step aside, I must be gone,” she said.  I didn't move and anger flared across her face.  Suddenly a slender silver dagger was in her hand.  She moved forward, aiming to pierce or prick me in the vicinity of my left ear, or possibly in my neck.  Instead of moving back, or aside as she expected, I stepped forward and grabbed her right hand with both my hands and dropped to the floor on my back, still holding onto her wrist and arm.  My move was so unexpected that she dropped on top of me and let go of the dagger, which fell free and rolled somewhere beyond the top of my head.  I rolled over and pinned her lovely shoulders to the floor.  My knees pressed firmly on her upper arms and my rear end perched against her heaving breasts. 

     “Remove your hands from me, you low-level.”  Suddenly she stopped struggling and said to me with an awakening realization, “You have come because of the ad, right?”

     “Yeah, but I think I made a mistake.  I've got a good job.  I don't belong here.  Look.”  I started to relax the pressure from my knees.  “If I let you go can we call a truce?”  She nodded her head.  “If I let you…”  I picked up the dagger and slid it into a pocket of my jacket.  I next stood up and offered her my hand, but she ignored it, standing lithely, in a single motion that reminded me of a cat leaping up onto a window ledge.

     “Perhaps my secretary didn't make a mistake.  You might be what I need.”  Once again she was speaking in that master-to-servant voice.

     “I did come because of your ad, but I've changed my mind.  I don't want to work for you.” 

     She was between me and the door now and as I moved toward it she backed up and grabbed the handle.  “Wait! Listen to me.”  Still commanding.  She apparently didn't know the word “please”.

     “I don't have to listen to anything, doll.  Move your bod and let me by.”

     I grabbed the door lever and pulled.  She reached up and I caught the glint of metal just before she touched the side of my neck and a cold, icy sensation came down from her touch all the way to my toes.  That's the last thing I felt.

 

     The room was starkly white—ceilings, walls, floors, and the cold sterile plastic tables and cabinets.  There was a door, or rather, a hatchway, on one end of the room.  The hatch was closed.  I was lying flat on my back, naked in place.  There were no visible restraints but I guessed that if they could do it to  a table top they could do it to me too.  As I became more aware of the space around me, the room suddenly grew brighter and the hatch floated open. I expected to see the boss lady.  Instead, a short, squat creature wearing a pair of one-piece coveralls sailed through the opening.  Around his waist was strapped a belt loaded with strange devices.  “Urrgg,” he began in a strange oriental tongue.  He stopped, adjusted a dial on the belt and began again, this time in English.  “I'm Randolph, your instructor.”  He began spreading the stuff from his belt across one of the plastic tops.

     “What instructor?” I asked, still unable to rise or roll over.

     “Please don't interrupt.  We have much to do and too little time to do it in.  She should have brought you here a week ago.”  The dwarfish figure returned to arranging the tools.

     “I can't do anything tied down and naked.  You can at least let me get dressed.”

     “Oh, very well.  You primitives are too modest.  It's so very difficult to deal with you.”  He came over to the table and twisted a dial and the pressure that was holding me suddenly relaxed.

     “You got some clothes for me to wear?” I asked.

     He handed me a pair of coveralls and a pair of soft cloth slippers and nothing else.  No underwear, belts or anything.  While I dressed he finished his display and then fiddled with a set of dials that caused one white wall to glow like an enormous television screen.  A mechanical voice began to recite a series of instructions on the use and care of an automatic analyzing rock pick.  It was a manual instrument, similar to a geologist's rock pick.  One end was pointed, but the other end was slightly cupped.  The depression held the device, which was used to analyze the chemical makeup of any mineral sample placed into the cupped end.  A read-out in the handle displayed the results of the test.  This was to become one of my most important tools, or so the squinchy-eyed gnome informed me.

     “Say, Randy,” I interrupted him.  “Who is she?  The tall broad I tussled with in the office, she's behind all this, isn't she?”

     “Mistress Rodwin is the owner of the firm which ran the ad you were responding to.  She is also the hereditary ruler of an area of space on the fringes of this quadrant.”  He looked over his shoulder as if there might be someone listening, then lowered his voice so I had to lean forward to hear.  “She was very angry at what you did to her.  A lady of her standing is not used to having anyone disagree with her or refuse to obey.”  Randolph seemed to smile and he leaned even closer to me as he whispered even more softly, “Is it true you grabbed her and threw her to the ground?  The whole ship's crew is talking about that.”

