Sharyn McCrumb - Zombies of the Gene Pool

"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."