Zombies of the Gene Pool

was astonishing. For the first time in her life, Angela found herself popular.

She hadn't intended to be a self-published magazine editor. At first she merely wanted to correspond with the people she met through other people's 'zines, but a few samples of these grainy, amateurish efforts convinced her that she could produce a better one, and she quickly realized that it was much simpler to produce one magazine than it was to try to write twenty-five personal letters.

So Archangel had been born. Either by luck or uncommon good sense (she refused to remember which), Angela had written to Brendan Surn and Pat Malone and a couple of the fan-elite of the day, asking them to contribute articles to her first edition. And because most of them would have given an article to anyone who asked them nicely, they responded by sending her amusing and informative columns that she dutifully typed in on her father's old Underwood typewriter. When the issue was complete, she sent it to a few of the People Who Mattered in fandom, and suddenly she was a celebrity. People clamored for subscriptions to Archangel, and overnight she had a hundred new friends.

She would be the first to admit that Archangel was not the legendary fanzine that Alluvial was. It was generally acknowledged that Alluvial?, chief editor, Pat Malone, was brilliant, but because Angela had a less abrasive personality and was able to get along with almost everyone in fandom, she could get a wide variety of interesting articles from almost everyone. By the time some of these fans went on to become famous pros, Angela was one of the most respected and influential amateur publishers.

She smiled again, remembering the heady feeling of acceptance in those early days. It was like being cheerleader, prom queen, and secretary of the class all rolled into one. And the letters were so interesting. They read the books that she read, and they seemed absorbed in worthwhile subjects, like space travel and future societies. Whereas her other correspondent, her dreary cousin Betty in Texas, only talked about her boyfriends and what she wore on dates. This was definitely an improvement.

Looking back, Angela knew that most of those people were not her friends at all. They sent her lectures on their own pet obsessions with a word or two of personalization, or they sent mimeographed letters to who-knows- how-many correspondents. Convoy duty was not her idea of a relationship, but it took her a good many years to realize that. The letters that were personal were mostly from unattached young men, who viewed her as a rare prize, because in the fifties women in the hobby were few and far between. She had indulged in a few long-distance romances with some of the more eloquent souls, but the spark never survived an actual meeting.

Over the years, though, Angela had become more perceptive, and more selective about her friends, and she had found some good ones and had managed to keep most of them for several decades now. She no longer published Archangel, though. As the years went by, she found that fans were getting younger and younger, and she no longer had much interest in communicating with the new bunch. She went to an occasional science fiction convention, upon prearrangement that friends she wanted to see would be there, but they paid little heed to the scheduled events, preferring to hold their own reunion. And every so often, someone would work up a privately published tribute to fandom, and she would be asked to include an article about Archangel, which she always did, reasoning that it was a debt she owed to the hobby in return for its earlier kindnesses to her.

Aside from that, she answered a few of the correspondents she chose to keep with real letters, and a score of less intimate acquaintances with a modest letterzine, really a round-robin letter in which she answered everyone in one letter and then sent copies to all of them. This lesser publishing effort she called Seraph, a pun both on Archangel and on the serif fonts she preferred in her IBM Selectric typewriter. Aside from these pastimes, Angela worked the night shift at the lab at the county hospital so that she could afford postage and cat food.

She had been surprised to hear from-she smiled at the conceit-MistralWorld, Inc. about the Lanthanides' reunion. The former residents of the Tennessee Fan Farm did not number among the friends she kept. She didn't suppose they had noticed, though. She still got eight-page letters from George Woodard about three times a year, but at least six of the pages were photocopied essays with no personalization whatsoever on them. They usually discussed the Woodard daughters, favorable comments received about Alluvial, and a bit of name-dropping: '… Had a nice note from my Maryland neighbor A. C. Crispin (Yesterday's Son)…' Occasionally George would dredge up a math puzzle, like Gauss' theorem of consecutive numbers, to amuse his readers, and once he had begun a mock-serious campaign to introduce another integer between two and three. He called it umpty, and encouraged his correspondents henceforth to count one, two, umpty, three… Then between the numbers twelve and thirteen, one would insert the related digit umpteen. She wondered how many people got George's manufactured letter. Dozens, probably. Whenever she got one, she would skim the biographical monotony looking for the bits pertaining to herself (few, but close together, so that the page could be inserted into the pre-existing sermon). Then she would write back a cordial but inconsequential reply, similar to the tone of her letters to Cousin Betty, and George apparently never noticed that there was no real communication or sentiment between them at all. When Angela's mother died of a stroke, her letter to George went off as perfunctorily as ever, but with no mention of the family circumstances. She couldn't bear to receive a one-sentence-personalization condolence.

As for the others, she had lost touch with Bunzie and Surn, half afraid that if she did write to them, she would receive a reply from some secretary treating her as another piece of fan mail. Occasionally they would appear at a science fiction convention, but she never looked them up. There was always too much else to do in a short weekend. She and Barbara Conyers exchanged Christmas cards, but she hadn't heard from Stormy or the others in years, and the fandom grapevine reported several of them dead.

She thought about the Substitute Con party, and the long drive she had made to get there, using most of her birthday money for gas! It would be strange to see all those idealistic boys again as old men. In retrospect, a lifetime was not very long. And what strange bread upon the waters to have her 1954 gas money expenditure repaid with a plane ticket from Ruben Mistral (Inc.). She wanted to cry just thinking about the distance between then and now, and about how short life is, and how easy it is to lose the thread between people.

'Excuse me, ma'am, are you all right?'

Angela looked up into the concerned eyes of a male flight attendant. He was about to hand a diet Coke to her seatmate, and apparently he had noticed her tear-stained cheeks. Apparently he had noticed.

Angela Arbroath summoned a gentle smile. 'Why, I'm right as rain,' she told him.

'It's no trouble at all,' said Jay Omega for the fifth time. 'It isn't far to the State Welcome Center. We passed it on 81 on our way in.'

Erik Giles reddened and heaved a weary sigh. 'How like George Woodard to have car trouble! Do you remember that character in 'L'il Abner' who always had a black cloud over his head? That's Woodard exactly. We used to call him Disaster Lad. I think Pat Malone once wrote a Superman parody using Woodard as Disaster Lad.'

'Cars are tricky things,' said Jay Omega, to whom they weren't. 'Marion once made me drive all the way to Roanoke to get her because her car wouldn't start. Turned out she hadn't put gas in it. Marion believes in mind over Mazda.'

Erik Giles grunted in what may have been amusement. 'Well, I hope this is the last of George's bad luck for the weekend.'

As they rounded a bend, an open space between the oaks afforded them a glimpse of the dry lake bed. 'It's a strange sight, isn't it?' Jay remarked.

Erik Giles shrugged. 'Only because the hills around it are so green. Out west it wouldn't look strange at all.'

'I haven't seen any sign of the town yet. I suppose everyone will visit that tomorrow when the reunion actually begins.'

'I doubt if there will be much to see after all these years. In fact, I wonder how Bunzie can be so sure he'll be able to locate the time capsule.'

'You must have had landmarks when you buried it.' 'A fence and an old tree. Do you suppose they'll still be there?' 'I don't know. Traces of them may remain. Once you locate the town, you should be able to get your bearings and pinpoint specific landmarks.'

'Perhaps so. I was just thinking how foolish we would all feel if we brought everyone here and then ended up