Zombies of the Gene Pool

by Sharyn McCrumb

  "I've heard that some pilots in private planes have flown over the valley and reported seeing bodies floating in the channel," Barbara insisted.

  "Catfish," said her husband. "Those channel cats can get up to six feet long."

  Barbara Conyers tossed her head. "Well, I just hope y'all don't stumble across any unearthed corpses when you go out hunting your time capsule."

  "I hope not too," said Bunzie. "The film crews couldn't use that sort of footage for promotion."

  "Speaking of skeletons in the valley," said a new voice, "I should think we had quite enough of our own."

  The Lanthanides looked up to see three newcomers standing in the doorway: a dark-haired woman and a young man who looked startled by their companion's outburst, and the speaker himself. He was a gaunt man in late middle age, and his somber outfit-a black jacket over black shirt and trousers-emphasized the pallor of his skin. He leaned on the door frame and studied the group with a smile that might have been derisive or challenging. It was anything but friendly.

  Bunzie decided to ignore the impertinence. Frowning at the intruders, he waved them away. "I'm sorry!" he called out. "This is a private party. The Lanthanides will not be giving interviews until tomorrow."

  The younger couple turned to leave, but the man in black still stood in the doorway, enjoying the disturbance he had created.

  Erik Giles stood up. "They aren't reporters, Reuben. At least, two of them aren't. These are my friends Jay Omega, the writer, and Marion Farley, from my department. They came with me. I'm afraid I don't know the other gentleman."

  Jay Omega looked apologetic. "We met him in the lobby as we were coming in," he explained. "He was looking for the reunion. He said that you would know him."

  The Lanthanides looked questioningly at each other. No one spoke. Bunzie nodded to his assistant, signaling him to be ready to handle an awkward situation. "I don't think any of us knows the gentleman," he said dismissively. "So if you will excuse us-"

  The man in the doorway smiled. "It'll come to you, Fugghead."

  "My God!" whispered George Woodard, peering at the stranger. "It's Pat Malone!"

  Chapter 8

  Pseuicide-The fannish term for faking someone's death. Since most of fandom is conducted by mail, hoaxes are relatively easy to perpetrate.

  "What was that all about?" whispered Marion when the door to the reception closed behind them.

  Jay Omega shrugged. "I guess they knew him. What shall we do now? Call it a night?"

  Marion glanced at her watch. "Not until I find out what's going on. Why don't we go out to the lobby and get some coffee? That way, we can waylay Erik when the party breaks up, and try to find out what's going on."

  Her companion stifled a yawn. "All right. If you insist, but I don't see-"

  "Shh!" Marion gestured toward the closed door of the banquet room. "Someone may come out unexpectedly. It would be a considerable blow to my self-esteem, not to mention my professional standing, if someone came out and caught us loitering in the hall like a couple of groupies. Let's talk about it over coffee."

  Several minutes later, Marion had commandeered the coffee shop booth with the best view of the lobby, and she was hunched over a steaming mug of black coffee with the furtive air of an unindicted co-conspirator. Jay Omega, whose attention had been captured by a piece of Dutch apple pie, was doing his best to humor her.

  "I'm sure they didn't mean to be rude," he said. "They seemed quite upset."

  "It's all very strange," she murmured, stirring furiously. She kept casting sidelong glances at the hallway to the banquet room as if she were expecting a stampede, but all was quiet.

  "He's another one of the Lanthanides, isn't he?" said Jay. "When we met him in the lobby, and he said that he was Pat Malone, I assumed that he was an editor or a film person, and that he was joking, but Woodard seemed to recognize him."

  Marion scowled. "Woodard called him Pat Malone, which is ridiculous. Pat Malone has been dead since 1958. Everybody in fandom knows that. I know that and I wasn't even in fandom in 1958. I was in diapers!"

  This was something of an exaggeration, but Jay wisely did not correct her arithmetic.

  "I admit that it sounded like Woodard said 'Pat Malone,' but it's impossible. Pat Malone is dead. All the books say so."

  Jay smiled. "That would explain the shocked looks on the faces of the rest of them."

  "It certainly would," snickered Marion. "Pat Malone! I wonder how he found out about the reunion?"

