Zombies of the Gene Pool

"I'm very glad you're here, Jay," Erik Giles was saying. "Actually, I need your help."

Jay Omega immediately looked around for a broken radio or a new-looking computer. That's what people usually meant when they said they needed his help, but he saw no evidence of electronic disasters in the English professor's office.

"Your help and Marion's, actually," the professor amended.

Then it definitely wasn't auto repair. Jay waited for enlightenment.

"There's a journey I need to make, and I'd like the two of you to go with me. You may have heard about my heart attack last year." He smiled at Jay's expression of concern, but signaled him not to interrupt. "No, I'm fine. I've lost a few pounds since last spring, and my blood pressure has improved somewhat. I'm not going to keel over on you. Anyway, I've received an interesting invitation, and because of my health and for other reasons, I don't particularly want to go alone. Actually, I don't want to go at all, but I believe I should, and I thought it was something that the two of you might be interested in."

Jay sighed. "Where is Worldcon this year?"

Professor Giles smiled. "It isn't that. And it isn't the MLA, either, which is just Worldcon hosted by Chaucer scholars." He looked intently at Jay Omega. "You do know who I am?"

Jay understood at once that Erik Giles was referring to his literary past as C. A. Stormcock, and since he seemed to expect an affirmative response, Jay decided to admit that he did. "Marion mentioned it to me a while back," he said.

"Yes, I thought so. Restraint is not one of Marion's virtues." Giles grinned at his colleague's unease. "And what was your reaction?"

"To the fact that you passed up fame? Well, I suppose I thought that it was a little strange. I mean, so many people seem to want to be famous writers, and science fiction is such a cult anyway, that it seemed odd for anybody who got mixed up in it in the first place to just walk away from an achievement like yours."

Professor Giles smiled sadly. "In a kingdom of the blind, the one-eyed man is king. When Marion found out who I was, she asked me the same thing, and I told her I grew up. It wasn't much of an explanation, but it was true. As time went on, I began to be less enchanted with my accomplishments. To give you one small example-I learned that almost any reasonably clever person can make puns. The truly intelligent person refrains from doing so."

Jay couldn't for the life of him make puns, but he decided not to argue the point. He was still wondering about the mysterious invitation, but Erik Giles had launched into a one-sided discussion of philosophy-probably a holdover from his days in science fiction.

"I am one of those unfortunate people who cannot appreciate a compliment unless I respect the person giving it," he said, with the air of someone who has given the subject much thought. "A great many people liked my book-but what else had they read? I felt hampered by their opinions and their expectations. There are a good many six-book critics in the genre."

"Six-book-?"

"People who have read six books and think that it entitles them to be critics. The sort of person who doesn't recognize a pastiche of Lysistrata because he's unfamiliar with the original."

Jay nodded. He had heard Marion say much the same thing, although at greater length and with considerably more venom.

"Anyhow, I got tired of being Gulliver. What I really wanted to do was to explore my potential as a writer."

"And what are you writing now?" asked Jay uneasily, thinking of the New Age Cafe readings. He wondered if Erik Giles was churning out slices of monotony in the present tense.

"I'm not. I discovered I couldn't do literary fiction. I'd got out of the habit of being tedious. So I said the hell with it, and now I teach undergraduate courses and do a bit of scholarly research to keep the department happy. How about you? Burned out yet?"

Jay was saved from having to reply by the appearance of Marion, who still glittered from her recent bout of intellectual combat. Her dark hair was tucked behind her ears, and her reading glasses were balanced precariously on the top of her head. Clearly she was still in office mode. "Somebody told me they'd seen you come in here," she said, scowling.

"Good afternoon," said Jay tentatively, in case she hadn't got all the rage out of her system.

Erik Giles was chuckling. "Finished your conference?"

"It is a fortunate thing that electric pencil sharpeners are too small to accommodate the heads of sophomores," Marion growled. "Well, at least I set him straight on his chronology."

"We heard," said Jay.

Marion sighed. "I know that tone of voice. You sound like someone making small talk with a hand grenade. I'm fine, really!" She managed a smile. "What have you two been up to?"

"Erik was just telling me that he wants us to go somewhere with him."

