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Chapter 11

The Immortal Storm

"Excuse me, ma'am," Wally said. "I'm sorry to bother you a second time, but I intend to break and enter Ms. Bernardo's home shortly, and I was wondering if you could help me."

He held his breath, poised like a cat to spring to safety, while she blinked blearily at him.

In America it might not have worked. But Canadians could still afford a romantic view of crime. "Why, yesh," she said finally. "I believe I could be of shome asshistance."

He had to wonder why she had failed to slur the last two sibilants. For that matter, why hadn't she shooshed last night, when she'd been just as drunk? "Thank you, Mrs. Live Here. That's very kind of you."

He still did not relax. He was not poised to escape an adverse reaction, but to dodge any more attempted bourbon kisses. Moira had agreed with him that this audacious approach, long shot though it might be, was the only possible way to burgle a home on Point Grey Road, but she had been extremely emphatic on precisely how far he was and was not authorized to go in securing assistance. If her sensitive nose detected a single molecule of bourbon—or worse, soap—anywhere above his collar or below his belt when he got home tonight . . . well, he wouldn't be able to go home, no matter what he found out at the Bernardo house.

"Why do you call me that?"

He slapped his forehead. Clumsy start. "I'm sorry. I have this . . . well, odd sense of humor. When I asked your name last night, you said, 'Never mind, I live here,' so I'm afraid ever since, I've been thinking of you as 'Mrs. Live Here' in my head."

She pursed her lips and blinked some more. "All thingsh considered, that'll do. But it's Ms. Live Here. Call me Liv for short."

"Ah." Oh God, don't let that mean she's single. "Well, Liv, is there any particular method of entry you would recommend? I'd prefer to keep this as discreet as possible. Actually, I'd like it if no one ever finds out I was in there; frankly, we're sort of hoping to come up on Ms. Bernardo's blind side. If you should know anything about the nature of her alarm system, for instance—"

"I only know one thing about it," she said, blinking, "but it's a pip. There ishn't one."

Wally blinked back at her. "Bless my soul. Really?"

"She told me once it was ludicroush to spend a penny on shecurity on Point Grey Road. She said she had no alarm, never locked her windowsh, and, for icing on the cake, as she put it, she always left the back door shlightly ajar."

"You know," Wally said slowly, "that makes a kind of sense. You see an open door, unlocked windows, you assume someone's inside."

She nodded so savagely she nearly unbalanced. "Damn right it make shense! Spesh'ly here. There hashn't been an attempted break-in on thish shtreet in . . . well, shince I've been here. Early this century. And do you think my fucking inshurance comp'ny'll let me do the same goddam thing? Bugger, they will! That'sh why I'm gon' help you: I wanna see her 'shurance comp'ny get what they desherve for being so shenshible and decent."

His brain kept trying to find the pattern in her intermittent slur; it was giving him a headache. She seemed most successful with sibilants spelled with a c. Could her tongue spell? "Of course. So you think it would be safe for me to just . . . pop next door, go round back, and try the door?"

"Long ash you don't look furtive," she said. "That'll get you shot anywheres around here."

"Oh, I won't," he assured her.

"You're poor," she said suddenly, as if challenging him to disagree.

"That's right," he said.

She snorted, fruitily, like a small horse. "You poor guys alwaysh got more intreshsting minds than the kind o' jerksh I gotta hang out with. Why'sh that, you think?"

"We need to," Wally explained.

She nodded as thoughtfully as if provisionally accepting his solution to Fermat's Last Theorem. "That soundsh right. Anybody on thish block wanted a break an' enner done, they'd hire it done. Too damn rich to be intereshsting."

He wanted, badly, to ask her how she had conceived the notion of both slurring and not slurring the sibilant in "interesting," and whether it required practice or had come easily to her—but he knew it would constitute a digression, and in any case, artists are seldom able to explain their methods satisfactorily to the layman. "It hardly seems like break and enter if I don't have to break anything, does it?"