  "Ouija board?" suggested Jay Omega, trying to keep a straight face.

  Marion, who had gone back to trying to figure things out, acknowledged his wit with the briefest of smiles. "Very clever. Actually, his knowing about the reunion is probably the least part of the mystery. Thanks to the dramatic effect of the drained lake, and to Ruben Mistral's excellent publicists, this reunion has been covered in everything from computer bulletin boards to the National Inquirer. You'd have to be dead not to know about it."

  "I wonder if Elvis will show up," Jay mused. "He's from Tennessee, too, isn't he?"

  "Don't be silly," said Marion. "Elvis Presley is dead."

  "That doesn't seem to have stopped Pat Malone," he pointed out. "Can you explain that?"

  Marion nodded. "I think so. Mark Twain said it best: All reports of my death have been greatly exaggerated. Actually, in fandom such misinformation isn't even uncommon. Fans chiefly correspond by letter and by hearsay, so it's very easy for someone to start an unsubstantiated rumor, which soon gets repeated as fact farther along the grapevine."

  "Somebody said he was dead, and nobody checked?"

  "Hardly anybody ever checks anything in fandom. Remember all the garbage that came out in fanzines after Bimbos of the Death Sun first came out? People thought 'Jay Omega' was a pseudonym for half of SFWA."

  "I told you not to read the amateur commentary on my book," said Jay, downing the last of his milk."It only upsets you. Even good reviews upset you."

  "I couldn't believe how shallow most of those reviewers were," said Marion, momentarily distracted. Then, noticing her companion's amused smile, she decided to jettison the tirade. "Well, never mind about literary criticism! The subject at the moment ought to be history. Apparently we have just witnessed the debunking of a death hoax of thirty years' standing."

  "Hoax?" Jay looked bewildered. "So you're saying that somebody deliberately made an announcement that Pat Malone was dead, and everybody just believed it and let it go at that?"

  "Something like that. Given the mentality of fandom, death hoaxes are inevitable occurrences. Some people do it as a practical joke; some declare themselves dead in order to get rid of people who otherwise will not go away; and some people do it in order to annoy the person they report as dead. Back in the fifties, fans were taking up a collection to bring the brilliant Irish fan Walt Willis to Chicon II in Chicago, and a neofan named Peter Graham sent out postcards announcing Willis' demise." "Why?"

  "Apparently because Peter Graham felt like it, and because his parents had given him a postcard mimeo and he wanted to use it. He knew that it would cause a sensation because Willis was so popular. Most people realized that the postcard was a hoax at the time, because he had misspelled 'diphtheria,' and because it seemed strange that an Irishman's death announcement should be postmarked San Francisco."

  "I suppose Walt Willis was pretty upset about it."

  "I hear he wasn't. People said that when he got to the U.S., he charmed everyone by answering his telephone, 'Peter Graham speaking.'" Marion smiled at the memory of one of fandom's finest hours.

  "But, of course, you don't approve," said Jay solemnly.

  Marion looked stern. "Death hoaxes are cruel and pointless. I wonder who started this one?"

  "I wonder why Pat Malone didn't bother to set anyone straight?"

  "That may be what he is doing right now." Marion sighed. "I wish Erik Giles would come out. That is one conversation I'd give anything to hear."

  "You may get y
our chance tomorrow," Jay told her. "Someone is going to have to explain his presence to the media people. Still, thirty years is a long time to wait to correct a mistake like that, don't you think?"

  "I don't know. From what I hear about the personality of Pat Malone, he may have staged the hoax himself. And I know why everyone was so quick to believe in it."

  "Why?"

  Marion sighed. "Wishful thinking. Before Pat Malone died, he created a stink in fandom that lasted for decades. A lot of people will be dismayed to hear that he's back."

  Alluvial-Volume 7, Number 4 June 16, 1958

  ***Special Issue of ALLUVIAL dedicated to Pat Malone ***

  IN MEMORIAM PAT MALONE

  By George Woodard, Editor

  One of the most powerful, if strident, voices in fandom has been stilled by no less a censor than the Grim Reaper himself, who swept down with his black wings in the night, and carried off Patrick B. Malone, on June 8 in Biloxi, Mississippi.