"Oh?" Marion looked interested. "And where is that?"

"To dinner," said Professor Giles quickly. "This is going to be a long story, and I feel that I owe you both a steak just for listening to it."

Marion sighed. "I wish more authors felt that way."

The Wolfe Creek Inn was an eighteenth-century farmhouse that had been converted into an elegant restaurant. When the pasture lands adjoining the university were sold off one by one for apartment complexes and gas stations, most of the large old houses were torn down as detriments to the land value, or perhaps because they clashed with the current ambience of neon and asphalt. The Wolfe family farmstead was salvaged by a resourceful couple of Peace Corps veterans, who had not managed to make much of a dent on the problems in Bolivia during their years there, but who had learned carpentry themselves, a skill infinitely more useful than their majors in political science. They figured the Wolfe house would be easier to tackle than the Bolivian rural economy, so they bought the eighteenth-century house with its graceful wraparound porches, its oak floors buried under fifties linoleum, its huge stone fireplaces, its field mouse population, and its dry rot. The house was priced at only fifty-one thousand dollars, a price roughly equal to the cost of restoring it. With loans from their long-suffering parents, the Peace Corps veterans rewired, refinished, and rehabilitated every square inch of the old mansion and turned the result into a cozy, antique-filled restaurant much favored by faculty members and visiting parents. The meals were priced at roughly the average monthly income in Bolivia. Undergrads eager to impress their dates confined their visits to Friday and Saturday nights, particularly during football season, but tonight-a Tuesday in late May-the place was nearly empty.

Giles-Party-of-Three, as the waitress called them, was tucked into a pine-paneled alcove decorated with Bob Timberlake prints in rough wood frames. They were trying to read the hand-lettered menus by the light of the candle in a red jar, which doubled as a centerpiece on the oilskin tablecloth.

"This looks like a seance," said Marion, watching their shadows flicker against the pine wall.

"It is," said Erik Giles. "I'm about to raise a number of ghosts."

He waited until the waitress had taken their order and had gone to fetch the drinks before he began. "You want to know where it is that I have to go, but in order to explain that I'll have to backtrack." He began to trace patterns on the tablecloth with his knife. "Do you know much about science fiction fandom?" "I read science fiction," said Jay. "Does that count?" "No," said Marion. "Erik means the organized subculture that grew up around the genre. It began in New York in the thirties when the people who had been writing to the letters columns of the pulp science fiction magazines began writing to each other instead. Then clubs sprang up, and people began to publish amateur fanzines, reviewing books and arguing about topics of science or technology. By the fifties, it had become an end in itself."

Professor Giles smiled. "By then, there were people who scarcely bothered to read the genre, because they were so busy with the social aspects of fandom."

"I missed all that," said Jay. "I was into crystal radio sets as a kid, and after that computers. So you two were fans?"

Marion blushed. "If you grow up as a social misfit in a small town, it can be a very attractive option. I was smart when girls were supposed to be bubblebrains, and I wasn't very pretty in high school, which is a real burden for the teenage ego. Fandom is good about accepting people for being kind and clever, without caring about age, sex, race, or appearance."

Erik Giles looked thoughtful. "Why was I in fandom? I wanted to be a writer, I guess, and these people encouraged me. It's easy to get 'published' in fanzines. Of course, later I realized-" He shook his head sadly. "Well, it doesn't matter. I was explaining the reunion, wasn't I? Have you ever heard of the Lanthanides?"

"Sure," said Jay, reaching for a bread stick. "The lanthanide series is a group of fourteen elements on the periodic chart, consisting of lanthanum, cerium, samarium-"

"Hush! We're discussing literature, not chemistry!" said Marion. "I think that Erik is referring to a group of writers back in the Golden Age of Science Fiction." Erik smiled. "I'd put the Golden Age a little farther back than that group of chowderheads. The early forties, maybe. Whereas, the Lanthanides began publishing in-"

"1957?" asked Jay Omega.

"About then," Giles agreed.

Marion stared at him. "How did you know, Jay? You never read that stuff!"

Erik Giles laughed. " 'What do they know of literature who only literature know?' " he said, misquoting his beloved Kipling.

