Norman Spinrad - He Walked Among Us

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For

Timothy Leary

and

Gene Roddenberry

"Why, you shall say at break of day:

Sail on! sail on! sail on! and on!"

-COLUMBUS, by Joaquin Miller

1

“Have fun saving the world, Dex,” Ellie said dryly. “Butdo try not to get too beered out."

“Mustyou rain on my parade?” Dexter Lampkin muttered sourly.

“Who amI to deny you a little fannish fun?” said Ellie, her voice softening with a certain gentle

self-mockery. She pecked him on the cheek. “I just don't want you to wrap that damned thing around a

tree, is that asking too much? Peace?"

“Peace,” Dexter grunted and closed the door behind him, feeling like Dagwood having received a

patronizing pat on the head from the Little Lady.

He had been going to these first Wednesday things for, what, close on three years now. A dozen or so

fans of his out-of-print novel, drinking beer, sneaking the occasional joint, calling themselves

“Transformationalists,” and convincing themselves that they were somehow going to save the world in the

process.

Each first Thursday, he swore he would never go to one of these things again. Each first Wednesday, he

went anyway.

Why?

Because a few of these people were real scientists?

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Becausethey believed in Dexter D. Lampkin even thoughhe foundthem ludicrous?

Or because, God help him, some part of him still believed in THE TRANSFORMATION too?

Out in the front yard, the Santa Ana wind rattled the sere skeletal palm fronds, set dusty swirls of dead

leaves dancing, and dried the back reaches of his throat. Your average Angeleno professed a loathing for

the Santa Ana, which ripped shingles from your roof, whipped brush fires up into roaring infernos, and

supposedly brought out the homicidal crazies. But Dexter took a great big honk as he walked across the

yard to the garage.

Dexterloved the Santa Ana.

He loved those negative ions sweeping in off the desert, stoking up the old endorphins, tingling his

dendrites with norepinephrene, boosting the middle-aged biochemical matrix of his consciousness into

hyperdrive.

He loved the way the hot desert wind blew the Los Angeles basin clear of smog, perfumed the air with

bougainvillea and chaparral instead of undead hydrocarbons, the technicolor blue daytime skies and the

nights like this one—crystalline, heated to the temperature of twenty-year-old pussy, redolent with the

musk of the California Dream.

And if the acrid tang of far-off smoke all too often spiced the Santa Ana, well, hey, despite Ellie's

endless urging, Dexter hadn't fallen into the real estate trap, now had he?

As he kept telling her, any writer who sunk his freedom money into a house and a mortgage was a prize

schmuck. And anyone who thought it was a cagey investment to do so in a venue famous for

earthquakes, brushfires, and mud slides, where affordable insurance usually covered everything else but,

deserved what he was sooner or later going to get.

For truth be told, Dexter also loved the Santa Ana just because loving the Devil Wind was somehow a

finger held high in the air to the face of LA.

Not that Dexter hated Los Angeles with the provincial chauvinism of his former Bay Area compatriots,

who believed anything south of the fog-bank they were so cleverly fortunate to have chosen to inhabit

was nothing but Orange County roadside ticky-tacky and braindead airhead yahoos.

Indeed one of the charms of Los Angeles was the very lack of a local equivalent of that smarmy

Northern California boosterism. While the Bay Area brooded endlessly over its supposed rivalry with

La-La Land, people down here were only dimly aware of San Francisco's existence, crappy climate but

great Italian and Chinese restaurants, right, ought to fly up for a three-day weekend sometime, we get a

chance, babes.

The Bay Area took itself far more seriously than anyone else did. LA didn't take itself seriously at all. In

place of chauvinism, what was required of Angelenos wasattitude .

The attitude that expressed itself in hot dog stands in the shape of hot dogs, houses built to resemble the

Disney versions of Baghdad or Camelot, the Chinese and Egyptian theaters, and indeed the Hollywood

Sign itself, an enormous emblem proclaiming the obvious in towering pharonic letters a few molecules

thick.

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On a personal level, one knew one had achieved the proper LA attitude when, what else, one had found

a soulmate of a car.

Dexter flipped up the garage door and smiled a silly boyish hello to his.

When Dexter and Ellie were living in Berkeley, they had had a fairly new Toyota and a late middle-aged

Volvo, and neither could really be said to be his or hers. Down here in Fairfax, however, their two-car

garage contained, in addition to cartons of Dexter's author's copies and moldy manuscripts that surely

would be worth big bucks as collector's items some day, Ellie's two-year-old Pontiac Firebird coupe,

bought new and still under warranty, and Dexter's ancient red Alfa-Romeo convertible.

