James Oldfan was tired. He looked up from the letter he was typing. The clock on the wall said 11:37. He yawned, then glanced back at what he had just written:
"Moody is a jerk. I've suspected it for a long time now, but his piece for you, 'Why We Need Worldcon Security,' serves as outright confirmation. Only a jerk could"
Only a jerk could -- what? The entire thought had flown out of his head when he'd idly glanced at the time. His eyes fell to the fanzine folded open next to the typer. STF STUFF. A really neoish title, but snappily edited nonetheless. Something about Joel Crawford made the most naive ideas sparkle in his hands. The first five issues were just what the title implied, but they were dittoed in short runs of less than a hundred and mostly forgotten. When STF STUFF went xeroxed it suddenly bloomed with both striking new talents and revived-from-the-dead old talents. Joel had the touch all right. Oldfan admired him for that. Who else would use xerox in such a personal way -- even to running direct copies of the letters of comment he received? In anyone else's hands it would have looked messy, scrapbooky. Crawford made it look fannish, clever. It was probably, Oldfan reflected, and not for the first time, because Joel used the reduction feature on the xerox machine, reducing the letters 15% or so, that it looked so neat in STF STUFF.
Oldfan yawned again. Best leave it for morning. It would all come back to him then. He glanced at the Out tray on his desk. Four letters sat in neatly addressed and stamped envelopes, waiting to be mailed. Under them were three fanzines and a letter, ready to be filed away. He'd spent the entire evening at the typer.
He pushed back his chair and stood, stretching. Damned satisfying. Four letters done and a fifth half done.
He drank a glass of milk and went to bed.
#
Bright sunlight streaming through his bedroom Window awoke James Oldfan the next morning. He rolled over to keep the light out of his eyes, but he felt its heat on the back of his head and his neck and finally he gave into it and awoke.
He was still eating breakfast when the mail arrived. He poured himself a second cup of coffee and then while it was cooling he pried loose the staples that held shut the new VANITY PRESS from Beecham. He scanned the half dozen sheets quickly for the major news and any passing mentions of his name, then set the newszine aside for a more thorough reading later. He had stacked the letters in order of increasing importance, as assessed from return names and addresses, leaving the thick one from Crawford for last and opening first the letter from W.F. Glea. As he'd expected, it was a one-sheet LoC on Oldfan's FAPAzine, ELEPHANT'S GRAVEYARD, extras of which he sent out to non-FAPAns. W.F. Glea --no one had ever known the names behind those initials -- was one of those types who always and faithfully responded to each and every fanzine he got with a one-page letter of comment. There was never anything worth quoting in a W.F. Glea letter -- they were always almost anonymously bland -- and in fact the sure sign of a fanzine which wasn't getting good letters would be the appearance in it of a W.F. Glea letter. Every fanzine always received a letter from W. F. Glea. That was ol' W.F. 's hold on faneditors, Oldfan mused. He always responded, thus obligating the faned to keep sending W.F. his zines.
"Well, I just got my customary letter from W.F. Glea," Joel Crawford said in his letter. "You know, I really have to wonder about that guy. I bought some old fanzines from Tucker last year, and in one of them -- a Bowers fanzine, I think --there was this letter from W.F. Glea. Same address in South Carolina. And except for a couple of dated references it could as easily have been his latest letter to me! ...Oops! I just went to check. I was wrong -- it wasn't a Bowers fanzine, it was a RUNE. You know, I think it might be funny to reprint that old letter and run it in the next STF STUFF. What do you think, Jim?"
Oldfan grinned when he read that. Yeah, and it would be just like Joel to do it, too. Joel had the right touch.
He rose from the breakfast nook and took the mail with him into his fanden. He tossed Joel's letter down on top of the open issue of STF STUFF on which he'd been commenting, and threw the other letters into the In box to be answered (or filed) later. Then he plopped into the easy chair by the window to read VANITY PRESS more thoroughly.
#
Will Wheatly came over that afternoon.
"Hey, Jim," he said in greeting, "you get the latest BLACK HOLE?" He waved the fanzine in the air.
"No," Oldfan said. Will always seemed to get fanzines a day or two before he did. That and the man's never-ending cheerfulness was enough to put the damper on any day of the week.