  Word has reached me here in Maryland that Pat Malone has died, and, since this information has not been generally released and since it concerns a fellow Lanthanide, I consider it my somber duty to relay that which I know concerning his passing to the late, great Pat's many associates in the realm of science fiction fandom. According to Jack L. Bexler (editor of JACKAL'S MEAT), he (Jack) received a letter from his (Pat's) widow, Ethel Lucille Malone, who resides in Cupertino, CA. (She did not write to me, one of Pat's oldest friends in fandom, but that is another matter.) Why he died in Mississippi is not clear to this writer. Bexler relates that Pat Malone had been sick for a number of years with a tuberculosis-related illness of some kind, and that he finally died of it this month, in great pain. His body was donated to the Washington Medical School, by his own instructions.

  Pat will be remembered by his myriad correspondents as one of the founders of ALLUVIAL, one of the leading fanzines of this decade, but he is even better known as an incisive critic of the social order, the Jonathan Swift of fandom, the stinging gadfly of all he surveyed. He is the author of one SF

  novel, River of Neptune, which is unfortunately out of print, but somewhere in the Library of Congress, his name will be listed for all time.

  Who among us has not felt the barbed tongue of Patrick B. Malone? Of course, he will also be remembered for his perceptive analyses of the works of Jules Verne, and for his detailing the fulfillment of Verne's scientific prophecies (e.g. the submarine), but it is his fan-related writings which will make his name ring down through the ages. His opus THE LAST FANDANGO (privately mimeographed) is a classic of social commentary, and it revolutionized the heretofore timid accounts of fan politics and convention activities.

  He left the editorship of ALLUVIAL in 1955, when he left the Fan Farm, and I have carried on. I like to think that Somewhere, he will keep reading, and will say, "Well done, Woodard!"

  He is gone, and those of us who were his friends will miss his crisp forthrightness. His enemies have lost a chance to change his opinion of them. And we shall not see his like again.

  GEORGE WOODABD, ED.

  GOOD-BYE AND GOOD RIDDANCE, PM!

  A Guest Column By Jack L. Bexler

  Providence, Rhode Island June 1958

  I write to bury Pat Malone, not to praise him. Speaking no ill of the dead smacks of hypocrisy and I'll have none of it, so I will at least do Pat the courtesy of being as forthright as he was, and not pretend that death has improved him. (Though I thought it might.)

  I never met Pat Malone face to face, but I have certainly

  felt his typewritten wrath in various altercations that ran between ALLUVIAL and JACKAL'S MEAT. One such return salvo was sent back to me unopened in mid-June by Ethel Malone from Cupertino, California, enclosed in a letter saying that her husband Pat was dead, and so, ironically enough, it was his chief enemy who was given the task of announcing his death to his friends. (If he had any.) I only regret that, unlike MacDuff, I cannot also bring them his head.

  Others will have to eulogize Pat Malone, the man. I knew him as a typeface with one half the "S" missing. It summed him up very well. The half-essed Pat Malone. He came from a dull, but respectable background, and perhaps being something of the alienated intellectual, the perpetual rebel, made him decide to leave the little college town of his birth, and begin his odyssey-to make a fandom of hell, and a hell of fandom.

  He found others of his kind through the S-F magazines of the 'Forties, and later drifted onto the Fan Farm in Wall Hollow, Tennessee, where a mimeograph machine salvaged from a redneck's junkyard launched his career as a fan publisher. ALLUVIAL was born, and its regularity and reasonably good quality (he had a lot of other people's talent to draw from, and he used it well) quickly made him a celebrity in the genre. Not that Pat cared much about that. He contended that it didn't pay anything, and that the people singing his praises were "nobodies," so Pat tried to make the leap to pro-dom.

  He managed to write one novel, River of Neptune, which sounded to me like a rewrite of some of Jules Vernes' ideas (most notably "The First Men in the Moon"), but I am not a literary critic. I just know what I like, and in my opinion Harlan Ellison has a better chance to be famous than Pat Malone does.

  That one "real" book did not make a happy man of Pat Malone. He didn't become famous with his little paperback yarn. He didn't become the darling of the literati. And he still didn't have any friends. The fact that there is only ONE

  book by Pat Malone further suggests that it was a fluke, rather than an indication of any real literary talent.