"Jay guessed correctly the date of the Lanthanides' fiction debut because he was right about the origin of the term. The group's name was chosen from a chemistry book, and the lanthanide series begins with element number 57, which is the year the members thought they'd all be published authors."

He sighed. "It took a bit longer than that, of course, even for the luckiest members, and some of them never even got published."

"Pretty good name for a science fiction group, though," said Jay with a glint of mischief in his eyes. "The lanthanides are the rare-earth series of elements."

The older man nodded. "Yes, that was the real reason we chose it. We thought rare earth described our visions rather well. And, of course, the name itself-Lanthanides-is from the Greek lanthanein, meaning to be concealed, which is perfect for a secret society of adolescent crackpots."

"Now, wait a minute, Erik. Those writers were-" Marion gasped. "We?"

He smiled modestly. "Yes, I was a member of the Lanthanides. Of course, back in 1954 we were just a bunch of redneck beatniks in Wall Hollow, Tennessee."

"Tennessee?" echoed Marion. "Wasn't Brendan Surn one of the Lanthanides? I thought he was from Pittsburgh."

"He was. And Curtis was from Baltimore, Mistral was a Brooklynite, and Peter Deddingfield and I grew up in Richmond. But the year that the group was formed, most of us were in our early twenties, and our job prospects were middling. It was 1954. We didn't want to become the men in the gray flannel suits, and nothing else was paying too well. Anyway, we weren't ready to settle down.

"Dale Dugger and George Woodard were just back from Korea and Fort Dix, New Jersey, respectively. A couple of us were just out of college-with or without degrees-and a few were tired of the jobs they did have. We all knew each other the way science fiction fans do-through correspondence and a mimeographed fanzine-and we decided to get together. Nobody had anything better to do."

Marion frowned. "This is not an era I've done much reading about. It's the beginning of Sixth Fandom according to S-F fannish history. I'm familiar with Walt Willis and the Wheels of IF… Lee Hoffman and Quandry… Wasn't there a fanzine associated with the group?"

"Alluvial. George Woodard still publishes it. Or at least something called that. Of course, none of the rest of us have contributed to it in years."

"I never knew Stormcock was a member of the Lanthanides."

Erik Giles smiled modestly. "I wrote The Golden Gain while I was there." His fingers trembled a bit on the hilt of the table knife, and he suddenly looked old.

"So you formed a commune?" Jay prompted.

"Slanshack!" murmured Marion, correcting him.

"Back then, with Joseph McCarthy's witch hunters hiding under every bed, I don't think we would have called it a commune, but by your generation's standards I guess it was. We called it the Fan Farm. Actually, Dale Dugger's daddy had died while Dale was overseas, leaving him a hardscrabble farm in the east Tennessee hills, and we decided that life didn't get any cheaper than that, so we all packed our belongings and typewriters, and descended on Dugger's farm. We planned to live on beans and hot dogs while we each wrote the science fiction equivalent of the Great American Novel, and then we figured we'd all drive away in Cadillacs and live on steaks for the rest of our lives." He smiled, remembering their youthful naivete.

The waitress appeared just then, balancing three plate-sized skillets on a tray. "I have two prime ribs and a broiled-flounder-no-butter."

"The fish is mine," said Erik Giles. "Doctor's orders."

Marion attended to her dinner for a few minutes, but her thoughtful expression indicated that she was more interested in the conversation than the food. "So you actually lived with Surn and Deddingfield in-what did you say the name of the place was?"

"Wall Hollow, Tennessee. That's where the post office was, anyhow. Dugger's Farm was seven miles up a hollow. It was beautiful country. Green-forested mountains that looked like haze against the sky.

"The Green Hills of Earth," murmured Marion.

"No," said Giles, catching the reference. "He wasn't there. I didn't meet him until the late sixties."

"Well, your crowd didn't do too badly," said Marion, thinking it over. "Maybe you didn't leave the farm in Cadillacs, but you certainly produced some giants in the field of science fiction."

"Peter Deddingfield," nodded Jay. "Even I've heard of him. I loved the Time Traveler Trilogy."

