Sharyn McCrumb: Zombies of the Gene Pool

It seemed to Jay Omega that he had the worst of both worlds-another reason that the English department made him uneasy. The way he figured it, an author could either go for respect in the literary world-critical reviews in prestigious journals, scholarly articles on one's works, small print runs at respected university presses-or he could write popular fiction and receive fan mail and big bucks. The lurid bikini-clad girl on the cover of Jay Omega's paperback original left no doubt in the English department as to which category his work fell into. They assumed that he was making a fortune, and that it was easy money.

Every time Marion talked him into attending a faculty party, one of her colleagues would sidle up to him, margarita in hand, and say, "You know, maybe during spring break I'll dash off a science fiction novel. I could use the extra cash."

Apparently they didn't intend to be insulting. They all thought that he was rich and lazy. Jay suspected that if he admitted to them how hard he worked and how little he made, they would simply replace their envy with contempt, so he left well enough alone.

The professorial misconception was that genre writing was easy and high-paying, and that anyone with scholarly training could do it in a matter of hours. Occasionally one of them tried. Jay Omega had been forced to read some of these dashed-off manuscripts, and he found them to be plodding exercises in obscurity. They sounded like dissertations. Finding excuses not to give out the name of his agent or his editor was beginning to require more creativity than his latest book. He was losing patience. Sooner or later one of them was going to sneer at him once too often, and he was going to say, "Look-if you really want a surefire scheme for cash from trash, forget genre fiction. Just write a long convoluted novel in the present tense with no quotation marks and sell it to a university press. Get your friends to write reviews of it in the MLA Journal, get tenure on your literary reputation, and then sit back for the rest of your life collecting a fat salary and teaching two classes a week."

Marion would kill him.

He decided that he'd better stop loitering in the halls of the English department, before one of them accosted him with a new plot summary. Perhaps he could write Marion a note asking her to meet him at his office.

"Ah, Dr. Mega! I've been meaning to speak to you."

Too late!

Jay Omega looked up, hoping that he wasn't about to be presented with another manuscript. To his relief he saw Erik Giles, empty-handed, beckoning from the door of his office. Professor Giles taught nineteenth- and early twentieth-century British literature, and as far as Jay knew, he wrote only for scholarly publications.

"I take it that Marion is busy," Giles was saying. "Why don't you come in for a cup of coffee, and you can keep an eye on her door." He raised one eyebrow. "Or at least monitor the noise level."

With a grin of considerable relief, Jay Omega hurried into Professor Giles' shabby, book-strewn office. Compared to the engineering offices, it was a Victorian parlor. (Marion once said that his office looked like the inside of a pinball machine.) He removed a stack of papers from the Goodwill armchair and sat down. Despite the clutter, it was a comfortable room, well suited to Giles himself. It had the same air of old, but still serviceable, and its genial mix of well-worn books and prints of English landscapes suggested an old-fashioned gentility indicative of an aging scholar. This, of course, was a carefully cultivated pose on the part of Erik Giles, and it served him very well. His Dickensian office, his rimless glasses, and his baggy cardigan sweaters tallied with everyone's expectations of a kindly but dull middle-aged professor of English; few people bothered to look beneath the facade.

Marion had found out the secret quite by accident, on her way to her science fiction class to lecture on the history of the genre. Four minutes late as usual, she had scurried around the corner, balancing a chin-high stack of paperbacks, and crashed into Professor Giles, who was just leaving his lit class on Kipling. The collision sent the books flying. Ever the gentleman, Erik Giles had stooped to help his colleague gather up her belongings.

"So frightfully clumsy of me," he murmured, although it had clearly been her fault.

Marion claimed all of the blame for the mishap and tottered on to her classroom. She hadn't given the incident another thought until midway through her lecture when she was discussing the writers of the early fifties. "… And one of the most visionary and lyrical of the new generation of S-F writers wrote as C. A. Stormcock, which, as I'm sure you've guessed, was a pseudonym. His major work was The Golden Gain… ." She began to rummage through the stack of books in search of her copy. She found that she had acquired an edition of Kipling's poems during her collision with Professor Giles. Idly, she opened the volume at a place marked with a paperclip, half intending to save herself further embarrassment by pretending that this was the volume she sought. She looked down at a well-marked passage of "The Mine Sweepers," intrigued by a phrase in the poem.

She looked up to find thirty pairs of eyes staring at her expectantly. She resumed her search for the real book. "This landmark work, totally ignored when it was first published… it's here somewhere… illustrates the theory that… no, that's not it."

It wasn't there.

In the end, Marion bluffed her way through that part of her talk, dispensing with the reading of the death scene of Selig in chapter nine, but for the rest of the lecture, Dr. Farley was on automatic pilot. As she recited the particulars of genre history, her mind was analyzing the problem of the missing volume. She had taken it off the bookshelf in her office, and she remembered placing it in the stack…

"It is only in recent years that S-F scholars have taken any notice of Stormcock. His paperback originals were virtually ignored by the critics of the time. C. A. Stormcock was, as I said, a pen name. Many writers-especially in science fiction-used pseudonyms in those days."

"Like Jay Omega," said an engineering major.

Marion reddened, almost losing her train of thought. "Oh, yes. Our own Dr. James Owens Mega, of the electrical engineering department, writes as Jay Omega, which is a physics term-"

"Frequency times the square root of negative one," said the engineer.

Marion scowled. "I knew that."

"So what was Stormcock's real name?" someone called out. "There are several theories. One is that he did not exist, and that Curtis Phillips and the notorious Pat Malone actually wrote his works in collaboration. Others think that-"

"Is this going to be on the test?" asked a serious-faced little blonde.

Marion sighed. "No," she said. "Because, after all, we really don't know who he was." But suddenly she did.

When the chimes sounded the hour, Marion got out of the room faster than the football players. She ran down the hall and into Professor Giles' turn-of-the-century lair without bothering to knock. "Why did you take my copy of The Golden Gain?" she demanded.

He looked up from a stack of term papers, genial but apparently puzzled. "Did I?" he said mildly. "It must have got mixed with my own papers."

Marion almost wavered, but then she remembered. "You weren't carrying any papers when I ran into you."

He sighed. "Oh dear. Well, I'm afraid it isn't a very good book. Reverse alchemy, in fact-turning gold into lead. Must you include it?"

Marion looked stern. "May I have my copy back, please?" With a sheepish smile, Professor Giles reached under the stack of term papers and brought out the tattered paperback.

Marion made no move to retrieve it. "May I have it autographed, please?"