Zombies of the Gene Pool

Chapter 4

Forty years ago, when the Lanthanides were reading comic books instead of selling serial rights to them, there was a comic series called "The Little King," featuring a diminutive cone-shaped monarch with a red robe and a perpetual scowl of ill-humor. People of a certain age invariably remembered that cartoon character when they encountered the less regal but equally peevish George Woodard.

The resemblance at the moment was great. Wearing a tatty red bathrobe over his clothes to combat the chill of the basement, the stout and shortsighted George Woodard paced the damp concrete floor, back and forth between the clothes drier and the mimeograph machine, in search of literary inspiration.

The next issue of George Woodard's fanzine Alluvial was due out in a week, and he had to begin the page layouts tonight.

There were many articles to be typed up, and many estimates of column inches to be calculated to make sure that everything fit in the correct number of pages, which is to say: the most that could be mailed for a single first-class postage stamp. George believed in getting his money's worth from the post offal (or post orifice or post awful-the puns varied per issue), but since his three dozen subscribers were of mostly straitened means, he could not expect them to pony up more money for a bigger ish.

He knew that some of the younger "publishers"-indeed, most of them-used word processors these days, and some even had software packages like Pagemaker which could produce very professional-looking 'zines, but George would not be converted by the lure of technological ease. The mimeograph machine was within his ability to operate, and it was paid for. The prospect of a complex and expensive computer strained both his self-esteem and the uneasy peace within the family on the subject of his hobby.

It was late. His wife had long since gone to bed, advising him to do the same since he had "school" tomorrow. It was the same phrase and tone of voice she had employed when the children were young. She said "school" as if he were a pupil rather than a professional educator. Indeed, there was much in Earlene's manner toward him lately that suggested she had abandoned the role of wife for the more authoritative one of mother. The mousy little girl of the fifties was now tart and forthright, bossing him about with contempt masked as concern. Her attitude implied that it was he who forced this change in her behavior. What but a mother can one be to someone who refuses to grow up? But all of this had taken place without the utterance of one cross word, without one syllable of reproof from her. Gradually, the shy waif had given way to the Valkyrie, and one of the chief illusions lost in the process had been her image of George.

He sighed. Women were too mired down in the here and now to really be idealists, he told himself. They were always ready to turn practical at the first phone call from a creditor, or when the baby got sick, or when someone they knew saw them using food stamps. No devotion to causes. He had long ago stopped asking her to help him address issues of Alluvial.

He yawned. He should go to bed, of course. Those hellions in Algebra I would require every ounce of patience and stamina in him tomorrow, but his self-imposed deadline for Alluvial forced him to keep working. After all, this was a special issue, containing actual news: the announcement of the Lanthanides' reunion in Tennessee. He picked up the article, which he had composed on stencil, and read through it again.

LANTHANIDES REUNITE

TO RETRIEVE TIME CAPSULE

Has it really been thirty-six solar years since we left the Fan Farm?

Indubitably it has. The Lanthanides, as an organization, is but a golden memory in the minds of those of us who were a part of it, but its effect on SF springs eternal. From this group of devoted fhans, living in idyllic squalor in Wall Hollow, Tennessee, came many of the names in the genre's (illusory, because we can't afford to build one) Hall of Fame: Angela Arbroath, Dale Dugger the original co-editor of Alluvial, and of course your faithful correspondent: myself.

The group spawned a few dirty old pros, too: Surn, Deddingfleld, Phillips, Mistral. (Just kidding, guys!) In the last ish of Alluvial, I recounted our adventures on the Great 1954 Tennfan Expedition to Slan Francisco, and how it came to grief in the Indiana outback due to an excess of hot air. (Always a problem with the some of the Lanthanides, most notably P. Malone.) Your humble chronicler went on to recount how he managed to at least partially repair the auto (much to the admiration of Surn, who only knew theoretical rocket mechanics), so that the Stalwart Six were able to make it back to the Fan Farm. He then suggested that they use their remaining funds to have a Con of their own.

