"Make sure your hands are clean," Woodard warned.
Sarah Ashley heaved a sigh of relief. Her blond hair was still immaculately coiffed and her gray suit was perfect, but there were lines of strain around her eyes, and her face was drawn. The interviews were over now, the exhibits had been removed, and only she and Ruben Mistral were left in the conference room with the empty pickle jar, which now looked very ordinary and unimpressive.
She set down the assortment of papers on the desk in front of Ruben Mistral and began to wipe her soiled fingers with a moist tissue. "Well, you old rogue," she said, smiling at her most audacious client. "You've done it!"
Mistral's eyes widened in mock innocence. "I don't know why you doubt me, Sarah. Isn't it everything I said it was?" He patted the humble pickle jar as if it had just won the Derby.
"Miraculously, yes," she said dryly. "I suppose the handwriting will have to be analyzed, and perhaps the paper tested to certify age. Depending on how picky the purchaser is about authentication. But I shouldn't think there will be any problems whatsoever in going ahead with the auction tomorrow. You really did produce the lost works of the genre. Thank God. I had visions of looking foolish in front of thirty million people."
"The time capsule is absolutely genuine, Sarah. The sleight of hand was in the hype," said Mistral with a feral smile. "I took what is perhaps a mediocre collection of juvenilia and parlayed it into the Dead Sea Scrolls of Science Fiction."
"Yes, I heard that. Nice catch phrase."
"It should be. I paid an ad agency five grand to come up with it." His manner grew conspiratorial. "Incidentally, while we're being candid, there is one little matter I need to discuss with you, Sarah. We had an unexpected visitor turn up last night, and now he's dead."
She listened expressionlessly while Mistral explained the reappearance of Pat Malone and his sudden death some twelve hours later. When he had finished his recital, Sarah Ashley's eyes narrowed. "I do dislike coincidences. It was natural causes, of course?"
Mistral shrugged. "What else? I didn't talk to the police, of course, but nobody has said anything, so I thought it best not to mention the incident to the press."
"Very prudent. Perhaps tomorrow you might tell the story to the winning bidder, in case he wants to use it in publicizing the anthology. By then the news stories we need will have been filed with their respective publications, don't you think?"
Mistral nodded happily. "That's all right, then. I guess it's all over but the photocopying."
"And the bidding. But you must let me worry about that."
Locked in the attic of Ruben Mistral's consciousness, Bunzie pounded and pleaded to be let out, but his chances of having any say-so in the proceedings was nil. He might mourn his old friend in private, and even wonder about the circumstances of his death, but this was business, in which he was never permitted to interfere.
Marion knew that her appearance in the manager's office wasn't going to brighten his day any. The long-suffering hotel official had already endured a peculiar, media-infested science fiction get-together, the murder of one of the guests, and the arrival of police on the scene to disrupt the normal routine and intimidate the other patrons of the lodge. All he needed now was a self-appointed amateur sleuth wasting his time with ingenuous questions. Marion hoped she didn't look too much like a scatterbrained crank.
She phrased her request to the desk clerk with what she hoped was polite authority, and after a few stammered objections and a five-minute wait, the clerk led her back to the office of Coy A. Trivett, manager of the Mountaineer Lodge. It was a small, sparsely furnished room, decorated with framed photographs of mountain scenes and a hardware-store calendar from Elizabeth-ton. The carpeting matched that in the lobby, and the worn chintz loveseat had been salvaged from the lobby seating area during last spring's renovations. Trivett himself, a blond man in his thirties, looked like a high school athlete who was thinking of running to fat. At the moment he wore the tentative smile of one who has resolved to be civil despite all temptations to the contrary.
"Is everything all right?" he asked in the anxious tones of one who knows better.
Marion introduced herself, placing a slight stress on the honorific "doctor" with which she prefaced her name. She found that use of her title helped to prevent people from mistaking her for an idiot. "It was I who found the body," she explained. "And I just wanted to see how the investigation was going. In case the police want to talk to me," she added in an inspired afterthought.
"I believe they will," Trivett told her. She noticed a lingering trace of a local accent in his carefully precise speech. "I had a call from them a little while ago, and they asked whether your group would be staying on through tomorrow. They said they'd be over in the morning to talk to you people."
Marion's eyes widened. "Do they suspect foul play?"
"They didn't say exactly. But they took the fellow's medicine along with them for testing. Were you a friend of his?"
"I had just met him," said Marion. "But he was rather famous. I guess most people in science fiction have heard of Pat Malone."
The hotel manager blinked in surprise. "Who?"
"I suppose he wasn't exactly a celebrity outside the genre, but, believe me, in science fiction, Pat Malone was a name to conjure with."
"Ma'am, who are you talking about?"
"Pat Malone. The gentleman who died here last night."
Trivett frowned in confusion. "Was that his stage name or something?"
"No. Why?"
"Because the dead man was a Mr. Richard Spivey. At least according to his driver's license. I don't know anything about a Pat Malone."
On the editors' bus, en route to the Johnson City Holiday Inn, Enzio O'Malley was complaining loudly to all and sundry. "Some of this stuff is handwritten!" he wailed. "I haven't had to read handwriting since I edited the college poetry magazine!"
"Be thankful it's legible," said Lily Warren. "I was afraid they'd find a time capsule filled with muddy water-that is, if they found anything at all."
"This is going to take me hours to read."
"Fortune cookies take him hours to read," muttered the Del Rey editor sotto voce.
"Has anybody looked at any of this stuff?" asked Lily. "I wondered if some of these stories are early drafts of pieces they rewrote and published later. I'd hate to pay six figures for a draft of Starwind Rising."
"This story by Dale Dugger is pretty good," said a short dark girl who couldn't have been more than twenty-three. She had recently been transferred from the romance division to science fiction, and she was still unfamiliar with her new territory. "Has he got a back list?"
After a few moments of stifled laughter from her rival editors, Lily Warren said gently, "No, Debbie. Dale Dugger died of alcohol-related disorders in Nashville. He isn't significant."
Enzio O'Malley scowled. "Well, at least we can assume that he wasn't a temperamental old bastard like the famous ones."
"I thought Mr. Conyers was very nice," said Debbie.
Lily Warren sighed. "He's just a lawyer. The famous ones are Surn, Mistral, Phillips, Deddingfield, and possibly Erik Giles, who wrote the C. A. Stormcock book."
"He thinks he's famous," said O'Malley. "I asked him to autograph my photocopy of his time-capsule short story, and he refused point blank."
Lily Warren laughed. "I always suspected you of being a closet fan, O'Malley."
"Are all the authors represented in the manuscript?" someone else asked.
Lily flipped through the pages of faint typescript and badly photocopied holograph manuscripts. "I don't see Deddingfield," she said. "Everyone else is there."