"Well," Will continued, "you'll want to look at this one, then, because Mike Moody has a really heavy attack against you in his column, 'The Moody Blues.' "
"Yeah?" That wasn't too surprising. They'd been sniping at each other off and on for the last two years. Christ, Moody was such an asshole! Always wore black whenever he showed up at a con or a fangathering, always looked like someone had rammed a poker up his fundament.
"Yeah! Look --" Wheatly thumbed through the fanzine until he found the page he wanted, but rather than showing it to Oldfan, he began reading aloud from it:
" 'Jimmy Oldfan's reactionary crusade against progress is typical of the kind of ostrich-headed fan who thinks that just because conventions used to be small enough to be held in motels we ought to limit the membership in today's worldcons to no more than ten thousand. That's fine for reactionary elitists, but what about the rest of us? Don't we have a say in this too?' " Wheatly stopped reading to glance up at Oldfan's deliberately disinterested expression. "Hey, you wanta look at it yourself?" He thrust the fanzine at Oldfan.
"No," Oldfan said. "I'll probably get it in tomorrow's mail. That' s soon enough. I don't need Mike Moody. He's a fugghead."
They talked a while longer. Wheatly asked questions and Oldfan answered at length, gratified at the younger fan's interest. Then Will glanced at his wrist, said "Gotta go," and left. He left his copy of BLACK HOLE behind. Oldfan noticed it just as the door closed and had. to wrestle with himself for a full minute before deciding that if Wheatly wanted it badly enough he'd come back for it, and then settling back to read it from cover to cover.
#
Wheatly shut the door behind him and stepped out into the bright yellow sunlight of late afternoon. The shrubs in Oldfan's front yard looked an impossible, heart-ache green in the low-angled light, the shadows from the white picket fence marching like soldiers across the grass. An invisible bird overhead in the oak tree sang a full-throated song. Wheatly chuckled to himself as he imagined Oldfan making a mad dash for the purposefully abandoned BLACK HOLE the instant the door had closed. He shook his head as he opened the gate, and turned to look back as he swung it shut. The house, a cottage really, looked almost quaint. But It was surely no more quaint than its inhabitant. Wheatly shook his head again, as if dismissing what he saw, and and turned his back on the house.
He strode directly across the macadam road and up the walk to the front door of the house which stood directly opposite Oldfan's. He fumbled with a key and opened the door, stepping directly into the antiseptic corridor that lay beyond.
He went through another door, this one fitted with pressure seals, and closed and dogged it. His ears popped and he swallowed automatically as he undogged and opened the third door. Oldfan got Earth-normal; the rest of Leytown got by on 8 lbs pressure. Wheatly let his muscles slacken as he fell into a "luney slouch," and his pace became the "luney lope," It was damned tedious trying to pretend that 1/6th G was also Earth-normal.
Wheatly followed the corridor to its first intersection, turned left and then again at the first door. The room inside was dimly lit and one wall was filled with monitor screens. Some showed the outsides of Oldfan's house, others each room inside. Wheatly's eyes went to the monitor which showed Oldfan engrossed in the copy of BLACK HOLE.
"We're going to have to step up the Moody material," he said to the room's other occupant.
The being, encased in a life-support system which resembled a tiny tractor with an aquarium on top, extruded an eye with which to regard him. Three other eyes remained transfixed by the monitors.
"That will require reprogramming. Is it necessary?"
"You know as well as I do that we have to keep his attention fixed on that pseudo-1987 world he lives in. 'Moody' provokes him, makes him angry. He loves to be angry, expecially when he knows he's right. It really engages him. So jack up the program - it's time for some fine-tuning. That's why I've been giving him personal visits, anyway."
The life-support loudspeaker rasped; Wheatly knew it was intended to sound like a human sigh, to indicate the shrug of non-existent shoulders. Then, with a whirring of electric motors, the machine turned and crossed the room to a computer console, leaving Wheatly to stare alone into the monitor screen where James Oldfan still sat reading the left-behind BLACK HOLE. To think that the fate of the whole of humanity rested upon convincing this one man that he lived more than fifty years in the past! Wheatly shook his head yet again.
--to be continued next issue--
--Ted White
(illo: COMPUTER LIZARD (Batteries not included)
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Has Ted White ruined fandom?
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Data entry by Judy Bemis
Hard copy provided by Geri Sullivan
Data entry by TextBridge Pro 9.0 and Judy Bemis
Updated October 19, 2002. If you have a comment about these web pages please send a note to the Fanac Webmaster. Thank you.