It was during that weekend that the Lanthanides Time Capsule was planned, and subsequently buried.

In the last ish (back issues of Alluvial available for $!/ postage), I told how we came to bury that amazing cache (after much bheer had been consumed) which included a short story by each member of the group. Since we had no copy machines and nobody typed on stencils, all these stories are unpublished! No one has ever seen them! (A pity. Curtis Phillips said that Yours Truly's story was the best he'd ever read.) For a list of the rest of the contents of the Time Capsule, see page 4.)

In the last issue's article, we lamented the fact that no one ever would see those unpublished yarns of ours. As all Trufandom knows, in the mid-Fifties, after the Lanthanides had gone their separate ways, the TVA turned the whole valley into a lake, and the famous Wall Hollow Fan Farm was hundreds of feet under water. For the past thirty-five years the time capsule has been at the bottom of the Gene C. Breedlove Lake. (Known to fandom as the Gene Pool.) (Gene C. Breedlove was some mundane Tennessee politician. Not important.)

Be that as it may (and I'm not sure that it was), after I printed this tale in the last Alluvial, I had a letter from a Tennfan, who enclosed a newspaper clipping from the Bristol Herald-Courier, saying that THEY'RE GOING TO DRAIN THE LAKE. The dam needs repairing (no noun omitted here, folks), so the TVA is going to drain the Gene Pool, and after a few phone calls from Ye Editor, it was all settled. It turns out that Jim Conyers and his lovely femmefan Barbara (would you believe she's a grandmother now?) still live in the area, and they were receptive to the idea of a reunion. Jim's going to make the lodging arrangements for this micro-mini con. Many of the Lanthanides are going back to Tennessee to attempt the recovery of the Lanthanides' Time Capsule. Surn! Mistral! Angela Arbroath! And Moi. What a reunion! Fan history in the making. And a new chapter in the

annals of Science Fiction. Yours truly will be on the scene, and the next ish will carry a full report!

#30

TO THE FUTURE WITH LOVE:

The Contents of the Lanthanides' Time Capsule*

(* To the best of my recollection

and that of Jim Conyers)

• One WAR OF THE WORLDS poster, wheedled from the manager of the Bonnie Kate Theater in Elizabethton.

• Deddingfield's treasured copy of the August 1928 issue of AMAZING, signed by E. E. "Doc" Smith and Philip Francis Nowlan.

• One jar of grape jelly (in case Claude Degler should survive the Nuclear Holocaust).

• One typewritten manuscript of a short story or novella from each member of the Lanthanides.

• John W. Campbell's Letter to the Twenty-First Century.

• Curtis Phillips' copy of THE OUTSIDERS by Lovecraft, annotated by Lovecraft expert Francis Towner Laney.

• Letters from various people now famous, or infamous for being nonexistent (e.g.-Sgt. Joan Carr).

• Copies of all the issues of Alluvial up to that time.

• Copies of ASTOUNDING and WEIRD TALES, including a dummy issue of the last, never published issue of WEIRD TALES, containing a story by Peter Deddingfield.

• Some Ray Bradbury fanzines.

• A picture of a dog (To confuse the Aliens).

• One propeller-beanie.

• Other stuff that we have forgotten over the years.

editor's note: All you Trufan collectors out there know that this stuff is worth a lot of money in today's market, but of course the greatest treasure of all is the manuscript collection of the Lanthanides themselves. (Little did we know!) (But we had a hunch!) – Anyway, I foresee all kinds of excitement over this resurrection of the Holy Grail of Fandom. Look for news about a forthcoming anthology in future issues of ALLUVIAL! (Sure LOCUS will report it, but WE'LL KNOW FIRST.)

