Zombies of the Gene Pool

Chapter 9

The reunion was only seven hours away, but no one was sleepy. The full moon shone on the newly resurrected Watauga River, which coursed again in its original channel, a ribbon of light in the muddy wasteland of the valley. In the long grass on the hillsides above the shoreline, crickets chirped in a ceaseless drone. It was a peaceful night in the mountains, but no one forgot that when the sun rose to reveal the barren lake bed, the dead would be back among them. Indeed, one of them had returned already.

After Pat Malone's invasion of the Lanthanides' reunion, no one wanted to talk anymore about old times. Within a space of ten minutes, everyone at the reception in the Laurel Room had pleaded fatigue or the lateness of the hour, and had retired to their own rooms to ponder the evening's events.

Jim Conyers had been unmoved by the encounter, and he felt a thickening in his senses that he knew was a craving for sleep, but Barbara, who was outraged, wanted to discuss it.

She sat on the foot of the bed, staring at herself in the mirror as she did her customary one hundred strokes a night with her hairbrush. Her shoulder-length curls-still a rich shade of chestnut (now obtained from a bottle)-shone in the lamplight, and her face seemed as unlined as a young girl's.

"That certainly was a performance tonight!" she remarked, brushing vigorously.

"Bravado," said Jim, stifling a yawn. "The Lanthanides loved to make scenes. They used to remind me of a bunch of Shetland pony stallions: terribly fierce and sincere, but so insignificant as to be comical."

"Well, it was a revelation to me," said Barbara, checking out his expression in the mirror. "I never knew that all those sexual high jinks were going on up at Dale's place."

Conyers shrugged. "They weren't, really. Jazzy Holt was somebody the others met at a science fiction convention. She never even visited the farm. They-er-got together at conventions, and spent the rest of the time writing soulful letters to her. She married Curtis after he left Wall Hollow, in '56, I think, and they divorced pretty soon after, about the time of his nervous breakdown."

Barbara sniffed. "Curtis Phillips was always crazy, if you ask me. Not that the rest of them were much of a contrast. Anyhow, it's a good thing for you I didn't know about such goings-on in 1954, Jim Conyers, or I'd have thought twice about marrying you." Another thought occurred to her. "What about Earlene Riley and Angela Arbroath? You can't say they didn't visit!"

"Angie was a high school kid, and built like a pipe cleaner back then. Not exactly a femme fatale. Most of us treated her like a kid sister. And Earlene was a pudding-faced girl who used sex to build her self-esteem."

Barbara stared. "Jim! Do you mean she thought she was worth something because that pack of drips wanted to sleep with her? Lo-ord God! They would have slept with an Angus heifer if they could have caught one!"

Jim's smile was rueful. "Well, I wouldn't have!" he told her. "I had the prettiest girl in east Tennessee as my one and only."

She put down the brush and came to hug him. As he enfolded her in his arms and lay back on the bed, he thought how good his life had been, and for the thousandth time he was glad he had never told Barbara about that one little incident with Earlene Riley. He wondered if Pat Malone remembered it.

Several rooms farther down the hall, Ruben Mistral was pacing, while his preppy minion, still wearing a coat and tie, sat at the writing table by the window, notebook at the ready, in case there were instructions to be carried out. "He's not dead!" said Bunzie for the umpteenth time. "The son of a bitch isn't dead!"

The minion, a recent USC film school graduate named Geoff, ventured an opinion. "Excuse me, sir? Are you sure he's really Pat Malone? We never asked to see his driver's license."

Bunzie snarled. "Of course it's him! He may not look the same, but there's nothing wrong with that steel trap he calls a mind. His memory is perfect! Why couldn't he have gone ga-ga instead of poor old Brendan? Did you notice how out of it Surn was?"

"Not especially, sir. I had never met him before. He did seem less forthright than Mr. Malone."

"So did Attila the Hun. I should have known Pat's death was too good to be true! At that party tonight he remembered enough damaging tidbits to keep the Enquirer presses rolling for a month! If he tries to get chatty in front of the reporters, so help me I'll kill him!"

"Would you like me to see that he is barred from the activities tomorrow?" said Geoff, whose job was to anticipate such assignments.

It was tempting, and Bunzie hesitated, thinking of the serenity of a reunion without the Lanthanides' stormy petrel, but as appealing as the suggestion was, it was too risky. "He'd call a press conference the minute our backs were turned," he sighed. "He'd use the hotel fax machine to blitz the media. By the time we schlepped back to the hotel with the time capsule, he'd probably be booked on Oprah, Geraldo, and Donahue! I think we're going to have to take him with us-so that we can keep an eye on him."