"He writes in a very literary style," said Marion, offering her highest praise. "Critics have compared him to Herman Melville."

"Well, I like him anyway," said Jay.

Marion frowned. "And Brendan Surn is the greatest theorist in the genre. I think he's required reading in NASA. I always think that he looks like a snow lion with that white mane of hair and his white beard. Who else was in the group?"

"That you would have heard of? Pat Malone, of course."

"He's a legend. What was he really like?"

"You mustn't rely on my judgment," said Erik Giles. "I didn't know at the time which of my friends to be impressed by."

Jay Omega, who had no memory for authors' names and was thus at a dead loss at Trivial Pursuit, was trying to place Pat Malone. "Should I have heard of him?" "Yes!" said Marion. "He wrote River of Neptune, which wasn't a classic or anything, but it was a very promising work for a young writer, but then Pat Malone did another book that will be remembered forever in fandom-The Last Fandango. It wasn't officially published-just mimeographed and distributed by FAPA, the Fantasy Amateur Press Association-but it was so caustic and critical of certain fans that it became an underground classic. He revealed their sexual preferences,.their lapses in hygiene, and their petty machinations in fan politics. I hear that it was really hot stuff in its day."

Erik Giles nodded. "It was an unpleasant duty that Pat positively reveled in doing. The glee in his tone is at times unmistakable."

"I imagine that publication cost him a few friends," said Jay. "I have friends in engineering who dream of doing that on a faculty level, but they dare not."

"I would strongly discourage it," said Marion, with a repressive glare suggesting that she suspected which engineer harbored such a fantasy. "Because a professor who did that would have to live with the consequences, while Pat Malone did not. He simply dropped out of sight. Apparently he became very embittered with science fiction because of his disillusionment with all his old associates and he gafiated."

Jay stared. "I beg your pardon?" He was picturing Japanese rituals of disembowelment.

Marion blushed at having been caught speaking fanslang. "gafia. It's an acronym for getting away from it all. It means dropping out of the world of science fiction."

"And lived happily ever after?"

"Apparently not. My source materials say that he died in mysterious circumstances. The word is that he was found dead on a mountaintop in Mississippi."

"There are no mountaintops in Mississippi," Jay pointed out.

Erik Giles laughed. "A grasp of material facts has never been a strong point in fandom. That was the story that went around the grapevine back then, and I never heard otherwise."

"Those are all the Lanthanides I know about," said Marion. "I confess I've never heard of Dale Dugger or George- What was his name?"

"Woodard. He's still around. He never published much of anything, but he lives in Libertytown, Maryland now, and, as I told you, he puts out a fanzine called Alluvial. That and his incessant correspondence seem to take most of his energy. Aside from that, he teaches algebra."

"And Dale Dugger?"

A spasm of pain crossed Erik Giles' face. "He died some years ago. He became an alcoholic, and finally at the end, a street person. I heard about it later. Wish there was something I could have done."

"There aren't many of you left then," said Marion, doing a mental tally.

"No. There's Surn, but he's quite feeble now, I hear. And Woodard. Angela Arbroath. Jim and Barbara Conyers, and Ruben Mistral."

"Mistral," murmured Jay. "That name sounds familiar. He's a screenwriter, isn't he?"

"Yes. When I knew him his name was Reuben J. Bundschaft. We called him Bunzie. He's probably got more money than Surn and Deddingfield by now, with all those movie deals. Still, I hear he's coming to this little show."

"What show is that?"

Erik Giles sighed. "The Lanthanides are having a reunion."

Noticing the lack of enthusiasm in his announcement, Marion said gently, "Don't you want to go?"

"There's more to it than that. I have to tell you why there's a reunion, and why we didn't have it in 1984 like we'd planned."

"Why didn't you?"

"Because Wall Hollow, Tennessee is at the bottom of a lake."

It was late. After cheesecake and several cups of coffee, the three professors had finally called it a night and said their good-byes on the porch of the Wolfe Creek Inn. Jay was driving Marion home. She leaned back in the passenger seat of Jay's temporarily functional MG, clutching her headscarf against the wind that whipped through a crack between the canvas roof and the windscreen. "I was just thinking about Erik Giles and his extraordinary reunion," she called above the roar of the wind and the 1600 engine.

