Sharyn McCrumb - Zombies of the Gene Pool

"I think he was hoping they'd have pointed ears," joked Barbara. "The three-year-old can already say the whole thing: Space, the final frontier …"

Erik Giles consulted his watch. "It's nearly ten. I wonder what happened to Marion. She's going to miss the boat if she isn't careful."

"She came and got us about twenty minutes ago," said Lorien Williams. "Isn't she back yet?"

"She'll turn up," said George Woodard, who was bored by the troubles of others. "Do you think they'll provide us with Drama-mine for the boat ride?"

Angela Arbroath smiled. "I don't think there will be much turbulence in shallow water, George. But you might want to stop drinking coffee. There's no place to pee in an open boat."

"Where is Pat Malone?" asked Barbara Conyers.

"Maybe he overslept," said Woodard. "He was always completely irresponsible. I, for one, won't miss him."

"I will," said Angela. "I forgot to ask if he's still married."

Brendan Surn smiled and patted her arm. "Wouldn't you rather have Pete Deddingfield?" he asked playfully.

"I'm sure she would," said Lorien hastily. "What a guy!" She didn't want to have to explain again who was dead and who wasn't to Brendan Surn.

Ruben Mistral emerged from the crowd of reporters just then, looking grave. "Before we head down to the boats, I need a word with you," he said, pitching his voice to a discreet undertone. "What's wrong?" gasped Angela, taking a mental tally of who was present.

Mistral looked faintly disapproving, as if he were anticipating hysterics. "Just a little bad news," he murmured. "But the important thing is that we must not discuss this with any of the media people present."

"Who died?" asked Jim Conyers.

Mistral winced at the plain speaking. "It's Pat Malone, I'm afraid. He wasn't looking too well last night. Heart attack, I imagine. It's something we have to face when we get to be our age. But you know how reporters are. We wouldn't want to distract them from the real story, would we?" He looked sharply at George Woodard, traditionally the weak link in the chain. "After all, if we make a fuss, it could diminish the importance and the monetary value of our time capsule. Not to mention the possibility of our being detained by the police for questioning."

The Lanthanides looked at each other nervously. Finally Jim Conyers said, "I don't see any harm in keeping quiet about this for the time being. It isn't obstructing justice to refrain from mentioning a death to a bunch of reporters and book editors."

"Exactly!" nodded Mistral, visibly relieved.

"None of their business," said George Woodard.

Angela Arbroath was pale, and her eyes were red-rimmed. "I suppose you know best," she murmured. "But it was natural causes?"

"Sure," said Mistral. "What else could it be?"

"Marion, what are you doing in here?"

When Marion hadn't reappeared at the briefing, Jay Omega had gone in search of her. He had checked the coffee shop and the lobby without success, and finally he decided to look in the room to see if she had been taken ill. As he made his way along the second-floor hallway toward their room he had noticed an open door, and when he glanced inside he saw Marion Farley, gazing out the window at the barren expanse of red clay between the pine-topped slopes. She did not turn to face him until he had repeated the question.

When Marion stood up, he could see that she looked ill.

"Are you all right?"

She pointed toward the bathroom. "Pat Malone," she said grimly. "He's dead again."

He looked in the direction she pointed, and for the first time he noticed the blue-robed body sprawled partly inside the bathroom. Jay looked from Marion to the corpse and back again, half expecting everyone to burst out laughing and say "Gotcha!," but the look on Marion's face was solemn and strained, and he was forced to believe that it was true. As he came toward her, he became aware of the smell, and this convinced him beyond any doubt that there had indeed been a death.

"What happened?"

Marion shrugged. "He was like this when I found him. I checked to make sure that he was dead-no pulse-and other than that, I left him alone. The maid was with me when I found him, and she saw to it that the authorities were called. I'm sorry I didn't come back, but I couldn't leave him. I kept thinking to myself, This guy wrote River of Neptune. I know that doesn't make him anything extraordinary, but-well, to me it does. I'm an English professor. I'm a fan." There was a catch in her voice. "I even wanted to get his autograph."

Jay put his arms around her. "Far be it from me to talk you out of revering writers," said the author of Bimbos of the Death Sun. "But there really isn't anything that you can do here."

"I know, Jay. I said I would stay until someone came for the body, though. You understand, don't you?"

Jay sat down in the armchair by the window and motioned for her to sit on the bed. "I'll keep you company," he said. "We'll make it a two-person wake. It's too bad about the old fellow. I think he was looking forward to this. Wonder where he's been all these years."

"I wonder who he's been all these years," said Marion. She told Jay about the medicine bottle issued to someone other than Pat Malone.

Jay looked puzzled. "An alias? That seems strange. I wonder how the police are going to notify his next of kin."

Marion looked sadly at the crumpled figure in the doorway. "I wonder if he has any," she said.

"Didn't that old fanzine of yours say that he had been married?"

"Thirty years ago," said Marion. She gasped. "I wonder if she knows he isn't dead. I mean, he is, but I wonder if she knew that he didn't die in 1958."

Jay Omega shrugged. "Won't the police handle all that?"

"I don't know," said Marion. "If it was natural causes, they might not try too hard. And it might take them weeks or months. Damn it, I want to know who Pat Malone was for the last thirty years! I wonder if he had any ties in fandom!"

"I brought my portable computer," said Jay diffidently.

"Of course you did. You never go anywhere without it!" snapped Marion. "So what? Are you going to compose the eulogy?"

"No, but I may be able to find out some things about Pat Malone in a hurry. You remember Joel Schumann?"

"An engineering student of yours? Sort of."

"He gave me a phone number that might be helpful. Joel is known around the department as the Napoleon of hackers."

Marion looked interested. "An FBI of nerds! It might work. When can you start?"

"This evening after the boat trip," said Jay. "The rates go down at five."

At ten forty-three in the morning, a gaggle of rubber-booted literary tourists waddled down the red clay slopes of Breedlove Lake and clumped onto the concrete boat ramp, which now stopped two hundred yards from the water's edge. Above them towered hillsides of clay and rubble, once submerged beneath the lake and now forming a desolate canyon beneath the pine-topped hills surrounding it.

Beside the boat ramp, a rocky mountain stream bubbled down the hillside, headed for the distant lake water. Before the drawdown the stream had been swallowed by the expanse of Breed-love Lake, existing only as a current within the reservoir, but now it had been freed to course through its own eroded canyon, through seasons of silt, as it cut its way to the muddy waters of the great Watauga, pulsing again through the heart of the valley.

The concrete of the boat ramp ended twenty feet down the slope, succeeded by a flat graveled plain that might once have been a road. Another hundred yards on-and thirty feet down, had there been a lake-the road fell away into a series of curving rock ridges, spiraling down to a shelf of brown clay that was the new shoreline. Except for deep gullies that had trapped the ebbing lake water, the valley was visible again, and once more the Watauga River, artery of the region, was a discernable confluence, kept within its banks by the release of its overflow through the sluice gates of the TVA dam.