"Thor," she said, "don't even think it." And she whipped around with a snowball in her hand and blasted him on the chest.
Then all fandom was plunged into war. Even the Eskimos joined in. It was such a relief to know that they would not freeze! Sherrine wondered if she might even get a tan out of it. She was laughing and dancing and dodging snowballs when the spotlight from the helicopter caught them dead center.
Lieutenant Gil Magruder studied the shapes dancing in the spotlight below. There were two sleds piled high with clothing and blankets. Nestled in the clothing, he saw two naked corpses, long dead of starvation by the looks of them. Cavorting around them in some sort of ritualistic dance were a dozen naked and near naked men and women, including at least two children. When the light hit them, they froze in place and stared up at the helicopter. Magruder pivoted the copter, keeping the beam centered.
"Sergeant. What do you see down there?"
Staff Sergeant Emil Poulenc looked and swallowed his gum. "It looks like some kind of funeral, sir," he said in a Louisiana drawl. "Those are Eskimos, aren't they? But--"
"But they're naked, aren't they, Sergeant. They're on the Ice at thirty below and they're naked."
"Well, that lady there, she has a brassiere and panties on."
Magruder gave him a stare.
"I mean, she's not completely naked." Poulenc's voice sounded wistful.
"Sergeant, what possible difference can a pair of pink panties make at thirty degrees below zero?"
Poulenc scratched his chin. "Well, sir, since you put it that way."
Magruder stared at the group on the ground. "HQ ain't never gonna believe this," he muttered. He straightened and adjusted the rotor. "You know what I think we saw, Sergeant?"
"Sir, I can't imagine."
Magruder turned off the spotlight and banked the copter away to the west. "Nothing, Sergeant. I think we saw absolutely nothing at all."
The General Mills station at Brandon was a gleaming beacon in the dark for the last few miles of the trip. Alex sighed. The madcap trip across the Ice was nearly over. Sherrine drove the snowmobile down the state highway toward the station, where Alex saw a man--presumably Bob Needleton--sitting in a lawn chair reading a magazine beside a blazing fire he had built in an oil drum. When he heard them coming, he folded the magazine and stood up.
"It's about time you got here," he said. If he thought there was something extraordinary about a procession of naked people coming off the glacier, he did not say. Instead he gave directions for loading the van.
Alex and Gordon were trundled into the back of the van and laid out flat on a pair of old mattresses. The last sight Alex saw before they slid the door closed was a bunch of naked Eskimos dancing around the blazing oil drum. It was probably a measure of how accustomed he had already become to Earth, that the sight seemed perfectly natural. So far, all the Earthlings he had met had behaved oddly.
Maybe gravity pulled blood from the brain…
Bob climbed into the pilot's seat. "That's that," he said. "Sherrine, honey, your grandparents stayed behind in Mapleton just in case you managed to get back there after all. As soon as we find a working telephone we'll call and tell them you're okay and where to find their equipment. Your pal Krumangapik agreed to wait here until they came by, if I would let him have the fire I built in the oil drum." He started the engine. "I guess that takes care of everything."
"Not quite everything," Alex said. "It's going to get cold. We told SUNSAT to turn off the beam when we got to Brandon."
"Sigh," Thor said. "I suppose we'd be too easy to locate if we kept it. But it was nice to be warm."
There was a mad scramble in the back of the van as everyone hastened to don clothes. Conditions were crowded with seven people in the back of the van. Alex didn't mind the occasional elbow or knee as the others pulled on sweaters and pants, because their body heat warmed the place nicely. He supposed that was how Krumangapik and his friends could sit around naked in a house made of snow bricks. Besides, Sherrine took charge of dressing him, and he rather enjoyed it.
Alex relaxed to the rhythm of the van over the highway. He closed his eyes. The rescue was over. For the first time since he'd seen the missile on the radar, he knew he would live for one more day.
A couple miles farther on, he felt a hand shake his shoulder. He opened his eyes and saw Steve's dark face above him.
Steve grinned. "It's too close in here to run through any asanas; and you're not up to it physically yet. So let's begin your conditioning with some pranayama. I want you to practice breathing."
Alex wondered what it was that his lungs had been doing all his life. "I already know how to breathe," he told him.
"I don't want you to breathe from your diaphragm. I want you to breathe from your little potbelly." He set his hand on Alex's stomach. "Make your stomach go in and out, not your chest."
Steve wasn't kidding. Alex looked at Gordon and Gordon looked at him and he shrugged with his eyebrows. Didn't everyone breathe from their stomachs? He studied the Earthlings surrounding him and, yes, it was indeed their chests that rose and fell. He watched Sherrine's chest more closely, just to make sure. Maybe their rib muscles were better developed. Gravity again, he supposed.
"That's very good!" Steve seemed genuinely surprised and delighted. "Now I want you to breath using only your left nostril."
He still wasn't kidding. Alex looked around the van, but Mike and Sherrine and even Doc Waxman showed no reaction to Steve's bizarre request; and Thor was trying to follow his directions.
"Come on," Steve said in an encouraging voice. "Practice along with me. In through the left nostril. Out through the mouth." When he breathed out he chanted, "Om mane padme om."
Hot damn! thought Alex. We're in the hands of crazy people. He had never felt safer.
CHAPTER SIX
"… A Way of Life"
Where in hell was the Con Committee?
Tradition told that a convention committee could win the bid and then vanish. The Worldcon would happen anyway. Chuck Umber believed it. He'd seen conventions, like Nolacon in New Orleans, where the committee's disappearance would have saved the convention. But he didn't believe that this committee could hide in a crowd of less than sixty!
The Con was ready to go. Fans had been arriving for several days and the official program had already started… but Bruce Hyde and the rest of the Con Committee seemed to have vanished into thin air, all but one or two and they weren't talking. Something was up… and even Crazy Eddie seemed to be in on it.
Chuck Umber had published fandom's most successful news magazine for more than twenty years, in formats growing gradually more cryptic and secretive for an audience growing gradually smaller. He'd always kept secrets that had to be kept. He smuggled copies of Hocus to closet fans with mundane jobs. He knew were Thor hid out.
He was even pretty sure he knew where the Oregon Ghost was hiding. What kind of secret was it that Edward Two Bats could be trusted with it and Chuck Umber couldn't?
He stalked down the first-floor hallway of the Fielding Mansion, counting the doors as he went. Crazy Eddie had said to try the third door on the right in the west wing. Ordinarily he rated Crazy Eddies reliability as no better than that of a network newsreader; but so far he was the only person who allowed as how he might have seen Bruce Hyde around the mansion.