Page:Fantastic Volume 08 Number 01.djvu/46

 place My regrets have turned outwards—the chief of them is for the distress my Isabella must now be feeling, and for the anxieties I must leave her to face alone as George and Ana grow up not knowing their father.

I do not know who is going to read what I am writing. One supposes that it will be some member of an expedition that knows all about us, up to the time of our landing. We gave the bearings of our landing place on the radio, so there should be no great difficulty in finding the ship where she now lies. But one cannot be sure. Possibly the message was not received: there may be reasons why a long time will pass before she is found. It could even be that she will be discovered accidentally by someone who never heard of us So, after all, an account may serve better than a log

I introduce myself: Trunho. Capitao Geoffrey Montgomery Trunho, of the Space Division of the Skyforce of Brazil, lately of Avenida Oito de Maio 138, Pretario, Minas Gerais, Brazil, America do Sul. Citizen of the Estados Unidos do Brasil, aged twenty-eight years. Navigator, and sole-surviving crewmember, of the, E. U. B. Spacevessel, Figurao.

I am Brasileiro by birth. My grandfather, and my father, were formerly British subjects, and became Brazilian by naturalization in the year 2056, at which time they changed the name from Troon to Trunho, for phonetic convenience.

Our family has a space tradition. My great-great-grandfather was the famous Ticker Troon—the one who rode the rocket, at the building of the first Space-Station. My great-grandfather was Commander of the British Moon Station at the time of the Great Northern War, and it is likely that my grandfather would have followed him there later, but for the war. It so happened, however, that the war broke out during my grandfather's term of groundwork at the British Space-House—or, to be more accurate, at one of the Space-House's secret and deep-dug operational centers; and it happened, further, that the actual outbreak of hostilities occurred when he was off-base. He was, in fact, on leave in Jamaica, where he had taken his wife (my grandmother) and my father, then aged six, on a visit to his mother's recently bought house. 46