#30

George read the articles, inserted a few open parentheses, and pronounced them up to his usual standard, despite his fatigue. He thought he'd better make himself a pot of coffee before he tackled the article on the future of NATO. He would have to pull an all-nighter to finish the issue. It would be better to get it in the mail to his subscribers before Earlene read it and found out he was gong to raid their Christmas club account to fund a trip to Wall Hollow, Tennessee. At least the phone bill wasn't too bad this month. Woodard didn't have telephone numbers for most of the Lanthanides, even if he could have afforded to call them. He did manage to reach Ruben Mistral, and Bunzie had put one of his secretaries to work arranging the rest. George clutched the lapels of his bathrobe, trying to keep out the basement chill. It was good to know that somebody still treasured the old days, even if he had become rich and famous. Ye Editor resolved not to use the term "Dirty Old Pro" quite so often in the next few issues.

Brendan Surn, the legendary lion of science fiction, no longer lived on earth. For some time now, his mind had been elsewhere; it returned from time to time for increasingly shorter intervals, but the ties between the author and his life and work were nearly severed. Soon he would be gone for good.

Surn sat in his monogrammed deck chair, staring out at the placid sea. He wore a cowled beach robe of natural fibers and leather sandals, and his white mane of hair reflected the sunlight in a halo around his serene face. He looked like a monk in holy contemplation. Even the architecture of the house fitted the conceit: its exposed-beam cathedral ceiling formed a nave above Surn's head, and the setting sun turned the window to stained glass. With his classic features and that expression of sorrowful contemplation, he could have posed for a portrait of a medieval saint. He might have been Thomas a' Becket, saying his last mass at Canterbury.

Lorien Williams wondered what Brendan Surn did think about these days. He spent most of his waking hours gazing out at the ocean, saying little and writing nothing. She liked to think that he still lived in the dreaming spires of Antaeus, the world featured in his greatest works, but he never mentioned his books to her. She hoped that he had not forgotten them. The sound of the ringing telephone a few moments before had pierced the silent house, but it had not reached his still point. He sat as calmly as ever, studying the endless motions of the green waves.

Lorien stood with her finger poised on the hold bar of the phone, wondering what she ought to do about the call. There wasn't anyone to ask. When she had first arrived on her fan pilgrimage to Dry Salvages, Surn's futuristic aerie on a cliff in Carmel, she had been afraid that no one would let her in to meet the great man. His reputation for solitude was legendary, and few people dared to test it. But Lorien had read all of Surn's works, and she felt that she had to express her admiration for him in person. She hoped for an autograph; maybe even a picture of herself standing beside him.

Surn himself had answered her knock, shambling to the door in his robe and slippers and admitting her without question. A few moments' conversation, and the litter of spoiled food and unopened mail told Lorien what she had stumbled into. Her grandmother had been much the same in the last years of her life. Lorien didn't remember being affected much by that, but Brendan Surn was her idol, and she could see that he needed her. So she cleaned up the mess and fixed him a hot meal, and then she decided to stay until someone else turned up. Surely he had a housekeeper? As the weeks passed, Lorien became used to her new surroundings. Her fast-food job in Clarkston, Washington was not something she had wanted in the first place, but it supported her science fiction activities and placated her parents. She wrote to them and said that she'd found a better job in Carmel, which, in a way, was true. She noted that Surn had good days and bad days. Sometimes he was almost normal. He could still carry on a conversation, write checks, and decide what he wanted to eat, but he seemed very much like a little boy. The depth of adult emotions was missing, and he compensated for it by becoming more pleasant, and by agreeing with almost anything she suggested. Lorien thought it was lucky that it had been she who found him, rather than some gold-digging blonde or some unscrupulous business person. She wondered if Surn ought to see a doctor, but when she suggested it, he would become agitated, making her afraid that he might tell her to leave. That would be bad for both of them. It would mean that she would have to go back to a deadend job somewhere, and he would be thrown to the mundanes. He might even end up in an institution. It was better this way; at least, until he was much farther gone.

