Zombies of the Gene Pool

Chapter 6

The Mountaineer Lodge had been designed to be picturesque. In the early eighties an architect for the Tennessee State Park Service had designed a rustic-looking hotel of timber-framed oak and glass, intended to make out-of-state visitors think of Davy Crockett and to satisfy environmentalists that the new building harmonized with its pastoral surroundings. The Mountaineer Lodge was an imposing fretwork of rafters, joists, beams, and purlins slotted together with hand-tooled joints: a modern version of the pioneer cabin, expanded to accommodate fifty guests in neo-rustic splendor, i.e. with central heating and air conditioning, multilevel decks encircling the building, and floor-to-ceiling vistas of the Gene C. Breedlove Lake. Nestled into a hillside of oaks and mountain laurel, the lodge was known for its simple elegance and for its breathtaking views of the lake.

At present, one of these attributes was missing.

Gone was the shining green lake that had formerly stretched out from beneath the lodge's decks to meet the green hills on the far side of the valley. In its place was a mud hole two miles wide, dotted with rubble and dead trees. In the center of this moonscape, the Watauga River coursed along in its accustomed banks, carrying the lake water on downstream in daily increments.

Erik Giles stood at the glass wall of the hotel lobby and stared out at the desolation. His suitcase sat forgotten beneath the ledge of the check-in booth.

"Do you think we ought to go and talk to him?" whispered Marion to Jay, who was filling out a reservation card.

"I don't know," said Jay. " 'What company are you with?' Should I put the university?"

"No. This isn't an academic conference." Marion looked at Giles' unmoving figure in the fading light. "It's a wake." Without waiting for Jay's reply, she hurried to Giles' side, touching him lightly on the arm. "Are you all right?"

He turned to look at her. "Yes, of course. I was just a bit surprised by the look of it. I'm trying to get my bearings, but this bears no resemblance to the valley I remember, so I've no idea where we are in relation to the farm. Still it's fascinating to see what engineers can do in such a short time. I wonder what they did with all the water."

"I expect Jay would know," said Marion, still trying to gauge Giles' mood. She pointed to the dead landscape of rocks and red mud. "You don't find this depressing?"

Giles seemed puzzled by her concern. "Why? They're going to put it back, aren't they? It isn't as if it were strip mining. Three weeks from now this will be a lovely lake again." He started back toward the registration desk. "Well, that's enough sightseeing for now. I suppose I'd better go and check in. Are any of the others here yet?"

"I didn't ask. Of course, the reunion actually begins tomorrow, but you could ask if anyone else has arrived early. Someone may have left you a message. Jay and I thought that we would wait to see if any of your old friends had turned up, and then we'll go to dinner. Unless you need us to stay around. Or you're welcome to join us if you like."

He smiled at her. "Let me see what my options are."

"Good idea," said Marion. "While you check in, I think I'll help Jay take the bags up to our room. We'll meet you here in the lobby in ten minutes."

She found Jay Omega hauling suitcases out of the trunk of the Oldsmobile and loading them onto a rolling cart that he had borrowed from the hotel lobby.

"That was organized of you," said Marion approvingly. "I came out to volunteer my services as a bearer, but I see that you don't need my help after all."

"I'm an engineer," Jay reminded her. "We are trained to be efficient and organized. That's what we do."

"And English professors are trained to be sensitive, but I don't see much of that in Erik."

Jay Omega finished loading the luggage cart and began to maneuver it toward the glass doors of the lobby. "What do you mean? How is Erik being insensitive?"

She shrugged. "I thought that he would be more upset by the destruction of the valley he used to live in, but he seemed to think it was exciting. As far as he was concerned, the whole process was an engineering conjuring trick." She looked suspiciously at the self-confessed engineer. "I suppose you agree with him?"

Jay stopped the can in mid-lobby to take a long look out the window. "It's probably a very nice lake. I grant you that the site looks hellish at the moment, but that's what lakes look like underneath. The question is, was this lake necessary, and I don't know the answer to that. I'm not a civil engineer."