She smiled her feral smile, tightening her face so much that for a moment he feared her eyeballs would pop out. "Far'sh I'm consherned, you can exshplore that ashpect of your artishtic vision once you're inshide. I promish not to hear a thing. And the old Chink on the other shide's deaf as a boot. Wing Wang Wong, or whatever her name ish."

Now she was slurring c's—and even an x! "I really appreciate your help," he said. He was already backing away as he began the second syllable, out of the sheltered doorway and into the rain. This proved to be nice timing: her aborted lunge was unmistakable. "Goodbye, Liv, and thank you."

"Good luck, Handsome."

Wally had last been called handsome by a woman not Moira while auditioning for a part in a fannish play that was to have been performed at a small regional relaxacon, some eighteen years before—and he had not gotten the part. "Cuddly" he could aspire to; "handsome" exceeded even his fantasies. Nevertheless he was within ten steps of Carla Bernardo's back door before he next remembered to be terrified again. There was something to be said for drunken myopia—and nymphomania, too, if it came to that.

His pulse quickened when he saw that the door was not, as advertised, actually ajar. Liv Here might—in fact, almost certainly did—suffer from that condition Moira called rectofossal ambiguity. ("Fossa" being Latin for "a hole in the ground.") If he tried that door . . . was he going to trigger the alarm system Liv had assured him didn't exist, and end up with his own rectum in a torsa ("sling")?

Did he have any choice?

The door opened at his touch like a nymphomaniac's legs, easily, thoroughly, and silently.

Wally stood there before the open door, absolutely motionless, in drizzling rain, for a full five minutes. He told himself he was listening, but the rain and his pulse would have drowned out anything short of a pistol being cocked next to his head. It took him nearly the whole first minute to realize that there was a radio playing in the house, a talkjock whose topic tonight seemed to be the old Canadian standby, "America: Threat or Menace?" If Wally had merely been a junkie with his whole body screaming for a fix, he'd have left. Only one thing finally had the power to drive him inside: the vision of Moira's face when he reported back. He found that he wanted, very badly, to hear her say, "My hero!" so that he could say, "Aw, shucks."

Once in the house, however, he simply doffed his rain gear and got to work. He lost some time and some shin skin to his reluctance to turn on any lights—successfully establishing by way of consolation, however, that anyone else in the building was dead or deaf, and that a human heart can't actually explode. He also managed to silence the talkjock, at least locally. But once he penetrated to rooms with no exterior windows, where he felt safe turning lights on, things picked up quickly. Not only did he locate the computer in the second room he tried, and not only was it a make and model and operating system he was reasonably comfortable with, its security encryption program yielded to him even more skittishly than the door had.

As he had guessed, "Carla Bernardo" had characteristically been a hair too cute for her own good: the password that cracked her shields was "Tammy Lynn." It was an obvious choice, if you had some experience at what hackers and crackers called "social engineering"—and if you realized "Carla" had made up her name by reverse-combining those of the notorious, recently sentenced Canadian monsters Paul Bernardo and Karla Homolka. The first of the young girls they had raped and murdered together—a few weeks before their wedding—was Karla's fifteen-year-old sister Tammy.

Wally didn't even bother to read a thing: just fired up the modem and uploaded everything he could decrypt to one of his own hard drives back home. It came to something over fifty megabytes. Then he scanned the stuff which had not been encrypted, and uploaded some of those files to a separate folder at home. He could see Moira smiling, in his mind's eye, and grinned back at the screen.

When he was satisfied he had every byte he could locate and wanted, he reformatted Carla's whole hard drive three times—wiping it irrecoverably—and entertained himself as it churned by thumbing through the Japanese pornographic comic book collection he found in a drawer. She had some better ones than he and Moira did.

