Zombies of the Gene Pool

by Sharyn McCrumb

"That was in the fifties," Angela reminded her. "And his wife was about ten years older than he was. Don't ask me to explain that. I do remember that there was a lot of chauvinistic letter writing in fandom in those days, with those runty little shits asking each other what he saw in her. Nobody ever thought to marvel that she'd seen anything in him. Well, as I say, it's a long time ago. She may have died."

  "Maybe so. By the way, have you ever heard of Richard Spivey?" asked Marion, trying to appear casual.

  Angela shook her head. "If he's a new writer, don't expect me to know him. I haven't kept up."

  "I don't know who he is," Marion admitted. "But I sure do wish I knew what killed Pat Malone so conveniently. Not that the police would confide in me."

  "Get Jim Conyers to ask them. He's a lawyer around here, and he's probably old friends with the sheriff."

  Marion looked at her with renewed respect. "What a perfectly simple, brilliant idea."

  Angela nodded. "Well, I hope you find out something," she said. "As cantankerous as Pat was, I never wanted him to be dead."

  There was a soft tapping at the door. "I'll get it," said Marion, eying her hostess' kimono. She went to the door and eased it open. "Yes?"

  Lorien Williams stood there, twisting her hands and looking anxious. "Excuse me, is Miss-um-you know, Angela. Could I speak to her, please?"

  Marion glanced back at Angela, who waved for her to let the visitor in.

  "Is anything the matter?" she asked as Lorien edged past her, head down and slouching. Behind her, Marion looked over at Angela and mouthed: Who knows?

  "I wondered if you could take a look at Mr. Surn," she said to Angela. "I think somebody said you were a nurse."

  Angela paled. "What's the matter with Brendan?"

  Marion said, "Shall I call an ambulance?" She was remembering the huddled form of Pat Malone, slumped on the bathroom floor.

  "No. It isn't that bad. I mean, it isn't a heart attack or anything. It's just that sometimes he has… well, bad spells. There are times when he doesn't know me, and he gets very angry. I don't blame him, of course. I'd get angry, too, if-" Lorien's voice trailed off uncertainly.

  Angela looked from Marion to Lorien and back again. "I'll just go in the bathroom and change," she said.

  "I'm going to look for Jim Conyers," said Marion.

  Meanwhile, back at the electric Scout meeting, Jay Omega had succeeded in logging on to a nationwide computer chat on Delphi, and he established his own conference, devoted to "a discussion of the Lanthanides." He labeled his file more fandango, reasoning that the word "Fandango" would be a red flag to anyone who remembered Pat Malone, and that everyone else would give it a miss. This was not entirely true; a few people chimed in wanting to discuss the lambada, an association which eluded the sedentary Omega, and a few college-age chemists tried to get up a discussion of the periodic chart, but after a quarter of an hour, someone from Indiana actually did check in, responding with: "IS THIS ABOUT P. B. MALONE? AND, IF SO, WHAT ABOUT HIM? HE'S DEAD." The message purported to be from one J. A. Bristol.

  Jay typed back: "YES, BUT NOT FOR AS LONG AS YOU THINK‹ PERHAPS I NEED TO TALK TO SOMEBODY IN MISSISSIPPI ABOUT VERIFYING P.M.'s 1958 DEMISE."

  Meanwhile, other people chimed in with their own opinions of Malone's novel, and of The Last Fandango. Jay replied: "CAN WE TABLE THESE TOPICS? BIOGRAPHICAL DATA URGENTLY NEEDED. IS ANYONE ON FROM CUPERTINO, CA?"

  Of course there was. Cupertino, which is in California's Silicon Valley, has more computers than bathtubs. The response to Jay's request was almost immediate. "Kenny," another collegian, said: "NEVER HEARD OF THIS MALONE GUY, BUT I LIVE IN CUPERTINO, SO?"

  Jay consulted the notes he had scribbled down, containing everything he could remember about Pat Malone. "PLEASE CHECK PHONE DIRECTORY FOR AN ETHEL OR A MRS. PAT/PB MALONE," he told Kenny.

  Two other conference crashers were ignoring Jay's line of questioning to pursue an argument of their own about the symbolism that one of them saw in River of Neptune.

