HE WALKED AMONG US

by Norman Spinrad

Sample chapter

LOSTCON

Dexter Lampkin had committed himself to being Guest of Honor at LostCon months before Texas Jimmy Balaban called to tell him he had been summoned into the presence of Archie Madden on Tuesday.

"You're going to what?"

"A science fiction convention."

"Well for chrissakes, Dex, big deal, we gotta spend the weekend getting some kind of act together. Cancel."

"I can't. I'm the Guest of Honor."

"The which?"

The whole concept, of course, was rather difficult to explain to Balaban, as it always was to mundanes; that is, to any normal human being who was not a member of Fandom.

"The people who read your books?"

"Well, not exactly."

Trying to explain the world of science fiction to an outsider always tested Dexter's descriptive powers to destruction.

It was easy enough to convey the concept that the fans of science fiction threw enormous weekend bashes where they took over whole hotels to listen to their favorite writers bullshit, and have a masquerade, and watch movies, and buy books and comics and merchandising tie-in items, and party.

Texas Jimmy finally understood that they picked up the whole tab for the Guest of Honor and his wife, that, no, he couldn't cancel out at the last minute, it would be real lousy for his professional reputation, and his wife, who had managed to ship the kid off to her parents at the expense of no little agro, would kill him.

But Jimmy could not understand why any man in his right mind would take his wife with him to a long weekend in a hotel with a several hundred female groupies in the first place.

"Hundreds of groupies? And you're taking your wife?"

Dexter found himself unable to explain it to him in a manner Jimmy found credible.

"Hey, come on, Dex," Texas Jimmy said in a voice drooling with pheremonic fantasies, "you can't tell me you wouldn't be screwing your ass off otherwise!"

"The odds are not what you think."

"A couple hundred to one, that's not good enough for you?"

Jimmy refused to believe in the concept of a fannish genotype. "Come, on, Dex, you're putting me on, reading sci-fi makes them put on a hundred pounds and get funny eyeballs? It's a little early in the day for me to be that bombed."

They had both given up soon thereafter, after Balaban had begged him to at least think about the meeting with Madden over the weekend, pick some brains maybe, come up with what Madden probably wanted, whatever that was....

But Dexter remembered the phone conversation as he pulled the Alfa into the parking lot of the Los Angeles Airport Plaza Hotel, for the voice of sanity told him the moment he arrived at a convention hotel that for the duration it would never be too early to get bombed.

More often than not, it was a hotel out by the airport like this one. Convention committees favored airport hotels because fans could fly in from anywhere and take the shuttle bus right to the convention hotel.

That the location was therefore an airport strip smack in the middle of the flight pattern and steaming in jetfuel fumes, where the restaurants ran to a choice between ten different flavors of upscale Denny's clones or the hotel clip joints didn't matter to a fannish point of view. Most fans would hardly leave the hotel.

They gobbled up the cafeteria fast food at inflated prices, and filled the fancy restaurant, and for a hotel-filling convention, there was an amazing lack of trashing, barfing, or fisticuffs. Which was why, despite their less than generous reputations as tippers with the soon-to-be-disgruntled staff, sf cons were a fave rave with hotel managers.

With hundreds of con goers checking into the hotel at the same time, with book dealers hauling in cartons of their stock, with paintings and sculpture and fixtures arriving for the art show, even if you were Guest of Honor, it would be pure fantasy to pull your car up to the chaos of the entrance and expect a bellman to magically materialize. Instead, you found a space in the parking lot, and schlepped your own luggage into lobby.

The Airport Plaza, like many hotels of this genre, was built around an atrium whose multileveled floor served as a central lobby around which the restaurant, cafeteria, bar and check-in desk were sited. Cafe tables on the restaurant and bar level, cascades of naugahyde conversation pits with expense bar service, potted palms, an expanse of pseudo-marble covered by pseudo-oriental carpeting between the entrance and the line of check-in counters.

The fannish hordes had already occupied most of it.