The elevator opened, and they hurried to get the cart inside before the doors closed. Marion was silent until they arrived on the second floor. "Perhaps I'm being overly sensitive," she remarked. "But I think that if this valley had once been my home, I would be upset at seeing it so desolate."

"Well, Marion, he's had thirty years to get used to the idea."

She shuddered. "I don't think that would be long enough for me."

"Here's our room, 208." Jay fumbled for the key. "Are we meeting Erik back downstairs?"

"Yes. I told him ten minutes."

The key clicked in the lock, and he pushed open the door, signaling for Marion to enter first. She glanced at the quilted twin beds, the framed silkscreen prints of mountain scenes, and the little round table placed under a swag lamp. "It looks okay," she conceded. "Nouveau rustic motel."

At the far end of the room the floor-length curtains were drawn to keep out the evening sun. Marion pushed back the curtains and called out to Jay Omega, "Oh, goody! A view of the lake."

When they returned to the lobby ten minutes later, Erik Giles was sitting on one of the earth-tone sofas, leafing through a travel brochure on Ruby Falls. "In my day the big attraction was Rock City," he remarked. "Half the barns in the region had 'See Rock City' printed on the roof in white letters. I never did, though. Wonder if it's still in business."

Marion frowned. "I think that's down near Chattanooga. This part of east Tennessee seems fairly devoid of tourist traps."

Giles grinned. "Don't tell Bunzie. He might try to turn this into a permanent exhibit."

"Is he here yet?" asked Marion, trying not to sound starstruck.

"No. He must be on his way, though. There was an invitation to a cocktail party for the Lanthanides in the Franklin Suite at nine tonight, so apparently we're all getting together to socialize before the media gets here to cramp our style." He looked up at Jay Omega. "Speaking of the Lanthanides, I'm afraid that I must ask a favor of you. There was another message here, too. It was addressed to 'Whichever of the Lanthanides Arrives First.' "

"Interesting," said Jay Omega. "A door prize?"

"Alas, no. It's from George Woodard. He's stranded at the State Welcome Center with car trouble. He wants us to go and get him."

The invisible woman was enjoying her plane ride. At least she was registering ironic amusement at the fact that no one seemed to notice her or cared to speak with her. She was not enjoying the trip in the sense that she was actually happy; she did not particularly care for plane rides. But it was pleasant to be going on an unexpected vacation, and at the moment it was entertaining to contemplate the lengths to which this invisibility might extend. Could she get up and dance naked in the aisles? Could she sing at the top of her lungs? No, but she could certainly observe her fellow passengers without fear of return scrutiny. She was the closest thing there is to nonexistent: an overweight, middle-aged woman.

Perhaps, thought Angela Arbroath, such women were like General MacArthur's old soldiers: they didn't die, they just faded away. Angela, who had never been a beauty in the first place, had been fading away for twenty years now, and she thought she must have achieved the ultimate in nonentity. Now when she walked down the street, people pushed past her with their eyes staring straight ahead as if she were merely a pocket of dead air.

A different sort of woman might have been offended at this universal slighting of her humanity, but Angela Arbroath, who considered herself quite charming and not particularly human, thought it was a wonderful cover. It was like having a secret identity. Let people ignore me, she would tell herself; that way they will never know what they missed. It was odd that people assumed that quiet, unglamorous people were also meek and unintelligent. She was neither, but she didn't see any point in letting the whole world in on the secret. Her friends knew what a special person she was, and that was enough.

Thirty years ago she might have minded being universally overlooked. But back then she still cared what strangers thought of her; she still had feelings to be hurt. Now she had adjusted very nicely to a world of her own making, which centered around her century-old cottage in Clemmons, Mississippi, and her garden of medieval medicinal herbs. And of course, her mailbox. Angela had assembled a carefully chosen family of cats, entertaining correspondents, fantasy and medieval history books, and a few eccentric old friends, and that was her world. The Soul selects her own Society-Then-shuts the Door. She had that line from Emily Dickinson done in calligraphy and framed. It rested on the mantel above the stone fireplace. On winter evenings Angela would sit on her red velvet settee beside the fireplace, with cats curled up all about her, and she would answer letters to people without really wishing they were there.

