Zombies of the Gene Pool

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 An anthology of unpublished works by the greatest minds in science fiction, and it has yet to be recovered.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.'

'I don't know, Marion. Maybe-and this is farfetched-this reunion could be helpful to my career as an S-F writer, but you don't stand to gain anything by going, and it isn't just out of kindness to Erik Giles that you're going either. You wouldn't miss it.'

Marion sighed. 'But I, my dear, am a recovering fan.'

Erik Giles studied his reflection in the bathroom mirror. There was a colorless look to his lined face, as if he were gradually fading to black and white. Even his eyes were gray. He glanced at the assortment of pills on the rim of the basin and wondered if he ought to go back to his doctor for a new prescription. How many formulas are there to stave off death? Can you switch from one nostrum to another and stay one jump ahead of it?

Not forever.

His mouth looked thin and sunken, and the muscles in his neck stood out like cords. Worse than any monster in Curtis Phillips' horror stories, he thought. This specter of death was much more invincible than the puny demons of Weird Tales. No magic words or pentagrams would drive it away. He must live with that mirrored reminder of his own mortality for whatever time he had left. He didn't think it would be long. The doctor tended to address him in patient, gentle tones that were more terrifying than any rudeness.

Was that why he wanted to see them all again? A moment's consideration told him that he did not particularly want to renew the acquaintance with his old companions, but at least the immediacy of his fate would ensure that the encounter would be mercifully brief. And he was curious after all these years to see how they had turned out. And what they looked like now. How much youth can you buy with Hollywood money? Perhaps they would still be fit and youthful looking. After all, he was just past sixty. He should have quit smoking years ago. The heart condition had devastated his health. Was he the only one who was old? Then he remembered that some of the Lanthanides hadn't even made it to sixty. Giles supposed that he could consider himself lucky that cancer or heart disease hadn't carried him off sooner. But he didn't feel fortunate. Not compared to the boys of summer out there in the Land of the Lotus Eaters. He suddenly realized that he was picturing them as men in their early twenties. Except for Brendan Surn. His white-maned features had become so famous that everybody pictured him as he looked in that one godlike publicity shot, clutching his malacca cane and staring out with what seemed to be infinite wisdom and pity.

Funny… In his mind, the others had not aged at all. He always imagined them as they had been thirty-five years before. He had to admit that most of them hadn't looked young even then. Dugger was pudgy and bespectacled; Phillips' hairline was beginning to recede; and Woodard had looked middle-aged since puberty. The Lanthanides had never been prize physical specimens, but he supposed that their interest in science fiction may have stemmed in part from that. Shunned by their classmates for being 'eggheads,' they retreated into a world of books and pulp magazines. They found their peers in the magazines' letters columns, and formed friendships by mail.

He could see them now, owlish young men in jeans and white T-shirts, loading up that old '47 Studebaker with cans of pork and beans and moon pies. It was a hot morning in mid-August, and the sky blazed blue and cloudless above the encircling mountains of Wall Hollow. The house was a weathered one-story structure nestled in a grove of oaks, in an acre of scrub grass and lilac bushes fenced in from the surrounding pasture land. No other human habitation was visible from the farm; it might have been an outpost on a genesis planet. The car was parked in the patch of red dust by the front porch, and the six departing members of the group were standing on the porch bickering about what to take along. George Woodard wanted to take two boxes of books to be autographed and a carton full of copies of Alluvial to give away to prospective contributors. Dugger insisted on packing food instead. While the debate raged on, Jim Conyers opened the Studebaker's trunk and began to hoist boxes into it, without a word to the quarrelers. Conyers wasn't even going on the expedition-he had opted to stay behind with Curtis Phillips to feed the three cows and fourteen chickens-but he was the only member of the group who could do anything without analyzing it for two hours beforehand. What ever happened to Jim?

Bunzie was going to drive. The pilgrimage to the San Francisco science fiction convention had been his idea to begin with. Even then-years before he became the celebrated screenwriter Ruben Mistral-Bunzie had been fascinated by California.

The others were less enthusiastic.

'San Francisco?' said George Woodard with his customary worried frown. 'Isn't that where they had the earthquake fifty years ago?'

'I don't care if they're having regular afternoon tidal waves!' yelled Bunzie. 'They're hosting the Worldcon! Everybody in the world will be there! Slan Francisco!'

Since this was the tenth time Bunzie had made that particular joke, no one bothered to laugh. Finally Woodard called out, 'Fans are slans!' but it was more out of politeness than conviction. The phrase would be chanted often in the days to come. Slan: a type of superior being described in the 1940 novel by A. E. Van Vogt. The Lanthanides had almost believed it in those days. They thought that they were the superbeings who had evolved one step beyond the mundanes of the planet. They would be the titans of the next century (and maybe the one after that; they all agreed that aging ought to be curable).

Erik Giles sighed wearily, remembering the mole-faced Dugger, the pedantic pettiness of Woodard, and the '54 version of himself: a bantam intellectual full of youthful arrogance. Slans, indeed. Because they understood the in- jokes in the magazines; because they knew who had written which pulp novella; because they were clever-too clever to really work hard at anything (low threshold of boredom) but endlessly capable of memorizing the facts that interested them. (What year did Asimov first publish? Who was the cover artist for the December 1947 issue of Astounding?) Might as well call a ghetto kid a genius because he knew the batting averages of every one of the Dodgers. So the Slan/ Fans wrote to each other, and argued with each other, and created endless feuds by gossiping about absent friends, secure in the knowledge of their slandom, and all the while, the world trickled right on past them.

Now Giles could look back and see that they didn't break the sound barrier; they didn't walk on the moon; they didn't invent the transistor. The mundanes did that… while they were busy arguing over the ethical considerations of time travel, or writing exhaustive accounts of the last science fiction convention they attended.

It wasn't fair, though, to filter the memory of that summer through the glare of his later understanding. They had been so innocently pleased with themselves back then, and so sure that merit was the only determinant of success. They might as well have believed in fairy godmothers.

He smiled ruefully. They had certainly believed that Dugger's dilapidated green Studebaker, the Tin Lizard, would make it across country. Fortunately it had died in Indiana instead of stranding them in the desert farther west.

It had been a glorious beginning, though. They set off from Wall Hollow for a three-hundred-mile straight shot to Nashville before heading north on Highway 31, which went through Kentucky on its way to Indianapolis. They had got a late start because most of them were night people anyway, so the first day's drive only got them as far as south Kentucky, just past Bowling Green. They spent the first night camping near Mammoth Cave, swapping stories about John Carter, Edgar Rice Burroughs' Virginia gentleman who was chased into a cave by Apaches and ended up on Mars. As they sat around their campfire, Dale Dugger told them a true story about the Kentucky caver Floyd Collins, who was trapped in the Mammoth cave system twenty years back and died of exposure while rescuers bickered about the best way to rescue him. 'Who does that remind you of?' said Pat Malone.

The others ignored his comment, preferring to discuss the existence of deros, and debating whether they ought to go looking for them in Mammoth Cave.

'What are deros?' George Woodard wanted to know. He had got so caught up in his fan correspondence and in Alluvial that he had very little time anymore for reading science fiction.

'Didn't you read that stuff in Amazing?' asked Surn. 'About ten years ago, Richard Shaver published a short story called 'I Remember Lemuria.' Shaver claimed that a race of insane beings lived beneath the surface of the earth.'