Lines of grubbily-dressed and overweight people with piles of strange untidy luggage stretched from the door to the check-in desks, creating the effect of a crowded bus depot in a Third World metropole.

Scores of them who had already run the gauntlet lounged about most of the available free seating in the lower lobby, and reluctantly oozed into the cafe table area where there was a one-overpriced-drink minimum.

This early in the convention, few of them were in hall costume yet--a few Spocks, a brace of wall-eyed barbarians, a three hundred pound harem girl from Pluto, a squad of teenage mercenary spaceship storm troopers, nothing out of the ordinary to a jaded con-goer like Dexter--but even without them, Fandom presented a rather alien spectacle to the naive viewer.

Such as the waiters and waitress, the desk personnel, the groaning bellmen, who were already getting that thousand yard stare as it sunk in that they were going to be locked up for the next three days with a several hundred of these people.

Most of the hotel personnel would never have seen so many grossly-overweight people together at the same time, and even if they had, certainly not wearing T-shirts and capris and jeans and harem costumes in such perfectly blithe disregard of the exceedingly unfortunate fashion statement.

Globuloids, Bob Silverberg called them.

Even fans whose physiognomy would pass unnoticed in your civilized hotel lobby did not exactly accouter themselves in a manner designed to reassure a nervously pretentious maitre d'. T-shirts with strange incomprehensible slogans and amateurish illustrations with rows of buttons up and down them in similar mode. Toting shopping bags and backpacks and briefcases overflowing with books and magazines. Loudly gabbing and shouting with each other as if the whole place had become their own private living room, which, believe it, boys and girls, for the duration it had.

And you ain't seen nothing yet.

"Mr. Lampkin! Mr. Lampkin! Over here!"

Fortunately, one of the committee's volunteer navvies had recognized him, and even more fortunately this was one of those cons which VIP-checked the Guest of Honor, a perk by no means certain in these egalitarian circles. The "gopher" walkie-talkied the con chairman, who ushered Dexter and Ellie through the slow-motion melee to the desk, where he introduced them to the day shift manager who checked them in, and then priority-summoned an actual bellman to show them to their suite.

"Not exactly the Clairmont," Ellie opined after checking it out, "but not so bad at all."

If you went to enough conventions, if you were guest of honor often enough, you became a hotel snob on a certain less than grand luxe level.

What had been laid on here was a parlor suite on the VIP floor, with a nice-sized bedroom and a parlor with the standard lounge furnishings plus a small wet-bar and a view through a sealed picture window of an active runway. The con committee had placed a bouquet in the bedroom and a bowl of fruit on a parlor table, and when Dexter checked it out, he found bottles of Jack Daniels and Remy under the bar counter and two six-packs of Bud and a bottle of Concannon champagne in the fridge.

"Not so bad ta be the king," Dexter said, doing a bad Mel Brooks imitation, and giving Ellie a little hug.

Even if it is king of the Monkey People, a Ralf-voiced demon insinuated in his ear.

For Dexter could not help viewing science fiction fandom from an inverse Marxist perspective. Groucho had voiced his skepticism about joining any club that would accept him as a member, and Dexter had his doubts about the hypocrisy of sucking up egoboo from an unwholesome tribe of nerdish wonks.

But "egoboo" was itself a fannish concept, and a cunningly clever insight into human reality.

And boo for the ego was what it was all about.

You could be a maladjusted three hundred pound postal clerk or computer jockey in the mundane world, but here, if you published an amateur fanzine, or created a hall costume that people remembered, or worked on enough con committees, or collected more of something than anyone else, or just knew how and where to hang out, you could become a Big Name Fan.

BNFs, Big Name Fans like Forrest J. Ackerman and Sam Moskowitz and Walt Willis and any number of others had been famous for being famous long before Andy Warhol got his fifteen minutes worth.

Pure uncut egoboo--ego-gratification with as much relationship to achievement, or talent, or any form of intrinsic worth, as that felt by a newborn avidly sucking its mother's tit.