Finally the computer chirped for the third time and drew him back from a particularly absorbing manga. He nearly left, then, but things had gone so well thus far, he was in the mood for a little adventure. So he searched Carla's office, finding nothing of lasting interest, and then her bathroom, learning only that she was not a natural blonde, and then her bedroom, where he found behind the false back of a bottom dresser drawer a lockbox whose combination was the same as her computer password. Its contents caused Wally to leap to his feet and dance the Monkey, for the first time in twenty years. A little work before a full-length mirror distributed these things about his person so well that even a sharper observer than Liv might not have noticed Wally was a bit more cuddly than usual.

On his way out, he stopped by Carla's office again, stole three of the manga, and added them to the swag, tucking them inside his belt in the back, under his shirt.

He recovered his rain poncho and left by the back door again—leaving it ajar—and returned to the street around the opposite side of the building from the one by which he'd entered. By the time Liv saw him and began cawing, he was within twenty steps of his car. Even walking carefully so as not to spill his pornography, he was able to make a clean getaway.

Halfway home, stopped at a traffic light on Broadway, he found himself unable to suppress an impulse to beat his fists on the steering wheel and howl with animal glee. He glanced to his left and saw a pedestrian staring at him from the sidewalk. "Vancouver," he cried happily through his rain-streaked window.

The pedestrian smiled, nodded, and waved.

The light changed and the mighty hunter went home to his mate.

 

Who literally greeted him with open arms. And open nostrils.

"My hero!" she cried.

"Aw, shucks, ma'am." Wally knew he was grinning the uncontrolled grin, the one that made him look goofy, but he couldn't help it. He had successfully carried out his first burglary, and he had passed his sniff test, and he had just heard and spoken two of his very favorite clichés—and the best was yet to come.

Moira hugged him tightly, putting english on it. "Really, Wally, you did great. I've been going through some of what you sent, making a start, anyway, and there's—what?"

He had disengaged from the hug just far enough to silence her with an upraised finger. "Go to the meditation room," he said, "and wait for me there."

She frowned, studied him carefully, and one eyebrow lifted slightly in alarm. "Wally, that's the goofy grin. Am I gonna like this?'

"Want to see another grin just like it? Bring a hand mirror to the meditation room and wait for me there."

"Hey, where's your coat?"

"Read on," he suggested.

She sighed. "Should I put on music?"

He shook his head. "There'll be plenty. Trust me."

She looked exasperated. "That's the trouble. I do."

He went back to the car, recovered his coat, and carried it inside in his arms. He locked the door behind him and made sure the phone machine was armed before joining Moira in the meditation room. He found her there, sitting on her zafu, measuring her breath. She had not fetched a mirror. Again he made sure the door was sealed behind him, then dropped into tailor's seat opposite her, setting his bundle down between them. Declining to feed him any more straight-lines, she waited serenely.

He adopted his Panel Moderator voice. "Having stolen all the really important items—that is, the data—of which you were just about to deliver a preliminary summary that I am, I promise you, most eager to hear—I turned my attention briefly, before I took my leave, to mere material things."

She kept waiting, but her lips seemed to tighten ever so slightly.

He nodded as if she had said something. "I hear you. You're thinking: no matter how lavish or fine they may be, I don't want any of the possessions of those people in my house. I felt much the same way when I began my search. Doubtless you're wondering why I'm going around Robin Hood's barn like this, why I've got what I found bundled up in my coat. If I'd left it all where I had it stashed when I left the place, you'd have felt most of it as soon as you hugged me a minute ago, and then there might have been trouble. I thought it would be better all around if we did this here. Are you ready?"

She took one more deep breath and nodded.

He unwrapped his booty.

He let her have five seconds to absorb the basic gist of the contents, and then placed his fingers in his ears, and in a loud clear voice, provided inventory details. "The Canadian is forty-seven thousand five hundred in used nonserial fifties. The American is thirty-five thousand in new nonserial twenties. The handgun is a Glock nine millimeter, fully loaded; there was no extra ammo. The comics are great. The passports are all—" That was as far as he got.