By any rational automotive standard, the Alfa was an unreliable piece of shit. Its leaky gaskets caused it

to slurp oil at the rate of a pint every thousand miles, the gearbox made ominous noises and the shift lever

now had to be held down in second, and the electrical system had been rewired so many times by

amateurs that even new heavy-duty batteries mysteriously died at the usual inopportune moments.

But Dexter loved the Alfa. Not for its all-too-obvious flaws, but because it was indeed an authentic red

Italian sports car that whipped around the curves as if on rails, snapped your head back in a satisfying

manner when you came out of one and stood on it in second, and in general was a hoot to drive back

and forth to the mechanic, which was often.

Was it juvenile for a forty-three-year-old professional writer with an expanded middle and a wife and

kid to support to chunk out north of three thousand bucks a year in insurance, repair bills, oil, and

expensive imported Italian parts to maintain this decrepit automotive wet-dream?

Ellie was certainly of that opinion.

“It's pathetic, Dex, it's your mid-life crisis on wheels, when are you gonna dump the thing and get a

reliable second car?"

“The upkeep on the Alfa's less than the monthlies on another new car,” Dexter would point out logically.

“I saw a decent four-year-old Celica (or Civic or Plymouth or whatever) going for thirty-five hundred,”

she would say, “and you could probably talk it down to an even three thousand in cash. You piss away

half of that every year in repair bills and oil."

At which point, Dexter would give her the ghost of the very leer that had lured her once tasty young bod

to him across a crowded room a decade ago, the glamorous cocksman's leer of the thirty-one-year-old

Dexter D. Lampkin, of a risen young star along the science fiction convention circuit.

“Cheaper than a mistress in a tight dress of the same color,” he would say.

It was an old joke that had long since ceased to be funny, and an old threat that had long since ceased to

have bite.

Ellie knew that he would cop one of the readily available quick ones at a science fiction convention from

time to time when she wasn't around to stop him, but she also knew that he was not likely to screw

anyone at such scenes that he would care to contemplate in the morning, and he knew that she didn't

really care as long as he respected her need not to know.

Both of them knew all too well what on between writers and fans at these conventions. Both of them

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knew what it was to be the belle and the beau of such a masquerade ball. Which is what they had been

when they met at that publisher's party at the Seattle Westercon.

Dexter D. Lampkin had won the Hugo for best science fiction novel the year before, a silvery rocketship

admittedly awarded by the fans who staged these conventions rather than his literary peers, but an

appropriately phallic trophy for someone not entirely above using it to add to his reputation as a

convention cocksman.

This was more a matter of getting stoned and/or plastered enough quickly enough to lose one's sense of

sexual esthetics than honing one's jejune skills as a seducer. Any published writer who bathed monthly

and weighed less than three hundred pounds, and some who didn't, could get laid at these things. The

question was, bywhat ?

Why did science fiction fans of both sexes tend to be so overweight? Why did they tend to be

pear-shaped and look strange about the eyes? Why did masses of them crammed into convention hotel

room parties exude such clouds of anti-sexual pheromones?

The story that Norman Spinrad told Dexter at some con or other had the awful ring of scientific truth.

“My girlfriend, Terry Champagne, had a theory which she took quite seriously that allegiance to science

fiction fandom is genotypically linked to a minimal distance between the eyes, narrow shoulders, and an

enormous ass. One time, we were going to a convention in some horrible fleabag on Herald Square in

New York, crowds of people going into the subway, Macy's, Gimbel's, movie houses, your bell-shaped

general population curve on the random hoof. As a scientific experiment, we stood across the street from

the con hotel trying to predict who would go inside. Terry scored better than seventy-five percent."

Ellen Douglas, however, would have gone undetected as a science fiction fan by the genetic criteria of

Spinrad's former girlfriend.

True, Dexter had known of her by reputation before he ever set eyes on her, for Ellen was what was

known in the science fiction world as a Big Name Fan, what in the rock biz would have been called a

Super Groupie; someone, in other words, who was famous for being famous.

In the world of science fiction fandom, however, one did not generally achieve such status by screwing

stars like Dexter D. Lampkin. One got to screw the stars, such as they were, by achieving the status of

Big Name Fan. This might be accomplished by serving on the committees that put on the conventions,

publishing an amateur fan magazine or writing for such fanzines, entering work in convention artshows,

making a big splash in masquerade costumes, starring on “fan panels” at cons, or any combination

thereof.

By reputation, Dexter knew Ellen Douglas as a con organizer, fannish panel personality, and fanzine

gossip columnist. She was also reputed to be a great beauty who knocked ‘em dead at masquerades in

famous minimalist costumes, but, fannish standards of pulchritude being what they were, Dexter had given

this a heavy discount for hyperbole until that moment when their eyes met for the first time across that sea

of flabby flesh in Seattle.