The lust for egoboo was maybe the basic human drive, and a saving grace of Fandom was that this was not only openly acknowledged in these circles but with a sense of humor.

With the writers however, aka the "Dirty Old Pros," Dexter was forced to admit, it got a little more twisted.

For of course he not exactly been up front with Texas Jimmy Balaban. A science fiction writer at a science fiction convention could indeed fuck his brains out if he could achieve a sufficient state of suspension of disbelief in the reality of his own actions, and at a con the means of dissolving critical judgment were impossible to avoid.

There were few science fiction writers who had not committed indelicacies at these things that they would wish to have expunged from collective memory, emphatically including their own, and Dexter was not one of them.

In the mundane world, science fiction writers were not exactly figures of glamour fawned upon by hordes of beauties ripping their clothes off as they hung on your every word. Nor were they a tribe of suave and handsome sophisticates able to charm the same out of trees.

Tending towards the endomorphic spread as a genotype, science fiction writers were ordinary guys or worse when it came to scoring with women.

So how much fastidiousness would such an ordinary guy maintain when dropped down for three or four days in a sealed starship where the very pleasure of his company could become a means of counting feminine coup by a good deal less than his wet-dream fantasies?

Better you don't ask, Jimmy! Dexter thought. Better I don't remember!

Dexter stole a sidelong glance at his wife and the mother of his daughter. Yes, she had put on the pounds over the years, and true the fires had long since died down to fitfully glowing embers, but he doubted that he could have explained to an ardent and unrepentant cocksman like Texas Jimmy that the paucity of tempting pulchritude at these things was not his true reason for dragging along the little lady.

Dexter was not above getting himself a little at a con from time to time, not that he would have been eager to whip out wallet-photos of most of his easy conquests. But as far as he was concerned, those of his colleagues who denied their wives their fair share of the egoboo of a Guest of Honor turn and instead used the opportunity to dip their wicks into everything that moved and a few things that didn't, were, well, cads.

Dexter still loved his wife after all these years, if not with passion, then certainly with a sense of lifelines inextricably entwined, and their marriage being the old-fashioned single-career affair that it was, with a feeling of responsibility for, well, husbanding, her sense of self-worth, of pride in her own identity.

And science fiction writers' careers being what they were, such a Guest of Honor weekend was about the only time when she got to really bask in his reflected glory, and more to the point, these conventions were the only place where she still enjoyed a measure of her own fannish fame.

For though in a certain sense it galled him to think of it to the point where he might slug someone who said it to his face, his wife, Ellen Douglas, was still a Big Name Fan.

These days, her fan activity might be confined to letters and pieces in fanzines and appearances on convention panels, but though it had been years and years since Ellie wowed 'em in next to nothing at all at a masquerade or served on a convention committee, Fandom's institutional memory was long, and still remembered her own glory days as Queen of the Convention Hop.

That had been the Ellen Douglas he had wooed and won and/or visa versa in plain sight in the middle of a major publisher's con party! They were both riding pretty high already, Fandom relished public spectacle and juicy gossip, Ellie had it and was dressed to flaunt it, so why not give them a turn as Scott and Zelda?

So after a round or two of public gropings and smoochings, "smoffing" as the fanzines had it, Dexter had snatched up a bottle of freebie tequila from behind the bar in a flamboyantly open gesture, and off they went to her room, having declared their open intention of banging each other's brains out.

Which they had then proceeded to do into dazed exhaustion, transfigured by a joint an admiring dealer had layed on him, and fueled by the best part of a bottle of publisher's tequila.

Dexter found his cock stiffening with the memory, fuzzy as it was. The fabulous Ellen Douglas was at the time far and away the best-looking woman Dexter had ever bedded. Brian Aldiss had declared fame the ultimate aphrodisiac, but the drools of envy on the part of his male colleagues as he exited with his prize was no mean added turn-on either.

It had been the fuck of Dexter's life never to be topped or repeated, a space-time nexus into which no one could slide his dick twice, a youthful blaze of glory ignited by psychosexual synergies which might not bear the weight of excessive mature introspection.