One of several reasons Moira had been in more or less constant demand for fan theatricals over the past few decades was her scream. It might have made a Hammer Films alumnus weep with nostalgia, or won a nod from Coltrane—evoking all the stark despairing terror of a virgin accosted by the Ripper on her wedding night, yet delivered by a vocal instrument with the raw pneumatic power of a Sophie Tucker or a Mama Cass. At the previous year's Worldcon Hugo ceremonies, where she had performed for two thousand pros and fans in an immense hall, the tech crew had not found it necessary or even advisable to mike her. The effect in a small soundproof room was impressive. Even with his fingers deep in his ears and his palms cupped over them, Wally paid for his fun. He had expected to, and paid up like a man. But then he made a very bad mistake: he took his fingers out of his ears—just as she did it again.

Shortly he managed to pry his eyelids open again, but he kept on seeing paisley swirls and neon mandalas. Gradually, as in one of those tests for color-blindness, some of them resolved into Moira's face. The lips were moving. He waved and gestured to indicate the transmission was unsuccessful, but they kept moving. He closed his eyes to conserve processing power and concentrated. White noise slowly arrived from the far end of the universe, rose to the level of static—then, as with the visual data, some of it coalesced into a parody of Moira's voice.

"—alize what this means? This is wonderful. This is horrible. It couldn't be better, and it couldn't be worse. Who's writing this mess, Wally? What did we ever do to deserve this? Stop grinning, dammit!"

He hadn't realized he still was. He made it go away with a massive effort, and his hearing improved slightly. "You understand why I did this here?" he asked. His voice sounded to him flanged, distorted, like John Lennon in "I Am the Walrus," a comparison that irritated him.

She nodded impatiently. "Of course. Everyone on the block would be dialing 911 right now if we weren't in a soundproof room. But Jesus, Wally, the way you set it up I thought it was gonna be something good."

What in Finagle's name did he have to do to please this woman? "This isn't good? One: sitting right there on the floor is on the close order of ninety-five percent of what we got taken for; I did the math. As far as I can tell it's all real and it all spends. Two: it's enough—as of now, VanCon can happen after all, and we even got some of our own money back! Three: that means hereinafter, I can be assured that my motives in continuing to stalk these bastards are at least eighty percent pure personal vengeance; I don't know about you, but that gives me a lot of spiritual satisfaction." His hearing was improving; by now he sounded like Lennon in "Strawberry Fields." (The first half.) "And four: now we each have a gun, and neither can be traced to us. Tell me the downside, because I don't—oh wait, I get you. Here we are in the middle of a manhunt, and we have a convention to run again. Okay, so we give up sleeping on alternate days, instead of every third—"

She cut him off. "What would have happened if we'd gone on the Net this morning and announced exactly what had happened to us? That we got taken, and VanCon was vaporware?"

He frowned. If this was a sequitur, the connection escaped him. "Well . . . put it this way: the only upside would have been that we'd never have heard another live filksong in our lives."

She nodded. "Total humiliation, and lifelong expulsion from the councils of fandom. Possibly even total excommunication from fandom itself. We'd have had to have plastic surgery and change all our ID to ever see another huckster room."

"And your point is . . . ?"

"Obviously that's unthinkable. But what would happen if we went on the Net right now, and truthfully reported events as of this minute? VanCon's still on, but here's why it almost didn't happen?"

He flinched slightly, and then made himself think about it dispassionately. If she wanted to be Socrates, he could bat around a theoretical proposition as well as Phaedrus. "Uh . . . let's see . . . still total humiliation, for sure . . . but probably no banishment. It'd be just too much fun to have us around to laugh at. Best guess, I'd say we'd be making significant progress toward living it down in—I don't know, ten years? Twelve? A couple of fannish generations, call it, before we'd ever be given anything but scutwork to do again. Long after we died, they'd still be telling neos about us. And the neos would be laughing. Except for the occasional sweet one who would pity us."

