Zombies of the Gene Pool

hold just about anything you'd care to save.'

'We don't have a ten-gallon pickle jar, though,' said Woodard.

'True, but I was in Mclnturfs this morning, and there were only five or six pickles left in the jar. I say we buy whatever ones are left and offer Xenia Mclnturf a dime for the jar. All in favor?'

The motion carried, after Bunzie added a rider that the pickle jar expedition be extended to include a trip to Elizabethton to see War of the Worlds at the Bonnie Kate Theatre. After that, another two-hour discussion began over what was to be put into the time capsule, but Jim went to bed and left them wrangling. Knowing the Lanthanides, he was sure that they wouldn't actually get around to burying the time capsule for a couple of weeks, and that whatever went in would depend upon their moods on the day of the burial. He had been right on both counts.

For another ten days they had worked on their short stories for the time capsule, and Bunzie had written to John W. Campbell Jr., asking him for 'a letter to the future' to be included. When the reply came a few days later, it was placed unopened in the pickle jar along with the War of the Worlds poster that Pat Malone had swiped from the theater in Elizabethton and the rest of the Lanthanides' treasures.

The burial ceremony took place at sunset one Tuesday evening. The Lanthanides had marched up the hill behind the house to a spot chosen by Jim and Dale Dugger, and pronounced by them 'easy to locate again.' It was midway between the stone fence and an old sycamore tree that grew about ten feet south of the fence line. After the first ceremonial spadeful of earth had been dug by each of the Lanthanides, accompanied by speeches in varying degrees of pomposity, Jim and Dale took turns digging the three-foot hole. After that, the pickle jar/time capsule was wrapped in a burlap feed sack and buried, while the group sang 'Off We Go into the Wild Blue Yonder,' referring not to the Air Force but to the future of space travel. Jim Conyers' last memory of them all together was on that September day, standing in the shade of the sycamore before a tiny mound of freshly turned clay, gazing skyward and singing.

That had been the last perfect day, and when he felt twinges of nostalgia it was always that scene that he pictured. He wasn't really sorry when it ended, though, as it had a few months after that September day. Pat Malone had taken off a short time later, after what was reported to be a huge fight with Surn. Jim wasn't there at the time; he had been spending more and more time with Barbara since the fall term began. After that breach in the Lanthanides' solidarity, more factions began to form, so that there was nearly always a feud going with somebody at the Fan Farm. Jim took to studying late at the library with Barbara. He had already begun to be tired of the slanshack by early 1955, when Stormy got that teaching job in Virginia, and Bunzie finally took off for California. Jim had just become officially engaged to Barbara, which meant that he had less time to spend at Dugger's. Finally he found a roommate at Milligan and moved on campus to be closer to his bride-to-be. By March they were all gone except Dugger. When the TVA announced that it was constructing a man-made lake in the Wall Hollow valley, there was no one left to care except Dugger, who couldn't afford to hire a lawyer to fight it. Not that it would have done any good. Poor people never did seem to stand much of a chance against the government, as far as Jim could see.

He remembered Dugger's last day on the farm. The TVA had spent most of the spring months preparing its new lake bed. It had hauled farmhouses away to higher ground, lumbered the oaks and poplar trees from the yards of the former residents, and relocated some-but not all-of the family cemeteries. The day the floodgates closed, Jim had driven out to Dugger's farm, partly out of curiosity and partly on a hunch that Dugger would be there alone and in need of a friend.

He had found Dugger sitting on the rocks that had once been the foundation of his farmhouse. The house was long gone, and the empty cellar looked like a bomb site. Together they looked out at the bulldozed desolation, and Dale had said, 'Kind of puts you in mind of Korea, don't it, Jim?'

They walked on past the house site then, into what had been the backyard, and they sat for a long time on the stone fence, talking about the rest of the guys, and about books-about anything except the water that was spilling over the banks of the Watauga and coursing into the valley. Conyers thought of asking about the time capsule then, but he decided that it would have been rude, a denial that there would even be a future. So he tried to keep Dugger's spirits up by talking about his forthcoming wedding. Dugger must come, of course. He didn't remember what plans, if any, Dugger had been making for his own future. He wasn't going to live in the new Wall Hollow. A lot of the old residents chose not to.

When the sun was low in the sky, they could see the shine of water from the old cow pasture, and in order to get Dugger out of there Conyers offered to buy him a fifty-cent dinner at the college cafeteria. Absently, Dugger agreed. His eyes kept straying back to the valley, as if he were trying to take a picture of it in his mind.

They got out by going straight up the wooded hill past the stone fence and coming out on the paved roadway that skirted the mountainside. Jim had parked his motorcycle there, knowing that vehicles weren't allowed down in the valley anymore. With Dugger riding astraddle behind him, he gunned the bike and took off for town, too fast for Dugger to look back.

It was on this same road that Jim Conyers was standing now, looking down into muddy water that receded day by day. He was twice a grandfather now, and Dale Dugger had been dead for

thirty years. He couldn't get over the feeling that somewhere down in that lake bed was his youth, waiting for him to come back and dredge it up. Conyers smiled at this bit of fancy, wondering if the other Lanthanides felt that way or if the reunion was a colorful way to make a buck. Impossible to tell. They had long been strangers to him. He wasn't sure he wanted to get reacquainted with these successful old men who had once been his friends, but he supposed that he would have to try. Barbara was very excited about the prospect of the reunion, and about meeting famous people from Hollywood. It was only a few days, after all.

He kept looking at the lake, trying to get his bearings. Was this the spot where the farm had been, or the cliff overlooking the town? Near the bottom of the slope a skeletal tree had risen out of the depths. Was it the Dugger sycamore? The blackened trunk might have been any species of tree, and the other landmarks were still submerged. He would have to wait. A few more weeks and the lake would diminish even more. Then perhaps he would be able to distinguish the ruins of Dugger's house and the road that had led to Mclnturf's store. Perhaps when the drawdown was complete, they could locate the time capsule which now seemed so valuable. But that was not what brought him week after week to the fading shore. Jim Conyers knew that whatever he was looking for in the dead waters of Breedlove Lake, it was not that.

Chapter 4

Fans are always at their best in letters, and I took them at their self-stated value.

– FRANCIS TOWNER LANEY

'Ah, Sweet Idiocy'

Forty years ago, when the Lanthanides were reading comic books instead of selling serial rights to them, there was a comic series called 'The Little King,' featuring a diminutive cone-shaped monarch with a red robe and a perpetual scowl of ill-humor. People of a certain age invariably remembered that cartoon character when they encountered the less regal but equally peevish George Woodard.

The resemblance at the moment was great. Wearing a tatty red bathrobe over his clothes to combat the chill of the basement, the stout and shortsighted George Woodard paced the damp concrete floor, back and forth between the clothes drier and the mimeograph machine, in search of literary inspiration.

The next issue of George Woodard's fanzine Alluvial was due out in a week, and he had to begin the page layouts tonight.

There were many articles to be typed up, and many estimates of column inches to be calculated to make sure that everything fit in the correct number of pages, which is to say: the most that could be mailed for a single first- class postage stamp. George believed in getting his money's worth from the post offal (or post