She leaned back in her seat and smiled with contentment at her lot in life. Pat Malone would have been proud of her-insofar as he would have given a damn, she amended hastily. Poor old Pat. He was the only one of the Lanthanides that she would really like to see, and he was dead. A pity-she wondered what he would have thought of the mature and mellow Angela, the one who would rather bake zucchini bread than argue.

"About damn time," she pictured him saying. "Arguing is a waste of time. You cannot convert a fan; you can only enrage him."

But Pat might have minded that she had let herself go a bit. There was no getting past it: men were shallow. Even clever and unconventional ones like Pat Malone would probably prefer the sloe-eyed gamine of yesteryear to her present grandmotherly self, but even that didn't trouble her much. She still wore her hair long and straight, because it was the least troublesome thing to do with it, and her wardrobe ran to comfortable shifts, oversized jackets, and flat shoes, because fashion did not concern her either. For festive occasions she had homemade and hand-embroidered dresses in a medieval style, because it pleased her to wear them. Angela had come to terms with who she was, and had there been a psychiatrist in Clemmons, Mississippi, he would have pronounced her well adjusted.

Angela was still in high school when she began writing to the Lanthanides. One of them had written a comment in one of the fanzines she subscribed to, and he mentioned the Fan Farm. Their Tennessee address had reassured her somehow that these were nice boys. You never knew with the ones from New York or Minneapolis. Her mother had drummed it into her head that Yankees couldn't be trusted, that they weren't the right sort of people. After all, look what they did to Vicksburg. By the time she discovered the northern origins of most of the Lanthanides, they were solidly entrenched as her friends and confidantes, and she had become a fan publisher with her very own 'zine, reaching out to Yankees and other alien beings from coast to coast. She used the church's mimeograph machine, paying for her ink and paper supplies with money she earned on a paper route. The response was astonishing. For the first time in her life, Angela found herself popular.

She hadn't intended to be a self-published magazine editor. At first she merely wanted to correspond with the people she met through other people's 'zines, but a few samples of these grainy, amateurish efforts convinced her that she could produce a better one, and she quickly realized that it was much simpler to produce one magazine than it was to try to write twenty-five personal letters.

So Archangel had been born. Either by luck or uncommon good sense (she refused to remember which), Angela had written to Brendan Surn and Pat Malone and a couple of the fan-elite of the day, asking them to contribute articles to her first edition. And because most of them would have given an article to anyone who asked them nicely, they responded by sending her amusing and informative columns that she dutifully typed in on her father's old Underwood typewriter. When the issue was complete, she sent it to a few of the People Who Mattered in fandom, and suddenly she was a celebrity. People clamored for subscriptions to Archangel, and overnight she had a hundred new friends.

She would be the first to admit that Archangel was not the legendary fanzine that Alluvial was. It was generally acknowledged that Alluvial?, chief editor, Pat Malone, was brilliant, but because Angela had a less abrasive personality and was able to get along with almost everyone in fandom, she could get a wide variety of interesting articles from almost everyone. By the time some of these fans went on to become famous pros, Angela was one of the most respected and influential amateur publishers.

She smiled again, remembering the heady feeling of acceptance in those early days. It was like being cheerleader, prom queen, and secretary of the class all rolled into one. And the letters were so interesting. They read the books that she read, and they seemed absorbed in worthwhile subjects, like space travel and future societies. Whereas her other correspondent, her dreary cousin Betty in Texas, only talked about her boyfriends and what she wore on dates. This was definitely an improvement.