And indeed even then, after many a morning after's contemplation of the night before's companion in the cold cruel light of dawn, Dexter had already lost a certain respect for the quality of his esthetic judgment when stoned out of his mind.

So it was not without a certain cotton-mouthed trepidation that he gingerly pulled back the sheet to reveal the waking reality of last night's dream girl.

And what to his wondering eyes, snoring lightly on the bed next to him was not the dreaded three hundred pound globuloid but what could fairly be said to be most beautiful naked woman he had encountered in fleshly reality. Perhaps not Hollywood class, but zoftig and not chubby, smoothly rounded, creamy skinned except for this and that here and there, and with the sweet smile of a satisfied sexual predator in repose.

He just lay there watching her for a long time while willing her eyes to open.

When they finally did, she looked him up and down appraisingly for a measured interval before smiling and delivering the line that was to win his heart.

"Nice to see," she said "that you're not just another pretty mind."

And if from nostalgia's linear perspective that was once upon a time in a galaxy far, far away, from a more post-modern stance of Einsteinian temporality it would always be the crossing of their geodesics, the intersection of their time-lines, the defining moment still.

Dexter smiled at his wife, at the fabulous Ellen Douglas of yore, and found, to his uneasy delight, that the sight of her here in the Guest of Honor suite at a science fiction convention was giving him a hard-on of an insistency seldom achieved out there in the mundane marital world.

Here within this charmed circle, this housewife and mother was still Ellen Douglas. Still a Big Name Fan rather than just another faceless writer's wife. Still a glamorous legend in the collective memory of Fandom.

She might have put on twenty pounds or so, her breasts might be developing middle-aged sag, her ass might have migrated a few degrees south, and her chin might be shadowed by a bit of a doppleganger, but she had not developed globulosis.

She had matured instead into an older version of her younger self, which, while it might not draw her much attention in a Beverly Hills supermarket, was still enough good to let her shine within a con hotel's walls.

And while he might not have maintained the Adonislike perfection that he never had in his youth either, he was still a reasonably normal specimen of middle-aged primate maturity.

Which was to say as Guest of Honor and Big Name Fan at a science fiction convention, they were both still far enough up the local pear-shaped curve to pass for hot shit.

Dexter Lampkin kissed his wife lightly on the lips and then the went to fetch some free champagne from the refrigerator in the wet-bar of his Guest of Honor suite.

He popped the cork and let it fizz all over the wall to wall like a rock star as he brought two foaming glasses back.

"Not so bad ta be the King and Queen," he said again as they clinked them, turning the line into something softer and sweeter than what was dreamt of in Mel Brooks' philosophies.

Even if it's the King and Queen of the Monkey People?

"Noblesse oblige," said Ellie, and guzzled her champs down.

"I'll drink to that, Zelda," said Dexter, doing likewise.

It was a simple parlor suite in a second rate airport hotel, a modest sort of fame with a tawdry backtaste, the sugary California champagne had not been properly chilled, and the con committee had failed to stock the fridge with eggs should he feel the impulse to have one in his beer.

Yeah, even if it is King and Queen of the Monkey People, he told that snide voice in his head, not without a sincere affection for his less-than-ideal subjects.

In the mundane world out there beyond the hotel walls, how many people lived and died without ever getting to experience even a single moment like this?

#

A half hour's lovemaking with the latter-day incarnation of the fabulous Ellen Douglas, like most incarnations of convention fantasies, might not have been quite up to the memory of glory days, but it had been sweet enough to send him out into the maelstrom of the convention wearing virtual rose-tinted granny-glasses.

Which stood him in good stead when the elevator door opened on the tenth floor and he was immediately confronted by a battle-axe-wielding barbarian in plastic chain-mail, a Hagar the Horrible helmet that Dexter recognized as a promo freebie, and a pair of urinous jockey shorts.

"Uh, uh, uh, me berserker!" he squeaked in a high-pitched semblance of a Viking battle-grunt as he whirled the axe about his head.

