Time Travelers Strictly Cash

by Spider Robinson

  “He is. You’re our Fan Guest Of Honor.”

  “But I’m not a Fan. Never have been.”

  “That’s okay. Bob Tucker’s our Artist Guest Of Honor and he’s not an artist.”

  I thought a bit. “Geeze, if I was Delany, I’d be insulted.”

  “Well, we wanted you three people at our convention, and we’re not fussy about technicalities.”

  Neither was I. A free trip to anywhere is worth it, and besides, I had always wanted to meet Samuel R. Delany. I agreed to go.

  But it left me with a small problem: as Fan GOH, I would have to make a speech—and as I said, I was not and had never been a Fan. So I thought about it, and the following speech resulted. What exactly is fandom? I think it may be:

  THE WEB OF SANITY

  Good evening, genties and ladlemen of the audio radiance, and good odding, too, for that matter. I am Spider Robinson, the Herb Varley of the Stone Age. Here I stand, a credit to my procession and a sanitary sight to see, I hope you will all agree.

  We are standing in the vestibule of a new age, which, like a corporation that kicks its deadwood upstairs, can only fire us higher. Higher than the topless towers of Ilium—

  Hey, do you remember when the towers first went topless?

  For that matter, do any of you remember Ilium? Ilium Kuryakin, used to do a solo with a guy named Team—I mean, a team with a guy named Solo, the Man From I Surrender, who incidentally was so low he once gave a camel a hickey. I once gave a guy named Hickey a Camel, myself, when I was trying to give up smoking, but according to his father that was heir pollution too—but that’s neither hither nor yon.

  Excuse me for yonning, I didn’t get much nest last right…I mean, I didn’t get the next-to-last rites…the second serial rights went to Conde-Nast publishers. Buy all rights, they said, and by all rights I should be asleep rite now.

  No, but foolishly, folks—did you ever notice that comedians always say “No, but seriously…” right after they’ve laid an egg?—the reason I’m squatting here tonight is to pass a great gasp of relief at the way we’re all managing to fart at staggered intervals rather than all at once, holding it down to a tolerable level, even, if you will, helping all the candles of the world to burn a little brighter. I think it’s magnificent that the Lord, in His downtown Providence, Rhode Island, saw fit to arrange things so that peristalsis runs downward. Imagine if digestion ran in the other direction! Toilet bowls would be placed at chin-height; tables would be drastically lowered; chairs would require total redesign. All food would have to be in suppository form, and banquets like this one would probably pass out of existence. So would all beards and mustaches…facial ones, I mean; in effect everyone would be bearded (And I can tell you, a mustache is hard enough to keep sanitary when it’s, uh, right under your nose as it were.) I leave the tailoring problems to your imagination. And while you’re at it, imagine young lovers having to bend over and back up to each other…

  And of course all the Greeks would become French and vice-versa.

  Now that I’ve helped you all to return your dinners (and not a moment too soon; they’re booked elsewhere), it looks like I can’t put off much longer saying something reasonably serious and intelligent about what it feels like to be a Fan Guest Of Honor, when you’ve never felt much like a Fan before. As I said last night, for those of you who weren’t here then, I barely knew that fandom existed until I happened to sell Ben Bova a story. Almost accidentally, he’s responsible for having exposed me to you zanies. I was too much of a loner by nature to be more than vaguely aware of fandom’s existence, until I sold a story. This state of virginity was ended rather quickly thereafter, and, as such things go, rather painlessly.

  The shock has not yet faded. I kind of hope it never will.

  It has been said—I don’t know if correctly or not—that the ancient Chinese treated the insane with reverent fear. I believe this is an appropriate response. I have had enough friends who worked in mental institutions and hospitals to be certain that insanity can be more contagious than leprosy. Hell, I’m living in New York City this month, or anyway residing there.

