Zombies of the Gene Pool

'Deros,' said Bunzie. 'That's short for disentegrant energy robot. Someone whose mind has been destroyed by the Dis rays given off by the sun. Wouldn't that make a great movie?'

'It would,' Surn agreed. 'But Shaver claimed that it was all true.'

Bunzie shrugged. 'Curtis believes it, too. He told me so.'

The conversation had ended there.

The next morning the Stalwart Six, as they called themselves, climbed back into the car and headed north toward the Indiana border. The direct route from east Tennessee to California would not have led through Indiana, but Surn, the navigator, decided that since it was August and since Dugger's car was decrepit, they had better avoid the southern desert country. Besides, like most fans they had a nationwide network of friends and practically no cash, so the logical route would be the one that led from one fan hostel to another. Another bonus of the expedition was the chance to see famous fan landmarks along the way. Before they reached the second night's stopover with an unsuspecting fan host in Bloomington (showers optional, but highly encouraged), they wanted to drive through New Castle, Indiana, which was famous for being home to one of fandom's famous eccentrics, Claude Degler. Degler had formed a newsletter staffed by a whole society of fellow enthusiasts, who, upon investigation, proved not to exist. People still talked about Degler and his grape jelly-his only form of sustenance when traveling. He mixed it with water, an economy that provoked sneers even among the impoverished denizens of fandom. Degler didn't live in New Castle anymore, but that didn't matter. The traveling Lanthanides wouldn't have wanted to stay with him anyway. They just wanted to look at where he lived, and maybe ask a few townspeople for anecdotes about Degler so that they could report their findings to the rest of fandom at the convention.

Bunzie drove at whatever speed he felt like, and Brendan Surn played navigator, while Dale Dugger read the Burma-Shave signs aloud and made comments on the landscape in general. He kept trying to convince the others that there was more than one kind of cow, but was hooted into silence. In the back seat, Erik was crammed between Woodard and Pat Malone, who were keeping a running travel diary of their great adventure for publication in the next issue of Alluvial.

They sang 'Shrimp Boats' for hours on end, trying various harmonies, and they took turns reading aloud from Poul Anderson's latest book, Brainwave, amid Dugger's bitter complaints that Ballantine Books had the nerve to charge thirty-five cents for it instead of the usual quarter.

The trip ended in a puff of smoke outside Seymour, Indiana. The Stalwart Six stood at a safe distance from the Tin Lizard's radiator, watching their dreams of Worldcon evaporate in clouds of steam.

'Well,' said Woodard at last. 'It could have been worse. At least we didn't hit a train.'

'Can we fix it?' asked Bunzie, close to tears. He clutched his Esso road map as if it were a talisman.

'Can't afford a new radiator,' Dale Dugger told him. 'That would cost at least twenty bucks. We can stop every half hour or so and fill this one up as it leaks. That will get us home. But the Lizard would never make it across the prairie like that. It's too far between water holes.'

'We have to turn back,' Brendan Surn announced, and nobody argued. With a last look westward, they climbed back in the car, and for a full half hour no one's voice dispelled the gloom.

The ailing Tin Lizard headed for home, with her six Gunga Dins running for water at every streambed. By the time they reached Nashville, their spirits had revived, and Giles and Surn had immortalized the journey in a parody of Kipling's poem:

You may talk o' Blog and Bheer

When your fellow fen are near,

But Tin Lizard doesn't give a damn for boozing;

Studebaker's bastard daughter

Runs on Indiana water,

And about six quarts an hour she was losing.

It went on from there, with dwindling coherence and many forced rhymes, for some fourteen verses. Long before the composition was complete, Malone had retreated into the pages of Brainwave, and he kept ordering the revelers to shut up so that he could read.

They reached home just after nine, trailing ribbons of steam in the lingering twilight of a summer evening. The dark mountains closed behind them, walling out California and all the rest of the inaccessible world. Fireflies flashed like tiny meteors among the clumps of tiger lilies, and from the cow pond, the rhythmic chirrup of frogs welcomed the travelers home.

'How ya gonna keep 'em down on the farm?' said Bunzie. As he climbed out of the Tin Lizard, he kicked a tire in disgust. 'So much for the goddamned Worldcon.'

'What do we do now?' asked George Woodard.

Pat Malone, who was helping to unload the trunk, looked thoughtfully at the box of supplies he was holding. 'We've got the makings for a hell of a party.'

'We could have our own convention,' said Bunzie. 'We have everything but the Worldcon guest of honor. John W. Campbell Jr.-hell, I'll be him!'

'We have no femmefans,' Pat Malone pointed out. 'Jazzy is at the con, and Earlene has to work Saturdays.'

'We can call Angela Arbroath. She couldn't make it to 'Frisco, but I'll bet she could drive up from Mississippi. Maybe she could bring a girlfriend.'

'We still have most of our travel money,' said Brendan Surn. He was tall and lean in those days, with a hawklike face that seldom smiled. He was smiling now. 'Twenty-two dollars will buy a hell of a lot of beer.'

Dale Dugger took a running leap at the pasture fence and disappeared into the darkness.

'Where are you going?' Woodard called after him.

'To get some more water for Tin Lizard's radiator!' Dugger yelled back. 'The closest beer joint is eight miles up the road!'

Professor Erik Giles closed his bedroom window, shutting out the night air and the sound of chirruping frogs. He didn't want to think about the Lanthanides anymore. The years in Wall Hollow had been enjoyable but useless blocks of time out of his life. Not long after the Worldcon expedition, they had gone their separate ways. Shortly after the dissolution of the group, the Tennessee Valley Authority had condemned the entire valley, paying its residents nominal value for their land. Then, in order to keep the Watauga River from flooding farther downstream, the TVA built a dam, creating a vast artificial lake in the sprawling valley. He had never been back to see it. There had been a letter from Dugger at the time it happened, but he had waited too long to answer it, and his reply came back marked 'No forwarding address.' Dugger was gone by then, drinking up his settlement money in the honky- tonks of Nashville, giving up fandom for different and more dangerous obsessions. Giles wondered if the government's seizure of the Dugger land had caused Dale's downward slide into alcoholism and poverty. It was too late now for Dale Dugger, but for the rest of them, there was a chance to get together again and to recapture at least some of the past. In his last letter, Dugger had written: 'I didn't dig up the time capsule. I got no future to take it to.'

Chapter 3

For three months gravity feeds the main sluice pulled nightly at the dam. The reservoir drains. Each afternoon he stops on the bluff to watch the valley fill with air, light wrapping the fine branches of trees rising from the surf ace full-grown but leafless, though no wind has blown for thirty-seven years.

– DON JOHNSON Watauga Drawdown

They might as well be exhuming a corpse. Jim Conyers stood on at the edge of the grass line-the spot where he usually fished-and stared at the dead landscape stretching out below. Where once the opaque green water of Breedlove Lake lapped at the hillside, there was now red mud, a no man's land of bare trees and asphalt roads leading back into the mire. This patch of grass used to be the edge of the lake, but now if Conyers wanted to he