All right, so this lady might not be quite movie starlet material, but oh yes, she had it, particularly in the

usual convention context, and oh boy, did she flaunt it!

Natural blond hair permed at the time into this incredible afro, regular features, big green eyes the

regulation distance apart, and this wonderful ripe body artfully barely-contained in a tight low cut thigh slit

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black dress, the whole effect something like that of azaftig surfer-girl Vampira.

It had been a magic moment, and a hot night, and a wild weekend, and a kind of frantic slow motion

cross-country romance, as Dexter and Ellen fucked their way from convention to convention for about

six months, before she finally gave up her place in St. Louis and moved into Dexter's little apartment in

San Francisco, and soon thereafter into the house in Berkeley.

For two or three years they were the Golden Couple of the Greater Bay Area Co-Prosperity Sphere,

the circle of science fiction writers, their significant others, their significant other's significant others, and

the surrounding cloud of fans, hangers-on, fringe scientists, and Big Name Dope Dealers to same who

formed what was the largest science fiction community in the United States.

Those were the days to be young, and in love, and a science fiction writer in Berkeley, and Dexter D.

Lampkin!

The science fiction genre had completed the transformation from lowly pulp publishing backwater, where

for a quarter of a century 5 cents a word for short fiction and $3000 for a novel had been considered hot

stuff, into what was soon to be known as a “major publishing industry profit center.” Meaning that a hot

young talent like Dexter D. Lampkin could command thirty or forty thou for a novel.

Those were the days, my friend! Dexter could take six months or even ayear to write a novel. He could

afford literary commitment and social idealism and enjoy a life of relative bourgeois ease at the same time.

He could even believe he could change the world.

A lot of science fiction writers did, and, for better or worse, some of them demonstrably had. Arthur C.

Clarke had inspired the geosynchronous broadcast satellite, the Apollo astronauts credited science fiction

with putting them on the path to the Moon, DUNE and STRANGER IN A STRANGE LAND had

created the hippies and the Counterculture, and L. Ron Hubbard had turned an idea for an sf novelette

into a multimillion dollar real-world religious scam.

Dexter had even read a piece by some French intellectual who had opined that science fiction writers

should get together, decide the optimal future for the species, and, by setting all their stories in that future,

call it into being thereby.

Given the difficulty any three science fiction writers had agreeing on how many letters made up a word at

5 cents per or whether to send out for Chinese or Italian, this kind of collaborative messianism did not

seem entirely practical....

However....

Dexter wrestled down the top, looked under the car to see whether the size of the oil puddle demanded

a look at the dipstick, decided it didn't, put the key in the ignition, and heaved the usual sigh of relief,

when, after the usual catch and hesitation, the starter managed to turn the engine over.

However....

The science fiction community did already accept certain truths as self-evident that had yet to penetrate

the obdurate brain-pans of the so-called “mundanes,” aka the rest of the species.

First and foremost was that the Earth was merely the cradle of a future space-going humanity, and the

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obvious anti-anthropocentric corollary, to wit that in a galaxy containing hundreds of millions of stars

similar to our own, it would be ridiculously arrogant to assume that our evolution was unique.

And given the ordinary nature and average age of our star, the age of ourspecies should lie somewhere

towards the mean of the galactic bell-shaped curve, meaning that advanced space-going civilizations who

had achieved mastery of matter and energy and long-term stability should abound.

No less an intellect than Enrico Fermi had asked the obvious question: If so,where are they ? Why

haven't we detected them? Why haven't they visited us or at least sent a cosmic postcard?

Unless you believed in flying saucers and the maunderings of Erik von Danniken, the answer was a good

deal less than reassuring.

Namely that the natural tendency of sapient species was to do themselves in before evolving to the

long-term stable stage.

After all, it was hard to imagine that any species could develop space travel without unlocking the

Faustian fires of the atom. It was hardly guaranteed that any species would develop clean sources of

power like fusion or space-born solar power before the necessary precursor technologies like fossil fuels

and nuclear fission poisoned the biosphere. And these were only the most obvious means by which our

own species seemed likely to expire. Different fatal strokes for other asshole folks did not seem beyond

the realm of possibility.

It came to Dexter one night during a long stoned bull session with several science fiction writers and one

famous scientist that perhaps it was hubris also of a twisted sort to imagine that the human race lay

anywhere but close to the mean when it came to the bell-shaped curve of galactic assholery.