"Quite a story!" Jay agreed.

"After he told us about it, I remembered hearing bits of it before. The underwater slanshack. It's a legend in science fiction circles, of course. But before my time," she added hastily.

"I can see why it's a legend," said Jay. "It's the Atlantis of fandom."

"And they held their own substitute convention! Wouldn't that be a wonderful story to write for a volume of fan history?" mused Marion, whose brain was never quite out of gear.

"Surely someone has already written that tale," said Jay.

"Knowing the Lanthanides, they probably fictionalized it. I'll bet that if we read all of Deddingfield, all of Surn, all of Mistral, and so on, somewhere we'd find the story of the unfinished journey and the time capsule. Writers always cannibalize their own lives for fiction."

"Oh, so you recognized yourself as the green lizard woman in Bimbos?"

Marion made a face at him and went back to contemplating the moon. "I can just see them in 1954, can't you? A bunch of post-adolescents with plenty of idealism and ambition, but no money or common sense. And because the Twelfth Worldcon is being held in San Francisco, six of them decide to pile into a disintegrating Studebaker and off they go!"

Jay Omega shrugged. "Why not? Gas was about eighteen cents a gallon then."

"But they were still broke. How much cash did he say they took with them? Twenty-five bucks? For a cross-country trip!"

"I guess it wasn't much money even for that era, because Giles said that when the car broke down in Seymour, Indiana, they couldn't afford to get it fixed. Apparently mechanics were expensive even then."

"Thank goodness it was only a radiator leak, so that they were able to limp back to the farm. I can't imagine Brendan Surn having to hitchhike."

"They must have been pretty game, though," said Jay. "If I had been unable to make a trip I'd had my heart set on, I don't think I'd have taken it as well as they did."

"No, you'd sulk for days. But, then, why should they have cared about missing that convention? As far as future generations are concerned, the great literary minds of the era were all in Wall Hollow, Tennessee that weekend. Except for Friday night when they went to Elizabethton to see the movie. Wherever they were, there was science fiction." Marion sighed. "That's the con I would like to have attended: all the great minds of the genre in an old farmhouse miles from anywhere, swapping story ideas."

"It should be easy to arrange. Erik Giles told us what they did that weekend. So we rent a copy of War of the Worlds, buy a couple of cases of beer-"

"It wouldn't be the same. I'd like to know what Peter Deddingfield said to Pat Malone about the movie. I'd like to have heard them talk about their work!"

"Well, at least you may have a chance to see what they were writing at the time. If they can find the pickle jar," said Jay. "To me that is the most amazing part of all. An anthology of unpublished works by the greatest minds in science fiction, and it has yet to be recovered. It must be worth a fortune."

"I expect so. When Giles said that all the Lanthanides were coming back to this reunion, I realized that there must be quite a lot of money in it somewhere. Sentiment seldom guarantees perfect attendance, but money usually does."

"I don't know, Marion. Maybe-and this is farfetched-this reunion could be helpful to my career as an S-F writer, but you don't stand to gain anything by going, and it isn't just out of kindness to Erik Giles that you're going either. You wouldn't miss it."

Marion sighed. "But I, my dear, am a recovering fan."

Erik Giles studied his reflection in the bathroom mirror. There was a colorless look to his lined face, as if he were gradually fading to black and white. Even his eyes were gray. He glanced at the assortment of pills on the rim of the basin and wondered if he ought to go back to his doctor for a new prescription. How many formulas are there to stave off death? Can you switch from one nostrum to another and stay one jump ahead of it?

Not forever.

His mouth looked thin and sunken, and the muscles in his neck stood out like cords. Worse than any monster in Curtis Phillips' horror stories, he thought. This specter of death was much more invincible than the puny demons of Weird Tales. No magic words or pentagrams would drive it away. He must live with that mirrored reminder of his own mortality for whatever time he had left. He didn't think it would be long. The doctor tended to address him in patient, gentle tones that were more terrifying than any rudeness.

