The Project Gutenberg EBook of Moment of Truth, by Basil Eugene Wells

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Title: Moment of Truth

Author: Basil Eugene Wells

Release Date: February 18, 2009 [EBook #28111]

Language: English

Character set encoding: ASCII

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_Basil Wells, who lives in Pennsylvania, has been doing research
concerning life in the area during the period prior to and following
the War of 1812. Here he turns to a different problem--the
adjustment demanded of a pioneer woman, not in those days but
Tomorrow--on Mars._

moment
of
truth

_by BASIL WELLS_

Beyond the false windows she could see the reddish
wasteland where dust clouds spun and shifted so slowly.

She had been asleep. Now she stretched luxuriously beneath the crisp
white sheet that the vapid August heat decreed. From memory to memory
her dream-fogged mind drifted, and to the yet-to-be. It was good to
remember, and to imagine, and to see and feel and hear....

She smiled. She was Ruth Halsey, fourteen, brunette, and pretty. Earl,
and Harry, and Buhl had told her she was pretty. Especially Buhl. Buhl
was her favorite date now.

The room closed around her with its familiar colors and furnishings.
Sometimes she would dream that she was elsewhere, unfamiliar, ugly
places, but then she would awaken to the four long windows with their
coarse beige drapes of monk's cloth and the fantasies were forever
dispelled.

Her eyes loved the two paintings, the dark curls of the pink-and-white
doll sitting prissily atop the dresser, and the full-length mirror on
the open closet door.

The pictured design of the wallpaper, its background merging with the
pastel blue of the slanted ceiling.... Almost as they had blended
together that first day when she was twelve. Yet not the same, she
corrected her thoughts, frowning. Sometimes, as today, the design seemed
faded and changed. The gay little bridges and the flowered, impossibly
blue trees seemed to change and threaten to vanish.

She laughed over at the dem