Zombies of the Gene Pool

could walk farther down, into the valley of… the shadow of death… Wall Hollow, into the remnants of the drowned village. He could revisit the farm and the other places he remembered from long ago. If he would just go down, he could go back. He stood as still as the black trees that had appeared from beneath the receding waters of the man-made lake. Conyers could imagine the body of a drowned swimmer caught by the hair in the skeletal branches of those trees, like some modern Absalom condemned for his trespasses. He did not want to go back.

In early May, the Tennessee Valley Authority had decided that after nearly four decades under water the foundation of the Gene C. Breedlove Dam needed inspection, and the only way to examine the structure and to effect any necessary repairs would be to create a drawdown. They were going to drain the lake.

A drawdown was a slow process, a matter of opening the sluices to let the lake water bleed into the Watauga River, so that gradually, over a period of three months, the green shroud would diminish, exposing the valley for the first time in thirtyfive years. There wasn't going to be any big ceremony, though, to mark the event. Even people who never got over losing their homes in Wall Hollow didn't feel called upon to celebrate its temporary resurrection. Everyone seemed to feel a little embarrassed at the prospect of having to look at the decayed remains and then having to say good-bye again. The drawdown was not a permanent reprieve, merely an incident in a bureaucratic summer. For approximately three weeks the valley would have a horizon of sun and sky instead of mud clouds in a sheet of green water. And then the floodgates would close again, and the water would come stealing back.

All summer long the people came quietly, in groups of twos or threes, to stare at the ebbing lake, straining for a glimpse of the ruins. Jim Conyers always went alone. A couple of afternoons a week he would leave Barbara to mind the shop, and he would drive the fifteen miles or so from Elizabethton to his fishing spot to watch the progress of the drawdown. It shamed him to come, though. He felt like a man at a peepshow, or, worse, like a spectator at the scene of an accident.

In one more week, the drawdown would be complete, and what was left of Wall Hollow would be visible to all comers. Perhaps by then he would be so busy with the reunion that he would not mind about the lake anymore. He tried to imagine meeting the guys again, but no clear image would form in his mind. He was somebody else now, and that somebody didn't have much in common with the Hollywood types like Mistral, or with Woodard, who had just turned eighteen for the forty-fifth time.

Jim Conyers reckoned that he had never been one of them, really. He was just Dugger's buddy from home. He and Dale had gone to high school together, and they were probably kin somewhere on their mothers' sides of the family, if you went to the trouble to trace all the Millers and the Byrds in that end of the county. They had never bothered. Everybody in east Tennessee had a passel of cousins; friends were even more special. He and Dale had pooled their dimes to send away for copies of Astounding Stories and the other magazines that were the staples of adolescent reading back then. They'd swapped tattered Zane Grey novels for dog-eared copies of H. Rider Haggard, and they'd sat side by side in the dark watching Flash Gordon battle the moon men. But Dale had been the one who took everything a step further.

When the army sent them their separate ways, their approaches to the hobby began to change. While Jim went on reading Damon Knight and Jack Finney in blissful solitude, Dale began to answer the 'Pen Friends' ads in the science fiction magazines, and he became involved in all the fan publications. All this was detailed in Dale's carefully typed letters to him, but Jim, who was stationed in Korea, was too caught up in events there to notice when Dale's hobby turned into a way of life. When they got home to Wall Hollow, fandom didn't particularly interest Jim, but he was glad to see Dale again, and it seemed as good a pastime as anything else in east Tennessee, so he put up with it.

Maybe it would have been different if he had moved away. As it was, he enrolled in Milligan College on the GI bill, and took a job at the Esso station in Wall Hollow to cover his other expenses. In order to save money on rent, Jim moved in with Dugger and the collection of fan friends he had accumulated on the Fan Farm. The new guys were intelligent-certainly more interesting to converse with than anyone down at the gas station-and al-

though he found them a bit silly at times, they were good people who shared his interests. He was the only practical one of the bunch, though. Take the great expedition to San Francisco, for example. The Lanthanides had talked about going to Worldcon for months. They had written to their entire network of pen friends announcing the journey, but not one of them had saved a penny toward expenses for the trip. In the end, they had borrowed five dollars from him-his gas station paycheck-so that they could go.