Looking back, Angela knew that most of those people were not her friends at all. They sent her lectures on their own pet obsessions with a word or two of personalization, or they sent mimeographed letters to who-knows-how-many correspondents. Convoy duty was not her idea of a relationship, but it took her a good many years to realize that. The letters that were personal were mostly from unattached young men, who viewed her as a rare prize, because in the fifties women in the hobby were few and far between. She had indulged in a few long-distance romances with some of the more eloquent souls, but the spark never survived an actual meeting.

Over the years, though, Angela had become more perceptive, and more selective about her friends, and she had found some good ones and had managed to keep most of them for several decades now. She no longer published Archangel, though. As the years went by, she found that fans were getting younger and younger, and she no longer had much interest in communicating with the new bunch. She went to an occasional science fiction convention, upon prearrangement that friends she wanted to see would be there, but they paid little heed to the scheduled events, preferring to hold their own reunion. And every so often, someone would work up a privately published tribute to fandom, and she would be asked to include an article about Archangel, which she always did, reasoning that it was a debt she owed to the hobby in return for its earlier kindnesses to her.

Aside from that, she answered a few of the correspondents she chose to keep with real letters, and a score of less intimate acquaintances with a modest letterzine, really a round-robin letter in which she answered everyone in one letter and then sent copies to all of them. This lesser publishing effort she called Seraph, a pun both on Archangel and on the serif fonts she preferred in her IBM Selectric typewriter. Aside from these pastimes, Angela worked the night shift at the lab at the county hospital so that she could afford postage and cat food.

She had been surprised to hear from-she smiled at the conceit-MistralWorld, Inc. about the Lanthanides' reunion. The former residents of the Tennessee Fan Farm did not number among the friends she kept. She didn't suppose they had noticed, though. She still got eight-page letters from George Woodard about three times a year, but at least six of the pages were photocopied essays with no personalization whatsoever on them. They usually discussed the Woodard daughters, favorable comments received about Alluvial, and a bit of name-dropping: "… Had a nice note from my Maryland neighbor A. C. Crispin (Yesterday's Son)…" Occasionally George would dredge up a math puzzle, like Gauss' theorem of consecutive numbers, to amuse his readers, and once he had begun a mock-serious campaign to introduce another integer between two and three. He called it umpty, and encouraged his correspondents henceforth to count one, two, umpty, three… Then between the numbers twelve and thirteen, one would insert the related digit umpteen. She wondered how many people got George's manufactured letter. Dozens, probably. Whenever she got one, she would skim the biographical monotony looking for the bits pertaining to herself (few, but close together, so that the page could be inserted into the pre-existing sermon). Then she would write back a cordial but inconsequential reply, similar to the tone of her letters to Cousin Betty, and George apparently never noticed that there was no real communication or sentiment between them at all. When Angela's mother died of a stroke, her letter to George went off as perfunctorily as ever, but with no mention of the family circumstances. She couldn't bear to receive a one-sentence-personalization condolence.

As for the others, she had lost touch with Bunzie and Surn, half afraid that if she did write to them, she would receive a reply from some secretary treating her as another piece of fan mail. Occasionally they would appear at a science fiction convention, but she never looked them up. There was always too much else to do in a short weekend. She and Barbara Conyers exchanged Christmas cards, but she hadn't heard from Stormy or the others in years, and the fandom grapevine reported several of them dead.

She thought about the Substitute Con party, and the long drive she had made to get there, using most of her birthday money for gas! It would be strange to see all those idealistic boys again as old men. In retrospect, a lifetime was not very long. And what strange bread upon the waters to have her 1954 gas money expenditure repaid with a plane ticket from Ruben Mistral (Inc.). She wanted to cry just thinking about the distance between then and now, and about how short life is, and how easy it is to lose the thread between people.

"Excuse me, ma'am, are you all right?"

Angela looked up into the concerned eyes of a male flight attendant. He was about to hand a diet Coke to her seatmate, and apparently he had noticed her tear-stained cheeks. Apparently he had noticed.

Angela Arbroath summoned a gentle smile. "Why, I'm right as rain," she told him.

