He opened the third door and stepped inside. "Bruce?"
A semicircle of femmefans twisted in their chairs to stare at him. They were variously dressed in gossamer robes and chain mail bikinis, a sight in which he might ordinarily have shown more interest. Instead, he looked left and right around the room. He stuck his goatee out. "Is Bruce Hyde here?"
The panel moderator, with her short-cropped hair and 15th century breast-and-back plate armor, looked like Joan of Arc as played by Ingrid Bergman. She shook her head. "You want the Con Suite I think it's on the third floor, south wing. This is a panel on medieval and barbarian costuming. You're welcome to join us, if you want."
"Uh, no, thank you." Chuck apologized for interrupting. He was revising his estimate of Crazy Eddie's reliability.
When he left the room he noticed Fang lounging against the opposite wall of the corridor. Five-eleven, muscular, tough as old leather, Fang was batting a rubber ball tethered to a wooden paddle. He wore a small propeller beanie on his head.
At last, Chuck thought. Someone reliable. "Fang!"
"Hey, Chuck." The ball was a blur of motion. Fang frowned at it in concentration.
"Have you seen anybody on the Con Committee?"
"Saw Crazy Eddie."
Arrgh. "How about Bruce? He's the Chair. He's gotta be around someplace."
"Think I saw him. North wing. Second floor." Fang missed a swat on his paddle and the tether ball Zigzagged crazily. He fumbled with it for a moment, then tucked paddle and ball into the back pocket of his jeans. "Library? Yeah, the library. I'm sure that was him."
"Thanks, Fang. I owe you one." Chuck turned and strode off toward the stairwell. Fang watched him walk out of sight. When Chuck was gone, Fang rapped three times on the door beside him. Crazy Eddie stuck his head out.
Edward Two Bats was a lean, hawk-faced old man, at least part Indian--although from what tribe he had never said. He had been writing science fiction forever, and movie scripts before that. He wore a yellow nylon jacket and a red bandanna tied around one leg just above the knee. His beard was stringy like a Chinese mandarin's.
His voice was gentle. "Where d you send him?"
"Library. North wing."
Crazy Eddie ran his hand across his jaw. He had odd hands. The fingers were bigger at the tips than at the knuckles. "Good," he said. "Good. Who's waiting up there?"
"Rowland Shew."
Eddie gave Fang a sham look. "You didn't tell Shew about this, did you. He isn't very reliable."
Fang shrugged. "He's kept Throop hidden for donkey's years… I didn't tell him anything. Too many in on it already. Shew's helping out because Chuck gave him a bad review once."
Crazy Eddie gazed toward the stairwell. "How long can we keep this going?"
"Not much longer. You know how sharp this crowd is. I feel bad about giving Chuck the runaround. He should be in on it."
Eddie clapped him on the shoulder. "Sure, he should. And Wade Curtis and Dick Wolfson and 3MJ and everyone else, including fen who couldn't make it to the con. It's just until the committee decides what to do. More than three people can't keep a secret for very long."
Fang sighed. "There's ten of us already."
Chuck Umber stepped aside to let the tall, lanky femmefan past. She pushed a wheelchair bearing an even more gaunt-looking fan, a thin young man with a vaguely Swedish look. Chuck wondered briefly if the poor kid had myasthenia gravis, like Waldo in Heinlein's story. Then he looked again at the femme and wondered if they were brother and sister. Who was she?
He searched through the back of his mind. Ah. A computer programmer, hiding out, gafiated years ago, even dropped her subscription to Hocus. He'd remember her name presently.
As he turned to continue his mission, his arm was grasped by Chuck. a thin man with long, wild brown hair.
"Hi, Chuck. I'm Anthony J. Horowitz the Third," the man said. "Remember me? I I've got two books out on the samizdat network. My latest is a volume of critical essays, Vampire Unicorns from Planet Thraxisp. And I have a novel, Living lnside. About the first spaceship to Venus. Would you like to interview me for Hocus? I do wonderful interviews. And I did Trash World. It's the ultimate synthesis between science fiction, cyberpunk, and horror."
The book or the interviews? Chuck shook his head. "Not now, Tony. I don't have time."
Horowitz said, not too forcefully, "Anthony, please. I gave up trying to write as Tony…"
Umber left Horowitz and entered the foyer by the main entrance. The foyer had a floor of Mexican tile and was brightly lit through the tall windows that flanked the front door. A great crystal chandelier hung from the two-story cathedral ceiling. A three-foot model of the space shuttle hung from the chandelier, and below that, an antique tin Buck Rogers spaceship. Chuck smiled when he saw that touch. Sometimes dreams did come true. If you made them.
Three hallways branched off into the three wings of the mansion and a grand staircase curved up to the balcony on the second floor. No question about it, Chuck thought, the Tre-house was a fantastic place.
Without Tremont J. Fielding--3MJ as he was known to all trufans--and his sprawling mansion, Minicon might not have come off at all. A public venue was naturally out of the question; and very few fen owned homes large enough to house even a small con. Chuck marvelled, as he often did, that the Fantasy Fund had ever had enough equity to help buy this place. It didn't hurt that 3MJ had inherited some money. Maybe a lot of money.
The Tre-house often served as a station on the Underground Fanway. It was stuffed with SF and fantasy memorabilia, usually hidden in secret vaults in the sub-basement, but they'd brought out a lot of it for the Con. The walls were hung with paintings: the usual ones of dryads and wood elves and other fantasy scenes, but now many of them sported a second picture hung to cover the First. There were prints of old Astounding covers, suns and starwisp nebulas in wild colors spaceships, men in fishbowl helmets and women in brass brassieres menaced by bugeyed monsters. It was so beautiful Chuck wanted to cry.
Much of the mansions treasure had been reduced to holograms. Without a projector, they were not incriminating. What was on display here were prints; but Chuck knew that Tremont would never have thrown away the originals. He remembered what the place had been like in its glory days, when everything was out, when you couldn't look anywhere without seeing another marvel. Original paintings. Movie posters for long-forgotten B pictures. The little paperweight made from one of George Pal's models for War of the Worlds. The Lensman costume. George Pal's pen.
And once--once Chuck had seen the original typewritten manuscript for Fahrenheit 451. That would be well hidden now! He looked around, but they hadn't put out the movie poster. Too dangerous--but sometime over the weekend they'd certainly show the film. Could that be the big secret? But nobody would cause Chuck to miss that. Chuck was Heinlein's Stranger in a Strange Land! He had two-thirds of the book memorized perfectly, and could recite most of the rest.
In that far corner had been the original Gort robot from The Day the Earth Stood Still. A tyrannosaur model from King Kong was there now. There had been so much. Now--now they did their best, but the walls and alcoves seemed empty and forlorn.
And Thor was coming down the east wing, pushing a wheelchair. Another crippled stranger. What was going on?
Hey, Thor!" Chuck moved to intercept them.