Dexter's present state of magnanimous glow allowed him to ignore this hall-costume asshole with a sense of amusement rather than pique, as well as the three or four other costumed "convention characters" he and Ellie encountered on their parade down the hall to the Committee Room.

After receiving their programs and shaking the hands of the committee members, Dexter and Ellie were free of scheduled obligation until the Meet the Pros party tonight, so she went off to catch some panel on fanzine publishing about which he couldn't care less, and the law of professional gravity led him inexorably towards the bar.

The main bar tumbled out into the atrium where the crush around the check-in desk had more or less evaporated and the fans had taken over the lobby, an invasion from Irwin Allen's Mars from the stupefied viewpoints of the airline hostesses and pilots constrained to pass the gauntlet of mutant ninja globuloids and punk tribbles in furs on the way to their company-booked overnighters.

But the back of the room, where you could sit around a semicircular bar in dim neon-tinted gloom or huddle at the surrounding tables, was well out of the fray, and, at this stage at least, this was where the writers would hang out.

Had this been a major convention, it would have been where the editors hung out too, and as the afternoon wore on through happy hour, Dexter would be gearing up for the competition to garner an expense account dinner from same.

No such luck here, however. LostCon wasn't important enough for any editor to justify the trip out from New York to the accountants, and when it came to the story editors for the Saturday morning sci-fi cartoon shows, on their budgets you had to watch out that they didn't stick you with the tab.

This early on in the con, there were less than two dozen people here in the deep end, two tables of whom consisted of an overweight middle-aged fantasy writer in a flowing rose gauze gown already holding court with her recently-pubescent fans, and a gaggle of animation writers of his acquaintance trying to corner the producer of a show that had already ripped him off.

So Dexter defaulted to the bar, where Ollie Peterson sat sipping bourbon with George Clayton Johnson. An odder couple could scarcely have been dreamt up by a cartoonist's imagination. Ollie looked like Sargent Slaughter stuffed into an author's elbow-patched jacket, and George, with the visage of an Indian brujo replete with long flowing gray warrior locks and an incongruous desert-rat beard, looked like the Old Man of the Mountain and had probably done twice as much hash.

Ollie wrote "hard science fiction", solidly researched and stolidly written tales of the exploration and colonization of the solar system with currently envisionable technology, science fiction's own brand of Socialist Realism, the sort of stuff which had placed the youthful feet of so many real-life astronauts on the path to the Moon.

George seemed to live on ectoplasm. For years at a time it would seem he wrote nothing at all. But his credits, while few and far between, tended to the major. Half of a successful science fiction novel which became a film and a tv series. A handful of prime time television shows. A major motion picture staring Frank Sinatra and his Rat Pack at the height of their sleazoid glamour. In the long in between, he tossed balls in the air like any other out-of-work Hollywood writer, and he talked. Oh how he talked!

"Hello there Dexter, Ollie and I have just come up with a brilliant plan to rescue the space program from the collapse of the military industrial porkbarrel, within five years we can have a major station in space and be on our way to the stars!"

Dexter ordered a bourbon himself, and gave Ollie an inquisitive look.

"George wants to sell it to Disney," Ollie said with an air of fatuous amusement.

"Sell what to Disney?"

"Space Station Mickey!" exclaimed George. "A zero-gravity Disneyworld in space!

Dexter drummed his fingers impatiently on the bar. This was not something to listen to sober. "Disneyland in orbit...?" he muttered weakly.

"And a feature film about its heroic construction actually shot in space!"

"George doesn't seem to have any idea of what it would cost," Ollie said blearily.

"Sure I do, Ollie, I figure on a production budget of four billion dollars."

"Three times as much," Ollie muttered.

"Not if we use those empty fuel tanks you told me about, Ollie," George told him. "That's what inspired my stroke of genius."

"Fuel tanks?" said Dexter.

