I felt like doing a little baying myself just then. Damned if I didn’t.
SEVEN
The convention was already in full swing when I got back to the hotel at ten the next morning. One of the wide central corridors off the reception lobby was crowded with people and lined with tables of various sizes, some of them draped in cloths that read Registration and Banquet Tickets and Seating and Tours of Sam Spade’s San Francisco. The people were of various sizes, too, and various ages that seemed to start at about fifteen and extend up to semiold duffers like me. Almost everybody was dressed casually-one young guy in a Shadow cape and slouch hat, no less, and one chubby girl in a short skirt and one of those metal brassieres you used to see on the covers of science fiction pulps. As soon as I quit gawking at the girl, I began to feel overdressed in my suit and tie. But then I spotted Bert Praxas talking to a couple of eager-looking kids, and he was also wearing a suit and tie and looked every bit as stuffy as I probably did.
I didn’t see anybody else I knew in the crowd, 78 *
so I went over to where Praxas was. He saw me, raised a hand in a “just a second” gesture, and finished telling an anecdote about having to make a last-minute change in one of his Spectre novels because of an unintentional double entendre. Then he excused himself from the kids and joined me.
Another teenager trotted by just then, this one wearing a Viking helmet and what looked like a motheaten bearskin, and waving a sword made out of wood and tinfoil. I followed him with my eyes, trying to figure out who or what he was supposed to be.
Praxas said, “Conan the Barbarian.” He was smiling.
“Pardon?”
“The Robert E. Howard character from Weird Tales. That’s who the boy is dressed up as.” His smile widened. “This has to be your first convention. You’ve got the usual nonplussed look.”
“Are there always kids who wear costumes like that?”
“Oh yes. If you think you’re seeing strange sights here, though, you should go to a science fiction con. It’s an experience.”
“I’ll bet it is. Why do they do it?”
“Self-expression,” he said. “A lot of them are lonely, social misfits in one way or another; they crave companionship and attention, and it’s only natural that they gravitate to others with similar interests. But you won’t see many of them here.
This is more a convention for dealers, collectors, and serious pulp fans.”
“Like me, huh?”
“Like you. The huckster room is open, by the way. If you plan to do any buying for your collection, you should go in as soon as possible. The turnover will likely be fast and furious.”
“Thanks. I’ll do that.”
But the first place I went when I left him was to the house phones, to call Dancer’s room. There was no answer. I went to the hotel bar next, but it wasn’t open for business yet. He still hadn’t joined the convention crowd, either, nor had anyone else I knew. Which gave me a good excuse to take Praxas’s advice and visit the huckster room.
The woman sitting at the registration table told me it was nearby on the main floor, just turn right at the end of this corridor. So I did that, and it turned out to be a big rectangular room with wide-open entrance doors and a couple of guys checking name tags. A three-foot-square sign to one side said, Convention Members Only-Shoplifters Will Be Prosecuted. It took me thirty seconds to remember what I’d done with the name tag Underwood had given me last night, and then to consider myself lucky I hadn’t changed suits this morning. When I got inside I was confronted with sales tables lining the walls and arranged in a middle square as well, so that pulp magazines-and some hardcover and paperback books-would loom on both sides of you all the way around. The room was almost as crowded as the registration area, but most of the people seemed to be upwards of twenty-five and to have a much more serious mien as they wandered around or bent over the stacks and boxes and trays of plastic-bagged pulps.
The whole place made me feel like a proverbial kid in a candy store. This was something I understood; this was my kind of world. I could feel myself grinning, no doubt in a fatuous way, as I started to do some browsing of my own.
It didn’t take long for the browsing to turn into a shopping trip. I found several issues of Detective Tales, Double Detective, Private Detective, and Detective Fiction Weekly that I didn’t have, plus a coverless Black Mask from 1931 with stories by Horace McCoy and Frederick Nebel. At the end of half an hour I was fourteen pulps richer and fifty-two dollars poorer.
Then I stopped to admire the display of a Southern California dealer-three 1920s Black Masks with Hammett stories, priced at $125 each, the first issue of Wu Fang at $650, the first issue of the rare hero pulp The Octopus at $800-and to wonder about the incredible inflationary rate of magazines that had sold new forty to fifty years ago for a nickel and a dime. Somebody caught hold of my arm while I was doing that, and when I turned I saw Lloyd Underwood standing there, showing me his stained dentures.
“Finding a lot of your wants, I see,” he said.
“Good. I picked up a ‘35 Shadow myself a little while ago, got it in trade for an Operator Five and a Spider. What do you think of it so far?”
I spent a couple of seconds sorting that out. “The huckster room?” I said finally. “I think it’s fine-”
“No, I meant the con. Of course we haven’t really gotten under way yet. First panel is at one. Have you seen the auction books yet?”
“Auction books?”
“The pulps we’re auctioning on Sunday,” he said. “To help pay for the con. Some very rare items. Our prize is the first issue of Weird Tales- March 23, 1923. You don’t own that one, do you? Not many people do. A beautiful copy.”
“Sounds expensive.”
“Opening bid is twenty-five hundred, but we expect to get three thousand at least.”
Three thousand dollars for a pulp, I thought. Suppose I had plenty of money-would I spend that much on just one magazine? Well, maybe. But then, what the hell would I do with it? I’d be afraid to open it, much less read it, and what good was having a pulp or any other reading material if you couldn’t enjoy what was in it?
“Come on,” Underwood said, “I’ll show you the display. Do you know many local collectors and dealers?”
“Not too many, no. I buy mostly through the mail…”
I didn’t finish what I had intended to say be cause he had hold of my arm and was maneuvering me through the jumble of people. The auction pulps turned out to be every bit as impressive as I’d expected; in addition to the first issue of Weird Tales, there were the first five of Doc Savage, the first G-8 and His Battle Aces, and several 1930s Spicy Mystery and Spicy Detective whose stories used to turn on the kids of my generation with descriptions of nubile breasts, alabaster thighs, and lush hips, and with lots of innuendo and three-dot chapter endings. From there Underwood steered me around to meet a bunch of local people, including the head of the San Francisco Academy of Comic Art and the owner of the San Francisco Mystery Bookstore-so many names and faces that they all blended together and flowed right out of my head. One that stayed with me was a big Italian guy who had a name similar to mine. He also had a large collection of pulps, he said, and claimed to be a writer of mystery and detective fiction. Maybe he was, but I had never heard of him.
I’d been in there for an hour by then, and Underwood’s antic monologues were beginning to wear on me. Besides which, I was tired of jostling and being jostled and of shaking hands while I tried not to drop or damage the pulps I had bought. It was time I went looking for Dancer and for Kerry. Particularly Kerry.