"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.

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.