Was that why he wanted to see them all again? A moment's consideration told him that he did not particularly want to renew the acquaintance with his old companions, but at least the immediacy of his fate would ensure that the encounter would be mercifully brief. And he was curious after all these years to see how they had turned out. And what they looked like now. How much youth can you buy with Hollywood money? Perhaps they would still be fit and youthful looking. After all, he was just past sixty. He should have quit smoking years ago. The heart condition had devastated his health. Was he the only one who was old? Then he remembered that some of the Lanthanides hadn't even made it to sixty. Giles supposed that he could consider himself lucky that cancer or heart disease hadn't carried him off sooner. But he didn't feel fortunate. Not compared to the boys of summer out there in the Land of the Lotus Eaters. He suddenly realized that he was picturing them as men in their early twenties. Except for Brendan Surn. His white-maned features had become so famous that everybody pictured him as he looked in that one godlike publicity shot, clutching his malacca cane and staring out with what seemed to be infinite wisdom and pity.

Funny… In his mind, the others had not aged at all. He always imagined them as they had been thirty-five years before. He had to admit that most of them hadn't looked young even then. Dugger was pudgy and bespectacled; Phillips' hairline was beginning to recede; and Woodard had looked middle-aged since puberty. The Lanthanides had never been prize physical specimens, but he supposed that their interest in science fiction may have stemmed in part from that. Shunned by their classmates for being "eggheads," they retreated into a world of books and pulp magazines. They found their peers in the magazines' letters columns, and formed friendships by mail.

He could see them now, owlish young men in jeans and white T-shirts, loading up that old '47 Studebaker with cans of pork and beans and moon pies. It was a hot morning in mid-August, and the sky blazed blue and cloudless above the encircling mountains of Wall Hollow. The house was a weathered one-story structure nestled in a grove of oaks, in an acre of scrub grass and lilac bushes fenced in from the surrounding pasture land. No other human habitation was visible from the farm; it might have been an outpost on a genesis planet. The car was parked in the patch of red dust by the front porch, and the six departing members of the group were standing on the porch bickering about what to take along. George Woodard wanted to take two boxes of books to be autographed and a carton full of copies of Alluvial to give away to prospective contributors. Dugger insisted on packing food instead. While the debate raged on, Jim Conyers opened the Studebaker's trunk and began to hoist boxes into it, without a word to the quarrelers. Conyers wasn't even going on the expedition-he had opted to stay behind with Curtis Phillips to feed the three cows and fourteen chickens-but he was the only member of the group who could do anything without analyzing it for two hours beforehand. What ever happened to Jim?

Bunzie was going to drive. The pilgrimage to the San Francisco science fiction convention had been his idea to begin with. Even then-years before he became the celebrated screenwriter Ruben Mistral-Bunzie had been fascinated by California.

The others were less enthusiastic.

"San Francisco?" said George Woodard with his customary worried frown. "Isn't that where they had the earthquake fifty years ago?"

"I don't care if they're having regular afternoon tidal waves!" yelled Bunzie. "They're hosting the Worldcon! Everybody in the world will be there! Slan Francisco!"

Since this was the tenth time Bunzie had made that particular joke, no one bothered to laugh. Finally Woodard called out, "Fans are slans!" but it was more out of politeness than conviction. The phrase would be chanted often in the days to come. Slan: a type of superior being described in the 1940 novel by A. E. Van Vogt. The Lanthanides had almost believed it in those days. They thought that they were the superbeings who had evolved one step beyond the mundanes of the planet. They would be the titans of the next century (and maybe the one after that; they all agreed that aging ought to be curable).

Erik Giles sighed wearily, remembering the mole-faced Dugger, the pedantic pettiness of Woodard, and the '54 version of himself: a bantam intellectual full of youthful arrogance. Slans, indeed. Because they understood the in-jokes in the magazines; because they knew who had written which pulp novella; because they were clever-too clever to really work hard at anything (low threshold of boredom) but endlessly capable of memorizing the facts that interested them. (What year did Asimov first publish? Who was the cover artist for the December 1947 issue of Astounding?) Might as well call a ghetto kid a genius because he knew the batting averages of every one of the Dodgers. So the Slan/ Fans wrote to each other, and argued with each other, and created endless feuds by gossiping about absent friends, secure in the knowledge of their slandom, and all the while, the world trickled right on past them.