  And if insanity is contagious, it seems reasonable to me therefore that so is sanity. I know this is going to dismay, affront and offend many of you, and I apologize in advance; but I maintain that as a group you are one of the sanest collections of folks I know. I’ll grant you, there’s a wealth of evidence against me on this, but I think it’s true. I think of us as people who inoculate ourselves against a plague of insanity with a powerful anti-idiotic called science fiction. I think sf is a literature which by its very nature requires that you be at least a little sane, that you know at least a little something. You must abdicate the right to be ignorant in order to enjoy science fiction, which most people are unwilling to do; and you must learn, if not actually how to think things through, at least what the trick looks like when it’s done. Frequent injections will keep a lot of madness away. I can tell you: I’ve been on sf therapy since the age of five, and here I am, I’m not even thirty years old yet and I’m a happy man, which would have surprised the hell out of me five years ago.

  But even the strongest dosage of even science fiction reaches a threshold effect, and side effects start to outnumber the benefits. The inability to remember which continuum you’re in at the moment, the constant necessity of reminding yourself that you’re not immortal, not to mention the aching eyeballs and the good friends who cannot be persuaded or cajoled by any means to try just one little bag of science fiction, for free.

  And so we gather together at frequent intervals to reinfect each other with sanity, in person. You may dispute this, but I contend that in a world like this one, gathering together to wear funny hats, sing parodies off-key, get smashed and shine lasers at each other can be—and probably is—sane behavior. The Firesign Theater, whom some of you may know, would probably consider us a subset of the group they belong to, the Bozos. (“People who get together with other Bozos to wear funny clothes and have a good time.”) And the world needs all the Bozos it can get.

  It seems to me that the central problem of the world today, if I may be so pretentious, is morale. Or rather, the lack thereof. I have a cousin who visited me last week, who lives in New York City, and we talked five or six hours that particular visit. At least five times in the course of conversation she said, almost like a litany, some variant of: “The whole world is going to hell, it’s going to go smash in a few years and nothing can be done, so the only thing for a smart person to do is get everything you can for yourself before the end.”

  I have heard variations on this theme for many years now, with increasing frequency. It’s not too hard to understand, I suppose. Here on Starship Earth, after a great many thousand years, we finally got together a reasonably efficient intercom-system—and mostly what we broadcast over it are damage reports. Bad news and situations comedies and mock-combat on Sunday afternoons. I can’t blame anybody who’s depressed. But what my cousin was talking about was despair, what the Catholics call the only unforgivable sin, and that is a different thing altogether. My cousin, I’m sorry to say, is part of the problem, the only real problem we’ve got.

  With so much bummer energy going around, the only way I can stay sane, or one of the only ways I can stay sane, is to come to Minicons, to get high and have a good time, with people who know better than to think it’s all pointless.

  There’s an anecdote Ben told earlier in the weekend about one convention we both attended where the toastmaster talked for an hour and a half and said essentially nothing. When he was done, people applauded fairly enthusiastically because he was done, but that was about all the enthusiasm they had left. Nobody wanted to hear a word from anybody else on any subject whatsoever. Poor Jay Kay Klein stepped up to the mike next, into the hot seat. He looked around the room and tears came into his eyes, and he said, “Holy smokes, just about everybody in the world I love is in this room.” And the whole place was his; at that moment we’d have fo
llowed him into battle with a song.

  Make no mistake: it is love, not a shared hobby, that has brought us together here. Oh, we have as much trouble loving our own personal selves as the mundanes do—perhaps more trouble. But we love each other a great deal. Most important, we love our species, we love the damfool human race—or we would not be so passionately concerned with its future.

  Like it or not, I think the majority of you are sane—I think you agree in your secret heart of hearts with what the wise and holy Frederik Pohl said at Discon: that as a species we have few real problems, but only complex games we have agreed to play with ourselves.

  (I have a copy of that speech, Fred, and I’m thinking seriously of having it privately printed and selling it through the mail. I’ll talk to you about the rights later.)

  The more audacious of you out there are actually working hard on solutions for the pseudo-problems we’ve posed ourselves. I think nearly all of you are sane enough to know at least that there are solutions, and that nothing but our best and hardest work will provide them. The government won’t do it, the man with the white beard won’t do it, not even Cal Tech will do it—thou art God, and you cannot refuse the nomination.