Geoff, whose threshold of modesty was considerably lower than his boss's, doodled a question mark on his note pad. "Has he really got all that much to tell? It was a long time ago, after all. Sounds like boyish pranks to me."

"That's a point," murmured Bunzie. "Maybe you're right. After all, we live in a world where Supreme Court nominees smoke pot, and elected officials get caught screwing around. Compared to that, we're small potatoes."

Geoff thought of adding, "And since you're not as famous as all that, who'd care," but he thought better of it. Instead he said, "It's not as if there were any terrible secrets within the group."

Bunzie was silent for almost a full minute before he replied. "No, I suppose not. But you can never tell what will strike the public fancy in the silly season! Remember when a moose fell in love with a cow and made Newsweek? All the same, I want you to stay with him tomorrow. Keep him away from the reporters! And the editors, too! Don't let him get off by himself with anyone."

"Sure. No problem." Geoff was careful not to react to this pronouncement. Privately, though, he was thinking, Holy shit! I wonder what those guys were up to back then!

"It went fine tonight. Just fine," said Lorien Williams for the third time. "You were great! Have you taken your medication yet?"

Brendan Surn, who was wearing his homespun monk's robe, was sitting on the edge of his bed, apparently unmoved by the evening's events. He had smiled his vague smile as Lorien helped him change clothes, and he watched the end of a television movie while she got into her pajamas. In response to Lorien's question about his pills, he looked about him for clues that he had taken it, a glass of water, the bottle of pills, but there was no physical evidence to jog his memory. He shook his head, giving her that helpless little smile that meant he didn't know.

Lorien rummaged about in her suitcase. "No, of course you haven't!" she announced. "I hadn't even unpacked them yet. Here, open the bottle while I get you some water."

Surn worked diligently on the childproof cap. From the bathroom, Lorien called out to him over the sound of running water, "Did you enjoy the evening?"

He thought about her question until she returned. "Yes, it was quite nice," he said, accepting the glass from her.

"It was interesting to meet them all," said Lorien, sitting down on the edge of the bed to continue the chat. "I wish I could have met Curtis Phillips and Peter Deddingfield, though."

Brendan Surn frowned. "Weren't they there?"

"No, Brendan," said Lorien gently. "They are dead. It was Pat Malone who came back. And I don't own anything of his that I could get autographed."

He gave her a vague smile. "Pat Malone forgot that he was dead."

Lorien, who was never sure whether or not Surn was joking, thought it best to overlook that remark. "Well, you are going to have a long day tomorrow, Brendan!" she said briskly. "There will be a lot of reporters and a lot of unfamiliar situations. Let's go through it all again, shall we? And then I think you should get some sleep."

"I'm not tired," said Surn. "Is there some work that I should be doing?"

His assistant stifled a yawn. "Do you want to finish your monthly letter to that fanzine you contribute to?" She went over to a small suitcase and extracted a sheaf of papers and a mimeographed journal bound in yellow construction paper. "I've made the notes here about the topics you wanted to comment on to each participant."

Although Phosgene was a science fiction fanzine, or more specifically a letterzine, its subjects ranged far afield of the genre. Any given issue might contain essays from various contributors on the subject of Central European politics, solar energy, abortion, or tropical fish diseases. Subscribers would write letters about whatever they cared to discuss, and in the next issue everyone else would comment, usually briefly, on each of the opinions expressed. The fact that almost no one had the slightest pretension to expertise on any of these topics did not deter them from pontificating. Indeed, one might suppose that anyone who had any proficiency in the subject would not be there in the first place, because he could find a better forum for his ideas, i.e. a place where they might actually have some influence. As it was, the soi-disant philosophers of fandom preached at each other while the world went by. Offering sermons from the mount of his celebrity to the subscribers of Phosgene was one of Brendan Surn's few vanities.

Lorien Williams consulted her notes. "Let's see… We have Lois Hutton talking about women in combat, and you wanted to say…"

Surn waved his hand. "Tell her that NASA experiments proved that middle-aged women would make the best astronauts. Surely they could be equally effective as soldiers." He giggled. "Besides, who'd miss them?"

Lorien wrote everything down except for that last comment. She felt that Surn was a prisoner of his generation, but that he should be protected from the scorn of his more enlightened younger acquaintances. "The next writer is Gareth Whitney from Culpeper, Virginia."