     “She pulled a blade. What was I supposed to do?  Let her trim my ear-lobes?” 

     Randolph rolled his eyes and stood back from me.

     “You fit the personality profile she was looking for perfectly.  If you hadn't grabbed her like that, you'd be on your way to take over as her chief of construction.”  He shook his head sadly, pointed to the table full of tools, and said, “Instead, you are to become one of the hundred indentured miners.  You will be required to find seventy kilos of grade 1 xenir crystals before you'll be returned to your planet.  I suggest you pay attention to the instruction tape if you wish to live long enough to fulfill your contract.”

     “Contract!  What contract?  I didn't sign anything.”

     He ignored my shouts and turned back to the table, idly shuffling stuff around as he replied.

     “You have no recourse.  You will be landed on whichever one of the three xenir-bearing planets she chooses for you.  They are all arid.  Two of the three are very hot and the third is cold.  Should you choose not to work, you'll not be re-supplied with food and water at the scheduled date.  Please, for your own sake, study these tapes, and, should Lady Rodwin come in, do not insult her again.  You are at her mercy.”

     He actually sounded concerned for me and I decided to listen to him for awhile.   I went back to watching the tape, but I turned my mind to analyzing my predicament.  From the fancy rock pick, the taped lesson progressed through the pile of stuff on the table, explaining explosive devices and cooking utensils and water distilling equipment and enough strange gear to fill an entirely new edition of the Very Last Whole Earth Catalogue.

     I paid attention to some of the stuff, but mostly I was trying to figure out how to get out of there without being landed on one of those xenir-bearing chunks of rock.  None of the planets were really large enough to qualify as full-size planets.  They were all small. Two of them were too close to their sun and the other one was too far away.  French-fried or freeze-dried, I didn't choose to end my glory days breaking rocks for some stuck-up extraterrestrial slave-runner.  But even if I did manage to break away from this room, where would I go?  I was obviously on some sort of space vehicle and I didn't want to try breathing what was outside.

     “Pay attention!”  Randolph's gruff voice jerked me back to the tape, which was explaining what to do in case of contact with the xenir-dust, which is used as an anesthetic by the doctors of the world that had contracted for the xenir crystals.  I wasn't planning on getting that close to xenir dust, but it gave me the beginnings of a plan.  The voice droned on and on about the necessity of wearing the respirator and the osmotic skin protector.  “Always be careful not to breathe the dust,” the mechanical voice continued.  “Even a particle concentration as low as one mote five micrometers in diameter per cubic centimeter of air can be considered dangerous and likely to put the person coming into contact with it into a coma.”

     “Say, coach,” I interrupted, “Could you answer me a simple question?” 

     The recording stopped at the sound of my voice while the green-tinted gnome glared at me in irritation for interrupting his nap.

     “What?  Why are you interfering with your lesson?”  He looked confused, almost like he wanted to cry.  I don't think he was used to working with people like me.

     “This dust, Mac.  Does it affect everyone? Or do just some unlucky studs get zapped?”

     I eased off the bench and slowly worked my way over to the table full of tools as I talked.  I began to try on various gloves and hats and masks.

     “Why, it gets to everyone if they become contaminated, weren't you paying attention to the lesson?”  He cast a pitying look in my direction and made a motion to the screen and it started talking again.

     “Wait!  Is there any Xenir here that I can look at?  I mean if I have to go down there and dig it up, I ought to know what it looks like and what it may feel like, don't you think?”  I picked up the fancy rock pile, feeling in my head the weight of it and thinking out what damage I could do to squinty-eyes with the vicious point.

     “Here, we have those samples, but don't drop them.”  He handed me three chunks of rock, each about six inches in diameter and weighing about five pounds each.  I laid them side by side on the table and slipped the respirator over my face. 

     “Is this how to work this pick?” I asked as I brought the point down onto one of the three samples.