"It's no trouble at all," said Jay Omega for the fifth time. "It isn't far to the State Welcome Center. We passed it on 81 on our way in."

Erik Giles reddened and heaved a weary sigh. "How like George Woodard to have car trouble! Do you remember that character in 'L'il Abner' who always had a black cloud over his head? That's Woodard exactly. We used to call him Disaster Lad. I think Pat Malone once wrote a Superman parody using Woodard as Disaster Lad."

"Cars are tricky things," said Jay Omega, to whom they weren't. "Marion once made me drive all the way to Roanoke to get her because her car wouldn't start. Turned out she hadn't put gas in it. Marion believes in mind over Mazda."

Erik Giles grunted in what may have been amusement. "Well, I hope this is the last of George's bad luck for the weekend."

As they rounded a bend, an open space between the oaks afforded them a glimpse of the dry lake bed. "It's a strange sight, isn't it?" Jay remarked.

Erik Giles shrugged. "Only because the hills around it are so green. Out west it wouldn't look strange at all."

"I haven't seen any sign of the town yet. I suppose everyone will visit that tomorrow when the reunion actually begins."

"I doubt if there will be much to see after all these years. In fact, I wonder how Bunzie can be so sure he'll be able to locate the time capsule."

"You must have had landmarks when you buried it." "A fence and an old tree. Do you suppose they'll still be there?" "I don't know. Traces of them may remain. Once you locate the town, you should be able to get your bearings and pinpoint specific landmarks."

"Perhaps so. I was just thinking how foolish we would all feel if we brought everyone here and then ended up finding nothing."

"Well, I hope you won't be disappointed." Jay hesitated at broaching the touchy subject of money. "You weren't counting on the anthology sales to finance your retirement were you?"

Erik Giles stared. "Retire? You talk as if I were old. I shall be at the university for another dozen years. In fact, I have a hunch that Graham may be leaving to take a job at Carolina, which will put me in line for department head." He rubbed his hands together, smiling. "You see what I do to their deconstruction program then! I intend to enjoy myself hugely."

Jay, who still remembered the headache that resulted from his last discussion of deconstruction, hastened to change the subject. "I'm glad to hear that things are going so well," he said. "So you aren't considering returning to science fiction?"

"C. A. Stormcock is dead," said the professor solemnly. They drove on in silence for the thirty miles that it took to reach the Welcome Center and Rest Area. Jay Omega enjoyed driving, and the rolling hills of east Tennessee provided the ideal setting for an evening's excursion. The winding road had been designed to accommodate the mountains. It clung to the hillside, a narrow path scarcely disturbing the rich vegetation that crept back on either side.

Jay didn't mind playing the Mechanical Samaritan, but he rather wished that it had been Surn or Mistral who had needed his help instead of Woodard, because he was sure that he'd be tongue-tied around writers of their stature, and an informal meeting over a disabled car would have done much to ease the tension for him. Still, he knew that he could count on Marion to be charming and chatty, and that was fine. He was glad to come along for a pleasant evening in the country if Erik wanted company, but apart from that, he had no agenda.

He was sorry when the two-lane blacktop ended at an overpass directing them onto the four-lane interstate. The rest of the drive was a less pleasant ramble, dodging trucks and staying out of the way of cars with Ohio license plates doing eighty. The shadows had deepened to a gray twilight when they finally reached the Welcome Center. Jay eased the Oldsmobile into the parking lot and began looking for the stranded George Woodard.

"Over there, I'll bet," said Erik Giles. "The old AMC Concord with Maryland tags."

Jay pulled into the space beside the white Concord and waved a friendly greeting to the distressed little man who was pacing the sidewalk in front of it. He was wearing tan walking shorts and a Star Trek T-shirt that held his physique up to ridicule. When he saw them, he hurried to the car and poked his head in the driver's window.

"Have you come for me?" he asked breathlessly. His glasses had slid down to the end of his nose, and his face was still sweaty from panic or the summer's heat. The air-conditioned Welcome Center stopped welcoming people to Tennessee promptly at 5 p.m.