  I cannot precisely echo Jay Kay—only a lot of the people I love are in this room, or would even be at a Worldcon held everywhere at once by videophone. But those of you here whom I do know and love, and those of you here whom I don’t know and love, are a part of my family, an indispensable part of my life, and part of what makes it possible for me to write my stories.

  As a Johnny-Come-Lately, I am proud to be considered a Fan. Contrary to the belief and expectation of most of you I seem to run into, I know extremely little of Fannish legends and rituals and famous personalities and such. I knew nothing at all about any of this until a very few years ago. I have a particularly abominable memory for names, which cripples me. And frankly, there are just too damned many of you for me to keep track of, too much lore to be absorbed, too many letters to answer more than a fraction of them. I am hampered in convention-going by having to meet many deadlines to stay alive, and I have no time to spare for fanac or letterhacking or even keeping up with the fanzines. (I seem to get them all—and do you have any idea how many fanzines there are?) I rarely have time for more than one or two carefully-selected conventions a year.

  But this is one of them, and I’ve had a fabulous time so far, and I must tell you that I have never in my life felt so at home and so at ease with so many drunken strangers.

  I really do try to do my part for fanac, but economics require that I publish it in the prozines. I hope that is satisfactory to fandom; fandom is satisfactory to me.

  In closing, I would like to thank you for your attention. But your at-ease was disgraceful, and your parade-rest was barely better than parading around undrest. I hope we don’t fall out over this, I’m rather sensitive about face, and I’m certain that eyes right.

  Nonetheless I love you all. Let’s go somewhere else and put on even funnier clothes than these and have a good time.

  MIRROR/RORRIM, OFF THE WALL

  I have mixed feelings about him. He was, of course, a criminal in the technical sense, but I never cared much for such. And he did have some of the finest booze I ever tasted, and was quite generous with it, which counts for a lot even if it didn’t taste as good to him. Furthermore, he was the only man I know who could have performed so unlikely a miracle as taking a hundred pounds off Doc Webster.

  But on the other hand, he was the kind of man who was willing to betray himself to the feds, in order to save himself from the feds—and that strikes me as selfish. Struck him that way, too, afterwards.

  And so I don’t feel too bad about having helped betray him to the feds myself. After all, it saved him from the feds, didn’t it?

  I’ll tell you about it.

  I generally don’t get to Callahan’s Place much before seven at night—but that morning my mailbox had saved my neighbor’s life, so I decided noon wasn’t too early for a drink or three.

  Doris’s Valiant had been slipping off the right shoulder, right across the street from my house, and was beginning to nose down off the twenty-foot drop to the marsh flats when it struck the mailbox. The box and the big six-by-six it stood on were of course punted some hundred yards at once, in flinders the smallest of which weighed twenty-five pounds, but they held for that millisecond necessary to lift her right front wheel and correct her angle of incidence. Instead of tumbling, the car went down like a cat, on all fours: from my point of view, across the street on my front stoop, she simply disappeared. She cleared the sloping bank by inches, hit the flats in a four-point Evel Knievel which only ruined the suspension system, and came to rest two hundred yards later in Stanley Butt’s garden, the bumpers and crannies of the Valiant so crammed with marsh grass, hay and lupines as to resemble a poor attempt at camouflage. We talked about it in my kitchen, Doris and I, and concluded that while a few inches lefterly would have made her miss the mailbox, fall kattycorner and explode on maybe the fourth bounce, a few feet to starboard would have put her into the telephone pole beside the mailbox and ended it right there. She needed a drink and a ride home, but I keep no liquor in the house (why would I drink alone?) and I’d had to leave my car keys and car at Callahan’s Place the night before, so I walked her home and let her husband pour her a drink. I declined one, refused to let him take my ten-gallon hat and left hastily, so that they could collapse in each others’ arms and weep while the need was still sharp. I let my feet take me to Callahan’s, while my mind ruminated on the fragility of these bags of meat we haul around.