"Yes. I like him. Tell him that I agree with him that even if A. P. Hill had not been shot, he would not have survived the Civil War, for reasons of health, and that while I cannot agree that he was the equal of Stonewall Jackson, I do think that as a brigade commander, he was exceptional."

Lorien scribbled down this reply. "Ready for the next one? They're arguing about Harlan again."

Surn smiled. "Oh, Harlan. Leave them to it. They're having such a good time, and he can take care of himself. I won't comment. What else?"

"Worldcon."

"San Francisco," sighed Surn. "Snog in the fog!"

Lorien looked away. "It's in Orlando this year, actually," she said in a tone of studied casualness.

"It doesn't seem very long ago," mused Brendan Surn, staring out into the dark void of the Watauga valley. "The San Francisco Worldcon. And living here. But they all look so old. Did I write a story about that once? About a man who comes out of a daydream to find that he has aged fifty years in two minutes?"

Lorien patted his hand. "That was Fredric Brown, Brendan. In Nightmares and Geezenstacks." Sometimes she felt that remembering titles and authors was all the help she could give him, but he seemed pleased at this shared memory.

"So it was," he said with a sudden smile. "I remember it!"

Erik Giles looked down at his third cup of coffee. "I really shouldn't be doing this," he remarked. "Either I'll pace all night or I'll have to sleep in the bathtub."

Angela Arbroath patted his hand. "Go on, Stormy! Have a caffeine orgy. After the shock we've had tonight, we ought to be drinking something a lot stronger than coffee."

On the other side of the table, Jay and Marion glanced at each other, wondering if this could be considered an opening for the introduction of a touchy subject. Shortly after the reunion party disbanded, Erik had come wandering out into the lobby, still chatting with Angela Arbroath, and Marion had hurried out of the coffee shop to snare them with the promise of coffee. So far, introductions and pleasantries had dominated the conversation, but now the hour grew late, and the other tables in the coffee shop had emptied one by one until they were alone. Now seemed like a good time to discuss the dramatic events of the evening's reception.

"I imagine it gave you quite a shock," said Jay Omega, "and it's partly our fault, for which I apologize. We ran into the fellow just as we were coming back from dinner. He was coming through the front doors with his suitcase at the same time we were entering, so naturally I helped him with the doors."

Marion smirked. "Virtue is its own punishment."

"Then when he asked me where the Lanthanides reunion was being held, we couldn't very well plead ignorant. I told him that outsiders were not permitted to attend, but he just smiled and said that he was invited."

"And, of course, I asked who he was," said Marion, taking up the tale. "Jay wouldn't have challenged him, but I'm much more assertive. Imagine my surprise when he said he was Pat Malone. It was on the tip of my tongue to say, 'But you're dead'; however, even I can't manage to be that abrupt."

Jay smiled. "You underestimate yourself." To Giles and Angela

Arbroath he explained, "In order to convey the impression that

he was expected at the party, the fellow said, 'I expect the Lanthanides have been looking high and low for me,' and Marion muttered, 'I thought those were the places to look.' "

"We figured it out, of course," said Marion. "We came in here for coffee and talked it over. It was a death hoax, wasn't it?"

"Apparently so," said Erik Giles dryly. "Even if I believed in resurrection of the body, I don't think the deity would waste it on Pat Malone."

"It was inconsiderate of him," said Angela Arbroath. "Just the sort of silly prank that fifties fans went in for, not caring about the feelings of those who were taken in by it."

"I suppose he came back to get in on the money and the notoriety?" asked Jay.

"I hope so," said Erik, "It would be much more like him to come back in order to upset things, don't you think, Angela?"

She considered it. "Not out of sheer mischief," she said at last. "But I will grant you that Pat was an idealist, and if he thought any of you were selling out, or capitalizing on your old days at Dugger's farm, then he might very well feel self-righteous about putting a stop to things."

"But he's over sixty now, too!" Erik protested. "Surely he could use a bit of cash as badly as the rest of us!"

Angela stared at him. "How odd!" she cried. "I've only just realized that we don't know a single thing about the resurrected Pat Malone! We were all so much in shock that no one thought to ask him what he has been doing all these years. We treated him as if he really were a ghost."

"Even if he did come to spoil things, how much trouble could he cause?" asked Marion. "You all are a bunch of writers. How many guilty secrets could you have?" She laughed at her own joke.

Everyone else looked thoughtful.