She reached out and took his hand. "Wally?" she said. His hearing was now nominal; nonetheless her voice sounded strained. "Those two jerks are still out there someplace, with new names and maybe new faces. We're looking for them, granted, but we don't even really know for certain they're still in Canada, much less in the Lower Mainland. They're experienced, professional vampires, and they've just learned how nice fans taste, and perhaps you'll join me in flattering ourselves that they are very fucking good." She had his complete attention; Moira rarely used that word. "Answer me this, honey: how important is it that fandom be warned?"

Wally screamed. Not in the same league with one of hers . . . but it was closer to his ears.

That postponed the first real quarrel they'd had in months for another several minutes.

 

It escalated, when it finally came, to yet another iteration of The Quarrel. Their version, that is, of the one all couples lucky enough to have the privilege will write together and perfect over the years granted them: the basic chord structure over which they would improvise The Dozens together, every time fate lashed them into song. It was no more interesting than any other couple's quarrel, full of You're Always and You Never and If You'd Just Once; its chief function was to allow them each to say things of which they would later be intellectually and/or emotionally ashamed—an instinctive human response to crisis so primitive it makes fight-or-flight look like an intelligent advance. By now they knew where each other's vulnerable places were, and were reasonably confident they could take each other's best shot. (Pity the singles and loners, who must make do with bar fights or politics.)

As in postmodern music—indeed, postmodern art of most kinds—communication was subordinated to personal expression; the results were thus unlistenable for anyone but the artists, and will not be recorded here. When this set had had time to seep into long-term memory storage, each would forget most of what they had said, and remember most of what the other had said, but they would process it differently. Wally would be deeply scarred by the very worst of her barbs—but would almost never consciously think of them again until the next jam session, and thus would take decades to deal with them. Moira, on the other hand, would replay his cruelest words over and over in her head daily for several weeks, until she had worn them smooth, then string them with the others on a secret necklace she could finger whenever it suited her to be depressed.

Fortunately for them, they both suffered from a chronic condition that might be called stupidity fatigue. Even driven by fear, frustration and shame, half an hour away from rationality was about the maximum either Wally or Moira were built to tolerate. This session followed their basic pattern: two extended solos, a spirited duet, a reprise of the theme, and then a smooth segue into their trademark ending. Wally always won the putative argument, whatever it happened to be, and then discovered his prize was a barren, blasted desert, and scrambled to apologize and surrender. This allowed her to apologize and accept his surrender, and at last they were free to return, tired but oddly refreshed, to whatever their actual problem was.

Which usually had neither changed in the slightest, nor suffered visibly from being used as an emotional dodgeball.

"Alright," he conceded finally, and swallowed a mouthful of the coffee cake she had fetched to seal the truce. "We have to warn fandom. It is our fannish duty. But do we have to do it immediately?"

"Let's use worst-case analysis," she suggested. "Say Jude and Carla walked from Point Grey Road down to the water, climbed into a float-plane and flew straight to—lets say, Edmonton. Okay, how long does Jude need to set up his next victims? How long did he need to set us up?"

He stopped a forkful short of his mouth. "Well," he said, "it must have taken him awhile to select us as targets, and research us both—"

"Worst-case scenario, I said. Assume he selected and researched multiple targets, and now he's going across the checker board: jump . . . jump . . . jump. Or maybe she does the research in advance for him. Like a celebrity surgeon: he holds out his palm, she slaps the next scalpel onto it. Whatever: once he knew he was coming after us, once he knew which window we'd be sitting beside, how much time did he need to take us?"

He took the bite, and chewed and swallowed it, before he was ready to say, "Half an hour to shave all over. Maybe an hour or two to buy and set up the magnesium. Then he could go as soon as it got dark enough. Oh, damn."

"We have no way to be sure we're the first fans he's hit, Wally."

"Butter me!" He spilled tea on his lap. "Ow. Oh, Moira, that's a horrid thought."

"And even if we are, he could have destroyed two more clubs already, by now. Every convention in North America with a Beatles fan on the concom is at risk, this minute."