  In exasperation, Jay fired at them: "HAVE IT ON GOOD AUTHORITY THAT THE NOVEL PROPHESIES THE COMING OF NINTENDO. YOU HAVE NOW REACHED EQUILIBRIUM. GO AWAY!-HAS ANYONE OUT THERE EVER SEEN PAT MALONE? LATELY?"

  "NO, BUT I SAW ELVIS AT PIZZA HUT LAST WEEK."

  Jay was beginning to understand why the police hauled people in for questioning: so that they could hit them. He ignored this last bit of baiting and waited for serious replies. What did he need to know about Malone, anyway? He made notations on one of his data sheets:

  "Malone's hometown?" Get Marion to find out.

  "Cupertino, Ca-Ethel Malone-Verify." Beside that he wrote: Kenny.

  "If dead, what happened to his possessions." He scratched that one out. The book in the dead man's suitcase had belonged to Curtis Phillips. Malone had only autographed it. Jay put in a new item: "Compare handwriting samples."

  "Mississippi-Malone's death-Verify."

  "Richard Spivey?"

  "Malone-Physical description."

  "Cause of death."-Marion working on it.

  "Elavil." Ditto.

  "Washington Med School. Body donated?"

  He glanced back at the computer screen. Three messages were waiting for him. One said: "MOONFIRE SPEAKING, I THOUGHT PAT MALONE WAS AN IRISH PINK ROCK GROUP-ALL FEMALE." Another respondent had shot back: "NO! HE WAS THE SALMAN RUSHDIE OF FANDOM" The third note was from Kenny: "ETHEL IS IN THE PHONE BOOK. NOW WHAT?"

  It helped that the desk clerk had become convinced that everyone connected with science fiction was crazy. After the barrage of requests she had endured that day (pickle jar cover, corpse removal, indefinite use of a telephone line), Marion's request for a list of all the Lanthanides' room numbers seemed positively reasonable to her. She copied them out on the back of a Sunday Buffet flier and handed it over with a weary sigh. What would they be wanting next? Electric soap? She closed her eyes to check out her headache on the Richter scale. At least she was now psychologically ready for the Tennessee war gamers' convention coming up in September.

  Armed with this guide to the other guests' whereabouts, Marion first checked the restaurant to see who was there: nobody she recognized. Either they went to dinner early, or they had called down for room service. As she studied the diners in the restaurant, though, she realized that there was a familiar look about at least a dozen of them. Many of them were bespectacled and heavyset, and they wore T-shirts with slogans on them and hairdos that had never been fashionable. Several of them were reading paperbacks while they ate; the others appeared to be arguing. Fans! Marion backed slowly toward the door before she turned and fled.

  "Well," she said to herself as she waited for the elevator, "at least it will give me a pretext for dropping in on people. I can warn them that the fen have arrived." Waving, she caught the attention of the long-suffering desk clerk. "Yoo hoo!" she called as the doors were closing. "Will you please not give out these room numbers to anyone else?"

  "Sure," said the desk clerk to the closed elevator doors. "Everybody except you is a crank, right?"

  Marion tapped gently on the door to the Conyers' room, hoping that they weren't the sort of people who went to bed ridiculously early and were smug about it.

  Barbara answered the door, and Marion could see that the room's television was on, tuned to Star Trek: The Next Generation. "Hi!" said Marion brightly. "Can I come in? By the way, you want to be careful about opening the door without asking who it is. There's a contingent of fans in the building."

  Barbara looked at her husband and smiled. "I'm not used to the idea of Jim having fans."

  Marion sighed. "You never get used to it."

  Jim Conyers motioned for her to sit down in the armchair by the worktable. "We brought snacks from home," he grinned. "Because Barbara's a skinflint. Want a beer? Diet Coke? Autograph your forehead?"

  "Diet Coke," said Marion. "Unless you really need to practice the autograph. Seriously, though, I'm here to talk to you about Pat Malone."

  Jim and
Barbara looked at each other. "It was a sad business," he said quietly.

  "I know," she said. "We also thought it was a very convenient coincidence. Pat Malone shows up, threatening, from what I hear, to do a new Fandango, and suddenly he dies."

  "I thought of that," said Conyers, scooping ice into a glass and pouring Marion her drink. "But our secrets are pretty small potatoes."

  Marion shook her head. "Not with all those reporters hanging around. And the hotel restaurant is full of fans. Any little indiscretion on anybody's part could-just this one week of your lives- easily make the AP, the Enquirer, and Time magazine. But, of course, that's just idle speculation, until we know how Pat Malone died."

