"Bimbos Of The Death Sun - 02 - Zombies Of The Gene Pool" - читать интересную книгу автора (McCrumb Sharyn)

It was late. After cheesecake and several cups of coffee, the three professors had finally called it a night and said their good-byes on the porch of the Wolfe Creek Inn. Jay was driving Marion home. She leaned back in the passenger seat of Jay's temporarily functional MG, clutching her headscarf against the wind that whipped through a crack between the canvas roof and the windscreen. "I was just thinking about Erik Giles and his extraordinary reunion," she called above the roar of the wind and the 1600 engine.

"Quite a story!" Jay agreed.

"After he told us about it, I remembered hearing bits of it before. The underwater slanshack. It's a legend in science fiction circles, of course. But before my time," she added hastily.

"I can see why it's a legend," said Jay. "It's the Atlantis of fandom."

"And they held their own substitute convention! Wouldn't that be a wonderful story to write for a volume of fan history?" mused Marion, whose brain was never quite out of gear.

"Surely someone has already written that tale," said Jay.

"Knowing the Lanthanides, they probably fictionalized it. I'll bet that if we read all of Deddingfield, all of Surn, all of Mistral, and so on, somewhere we'd find the story of the unfinished journey and the time capsule. Writers always cannibalize their own lives for fiction."

"Oh, so you recognized yourself as the green lizard woman in Bimbos?"

Marion made a face at him and went back to contemplating the moon. "I can just see them in 1954, can't you? A bunch of post-adolescents with plenty of idealism and ambition, but no money or common sense. And because the Twelfth Worldcon is being held in San Francisco, six of them decide to pile into a disintegrating Studebaker and off they go!"

Jay Omega shrugged. "Why not? Gas was about eighteen cents a gallon then."

"But they were still broke. How much cash did he say they took with them? Twenty-five bucks? For a cross-country trip!"

"I guess it wasn't much money even for that era, because Giles said that when the car broke down in Seymour, Indiana, they couldn't afford to get it fixed. Apparently mechanics were expensive even then."

"Thank goodness it was only a radiator leak, so that they were able to limp back to the farm. I can't imagine Brendan Surn having to hitchhike."

"They must have been pretty game, though," said Jay. "If I had been unable to make a trip I'd had my heart set on, I don't think I'd have taken it as well as they did."

"No, you'd sulk for days. But, then, why should they have cared about missing that convention? As far as future generations are concerned, the great literary minds of the era were all in Wall Hollow, Tennessee that weekend. Except for Friday night when they went to Elizabethton to see the movie. Wherever they were, there was science fiction." Marion sighed. "That's the con I would like to have attended: all the great minds of the genre in an old farmhouse miles from anywhere, swapping story ideas."

"It should be easy to arrange. Erik Giles told us what they did that weekend. So we rent a copy of War of the Worlds, buy a couple of cases of beerЧ"

"It wouldn't be the same. I'd like to know what Peter Deddingfield said to Pat Malone about the movie. I'd like to have heard them talk about their work!"

"Well, at least you may have a chance to see what they were writing at the time. If they can find the pickle jar," said Jay. "To me that is the most amazing part of all. An anthology of unpublished works by the greatest minds in science fiction, and it has yet to be recovered. It must be worth a fortune."

"I expect so. When Giles said that all the Lanthanides were coming back to this reunion, I realized that there must be quite a lot of money in it somewhere. Sentiment seldom guarantees perfect attendance, but money usually does."

"I don't know, Marion. MaybeЧand this is farfetchedЧthis reunion could be helpful to my career as an S-F writer, but you don't stand to gain anything by going, and it isn't just out of kindness to Erik Giles that you're going either. You wouldn't miss it."

Marion sighed. "But I, my dear, am a recovering fan."



Erik Giles studied his reflection in the bathroom mirror. There was a colorless look to his lined face, as if he were gradually fading to black and white. Even his eyes were gray. He glanced at the assortment of pills on the rim of the basin and wondered if he ought to go back to his doctor for a new prescription. How many formulas are there to stave off death? Can you switch from one nostrum to another and stay one jump ahead of it?

Not forever.