Erik Giles summoned a brief smile as he climbed out of the car. "Hello, George!" he drawled. "Traveling by yourself?"

Woodard winced at the mention of a sore subject. "Earlene had things to do at home," he said. "So I came by myself. Almost made it, too. Drove down from Maryland in eight and a half hours, and then the bloody contraption quits on me in the Welcome Center." He smiled. "I fancy there's an article to be written in that irony."

Erik nodded. "It isn't a leaky radiator this time, is it, George?"

Woodard intoned solemnly, " 'You may talk of Blog and Bheer when your fellow fen are near

Jay Omega glanced at his watch. "Excuse me," he said. "Could you tell me what's wrong with the car?"

Woodard shook his head. "Henry Ford was a magician as far as I'm concerned."

"I mean, what did it do? What were its symptoms?" Jay persisted.

"It did nothing, and those were its symptoms." Woodard began to pace again. "I pulled into the rest area to-" he giggled. "-to jettison some recycled Pepsi, and when I came out of the men's room, the car wouldn't start again."

Jay looked thoughtful. "Could be a vapor lock. Did it make a noise?"

Woodard shrugged. "I think it laughed at me, but I can't swear to it." He turned away to speak to Erik Giles. "Are you still Stormy these days?"

"I prefer to be called Erik Giles," said the professor.

Jay Omega interrupted again. "I mean, did it crank when you turned the key, or did it click or what?"

George thought. "I think it clicked. I tried it umpteen times." He did not seem interested in the diagnosis, because he immediately resumed his previous conversation.

The volunteer mechanic waited patiently for a lull in the monologue. Finally George glanced at him again, and Jay said, "I hate to trouble you, but could you undo the hood latch for me?"

At this point, Erik Giles made a belated introduction, and George, upon learning that his mechanic was a science fiction author, became noticeably more cordial. He remarked that he had heard of Bimbos of the Death Sun, but had been unable to find a copy, and he offered to review Jay's next book in a forthcoming issue of Alluvial.

"The hood latch?" said Jay.

"We're in Tennessee now, Mr. Surn."

The plane ride had been uneventful, for which Lorien Williams was thankful. They had sat side by side in first-class seats, and throughout the flight Brendan Surn had stared out the window at the changing landscapes beneath them. Just east of the Mississippi, when cumulus clouds obscured his view, Surn went to sleep, awakening only when the green crests of the Smoky Mountains swelled beneath them, twenty thousand cloudless feet below.

This was one of Surn's good days. He had talked briefly, and he seemed to understand the purpose of the journey. Lorien hoped that things would go well over the weekend. She didn't want Mr. Surn to be hurt or embarrassed by the experience. She hoped that it would please him to see his old friends again.

"Sit here in this nice plastic chair, and I'll go and see about the bags." Lorien's face assumed an expression of sternness. "You won't wander off, will you?"

Smiling, he shook his head. "Not in Tennessee," he said carefully.

"All right, then. I'll be back as soon as I can." She hoped that she had brought enough money for the trip. They had Surn's Visa and American Express cards, and two hundred dollars in cash for cab fares and tips. That ought to do it. It had to, because Surn couldn't remember the automatic teller code to get cash with his credit card, and she didn't want to draw too much attention to them by asking for help.

"I have to be crazy to think I can pull this off," thought Lorien. "But what an opportunity-for both of us!" She had purchased a new wardrobe for the reunion, reasoning that people would be more likely to accept her as Surn's assistant if she were not wearing jeans and sandals. Since Lorien had never met an employee of anyone famous, she wasn't sure what sort of attire was required, but she decided that if she copied the style of the woman vice-president at Mr. Surn's bank, she ought to succeed in looking both respectable and businesslike. She had even had her hair done for the occasion. Catching sight of herself in a restaurant mirror, Lorien touched her newly styled tresses and frowned. "I look just like Marilyn Quayle," she muttered to herself.