  He gained much more notoriety from THE LAST FANDANGO, because people are invariably drawn to sleaze, however mendacious it is.

  Pat Malone was a failure. He failed at life. He failed at fandom, his retreat from life. And he failed at being a writer, his retreat from fandom. His well-publicized and unprovoked attacks on well-meaning associates in the hobby testifies to his basic instability and to his own misery, which he attempted to alleviate by inflicting it on others.

  I do not mourn his passing, and upon contemplating his life and his death, I do not think they let him in to heaven. If they did, I don't suppose he likes it much.

  JACKAL BEXLER

  GOOD NIGHT, SWEET PRINCE

  In Remembrance of Pat Malone by Angela Arbroath

  (* REPRINTED FROM ARCHANGEL, JULY 1958, ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.)

  (Jack L. Bexler writes that Pat Malone has died in Mississippi. And I write this partly in sorrow for the loss of an old friend, and partly to let you know that I have no further details to give you on his actual passing. I did not know that Pat Malone was in Mississippi, and I believe that he was down near the Gulf, whereas I live up near Memphis, TN. Please don't send me any more letters asking for details. I don't know anything about Pat's death! What follows is a tribute to his life.-A.A.)

  It has been several years since I saw Pat Malone, so perhaps the person who has died is not, in the emotional sense, the man that I knew, but, for the annals of fandom, wherein lies his best hope to be remembered, it falls to my lot to eulogize Pat Malone.

  On a personal level, I can only say that I liked him as a friend and respected his talent, and then I must try to explain him to his many adversaries, because Pat Malone was truly a stormy petrel, whom few people appreciated and virtually no one understood.

  Pat Malone was an idealist who valued intellectual qualities above material possessions, and he very much wanted to be a part of a special group of dedicated and intelligent people. If he could have come to terms with God, he would have become a Jesuit, I think. As it was, he opted for a group of people who wrote with spirit and enthusiasm, made strong friendships (bickering aside), and who built an environment in which intelligence and verbal skill rather than race, social aptitude, sex, or family background determined one's position. Aldous Huxley aside, let us hope that this is the Brave New World. It is certainly the world in which Pat Malone wanted to live.

  When his newfound paragons fell short of these Utopian expectations, he too
k them to task for it. He hated the pettiness of some fans, and he was contemptuous of "Big Name Fans," who sought to become celebrities in what Pat considered a solemn intellectual order. He was forthright in his criticisms, and he made people angry. So long as what he said was true, Pat didn't care how people felt about its being said.

  But he wanted to love us. I think that the civilization described in his novel River of Neptune is an idealization of fandom: the Marilaks are us as he would have liked us to be.

  There is not much to say about my personal relationship with the young Pat Malone of the Wall Hollow fan farm. We wrote for a long while and drew mind-close, and later we came together as physical beings, and it was a very special time. I would have liked for us to have grown old together. I'd like to think of us 42 years from now, parking our air-car on a hilltop in Kenya and watching the Millennium come up like thunder, while we reminisced about sixth fandom, and all the wondrous things our old friends had done and been, but such a future was not to be.

  Three years ago Pat Malone went out of our lives, and now he has even left our planet. I wish that I could have said good-bye to him before he went, so that I could have tried to tell him that even a stormy petrel is a wondrous creature to his friends.

  ANGELA ARBROATH

  In the Lanthanides' private party, no one was singing "Auld Lang Syne," and their expressions of shock and dismay left no doubt as to which way they would vote on the question of should auld acquaintance be forgot?

  Only Angela Arbroath had summoned a tentative smile for the man in black. His expression suggested that he was receiving just the reception that he had expected, and was quietly enjoying it. While the others conferred in a buzzing undertone, he helped himself to straight Scotch and examined the hors d'oeuvres tray without favor.

  "Is it really you, Pat?" ventured Angela, coming close to peer at him.

  The stranger looked up from his perusal of the label on the bottle of Scotch. After a moment's study of the blushing middle-aged woman, he countered, "Am I to assume that somewhere in there is the former Angela Arbroath?"