George Woodard had brushed his teeth, put on his striped pajamas, and cried a few tears of sheer frustration. Now he was ticking off a list of his most sympathetic friends, trying to decide if there was someone he could safely call to discuss the current crisis, but he could think of no one who wouldn't be delighted at the irony and embarrassment of it. George realized that he could crank up the science fiction rumor mill with one phone call, but in doing so, he would not receive one word of consolation or consideration for his plight. It wasn't worth it. Let everybody find out from someone else. He couldn't be bothered.

Earlene was not the first person he thought of to call, but her name did come up in his ruminations. He decided against it. She would probably force a full account of the evening's confrontation from him, and somehow she would contrive to blame George for the fact that it happened at all. Serves you right for going, she would say. No, Earlene would not be pleased that Pat Malone remembered her so clearly. George wasn't pleased, either, of course, but he consoled himself by thinking that it certainly wasn't true.

It had been true thirty-five years ago, but the "hot little number" that Malone recalled had cooled off to glacial proportions several decades back. Now she gave every appearance of being able to fall into a deep sleep as soon as her head hit the pillow. George puzzled over this apparent contradiction in the essence of reality. How could something which was technically true be so utterly false? The polite fiction maintained by everyone else- that Earlene was a dull little housewife-was certainly more accurate, but it ignored a good portion of her life. It was as if Earlene were two people: he had married one, but was forced to live with the other.

For a brief moment, George caught himself wondering if the old Earlene would have continued to exist had she married Pat Malone, but that thought was too damaging to his ego for him to dwell on it for long. He rummaged in his suitcase for the emergency Baby Ruth he had hidden in a sock, and began to quell his anxieties in his customary manner.

In the Holiday Inn in Johnson City, the editors and reporters had taken over the cocktail lounge. They were glad for a chance to get together, although such meetings were far from rare. They just didn't happen in New York. All of the occupants of the lounge worked in Manhattan within a half mile of each other, but in order to socialize, they had to attend conferences in various cities, or turn up as fellow lecturers at a writers' workshop somewhere. If this were a Thursday night in New York, a third of them would be doing their laundry; the other two-thirds would still be at the office.

The fact that Johnson City was a relatively small town did not unduly depress them, because (1) while many of them had fled to New York from small towns, they were well able to tolerate small doses of rural Americana; and (2) the publishing business is a small town.

Although the editors were ostensibly camped in Tennessee to engage in a bidding war, their camaraderie was unaffected by the potential rivalry. They were veterans of many such campaigns, and it was, after all, someone else's money that they were playing with. Except for the possibility of added prestige for a literary coup, which might result in money or perks, the Lanthanides Anthology Auction might as well be a Monopoly tournament. Their attitude toward the other group of professionals present- the various media representatives who had turned up for the occasion-was cordial, but more reserved. They didn't want to seem overly interested in the glitz business, and until one of them owned the current project, they had nothing quotable to say anyhow. Besides, editors secretly fear that journalists have the Great American Novel stashed in typing-paper boxes in their closets, and that given proximity to a book editor, they will try to market it. The editors' dread of becoming a literary hostage- trapped in a corner, listening to an endless plot summary-kept them packed into a tight little herd for protection. They imagined the reporters circling them like lions, seeking to pounce upon the weakest member of the herd.

The journalists in turn kept to their own corner of the lounge, swapping war stories about covering the vice-president, discussing software, and exchanging interesting fax numbers (Billy Joel's, for example). They were equally wary of the editors, who, after all, might want to get their names in the paper or might be seized with a guilt-ridden urge to wave to the folks on TV. Among themselves they also swapped horror stories about the most obnoxious "civilians" who had tried to impose on them lately.

At the beginning of the evening the two factions had staked out opposite sides of the room, holding court around their own tables, with occasional furtive glances toward the other enclave, but as the evening wore on, and sobriety wore out, some of the braver souls began to exchange pleasantries across professional lines, and by midnight, the room had become one large mob of pros, driving less determined tourists to their rooms to contemplate The Best of Carson.

Sarah Ashley, agent for Ruben Mistral and architect of the Lan-thanides package, had hosted a prime-rib dinner for the group earlier in the evening, but she had wisely refrained from discussing business except to say that she for one felt privileged to be present at the making of a science fiction legend. After dinner, she had thanked everyone again for coming to the party and had gone up to her room, leaving the pack to speculate on the next day's events.

They had managed to avoid the subject for a good two hours, but finally weariness with the usual topics prevailed, and an Australian with one of the tabloids called out, "What do you make of this bit of grave robbing that's going on tomorrow?"

"The Dante Gabriel Rossetti syndrome," said Lily Warren, an editor who got her start in publishing with a university press.