  "Presumably we'll find out sooner or later."

  "It had better be sooner," said Marion. "Unless you want this to leak to the press. We thought that since you are a local attorney, you might be able to tap some inside sources and find out. We really need to know."

  Jim Conyers thought it over carefully. "All right," he said. "I can't see any harm in it. I'll do what I can. I'll call your room when I've found out anything."

  Marion gave him a helpless smile. "Could you please call now? Our phone line is kind of tied up."

  She sipped her Diet Coke and chatted quietly with Barbara while Jim Conyers consulted the telephone directory and began to make his calls.

  "I think it went rather well today, don't you?" asked Barbara. "I was awfully afraid they wouldn't find anything. They weren't terribly organized, you know."

  "They'd never misplace their manuscripts," Marion assured her.

  "Well, I hope the New York editors like what they read." She lowered her voice to a conspiratorial whisper. "I want to remodel the kitchen."

  Jim Conyers was oblivious of his wife's conversation. "Well, that was fast work, Dennis," he was saying into the phone. "Guess we're lucky it's the slow season, huh? Say that again, will you? I need to write it down. How do you spell that? Oh, just like it sounds. M.A.O. And what are you calling it?-Think so, huh?- Okay, Dennis. Keep me posted. Yeah, if I can help you out, I will. Thanks again."

  The two women looked up at him expectantly. Conyers set down the phone. His face was grave. He picked up the note pad and held it at arm's length. "According to the medical examiner, he died of having something called an MAO inhibitor mixed with his medication. And they think it was murder, so they'll be back in the morning to talk to all of us." He looked sternly at Marion. "Another thing. According to them, the deceased was one Richard Spivey. Now who the hell was Richard Spivey?"

  Marion shook her head. "I wish I knew."

  Chapter 13

  The chief reason I am writing these memoirs is to try to get you, and you, and you to face your own personal problems like men instead of like fans, get you out of the drugging microcosm, and triumph over whatever is keeping you in fandom.

  – FRANCIS TOWNER LANEY "Ah, Sweet Idiocy"

  Brendan Surn was quiet now. For nearly an hour Angela Ar-broath had sat with him, held his hand, and talked soothingly of times gone by. At last her soft Southern voice had seemed to penetrate his anger, and tears drifted down his cheeks. Now he was sitting on his bed, clutching his silver NASA jacket, and staring off into nothingness.

  Angela patted his hand and eased away from him. "I think he'll be all right for now," she told Lorien Williams.

  The girl summoned a grateful smile. "Thank you. I've never been able to calm him down as quickly as that. Mostly when he gets into rages at home, I just leave him alone until he tires himself out." She sat huddled on her twin bed, in a black T-shirt and slacks, looking very small and lost. Dark circles shadowed her eyes.

  "I suppose this is more than you bargained for when you took this job," said Angela.

  Lorien hesitated. "I was such a fan of Mr. Surn," she said at last. "I had read everything he ever wrote, and all the biographical material I could find on him. He seemed so grandfatherly, somehow. You know, like Yoda. And I wasn't very happy with my parents. They were always hassling me to give up fandom and get some mundane job, like being a stockbroker." She made a moue of distaste. "I thought I'd go and see Brendan Surn. He'd understand me."

  Angela sighed. She had heard it all before. Science fiction writers build castles in the air, and the fans move into them. (And the publishers collect the rent.) It was easy to find solace in someone else's storytelling, or in their apparent acceptance of what you are, and to build a soul for them. Surely, the fan thinks, he will like me as much as I like him; let me go and see him. It usually leads to disappointment: neither faces nor souls are as pretty in real life as they are on paper.

  Angela remembered her own fascination in the fifties with Miranda Cairncross, a woman writer who wrote a wonderful tale about a Danish girl called Gefion who becomes caught up in the Ragnarok, the Norse version of Armageddon. She had found so much wisdom and lyrical beauty in Ragnarok that she read it over and over until she had nearly memorized it. She couldn't wait to meet the author, and at a book signing in New Orleans one Christmas she got her chance. Clutching her tattered copy of Ragnarok, she stood in line, half expecting to be picked out of the crowd as a soul mate and whisked off to tea with the author. She had even made a green velvet cloak like the one Gefion wore in the novel, so that the author would know of her devotion.