Now Giles could look back and see that they didn't break the sound barrier; they didn't walk on the moon; they didn't invent the transistor. The mundanes did that… while they were busy arguing over the ethical considerations of time travel, or writing exhaustive accounts of the last science fiction convention they attended.

It wasn't fair, though, to filter the memory of that summer through the glare of his later understanding. They had been so innocently pleased with themselves back then, and so sure that merit was the only determinant of success. They might as well have believed in fairy godmothers.

He smiled ruefully. They had certainly believed that Dugger's dilapidated green Studebaker, the Tin Lizard, would make it across country. Fortunately it had died in Indiana instead of stranding them in the desert farther west.

It had been a glorious beginning, though. They set off from Wall Hollow for a three-hundred-mile straight shot to Nashville before heading north on Highway 31, which went through Kentucky on its way to Indianapolis. They had got a late start because most of them were night people anyway, so the first day's drive only got them as far as south Kentucky, just past Bowling Green. They spent the first night camping near Mammoth Cave, swapping stories about John Carter, Edgar Rice Burroughs' Virginia gentleman who was chased into a cave by Apaches and ended up on Mars. As they sat around their campfire, Dale Dugger told them a true story about the Kentucky caver Floyd Collins, who was trapped in the Mammoth cave system twenty years back and died of exposure while rescuers bickered about the best way to rescue him. "Who does that remind you of?" said Pat Malone.

The others ignored his comment, preferring to discuss the existence of deros, and debating whether they ought to go looking for them in Mammoth Cave.

"What are deros?" George Woodard wanted to know. He had got so caught up in his fan correspondence and in Alluvial that he had very little time anymore for reading science fiction.

"Didn't you read that stuff in Amazing?" asked Surn. "About ten years ago, Richard Shaver published a short story called 'I Remember Lemuria.' Shaver claimed that a race of insane beings lived beneath the surface of the earth."

"Deros," said Bunzie. "That's short for disentegrant energy robot. Someone whose mind has been destroyed by the Dis rays given off by the sun. Wouldn't that make a great movie?"

"It would," Surn agreed. "But Shaver claimed that it was all true."

Bunzie shrugged. "Curtis believes it, too. He told me so."

The conversation had ended there.

The next morning the Stalwart Six, as they called themselves, climbed back into the car and headed north toward the Indiana border. The direct route from east Tennessee to California would not have led through Indiana, but Surn, the navigator, decided that since it was August and since Dugger's car was decrepit, they had better avoid the southern desert country. Besides, like most fans they had a nationwide network of friends and practically no cash, so the logical route would be the one that led from one fan hostel to another. Another bonus of the expedition was the chance to see famous fan landmarks along the way. Before they reached the second night's stopover with an unsuspecting fan host in Bloomington (showers optional, but highly encouraged), they wanted to drive through New Castle, Indiana, which was famous for being home to one of fandom's famous eccentrics, Claude Degler. Degler had formed a newsletter staffed by a whole society of fellow enthusiasts, who, upon investigation, proved not to exist. People still talked about Degler and his grape jelly-his only form of sustenance when traveling. He mixed it with water, an economy that provoked sneers even among the impoverished denizens of fandom. Degler didn't live in New Castle anymore, but that didn't matter. The traveling Lanthanides wouldn't have wanted to stay with him anyway. They just wanted to look at where he lived, and maybe ask a few townspeople for anecdotes about Degler so that they could report their findings to the rest of fandom at the convention.

Bunzie drove at whatever speed he felt like, and Brendan Surn played navigator, while Dale Dugger read the Burma-Shave signs aloud and made comments on the landscape in general. He kept trying to convince the others that there was more than one kind of cow, but was hooted into silence. In the back seat, Erik was crammed between Woodard and Pat Malone, who were keeping a running travel diary of their great adventure for publication in the next issue of Alluvial.

They sang "Shrimp Boats" for hours on end, trying various harmonies, and they took turns reading aloud from Poul Anderson's latest book, Brainwave, amid Dugger's bitter complaints that Ballantine Books had the nerve to charge thirty-five cents for it instead of the usual quarter.