"What has baseball got to do with it?" asked the USA Today reporter.

Lily winced. "Rossetti was a nineteenth-century English poet. When his wife died, he buried some of his unpublished work with her, and then about a year later he… went back and dug them up again."

"Geez," said USA Today. "Is anybody buried with the time capsule?"

The tabloid reporter had pulled out his pocket notebook and was already composing his lead.

"I wonder if Sarah Ashley would consider splitting up the package," mused Enzio O'Malley, one of the New York editors.

Lily Warren shook her head. "She'd be crazy to agree to that. Think of the publicity value in the time-capsule anthology story! Every book club in the country will grab it, for starters. Then there's the other sub rights. Films, foreign-"

O'Malley sighed. "I know, but I was thinking in terms of actual literary merit." He ignored the snickering of his colleagues. "You see, we own Brendan Surn's back list, and he really is one of the great writers of the genre." More snickering. "I was thinking that it might be nice to acquire just his story-for a lot less money, of course-and put it in a new anthology of his short fiction."

"No way," said Lily. "The package is too valuable as a whole. Besides-" She hesitated.

"Exactly," said O'Malley. "Selling that piece would gut the whole collection, because Surn's story might be the only thing in there that isn't crap."

"Oh, come on!" another editor protested. "Surely, Curtis Phillips-"

"Curtis Phillips was a fruitcake, and you can never tell whether he was being brilliant or deranged on this particular writing binge. Suppose he just raves for twenty pages? And most of the other contributing authors were one-book wonders, whose early work may turn out to be worthless." Enzio O'Malley downed the last of his beer. "Sarah's asking us to take a hell of a gamble here. I'd buy anything of Surn's in a minute, but the whole package? I don't know."

"Suppose it isn't any good?" asked another editor.

Lily Warren chuckled. "Goodness has nothing to do with it. The very act of paying serious money for this collection in an auction will make it famous, and the publicity generated by this reunion is priceless. Half the country will know about this collection months before the pub date. By the time the publisher runs major ads, books the old geezers on the morning talk shows, and intimidates the sales force with a six-figure print run, every rube in America will have heard of it, and thousands of them will buy it for the novelty value alone. Didn't The Satanic Verses sell big, despite the fact that no one actually read it? Oh, this time-capsule gimmick will sell, all right. Sarah Ashley is no fool when it comes to marketing."

O'Malley stared mournfully into his empty beer mug. "The critics will savage it, and the S-F crowd, which is notoriously poor, will wait for the paperback, and you'll have to eat fifty thousand hardcover copies of a shit-awful book," he said mournfully.

The other editors fell silent. Enzio O'Malley's pessimistic, and probably accurate, assessment of the package had brought an unpleasant note of reality to the revels. For a moment they were forced to contemplate whether they actually ought to be trying to publish good books, instead of shilling for hyped books. But the feelings of gloom were brief, and almost instantly succeeded by a universally held conviction that Enzio O'Malley's negative comments were designed to throw them off the scent. Obviously, he had been issued firm orders by his publishing masters to acquire the time-capsule anthology at any cost. Silently they began to wonder what kind of money or treachery it would take to beat him out of it.

Jay Omega couldn't sleep. The party in the coffee shop had broken up an hour ago, and now the hotel was dark and quiet. He lay on the side of his bed, unable to relax, listening for night sounds and replaying the day's events in his head. Marion, unused to Lakecrest beer and long hours, was sleeping peacefully, but Jay was still wide awake. He thought he might have been able to fall asleep if he could have lain in bed and read a hard-science fiction novel, full of technical monotony, but the light would have disturbed Marion. He told himself that he needed to sleep because of the eventful day that would begin in just a few hours, but that only made him more alert. The more he pursued oblivion, the more restless he became. Finally, giving in to his own anxieties, he slipped on his jeans and sweatshirt and crept from the room. Perhaps a walk in the cool night air would calm his thoughts and allow him to sleep.

He crossed the deserted lobby and left the building, with the glass door swinging noiselessly behind him. The moon shone above the ridge of oak trees, and the air was crisp and cool, but the parking lot smelled of oil and burnt rubber. It was not a place he wanted to linger. Jay hurried away from it and found the path through the rhododendrons that led down to the edge of the lake. Now the steep moss-strewn trail ended in a gully of dry red clay, ringed like redwoods from the lapping waters of the receding Watauga.

