Part Three

by Ted White

He' d taken a lot of kidding about his name the first few years he' d been a
fan. " James Oldfan" --the name had to be a put-on, or "Oldfan" a hoax;
surely no one was born with that name. And at first he' d enjoyed the
attention. It was certainly one way to get noticed, to be singled out from
that year' s crop of neofans.

But eventually he' d put a stop to the jokes and speculation. He sent a
copy of his birth certificate to Joe Biggs, who Gestefaxed it and published it
in BIGGOT. "Oldfan is apparently an old and undeservedly uncommon
Welsh name," Biggs had observed at that time.

That was many years ago. Now he felt like an Oldfan: he was tired.
He was tired of a lot of things, but most of all he was tired of fandom.
It had changed somehow, and in the change had passed him by. While once
he had gotten stacks of fannish mail each day --letters and fanzines --it
seemed like today' s mail was mostly junk mail, full of slips of paper with
blurry pictures of generic children printed in colored ink under a heading
that asked "Have You Seen Me?" and envelopes that announced "You May
Already Be A Winner!" Fanzines showed up infrequently, often not for
weeks. Letters from his correspondents --those with whom he still
corresponded --were hardly greater in number.

Thumbing through the day' s stack of mail he mused that the amount of
mail he received daily was as great as ever --maybe even greater. But
what felt at first like a magazine was more likely upon examination to be a
bound collection of advertisements or a catalogue. Then there were the
loose ads --like newspaper inserts --touting the latest home-delivery pizza.
And the letters! When he opened them they turned out to be form letters
asking, "Thinking of selling your home?" or offering insurance plans and
policies.

But, wait -- here was a genuine letter from a real person, Will Wheatly.
Will used to live nearby. He used to drop in all the time, and he' d been a
pest -- always getting his copies of the latest fanzine a day or two earlier,
flaunting them at Jim.

He' d moved away a year ago, and Jim had experienced the odd
sensation of unexpected loss. He found he actually missed Will.
They hadn' t corresponded much since then, so the arrival of a letter
from Will was something of a surprise. Oldfan took it, still unopened, into
his fanden, wanting to savor for another moment the pleasure of its arrival
before actually reading it. "Probably just another address-change," he told
himself, to guard against the possible letdown.

After settling himself into the easy chair by the window, he used his
letter-opener to neatly slit the envelope, and took out Will' s letter.

Well, at least it wasn' t a form letter or an address-change. But it was
in some sense an advertisement.

"Dear Jim," Wheatly had written, "I wonder if you' ve noticed the
paucity of fanzines lately? I don' t know about you, but I haven' t gotten
but two in the last month, and one of them was BOOTWAH."

Oldfan sniffed when he read that. BOOTWAH was published by Sara
Parsons, an elderly woman who had been a faithful member of the N3F
since she' d joined it as a teenager. It looked like a church bulletin, which
was no surprise to anyone who knew that Sara also published her church' s
Sunday bulletins each week, which, as she (often) put it, "helps keep me
regular, ha ha." In BOOTWAH she listed the books she' d read, using an
arcane system by which each book' s content was classified with a group of
letters -- the latest Busby trilogy had earned a PTFX -- but otherwise went
without comment. BOOTWAH was almost totally devoid of interest to
anyone other than Sara Parsons, but she published it religiously (" ha ha")
every month. It was impossible to easily distinguish any one issue from all
the others, but it occurred to Jim that he hadn' t noticed the arrival of one
in several months. But maybe he' d tossed them into the pile of junk mail
and forgotten them.

"There' s a reason, though," Wheatly' s letter continued. "In one word:
NETwork. I just signed up and plugged in, and let me tell ya, that' s where
the action is. Crawford, Vegas, Tucker --they' re all there and they' re all
active."

Wheatly' s letter went into details, but Oldfan just scanned that part. A
computer "bulletin board" -- that' s where the fanac was now.

He' d been getting advertisements in the mail, solicitations to join
NETwork, the newest and supposedly the best of them. You could use it any
time between 6: 00 pm and 6: 00 am for a really minimal charge ( billed
through the phone company) . "Like the best room party at the conven-
tion!" one ad had touted. "Eavesdrop on the BNFs!" advised another.
"( Modem and initial registration charge not included)" whispered the fine
print at the bottom of each.

"Listen, buddy," Wheatly' s letter concluded, "you got to get back in
touch with everybody. Jump into the NET!"

Oldfan shook his head in disbelief. Why, he didn' t even have a per-
sonal computer, much less a modem. But Will' s letter explained a lot:
fandom had regrouped around the new technology and if he didn' t want to
be left totally out of it, he' d have to get a PC and catch up.

Groaning a little, he climbed out of his chair and went back into his
living room to retrieve the day' s junk mail from the wastebasket. Sorting
through it found the flyer he' d half remembered. "Your own personal
computer!" it said, "complete with modem for joining your favorite bulletin
board! Now only $ 29.83 a month for 72 months!"

He turned the flyer over in his calloused hands, and considered the
idea. . .

#

Will Wheatly looked up from the monitor screen on which Oldfan could
be seen, still holding the flyer advertising a computer. Another monitor
showed Oldfan' s fanden, and Wheatly' s letter lying on the floor next to the
easy chair, where Oldfan had dropped it.

"He made the connection," said the being next to Wheatly, speaking
through a vocoder device that it manipulated with several pseudopods from
within its personal life-support system. "He' s taken the bait."

Will grinned at it for a moment. "That' s good," he said approvingly.
"You' re starting to get the idiom now." Then he sobered. "I hope it
works," he said. "Everything' s riding on this -- everything we' ve done
here for the past ten years, the fake Terran house and environment, the
fake fandom we' ve been feeding him, it all comes down to this. We' ve got
to get him computerized. Otherwise. . . "

" Otherwise, it will all be wasted, " said the being.

" And everything will be lost, " said Will.

" We cannot allow that, " responded the being.

Will fought hard and managed to suppress a shudder.

TO BE CONTINUED...

Data entry by Judy Bemis
Hard copy provided by Geri Sullivan

Data entry by Judy Bemis

Updated November 20, 2002. If you have a comment about these web pages please send a note to the Fanac Webmaster. Thank you.