Free Ardor on Aros by Andrew J. Offutt Page A

my riding-slook ERB. I pronounced it as a word, rather than a jammed-together collection of initials, but I think of it as in all capitals. The other animal, plodding along behind us with the gear, I named Kline, which seemed appropriate enough.
    We were approaching something green. We kept approaching it for two days. I wondered why I was not seeing any animals and other creatures, and shortly thereafter I did. Birds in various sizes and nonstartling hues, snakes of unstartling size and color, insects and lizards. The green line I was approaching became a forest, and as ERB and I drew closer and closer it sprouted legs: treetrunks of only two shades, either gray-black or red-brown, like mahogany.
    I didn’t know if it was a jungle or forest, and I wondered why Kro Kodres hadn’t mentioned it. I had a choice: either try to bust through or parallel it awhile, in hopes of seeing a road. I had no doubt there’d be one.
    Why search for a way through this greenery, why seek out Brynda?
    Why not? I had so far met four Arone natives. I didn’t belong here. I had no place to go. My one contact was a dead man named Kro Kodres. He was from a place called Brynda, and I had things of his to prove I knew him—unless some idiot decided I had killed him and would be stupid enough to come straight to his hometown. He had apparently been on his way back to deliver a very important message, a message he held back from me, evidently, until he was 101% certain of me—or dying. I wasn’t even sure I HAD the message. I merely carried along in my head the words he’d shouted as he died.
    I had marked it down in my brain. He’d had no written message. As to the girl: well, her thoughts had given me a cloe or two there. She didn’t appear to have been his willing companion. As to his having the ring: from what I now know, I felt he’d taken it from her to put the quietus on her magical powers (I felt silly thinking that, but what les was there to think?). Where’d they’d been, what they were to each other—these I didn’t know. But I could find the Jadiriyah in Brynda, and I would try again. Carefully. Tangling with witches really didn’t seem too cool!
    I knew nothing else to do. I had been jerked off Earth and set adrift on this planet, as if God, as I had previously suspected, was not dead at all but was quite, quite mad. This way I had a goal: Brynda. I had a name to use, and I even knew someone in Brynda.
    I had no guarantee, and the thought crossed my mind many times and still does, that I could be jerked suddenly up from here and redeposited. Back on Earth, perhaps, in that same lab with Evelyn Shay glaring at me—or in the Atlantic Ocean. Or on another planet, perhaps, where there were critturs called tharks and thoats and a city called Helium, or where there were vooklangan and men living high in monster trees, and Mephis and Muso.
    I chewed on that. (I have to; I’m built that way. I can’t just accept, like a standard brainlessly brawny hero. Besides, I wasn’t brawny then, anyhow.)
    Maybe…maybe Burroughs’ novels, and those amazingly similar ones of Otis A. Kline’s, and others that seemed pieces of clothe loomed the same day—maybe they ARE true. Maybe there was or is a John Carter somewhere, a Carson Napier, a Miles Cabot, or the new Cabot, Tarl. Not on Mars or Venus. But somewhere else, as I am. (I should say as I was, since I am recording my thinking at that time, now long ago.)
    Perhaps I’d find others here from Earth, some of those thousands of famous disappearances that have puzzled our planet for centuries. Maybe that famous story about the gentleman—in England, wasn’t it?—who walked around his carriage one night and vanished—maybe it’s the story of a man who lived and died on Aros, or Andor (which certain DOES exist), or someplace else.
    Maybe Burroughs and Kline and those other writers got the facts bollixed. Or maybe they deliberately placed their stores on planets in the system of the sun