Sharyn McCrumb - Zombies of the Gene Pool

It was on this same road that Jim Conyers was standing now, looking down into muddy water that receded day by day. He was twice a grandfather now, and Dale Dugger had been dead for

thirty years. He couldn't get over the feeling that somewhere down in that lake bed was his youth, waiting for him to come back and dredge it up. Conyers smiled at this bit of fancy, wondering if the other Lanthanides felt that way or if the reunion was a colorful way to make a buck. Impossible to tell. They had long been strangers to him. He wasn't sure he wanted to get reacquainted with these successful old men who had once been his friends, but he supposed that he would have to try. Barbara was very excited about the prospect of the reunion, and about meeting famous people from Hollywood. It was only a few days, after all.

He kept looking at the lake, trying to get his bearings. Was this the spot where the farm had been, or the cliff overlooking the town? Near the bottom of the slope a skeletal tree had risen out of the depths. Was it the Dugger sycamore? The blackened trunk might have been any species of tree, and the other landmarks were still submerged. He would have to wait. A few more weeks and the lake would diminish even more. Then perhaps he would be able to distinguish the ruins of Dugger's house and the road that had led to Mclnturf's store. Perhaps when the drawdown was complete, they could locate the time capsule which now seemed so valuable. But that was not what brought him week after week to the fading shore. Jim Conyers knew that whatever he was looking for in the dead waters of Breedlove Lake, it was not that.

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.)