The trip ended in a puff of smoke outside Seymour, Indiana. The Stalwart Six stood at a safe distance from the Tin Lizard's radiator, watching their dreams of Worldcon evaporate in clouds of steam.

"Well," said Woodard at last. "It could have been worse. At least we didn't hit a train."

"Can we fix it?" asked Bunzie, close to tears. He clutched his Esso road map as if it were a talisman.

"Can't afford a new radiator," Dale Dugger told him. "That would cost at least twenty bucks. We can stop every half hour or so and fill this one up as it leaks. That will get us home. But the Lizard would never make it across the prairie like that. It's too far between water holes."

"We have to turn back," Brendan Surn announced, and nobody argued. With a last look westward, they climbed back in the car, and for a full half hour no one's voice dispelled the gloom.

The ailing Tin Lizard headed for home, with her six Gunga Dins running for water at every streambed. By the time they reached Nashville, their spirits had revived, and Giles and Surn had immortalized the journey in a parody of Kipling's poem:

You may talk o' Blog and Bheer

When your fellow fen are near,

But Tin Lizard doesn't give a damn for boozing;

Studebaker's bastard daughter

Runs on Indiana water,

And about six quarts an hour she was losing.

It went on from there, with dwindling coherence and many forced rhymes, for some fourteen verses. Long before the composition was complete, Malone had retreated into the pages of Brainwave, and he kept ordering the revelers to shut up so that he could read.

They reached home just after nine, trailing ribbons of steam in the lingering twilight of a summer evening. The dark mountains closed behind them, walling out California and all the rest of the inaccessible world. Fireflies flashed like tiny meteors among the clumps of tiger lilies, and from the cow pond, the rhythmic chirrup of frogs welcomed the travelers home.

"How ya gonna keep 'em down on the farm?" said Bunzie. As he climbed out of the Tin Lizard, he kicked a tire in disgust. "So much for the goddamned Worldcon."

"What do we do now?" asked George Woodard.

Pat Malone, who was helping to unload the trunk, looked thoughtfully at the box of supplies he was holding. "We've got the makings for a hell of a party."

"We could have our own convention," said Bunzie. "We have everything but the Worldcon guest of honor. John W. Campbell Jr.-hell, I'll be him!"

"We have no femmefans," Pat Malone pointed out. "Jazzy is at the con, and Earlene has to work Saturdays."

"We can call Angela Arbroath. She couldn't make it to 'Frisco, but I'll bet she could drive up from Mississippi. Maybe she could bring a girlfriend."

"We still have most of our travel money," said Brendan Surn. He was tall and lean in those days, with a hawklike face that seldom smiled. He was smiling now. "Twenty-two dollars will buy a hell of a lot of beer."

Dale Dugger took a running leap at the pasture fence and disappeared into the darkness.

"Where are you going?" Woodard called after him.

"To get some more water for Tin Lizard's radiator!" Dugger yelled back. "The closest beer joint is eight miles up the road!"

Professor Erik Giles closed his bedroom window, shutting out the night air and the sound of chirruping frogs. He didn't want to think about the Lanthanides anymore. The years in Wall Hollow had been enjoyable but useless blocks of time out of his life. Not long after the Worldcon expedition, they had gone their separate ways. Shortly after the dissolution of the group, the Tennessee Valley Authority had condemned the entire valley, paying its residents nominal value for their land. Then, in order to keep the Watauga River from flooding farther downstream, the TVA built a dam, creating a vast artificial lake in the sprawling valley. He had never been back to see it. There had been a letter from Dugger at the time it happened, but he had waited too long to answer it, and his reply came back marked "No forwarding address." Dugger was gone by then, drinking up his settlement money in the honky-tonks of Nashville, giving up fandom for different and more dangerous obsessions. Giles wondered if the government's seizure of the Dugger land had caused Dale's downward slide into alcoholism and poverty. It was too late now for Dale Dugger, but for the rest of them, there was a chance to get together again and to recapture at least some of the past. In his last letter, Dugger had written: "I didn't dig up the time capsule. I got no future to take it to."