  Callahan and Fast Eddie were just pulling into the lot when I got there, and it wasn’t until I saw the amp, mixer and speakers in the bed of the truck that I remembered it was Fireside Fillmore Night, the night Eddie and I jam for Callahan’s patrons. I’ve never tapped out on a gig before, but I didn’t feel much like playing or singing, so I told them so, and how come. Callahan nodded and produced a flask from the glove-box, but Eddie began offloading the equipment anyhow—it looked like rain. While Callahan and I shared an afternoon swallow, Eddie staggered to the door with my big Fender Bassmaster, set it down, unlocked the door, hoisted the amp again, took two steps into the bar and dropped the Fender on his feet.

  Curiously, I was more puzzled than dismayed—because I was certain that Eddie had screamed a split-second before the amp mashed his toes, rather than after.

  He instinctively tried to cradle both wounded feet in his hands, but this left him none to hop on, so he sat suddenly down, raising dust from his jeans. But he wasted no time on getting up or even on swearing—almost as he hit he was…well…moving backwards, without using hands or feet. Sort of levitating horizontally, the way Harpo used to do when he wanted to break Groucho up in the middle of a routine, propelling himself across the stage with his hams alone. Eddie backed into the truck at high speed, his head bouncing off the fuselage, and he sat there a moment, still cradling his injured dogs, face pale.

  Callahan and I exchanged a glance, and the big barkeep shrugged. “That’s Eddie for you,” he said, and I nodded judicious agreement.

  Fast Eddie stared vaguely up at us, and his eyes clicked into focus. All things considered, his expression was remarkable: mild indignation.

  “Mechanical orangutan,” he complained, and fell over sideways, out cold.

  Callahan sighed and nodded philosophically. “Probably shat rivets all over the floor,” he grumbled, and picked Eddie up under one beefy arm, heading for the door.

  I got there first. I know in my bones that anything can happen at Callahan’s, and the Passing of the Mailbox had used up all the adrenalin I had in stock—but I’d never seen a mechanical orangutan.

  But I was not prepared for what I saw. As I cleared the doorway, a tall demon with pronounced horns came at me fast out of the gloom. Callahan and Eddie and I went down in a heap, with me on top, and it knocked the breath back into Eddie. He said only one word, but it killed t
hree butterflies and a yellowjacket. We sorted ourselves out and Eddie glared at me accusingly.

  “Demon,” I explained, and backed away from the open door.

  Callahan nodded again. “Monkey demon. Probably lookin’ for Richard Farina—he usta drink here.” He dusted himself off and lumbered into the bar, receding red hair disarrayed but otherwise undisheveled. Somehow I knew he planned to buy the demon a drink.

  He cleared the doorway, slapped the lights on with his big left hand, and stopped dead in his tracks. I was prepared for anything—I thought—but the two things he did then astounded me.

  The first thing he did was to burst into laughter, and a good-sized whoop thereof: if the shutters hadn’t been closed I’m certain dust would’ve come boiling out the windows. One way to drive off a demon. I decided dizzily, and then he did the second thing. He reached into his back pocket, produced a comb and, still looking straight ahead, put the part back into his hair. (Doc Webster once said of Mike’s hair that the part is the whole.)

  Then he turned back to me and Eddie, still laughing, and waved us to enter.

  “It’s okay, boys,” he assured us. “It’s only a mirror.”

  Only a mirror!?!

  At any other bar in the world, the “only” might have been accurate—barroom mirrors are traditional. But Callahan follows his own eccentric traditions. Where most bars have a mirror, he has a blank wall on which are scribbled thirty years’ worth of one-liners, twisted graffiti and pithy thayings. “Does a skinny ballerina wear a one-one?” They range from allegedly humorous to dead serious (“Shared pain is lessened; shared joy increased.”) and include at least the punchline of every Punday Evening-winning stinker ever perpetrated. Callahan says he’d rather encourage folk-wisdom than narcissism. So I refused to be reassured.

  I eased up to the door and peered past Callahan. Sure enough, with the lights on, it was evident that there was now an enormous mirror behind the bar, installed in the traditional manner behind the rows of firewater and the cashbox. Only if I squinted at the rolled ends of my ten-gallon hat could I make them look like horns, now, but my mind’s eye could see much more clearly how Eddie might have mistaken a Fender with his face on top for a robot orangutan. A part of me wanted very much to laugh very hard, but most of me was too busy being flabbergasted.