At first she was afraid that someone would turn up and tell her to go away. Now she thought she would view eviction as a rescue; but that possibility grew more remote with each passing day. Months passed and no one came, so gradually she began to belong here. She learned "the routine at Dry Salvages, and she picked up the skills to take over the business side of Surn's life. The editors and other business people who telephoned for Surn accepted her without question. If anything, they seemed relieved to have someone capable and courteous to talk to, and no one seemed to care who she was or why she was there. Least of all Brendan Surn.

She identified herself now as Surn's assistant. Perhaps some of them thought she was his daughter. She looked quite young, with her sexless body and her dark hair worn flower-child long. She had sad brown eyes in a dreaming face, and no one would ever mistake her for a bimbo, the human furniture for the rich man's beach house. She was not that. Surn seemed to take her presence for granted, but sex did not appear to be one of his physical needs anymore. Even when she bathed him, he gave no sign of arousal. He had never even asked her name.

She looked again at the telephone, wondering what she should say. Most of the decisions were easy: Yes, you can reprint that, or please add a jar of coffee to the grocery order. But this was different. Would Surn want to go to Tennessee to see his old friends? Could he handle it?

It wasn't a decision that Lorien Williams wanted to make. She thought she'd better try to make him understand about the call. She knelt down beside his deck chair and touched his arm to rouse him from his reverie. "Brendan?" she said softly. At first she had called him Mr. Surn, but it seemed silly to be so formal with someone who could not even fry an egg. Now she thought of him as two people. There was Mr. Surn the great writer, and Brendan, the sweet, childlike man who needed her so much.

He blinked once or twice, as if he had been asleep. "Yes, Lori?"

"There's a man on the telephone who says to tell you that his name is Bunzie." A note of awe crept into her voice. "It's really Ruben Mistral, from the movies."

Surn nodded. "I know Bunzie," he said softly.

"He's calling about the Lanthanides." Lorien had read the biography of Surn, so she knew about his early years on the Fan Farm. "They're having a reunion back in Wall Hollow, and he wants to know if you would like to go. It's in Tennessee," she added, in case he had forgotten.

"Yes," said Surn in his mild, dreaming voice. "I know Bunzie. I'd like to see him again. Will Erik be there?"

"I don't know," said Lorien. She had not asked for details. "I can find out more about it now. I just wanted to see if you were interested in going."

"And Pat. Will he be there? Pat Malone?"

"I don't think so, Brendan," she said, patting his arm. Pat Malone had been dead for a long time. Everybody knew that.

On one side of Ruben Mistral's weekly engagement calendar there was an astronomer's photo of the Horseshoe Nebula, a billion pinpoints of light making a haze in the blackness of space.

Under the picture, Mistral had written: "This scene represents the number of meetings I attend per year!"

"Damn it!" he thought. "It's almost true." The many components of his film and publishing empire required considerable maintenance. He could delegate the day-to-day chores, but he supervised his underlings closely. After all, it was his money and his reputation on the line. The next few weeks of his datebook looked like a timetable for the Normandy invasion; nearly every damned hour was filled. When did they expect him to write? They didn't, of course. These days he had rewrite men and assistant screenwriters and a host of other flunkies to see that his barest idea was transformed into a two-hour movie. But Bunzie missed the old days, and the seat-of-the-pants style of production: the days when he was "Bunzie" instead of "Ruben Mistral." Being a Hollywood mogul had seemed like a wonderful dream in those far-off days; too bad reality never lived up to one's expectations. Bunzie, clad in a red designer sweatsuit and matching Reeboks, was pedaling away on the exercise bike in the corner of his office. He hated it, but it kept his doctor happy. He was supposed to be able to think "creative thoughts" while he exercised, but his brain wouldn't stay in gear. Instead of considering his current project, he looked appraisingly at his chrome and glass office, decorated with posters from his hit movies. He had probably spent more to furnish that office than poor old Woodard had spent for his house in Maryland. So, he told himself, life wasn't perfect, but he shouldn't kvetch. He was successful. The money was certainly okay; he still had his hair and his teeth; and his health was good thanks to the diet and exercise, every minute of which he hated. But, he thought, at his age, who had any fun anyhow? Better he should be rich and fit and miserable than poor and fat and miserable.