Brendan Surn was a good deal more casually dressed, because as a famous Californian he was not even expected to own a tie. Lorien had studied the pictures on the book jackets of Surn's novels, and she had packed a "representative selection" of similar attire, adding his silver NASA jacket, a gift from the astronauts, in case it was chilly in Tennessee.

So far things seemed to be going well. Perhaps the Piracetam was working. Someone at the health food store had mentioned that the drug was used in Europe for Alzheimer's patients and

people with memory problems, so Lorien ordered some. It wouldn't hurt to try, she reasoned. She wasn't sure if there had been any improvement. Sometimes he seemed fine and sometimes not, but she kept up the dosage in hopes that long-term effects would be more noticeable. If he didn't get any worse, that would be enough.

Brendan had done a couple of short telephone interviews concerning the reunion, and he had sounded fine. Lorien thought it odd that a man who couldn't remember how to turn on the stove could talk knowledgeably about literature, but she supposed that the things that would stay with him longest were the things that he cared about, not necessarily the simplest things he knew. She hoped that this meant he would remember the old days at the Fan Farm. If not, she could cover for him by staying close and changing the subject if things got awkward. There was only one problem Lorien Williams had not worked out: What happens if someone offers Brendan Surn big money to write another book? And what if he agrees to do it?

Managing Surn's business affairs and his laundry were one thing, but Lorien was not at all sure that she was up to writing a best-seller.

While George Woodard talked about his teaching job and the next issue of Alluvial, speculated on the content of the next Star Trek movie (and whether there would be one), and lamented his health, Jay Omega probed under the Concord's hood for signs of trouble. The possibilities were legion. Woodard's engine looked like he had just followed an Exxon tanker through a mud hole. Disaster Lad indeed, thought Jay Omega, but immediately he felt ashamed of himself for this harsh judgment. Surely, he told himself, if George Woodard could have afforded the maintenance on this car, he could also have afforded to trade it in for a newer model. A few moments of study told him what the trouble was.

"It's your battery cables," he announced, fingering the wires barnacled with white corrosion at the terminals.

Behind him the conversation continued unabated. In Woodard's eagerness to discuss old times, he had apparently forgotten his car, his mechanical difficulties, and his new acquaintance. Not that it mattered. Fixing the car would take three minutes and required no assistance from the owner. Jay went back to his own car to get the wet rag and wire brush he would need to clean the battery terminals.

As he went past them, George Woodard called out, "Found the trouble, have you? I hope it's not expensive."

"I can fix it for nothing," said Jay Omega.

Bunzie hated people who accepted telephone calls on airplanes, which was unfortunate, because it was a practice that Ruben Mistral indulged in quite a bit. At the moment he was conferring with his office to reschedule meetings and to see who had left messages in reply to his messages. While he had his secretary on the line, he asked how the final arrangements for the reunion had gone. The response was reassuring. The chartered plane had taken off from LaGuardia at six, and the two hotels had declared themselves ready for the reunion and the editorial contingent.

Bunzie wondered what the reunion would be like, aside from all the hype. Did he really have anything in common with those guys anymore? It. had been so long since he had talked about anything besides business that he wasn't sure he could carry on an ordinary conversation. And what if the guys were worse than boring-what if they didn't like him? Suppose they resented him for going Hollywood? Bunzie figured he had enough enemies throwing negative ions at him without inviting rejection from old friends. For one stifling moment he felt like faking an excuse not to attend and going home. But the plane full of book people had already left New York, and it was unthinkable that the auction should go on without him. The gang stood to make some nice money off this stunt, and it had been his doing. How could he think they'd dislike him?

Besides, he thought, these guys were his friends when he was broke and nobody. They had liked him then. There was even more reason to like him now. It was going to be all right.

Bunzie leaned back in his seat, watching the clouds roll by. Now maybe he could sit back and enjoy his friends and let the business take care of itself. He told Ruben Mistral to take the weekend off, and went back to reading the in-flight magazine.