"Mike Resnick - Roots and a Few Vines" - читать интересную книгу автора (Resnick Mike)

the lobby.) They didn't give out the Hugos at night, either. (An
evening banquet might run $5.00 a head, and the concom got enough
grief for charging $3.00 a head for rubber chicken served at 1:00
PM rather than six hours later.) They didn't have more than one
track of programming. (Multiple tracks came along 8 years later,
and evening programs even later than that.)
Well, with all the things they _didn't_ have, they needed a
way to amuse the congoers in the evening, so what happened was
this: every bid committee (and they only bid a year in advance
back then) treated the entire convention to a beer party on a
different night. We could all fit in one room -- I know the
official tally for Discon I was 600, but I was there and I'll
swear that there were no more than 400 or so in attendance; the
other 200 must have been no-shows, or waiters, or bellboys -- and
the bidding committee would treat us to a small lakeful of beer,
with or without pretzels, and then the next night a rival bid
would do the same thing. (You voted -- if you could drag yourself
out of bed -- on Sunday morning at the business meeting. A fan
would speak for each bid, telling you how wonderful his committee
was. Then a pro would speak for each bid, telling you about the
quality of restaurants you would encounter. The better restaurants
invariably carried the day.)
After the beer blast was over, everyone vanished. The
Burroughs people, all of them straighter than Tarzan's arrows,
went to bed. We remembered that Doc Smith had mentioned parties,
so we began wandering down the empty, foreboding corridors of the
hotel, wondering if the parties really did exist, and how to find
them.
We walked all the way down one floor, took the stairs up a
flight, repeated the procedure, then did it again. We were about
to quit when a door opened, and a little bearded man and a thin
balding man, both with thick glasses, spotted our name badges and
asked if we'd like to come in for a drink. We didn't know who the
hell they were, but they had badges too, so we knew they were with
the con and probably not about to mug a couple of innocents from
Chicago, and we decided to join them.
Turns out they were standing in the doorway to a huge suite,
and that their names were del Rey and Blish. Inside, wearing a
bowtie and looking not unlike a penguin in his black suit, was
Isaac Asimov. Randy Garrett was dressed in something all-satin and
not of this century. Bob Silverberg looked young and incredibly
dapper. Sam Moskowitz was speaking to Ed Hamilton and Leigh
Brackett in a corner; this was many years before his throat
surgery, and it was entirely possible, though unlikely, that no
one in the basement could hear him.
_And every last one of them went out of their way to talk to
us and make us feel at home._
Later another young fan wandered in. Much younger than me. I
was 21; Jack Chalker was only 19. We sat around, and discussed
various things, and then something strange happened, something