He looked up at the large framed photograph above his desk, as he usually did when the word "poor" entered his head. Most people thought that the picture of the blue mountain lake, nestled among green hills was a soothing landscape, a device to relax him like the crystals on his desk, but for Ruben Mistral the lake picture was a memorial to the days when he could relax. It was the only picture he had of Wall Hollow, Tennessee. It had been taken years after the guys left the Fan Farm, but he knew that somewhere under that expanse of green water lay his youth.

Bunzie forced himself to keep pedaling the damned exercise bike. That was the story of his life, wasn't it? Keep pedaling. Maybe everybody else was willing to give up, willing to take no for an answer, and willing to settle for less, but not Ruben Mistral. Mistral would have the best for himself, and he would demand the best from himself and from everyone he worked with.

After all these years, Bunzie still felt schizophrenic about his two identities. In the Wall Hollow days, he had dreamed of becoming Ruben Mistral-rich and famous-and several decades later, that person certainly did exist in all the imagined glory of Bunzie's daydreams. But inside that tanned and calorie-controlled body, the old Bunzie still existed, too. Science fiction legend Ruben Mistral bought two-thousand-dollar suits; Bunzie the fan from Brooklyn saved paperclips from the business letters he received. Mistral had discreet affairs with starlets whose year of birth coincided with his age; Bunzie secretly preferred Alma Louise, his wife of thirty years. Mistral was a tiger shark who could smell blood in a business deal a mile away; Bunzie missed his old pals from Dugger's farm.

Most of the time, Bunzie felt that he was a flunky who worked for Ruben Mistral; the great man never did the actual scutwork of writing, or editing scripts. That was Bunzie. Mistral was the glad-hander in Beverly Hills; the maven of the talk shows; the one with a thousand associates, contacts, and employees, but no friends. Bunzie had once had friends. Mistral had his business cronies and, now that the movie versions of his books had made him a celebrity, he had "people," those who were paid to like him, and paid to keep anyone else from ever getting close to him. Mistral was cold company for a nice guy like Bunzie. He was necessary though; Bunzie had to admit that. The cold and brilliant Ruben Mistral made merciless deals, paid all the bills, and he enabled Bunzie and Alma to live in a beautiful house in Topanga Canyon. He even tossed a few scraps to worthy charities from time to time. Not a bad guy by the local lights. He made so much money that he could afford to endow a hospital ward. What could good-hearted Bunzie have done without the ruthless Mistral ambition: give quarters to panhandlers? Bunzie knew that if there ever came a time when irreconcilable differences forced one of them to depart from the body for good, it would be Bunzie, not Mistral, who would have to go.

Still, in the brief periods of solitude when Mistral's presence was not required, Bunzie thought back on the old days with nostalgia and regret. If you were a true pal, he told himself, you'd have taken your buddies with you to the Promised Land.

"But I tried," said Bunzie to himself-or rather, to Ruben Mistral, who was sneering as usual. "Didn't I try to get Woodard to go to that Worldcon in the sixties and meet some people? Editors buy stuff from people they know, I told him. But he couldn't take the time off work, he said. And didn't I tell Stormy everything he needed to know about promotion, so that he could make a name for himself with his book? But, oh no, he wanted to be a college professor, and college professors are above that sort of merchandising." On the exercise bike, Bunzie kept pedaling. He had tried to help the old gang; not that some of them needed it. Surn was. a legend, and Deddingfield had been the richest required-reading author he knew. As for the others, he figured that there were some people who could not even have greatness thrust upon them. But he had tried. And sometimes, when Mistral was too busy to sneer at what a bunch of woolly-headed losers they were, Bunzie missed them.