Ollie got his own brand of far-away look as he sipped at his bourbon. "Every time NASA launches a Shuttle they have to burn extra fuel to dump a great big empty fuel tank into the ocean," he said. "They'd actually save money leaving them in orbit if somebody had enough use for them to pay for the station-keeping...."

"They are great big empty mothers the size of barns, aren't they Ollie? Easy enough to pressurize and install life-support equipment. You could put them together like a space erector-set. You wouldn't have to boost anything but the fittings, the actors, the crew. You could do it all with a modified Shuttle for half the price of NASA's silly little toy space station

"Jesus Christ...." Ollie whispered, and Dexter could see that he had been drawn into George's web.

Mercifully, Dexter's drink arrived. "Aren't you forgetting something George?" he said, taking a hefty slug.

"I don't think so, Dexter."

"Why would Disney spend four billion dollars on this thing, and where would they get the money?"

George grinned. "Be real, Dexter," he said. "We are talking the biggest grossing film of all time plus a completed orbital Disneyland, plus a spin-off tv series, no, wait, why not, a whole series of them generating a new network the way Paramount has done with Star Trek, plus three times the merchandising tie-ins of Batman!"

"Four billion dollars worth, George?" Dexter reminded him.

"Don't be silly, Dexter, Eisner would only have to come up with a fraction of the money, the rest would come as long-term loans from banks against both the movie and twenty years of profits from Space Station Mickey, besides which they can lay off the entire construction cost as a legitimate production expense, so the whole thing never shows a taxable profit...."

"Y'know, you could probably get NASA behind it," Ollie speculated dreamily. "Donating the tanks as an official space program civilian spin-off costs them nothing, Disney pays them for the additional Shuttle flights, and it'd create thousands of jobs right here in sunny Southern California where we really need it--"

Dexter downed another slug of bourbon. "I don't get it, George," he said, "what's in it for you?"

"You mean besides the spiritual satisfaction of rescuing our civilization from its terminal decline and putting our species on the path to transcending the petty planetary bounds of Earth and striding like gods to the stars?"

"Yeah," Dexter said dryly, "besides all that."

"Why the screenplay for the feature, of course, Dexter!" George Clayton Johnson told him. "And if our agents structure the deal carefully enough, the series pilot, a piece of every show, and our fair share of the merchandising rights too."

"What do you mean our agents, Red Man?" Dexter drawled.

"Well, since Ollie gave me the inspiration, and you are my friend, and I am such a generous fellow, I'm willing to bring you guys into the project," George said magnanimously. "I've already got the entire concept in my head, so I'll just rap it out into a cassette recorder, Ollie will get the science right, and then all you have to do, Dexter, is turn it into a first draft screenplay, and I'll do the revisions and pitch the project to Disney."

For a mad moment Dexter was almost tempted. Lock George Clayton Johnson in a room with Michael Eisner and almost anything might emerge out the other side.

"You, ah, have an in to Eisner, George?" he said.

George Clayton Johnson beamed at him brilliantly as only George could beam. "Why I was counting on you for that, Dexter," he said ingenuously.

"Right, Michael Eisner is my bosom buddy. He calls me every day, and when I put him on hold, he patiently waits through ten minutes of elevator music just to hear my words of wisdom."

"You sold THE WORD ACCORDING TO RALF to Archie Madden, didn't you, Dexter?"

"Uh, well, not exactly, it was my format, but--"

"Well then, surely your friend Mr. Madden--"

"I've never even met Archie Madden, George--"

And then a lighting bolt hit as he said it--

"--but I'm taking a meeting with him on Tuesday."

Pick some brains Texas Jimmy had told him?

Where would he find a more fertile brain so promiscuously avid to be picked than that of George Clayton Johnson?

Dexter leaned forward. "Let me buy you something a little better than that bar whiskey you're drinking George," he cooed. "You too, Ollie."

He ordered three double Wild Turkeys straight up and laid it out for them.

"So Balaban thinks that if we don't come up with something to make Madden believe that the ratings will pick up significantly, there'll be no second thirteen weeks...."