He prodded futilely at his soggy slacks with a handful of kleenex she'd given him, and gazed morosely at the results. "Heaven help me, I think I'd actually rather be a monumental sucker, than just another monumental sucker." He shook his head. "Isn't that appalling?"

"Well," she said grimly, "if we are, we can at least be the first ones who didn't fail the test of honor." She turned and looked pointedly toward the office, where the computers waited. "We can sound the alarm. Even if we have to pull our pants down to the world to do it."

For the first time he could recall, Wally didn't feel like finishing his coffee cake. He sighed, assessed the results, and sighed again. "I guess it's time to put my Asshole Principle to the test."

Some years before, he had suddenly stopped their car on a country road, gotten out and walked around it several times, shaking his head and mumbling, then slowly climbed back in and propounded to his wife the stunning new insight he had been vouchsafed: that every living human, and every one who had ever lived, was an asshole. He had challenged her to name a single exception. Jesus? Trashed a harmless currency exchange, which merely let foreigners give sacrifice to God in legal tender. Handpicked a round dozen custodians for the most important words ever spoken: every man jack of them both illiterate and too stupid to find a ghostwriter—staged the most important event in history and forgot to invite the media. What an asshole. Albert Einstein? Instigates Manhattan Project; says Oops: major asshole. John Lennon? Saw his future with utter clarity—began the last Beatles album with the whispered words, "Shoot me," wrote and recorded a prescient solo song called "I'm Scared"—then a few years later, forgot and stuck his head up again: poor asshole. Robert Heinlein had given Wally's theory the most trouble—but even the First Grandmaster of Science Fiction had disparaged marijuana, and once permitted one of his more authoritative characters to refer to homosexuals as "the poor in-betweeners." To be sure, Heinlein had more class than any other three assholes put together, but . . .

Once Moira had accepted her husband's basic premise, that everyone is an asshole—and she could not dispute it; she had a fair amount of self-honesty—she'd seen the obvious corollary. The trademark of the true, dyed-in-the-wool, hopeless and irredeemable capital-A Asshole (Wally had explained) is the fixed belief that there exist some people, somewhere, who are Not Assholes. This immediately gives rise to the passionate desire to be mistaken for one of them. Wally himself—he now saw—had been wasting enormous amounts of energy, time and invention on trying to keep anyone from suspecting that he was one of the Assholes. "Dignity doesn't have to be a suit of armor," he had told her. "It can be as weightless and transparent as a force field." And from that day forth, both had tried to refocus their efforts—to settle for being perceived (by anyone whose opinion mattered to them) as a pair of competent and pleasant and capable assholes. Assholes with class.

And, damn it, with senses of personal honor.

Building on his anal metaphor, and punning on a joke they both knew, so ancient it was almost due to come around again, she gestured with her head toward their office and said, "Time to answer the question, 'How far is the old log-in?' "

He took one last look at his coffee cake and heaved up from his chair. "About thirteen steps away, I'd say." He helped her out of her own chair, and they each put an arm around the other as they walked those steps to the gallows.

"Let's compose it on your Mac," he said as they waited for their machines to boot. "Then we'll save it as text-only, and both upload it. Gee, there are still a few clubs that aren't online yet, too—we better fax them. Don't you have a database for them somewhere?"

"First let's just sniff the Web and make sure we aren't too late," she said. "Maybe we'll get lucky: somebody else will sing first, and we can go down as a subtitle instead of a headline." Her browser stabilized on-screen and she began a staccato composition for keyboard and mouse.

He knew she could netsurf better and faster; he left her to it, and began to triage their e-mail. First he identified the VanCon traffic, which had to be sorted into business (hotel and other subcontractors), pro (the Guests of Honor and honored guests), and fan (everybody else with a right to yank on their chain). All three folders bulged with unread posts which he was just beginning to realize he was going to have to deal with after all, now that the con was tentatively back on. But he left them all unread and pressed on. Next he culled out and filed several professional messages—related, that is, to the cottage industry by which he and Moira earned their bread: writing and distributing stable software patches for existing computer operating systems, which made them more useful for the handicapped. He was briefly tempted to stop and read one of these messages, a beta-tester's critique of a new program intended to assist one-handed typing and eliminate mousework altogether in Mac System, but restrained himself. Finally he was down to personal mail, and began to read it—for once leaving his Joke of the Day subscription for last. If there were going to be a report of a major fiscal fiasco anywhere in fandom, this was (after the Web) where it was most likely to be.