     “No!  Stop that.”  He reached for me, but too late.  The fibrous, chalky rock shattered, sending flying dust everywhere.  The first dust reached him before he could grab a respirator, and, just as the tape had promised, he stiffened and then keeled over onto his side, unconscious.  He would stay that way until the xenir dust was completely metabolized, somewhere between two and four days, according to the recording that was still describing the hazards involved in mining xenir.  I grabbed the rocks and headed for the hatch.  Once out of my prison, I headed toward the rear of the vessel or ship or whatever it was, dropping bits of rock as I went.  Right off I found the supply room.  I stopped long enough to crush a big chunk and scatter it around inside the room, preventing anyone from getting to the spare masks.  I continued rearward, stopping and scattering dust inside every room and hatch I came to.  Eventually I found the air supply and re-circulating system and there I smashed the rest of the rock.  Then it was only a matter of time until everyone on the ship nodded off.  Xenir has no side effects.  It just puts you to sleep and keeps you there, safely, for a very long period of time.

     Once everyone was zonked, I set about tying the crew up and then stacking them like mummies inside the lounge.  It wasn't easy picking up all those sleeping bodies and dragging the limp bundles down to the lounge, but I didn't have anything else to do.  I found some surgical tape and I tied and wrapped each body twice to make sure someone didn't get loose.

     For the next two days I just sat in the lounge and waited.  I was afraid to leave the room for very long, because I didn't know how long they would stay under.  I searched, but I never did find any ship's manuals.  I couldn't figure out how to operate a view screen so I had no idea where we were or where we were going.  Eventually, though, one by one, the crew began to come out of their drug-induced stupors.

     Once squinchy-eyed Randolph and Lady Rodwin were awake I got down to the serious business of talking my way out of there.  That wasn't so easy.  “This is extortion and I will not deal with a terrorist.”  Believe it or not, that's what she said.

     “Look, Randolph, maybe you can talk to her,” I implored him.  “She's not going anywhere until I get her word of honor she'll take me back home.”

     “What do you want us to do?” he asked in a neutral tone of voice.

     “Tell him to untie me immediately,” Rodwin interrupted, “or we will never agree to anything.”

     I looked at her and shook my head.  There was no way in hell I'd untie the wildcat.

     “Begging your pardon, my lady,” Randolph said, bowing in her direction, “we are forced by circumstances to submit to this man's terroristic demands.  Please remember there are twenty three loyal crew members at his mercy.”  He bowed again and then turned to me.  “We will give you our word of honor to return you to your planet.  Now will you release us?”

     “Not so fast, Shorty.  Can you send a telegram to Earth?  Or can you tie into a telephone microwave station so that I can call my wife and let her know I'm coming home?”

     “We can contact Western Union and they will think we are telephoning.”

     We sent off a telegram stating that I was desperately needed at the ITT Arctic facility and would return in about a week.  I knew the telegram wouldn't do much to keep me out of hot water, but it was the best I could think of.  I'd had enough of the Glory Road and I knew I could make it up to Sally once I was home again.

     The ship dropped me off as promised and six days after I first climbed the dingy stairway I found myself standing on the sidewalk again, a block from Santa Monica Boulevard.  My car had four parking tickets and a 48 hour notice of intent to tow, but at least it was still there.

     I had a hell of a time explaining to Sally how and why I could just disappear for six days, but she finally forgave me, crying that she thought I was taking another overseas job.  She thought I didn't have the nerve to tell her and that I would just send a letter from some jungle in Asia once I was safely out of the United States.  I told her she should know by now that I would never do something like that, and I really meant it, too.

     While she was fixing my favorite dinner, always her way of making up after we had an argument, I grabbed the Times and turned, without thinking, to the personal ads.  That was an hour ago.  When we finished dinner I came into the study to think this out while Sally finished cleaning up.

     The Times is open beside me as I write this.  The fancy silver dagger, the only tangible proof of my vain effort to journey down the Glory Road, is lying beside the newspaper.  I have my Walkman on and I'm not sure what I'm going to do, but I know that this ad is my last chance.

               Glory Road needs repair.  You passed the test. 

              Please come back.  Independence counts with

              us.  We admire resourceful men who aren't

              afraid to follow through.  If you are our man,

              you will know where to come.