The Project Gutenberg EBook of Pastoral Affair, by Charles A. Stearns

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Title: Pastoral Affair

Author: Charles A. Stearns

Illustrator: Dick Francis

Release Date: May 9, 2010 [EBook #32303]

Language: English

Character set encoding: ASCII

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PASTORAL AFFAIR

By CHARLES A. STEARNS

Illustrated by DICK FRANCIS

[Transcriber Note: This etext was produced from Galaxy Science Fiction
February 1959. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the
U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]

[Sidenote: No wonder Stefanik meant to fight to the last--he wasn't
going to turn his kids over to an old goat like Glinka!]

The seaplane cast its silhouette from aloft upon the blue Arabian Sea,
left its white wake across the shallows, and taxied alongside the
ancient stone jetty, clawing into the sandy bottom with its small fore
and after anchors.

Colonel Glinka stepped out upon the wing, carefully measured the
distance to the jetty, and sprang for it, wetting himself up to the seat
of his voluminous khaki shorts.

This lonely sandspit, these barren slopes and frowning, ocher cliffs,
the oceanic silence around him, broken by the plaintive cries of
wheeling Caspian terns that were badly in need of laundering, were not,
he thought as he clambered ashore, exactly as one pictures a tropical
paradise.

And it helped the desolation of his mood not at all that upon these same
arid ridges scores of silent, burnoosed figures watched him as he stood
there, allowing the water to drain from his perforated white oxfords and
all unaware that his vast pith helmet, curiously heavy malacca cane and
formidable fundament cast a centaur's shadow upon the rocks in the later
afternoon sun.

Colonel Glinka took a pair of green sun goggles from his pocket and put
them on, resolutely hitched up his shorts, assumed the stern yet
conciliatory expression of a hedgehog in mating season, and set off up
the roc