He remembered the pizza. Years ago, when he had just moved out to California to pursue his dream of a screenwriting career, he was living on beans and buying old scripts at the Goodwill, trying to teach himself how to write one, but his letters to the gang scattered up and down the East Coast were always cheerful, full of hope. Bunzie agreed with Churchill that one should be an optimist; there wasn't much point in being anything else. Still, some glimpse of his dire straits must have shown through in the letters, because in the mail one day Bunzie found a check for fifteen dollars and a note saying: "You sound really down. Go buy yourself a pizza." And it was from Dale Dugger! Fifteen dollars must have been hard to spare for Dale back then, but he'd sent it anyhow, not even making it a loan. Just a gift from a pal. Bunzie never forgot that, and even these days, when Alma paid fifteen dollars for a cake of soap, Bunzie was still touched by the memory of that gesture. They had been his friends, not like this new bunch with their little axes to grind, their deals to make.

That was why Bunzie, ignoring the protests of Ruben Mistral, had agreed to organize the Lanthanides' reunion. George Woodard had called him about it, bubbling over with enthusiasm, but short of money as usual, and completely hopeless when it came to organization. If George handled it, it would end up being a three-man get-together in a cheap motel, and nothing would come of the book. Bunzie saw the potential, and he was pleased at George's eager display of gratitude when he volunteered to take over. Sometimes it helped to be famous. "Leave it to me," he had told George. Poor old humbug, thought Bunzie with a sigh; this reunion will be the thrill of a lifetime for George. Who could I bring along as a treat for him? Nimoy? Bob Silverberg? But he dismissed the idea of bringing other celebrities. That would mean that Ruben Mistral would have to come, too, and he'd insist on bringing some bimbo starlet to impress his pals. Bunzie didn't want that to happen. He wanted this weekend trip to yesteryear to belong just to him. But he wanted it well organized, and he wanted its potential mined to the fullest.

Wall Hollow, Tennessee?, one of his "people" had sneered. Is that anywhere near Hooterville?

But for once Bunzie had overruled the snobbery of Ruben Mistral and his minions. This time he wasn't going to take no for an answer. Dale Dugger had been dead for thirty years, but still there was a debt there that Bunzie wanted to pay. And a debt of friendship to poor old hopeless George Woodard, and to Conyers and Erik, and to the memory of that silly ass Pat Malone, who might have made it if he'd lived.

So Ruben Mistral would call in favors from a few influential people in the media, and he'd start the publicity ball rolling about the proposed anthology in the time capsule. He couldn't even remember what he'd written for it anymore. But he did remember doing one, handwritten with a cartridge pen in peacock-blue ink. Maybe he could revise it a little before publication. There are limits to the charm of nostalgia. He'd get a couple of his editor friends and his New York agent, and some movie people to film the event, and he'd fly the whole caboodle of them first class to the Tri-Cities Airport outside Blountville, Tennessee.

Then what? God only knew what accommodations there'd be. He had people working on it, though. They would charter the nearest acceptable motel. Maybe two motels. No point in having the press and the editors underfoot all the time. They were all a bunch of kids, anyway.

The thing was a natural from a publicity standpoint. A sunken city, a buried time capsule full of priceless manuscripts, a reunion of the giants-hell, the thing could be a movie in itself. (The Mistral part of his mind delegated somebody to work on that.) With all the hype he could arrange (Steve King to write the introduction to the anthology, maybe?), the collection of stories in that time capsule could be worth a pot of money. They could easily get a million at a literary auction. Not that Ruben Mistral needed the money-Bunzie hastily told himself that he was doing it for old times' sake-but the prospect of a big literary kill would make things more interesting. Why shouldn't they capitalize on it? And he'd split it with the gang. They certainly needed the cash. Say, ten percent for each of them, the rest to him…

The wall phone by the exercise bike buzzed once, and, still pedaling rhythmically, he picked it up. "Ruben Mistral here," said a cold, smooth voice.

And he was.