  But the magic friendship did not happen. Miranda Cairncross turned out to be a gawky, colorless woman who seemed dismayed at the prospect of talking to the crowd of fans hovering around her table. She signed the books with fierce concentration, as though she were shutting out her surroundings, and when she finished each one, she would look up at the purchaser with a taut, forced smile. Angela could not imagine anyone less like the bold and reckless Gefion of Ragnarok. When she reached the head of the line, Angela handed over her book and said, "I really love your writing."

  Miranda Cairncross peered at her over the pile of books, took in the sight of the plain young girl in a green velvet cloak, and reddened slightly. "I do what I can," she said. Moments later she returned Angela's copy, inscribed "There is no frigate like a book, M. A. Cairncross." Angela recognized the Emily Dickinson quote (another interest she might have shared with the author), but at the time she was disappointed that Miranda Cairncross' dedication had not been more personal.

  Years later, after she had run into Brendan Surn at a few conventions and seen him besieged by soul-starved young strangers, she saw things from the other side, and she realized that touching people through their books was the best that most authors could do. Anything else was a letdown. By then she had also realized that the Dickinson quote about books being frigates was meant perhaps as a gentle warning from the author, telling her not to stray too far from life. She saw Miranda Cairncross years later, a frail old woman who had been brought to Worldcon to receive a plaque. Angela decided that the best way to thank her would be to leave her in peace.

  "Yes," she said to Lorien Williams. "So you went to see Brendan Surn, thinking that he would be your friend."

  "I guess so." Lorien was close to tears. She glanced over at the staring figure of Surn and continued, "When I got to his house, the place was a mess, and he didn't seem to know how to cook or anything, so I said to myself, I'll just stick around until his household help comes back. But they never did! I think his maid must have quit, and he never got around to advertising for another one."

  "So you stayed?"

  She nodded. "I didn't know what else to do! I mean, I couldn't leave him. I guess I could have later, after I learned how to manage everything. I could have hired someone, I guess. But he seemed to need me. And I didn't know what else to do with myself anyway." Her voice broke. "But it isn't like I thought it

  would be! Sometimes, when he's wet the bed again or burned up another teakettle trying to boil water, I'll say to myself, This is the man who wrote Starwind Rising. This is a being of greatness. But he isn't! He's just an ordinary, sick old man. And I feel trapped."

  "Did you become friends?"

  Lorie
n shook her head. "He's never reacted to me the way he did to you today. I think I'm just a convenience for him, not a person!"

  There is no frigate like a book, thought Angela. Aloud she said, "Fans are not friends, dear. It can be dangerous to forget that."

  Jay Omega didn't even look up when Marion entered the room. He was staring at the screen of his computer as if it were showing Indiana Jones movies. "Your ferret is reporting in, sir," said Marion, tapping him playfully on the shoulder.

  "Shhh!" he said. "I'm talking to somebody."

  Marion looked around the otherwise empty room. "Who? Friend of Curtis Phillips?"

  He slumped back in his seat and looked up at her. "No. Not a demon. A guy out in California, and one from North Carolina. Whole crowds of people. Look at this." He tapped a block of text on the screen.

  Leaning over his shoulder, Marion read aloud: "To J. O. Mega. From Kenny in Cupertino. Called Ethel Malone's number. The woman who answered says Ethel is in a nursing home, and that she's her grandniece. She says her Great-Uncle Pat died in 1958. Thinks they have a death certificate around someplace. Physical description: 6'2" (she thinks); green eyes; black hair; very pale. Says she sometimes gets crank calls from fans. Asks that fans not make pilgrimage to her house, as she barely remembers Great-Uncle Pat. Wants to be left alone. She sounds cute, though. I'm thinking about asking her out. -Kenny."

  "Let me type a reply thanking this guy for his trouble," said Jay. "Then you can tell me what you found out, Marion. By the way, have we eaten dinner?"

  Marion reached for the room service menu. "I thought you'd never ask."

  When she came back from ordering a couple of chicken dinners, Marion turned back to Jay. "So, did he fake his death certificate so that he could get rid of his wife as well as his friends?"

  "I don't think so," said Jay. "A guy from Mississippi went down to his local library and found an obituary for Pat Malone in an old newspaper on microfilm." He grinned. "Somebody who called himself Jim Hacker offered to break into the records of the University of Washington medical school, but I declined."