Two sentences into the third message, he turned to stone in his chair.

Even a statue can read good news, though, given enough time, and happily the text of this message was short enough to fit on Wally's oversized screen without scrolling.

When his screen began to shimmer at the edges, he remembered to bunk. He stopped when he realized he was making it strobe. "Darling?" he said faintly. "Anything?"

"Bugger all so far."

He reached out, groped, found her wrist and clamped down hard. "Have you committed us to anything yet?"

She stopped work, looked down at his hand on her wrist, then up at him. "Of course not—we said we're going to write it together, didn't we? Aren't we?"

"Maybe not."

Her eyes widened, and she gripped his hand with her other one. "Tell me."

"Take a look at this e-mail from Steve."

 

Subject: Forwarded message from Space

Case

To: moira@eworld.com (Wallace Kemp)

Date: Tue, 14 May 1996 06:58:30 -0700

(PDT)

 

Found this in my mailbox this morning. Will be happy to forward any reply you want to send.

 

—Forwarded message from Space Case

(John Edw. MacDougal, III)—

 

From spacecase@teleport.com Mon May 13

22:33:15 1995

Message-Id:

<999605140533.WAA05535@desiree.teleport.com>

From: spacecase@teleport.com (John Edw.

MacDougal, III)

To: stevethesleeve@eworld.com (Steve Tomas)

Subject: smooth fen

Date: Tue, 14 May 1995 05:29:51 GMT

X-Newsreader: Forte Free Agent 1.0.82

 

Dear Sleever:

 

On 31 October 1995 00:19:57, you wrote:

>If you happen to run across any new fans, or even just

>fellow travelers, who look like they'd cast well as

>Captain Picard, let me know ASAP. (Please route thru

>me as Wally and Moira are busy with VanCon coming up.)

>As you might imagine, close facial resemblance is not

>as important here as willingness to go bald for awhile

>—and if he's articulate, so much the better. Please

>pass the word.<

 

Don't know if helps, but am out here on Bowen Island, hard by your friends' meat address, and gent just walked into my store today with 3-4 days' beard - all over head. Backs of hands, too. Not stilyagi: if had to guess, would say he bet Reform in last election. Late 20s, tall, in great shape, narrow face. IMHO, with right makeup could make wizard Picard—and if wife he mentioned let him shave head once, might again if asked quickly enough.

 

Funny thing: specifically stated was NOT fan —but quoted Lazarus Long . . . accurately. Perhaps one of those legendary poor bastards who got self de-fan-estrated for life, for some ripoff or cosmic concom blunder. Or perhaps, as he claimed, favorite English teacher once passed off Heinlein quote as own. Pleasant cobber, seemed a little dull to be fan. But note for whatever may be worth he also claimed to be hiker, and was full of shit about that. Still, get that lie all time out here . . .

 

Want me to ask grapevine for his 20?

Probably take <5 minutes and .5 droplet of sweat. Please advise.

 

CU at VanCon; will have latest NSS updates for our panel as promised.

 

—Space Case

Regional Rep, National Space Society

 

—End of forwarded message from Space Case (John Edw. MacDougal, III—

 

"He's on Bowen Island," Moira said, pounding on a thigh (Wally's) with a fist (hers). "With his girlfriend, enjoying the spoils of war. There's only one or two ways on and off that island. And we have a large war chest to hunt him down with."

"And two warm guns," Wally murmured dreamily, temporarily immune to physical pain. "Double happiness." He began to sing. "Bang bang, shoot shoot . . ."

She had to lean past him and use his keyboard to reply to Space Case.

 

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