Jay stood alone in the darkness, thinking that it was quiet, because like most country people he didn't register the ceaseless whine of crickets as noise. He looked up at the full moon, a small silver disk hanging above the distant hills, and saw it only as a dry lake bed suspended in the black sky. It illuminated the few clouds hovering near it, but there was no reflecting shine from the dark emptiness of Breedlove Lake, no response from the dead land.

Jay felt a disquieting urge to walk forward into the dark basin of the lake without caring where it would take him or whether he came back at all. Such moodiness was rare for James Owens Mega. Usually, he dealt logically with problems that he could solve, and he wasted little time fretting over the rest, but the Lanthanides troubled him. They seemed to him to be various projections of his own future: Erik, the sedentary academic who had given up writing; Mistral, the Hollywood mogul who had turned his hobby into an empire, and was universally accused of selling out; or George Woodard, who had allowed his alternate universe to consume his life, and lived in poverty and failure as a result. He supposed that Brendan Surn was the most enviable of the company, but he, too, presented a grim specter of a writer's future: obviously suffering from some mental impairment, he lived alone and friendless, except for his various business caretakers and the young nurse/companion who looked after him. Jay could see himself in any of those existences, and he did not like what he saw. Do writers live happily ever after, he wondered.

He was still pondering that waking nightmare when he heard footsteps on the path above him, coupled with the sound of rhododendron branches being brushed aside. The crickets fell silent. At last the figure stepped out from the shadows of the trees, and Jay could see the dark, emaciated figure of Pat Malone wending his way carefully over the rocks and coming toward him.

"You couldn't sleep, either," he called out softly to Malone.

The older man shrugged. "No. You're the young engineer, aren't you? I thought there would be a lot of sleepless people tonight, but I wasn't expecting one of them to be you."

Jay Omega sat down on the concrete ramp that had been a boat dock. Now it lay two hundred yards up from the shallows of the receding lake. "My sleeplessness wasn't on your account," he told Malone. "I was contemplating my own mortality, I guess."

"You could always come back from the dead," came the reply from the shadows. "I did."

"It's odd that you should turn up. I was just wondering what you had been doing for the last thirty years," said Jay. He explained his feelings about the other Lanthanides, and his own unwillingness to become like any of them in succeeding decades. "I had hoped that your life turned out happier than theirs," he concluded, straining in the darkness for a glimpse at Pat Malone's expression.

The responding voice was grim. "Was I any better off than they were? Not in the sense you mean, perhaps. I had to be somebody else, that's all. Tonight feels like a kind of resurrection for me. I'm not sure that I care for it, but I had to come."

"The others didn't seem pleased to see you," Jay remarked. "I wondered about that."

Malone laughed. "You wondered? Didn't you ever read my little mimeographed masterpiece called The Last Fandango? I drummed myself out of the hobby once and for all in that, and along the way I made some very unpleasant but true observations about certain prominent jerks in fandom. The more perceptive of the Lanthanides might assume that I was here to do more of the same."

"Are you?"

"I wouldn't be Pat Malone if I didn't. I am legend."

Jay was puzzled. "We were talking about you tonight," he said. "We all wondered what you have been doing for the last thirty years. You never said."

"Yes, I did. I told you that I had become somebody else. Come to think of it, they all did that, didn't they? But I'm not sure I like the people they turned into. Mistral who is somebody with a capital S. And your professor friend, who is trying to live down his years in fandom. But even the silliest of them-Woodard- came to terms with the real world when it came down to raising kids and making a living, but he trades on his youthful associations to impress neofans. George Woodard: a big-name fan! Some idealists, huh?"

"All except Curtis Phillips," said Jay Omega.

"Yes, I guess that's what happens to people who don't conform. They get locked up. But Curtis was more free than any of them, I think. He got to keep on being himself."

"And you didn't?"

"I could have. But I didn't want to end up like Curtis, so I traded my freedom for-" He seemed to think about it. "For respectability. A different kind of freedom."

Jay thought he understood. "I know. I faced that as a teenager. You have to conform to make money, and in our society, having money is the only way to keep yourself really free. So I became an electrical engineer instead of a journalism major, and now I can afford to do some writing, because-"

Pat Malone began to walk away. "I must go," he called back as he disappeared up the path into the darkness. "You weren't at all who I expected. Go to bed."

"Who ever you-" Jay's words echoed in the hollow stillness. Malone was gone. Go to bed, mused Jay. I suppose my elders have spoken. As he headed back toward the lodge, he was surprised to find himself yawning. "Tomorrow," he said aloud, "I will wonder if I dreamed this."