He remembered the bustle of activity as they prepared to leave… on that bright and cloudless morning. That phrase from the old hymn had fit both the morning and the mood of the Lanthanides on the day of their departure. 'When the Roll Is Called Up Yonder I'll Be There.' Dugger had been singing it all morning, but he was probably referring to the Golden Gate of San Francisco rather than to the Pearly Gates of Heaven. They reminded him of pilgrims headed for Mecca in their mixture of ecstasy and zeal.

But for all their enthusiasm, they were very inefficient pilgrims. They announced that they were going to leave at seven, but it was well past ten before they even got around to loading the car. In the end, Jim had to load it for them, because they had no more idea of utilizing space than a bluejay. Then, when he'd offered to check over the car for them, Bunzie had protested that they were in a hurry, and off they went, promising him postcards and autographed paperbacks upon their return.

He smiled at the memory of their return the next night. He and Curtis had been sitting on the dark front porch, smoking Camels and watching the lightning bugs flash in the fields, when they heard the sound of an engine and a discordant version of 'Shrimp Boats' carried on the wind from the direction of the highway. A few minutes later, a gleam of headlights along the gravel drive signaled the return of the Lanthanides. He had expected them to be despondent or enraged over the ruin of their plans, but they were all in good spirits, already bubbling with an alternate scheme. He would always remember the courage and good humor they had showed in the face of disaster.

Without a word of regret for their ill-fated journey, the Lanthanides had plunged into their preparations for their own convention. Erik, who fancied himself a ladies' man, got on the phone and persuaded femmefan Angela Arbroath to borrow her mother's car for the weekend and drive up to join the festivities; Dugger had gone off to spend their travel money for beer and party snacks; and Surn, as usual the serious one, had proposed that they commemorate the event with a time capsule.

'A time capsule?' snorted Deddingfield. 'In Wall Hollow, Tennessee?'

'Sure,' said Woodard, eager to ingratiate himself with Surn. 'When the Russians bomb Washington, the Smoky Mountains will protect us from the clouds of radiation. It's one of the logical places for civilization to be reestablished.'

If Dugger had been there, he would have pointed out that the prime target of nuclear attack, Oak Ridge, lay just to the west of them. Jim said nothing; bickering was his least favorite of the Lanthanides' attributes. Besides, since they were stranded on the farm with a crippled car, there seemed no point in debating where to place a time capsule. It seemed to him to be a fine and solemn gesture. Leave logic out of it.

The others spent an hour discussing the properties that a time capsule should have, with Dugger, who had returned by this time with 'refreshments,' arguing that what they really needed was a deactivated torpedo. That being pronounced generally unavailable, they were about to agree on using an old carpetbag that had belonged to Dugger's grandmother. At that point, Jim decided that it was time to put logic back into the discussion.

'You need something waterproof,' he said. 'There's a lot of groundwater here in the valley, especially in the spring. What if we got another flood like the one they had in 1903?'

Surn agreed with him. 'We need something airtight and waterproof. Preferably something that won't rust, too. Remember that a lot of what we're putting into the time capsule is paper. You want your short story to be readable in 1984, don't you?'

The others nodded. 'How about a milk can?' asked Dugger.

The suggestion was thoroughly discussed but finally vetoed on the grounds that milk cans might be susceptible to rust. By then they had reached the two-hour mark in the discussion, always a danger point in Lanthanide planning sessions, as it was the time at which things either dissolved into a shouting match or were postponed indefinitely for lack of sustained interest. To keep the previous two hours from having been a total waste, Jim Conyers spoke up. 'How about a pickle jar?'

'Too small,' said Deddingfield. 'It wouldn't even hold one story.'

'Not the pickle jar in the refrigerator,' Jim explained patiently. 'I mean one of those ten-gallon jobs that they keep on the counter at Mclnturfs store. It's made of glass so it won't rust, and it's watertight, and it's big enough to