It seemed logical to assume that we were onlyaverage dickheads, that the present crisis we had

entered, say about the time of Hiroshima, was something thatall sapient species must pass through, the

historical moment, as Dexter put it, when the lunatics take over the asylum.

Sooner or later any species that developed an evolving technology was going to get its hot little

pseudopods on the power of the atom, long before which its activities would have begun doing

unpredictable things to the biosphere, soon after which if not before it was going to crack the biologic

code and start playing with designer genes, all of which was likely to occur long before it had the

technology to escape the consequences by colonizing other planets.

Or, if the foibles of the human race exhibited only average shitheadedness, before it evolved the

necessary wisdom to transform itself into a civilization capable of surviving even another few centuries of

its own history.

Scary stuff.

The human race was going throughits transformation crisisright now , and judging by the lack of good

news from outer space, the chances of negotiating it successfully seemed something like slim and none.

On the other hand, Dexter's New York agent had little trouble getting him a $40,000 contract for a

science fiction novel based on the 30 page outline he batted out around this material on a hot weekend

with the aid of some excellent weed.

Dexter put the Alfa in gear, pulled out of the garage, scraped something on the belly-pan he didn't care

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to think about as he turned out of the driveway and north on Curson, and headed towards his rendezvous

with the rather pathetic latter-day fans of that very visionary novel, a novel which his agentstill hadn't

been able to get back in print.

“Transformationalists,” they called themselves. Their bible, Dexter D. Lampkin's exercise in science

fictional messianism, the book with which he really thought at the time he was going to change the world,

was called THE TRANSFORMATION.

A NASA deep space antenna picks up a message from an extraterrestrial civilization in the form of a

funeral oration by a species not much in advance of ourselves which has destroyed the viability of its

planet via atomic war, atmospheric degradation, and finally a horrific plague caused by an unfortunate

experiment in genetic engineering.

Worse still, these aliens have received similar messages from severalother intelligent species who have

also done themselves in by similar assholery. This appears to be the galactic norm. If there are any

intelligent species out there who have successfully passed through their transformation crises, they don't

seem to have any interest in foreign aid to Third World planets.

The government tries to sit on it, since it is evident that the measures necessary to avert catastrophe

would require enormous funding and a consequent politically-impossible massive tax increase on the one

hand, and the cessation of economic activities amounting to something like a third of GNP on the other.

But a few scientists in the know are horrified, and a secret conspiracy of “Transformationalists” gradually

comes together.

Whathas to be done to transform the human race into a successful long-lived space-going species is not

so difficult for this international network of major scientific talents to figure out. Big bucks have to be

poured into fusion, space-born solar energy, the colonization of the solar system, artificial photosynthesis.

The burning of fossil fuels and the use of dirty fission reactors must be halted come what the economic

consequences may, massive tracts of farmland must be reforested, and, oh yes, complete nuclear

disarmament will probably be required too.

Right. Sure. Andhow are they supposed to cram all this down the species’ throat?

After a few suitable plot twists and turns, they hit upon the idea of creating an alien from outer space, a

visitor from a far distant civilization that has survived its own transformation crisis, to serve as their

mouthpiece.

Their psychosocial studies show that a Goddess from space will be more acceptable than a God, so

they recruit a 16 year-old orphan hippie-dip runaway and go to work. They profile the perfect

transnational wet-dream fantasy and surgery and genetic tinkering transform her into the most stunning

woman the world has ever seen, with apple-green skin and purple hair.

With drugs and various sci-fi gizmos, they raise her intelligence to super-genius level, program her with

the millennial history and scientific knowledge of this imaginary advanced civilization she's supposed to be

from, and with more drugs and sophisticated hypnotic techniques erase all memories of her previous

incarnation so thatshe is convinced she is Lura, ambassador from the Galactic Brotherhood of Advanced

Civilizations, dispatched over vast distances at great expense to save the Earth.

With the various special effects at their command, the Transformationalists sell Lura as the savior from

space and begin to effect the great Transformation through her, presenting their visionary program as the

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tried and true path of all those civilizations who have succeeded in passing through their Transformation

Crises.

Many plot twists later, the civilization of the Earth is indeed transformed, the final McGuffin being the

capture of Lura by a mob of the dispossessed, and her impending martyrdom.

Some of the Transformationalists try to tell the world the truth to save her. But since Lura herself, even

unto death, contradicts them, sincerely believing that she is a noble being from an advanced civilization,

they fail, she is martyred, and the Transformationalists have no pragmatic choice but to turn her into the

legend that successfully puts the seal on the great Transformation.

In the epilogue, an immense spaceship then manifests itself in the solar system to welcome humanity into

areal Galactic Brotherhood of Advanced Civilizations. Earth has negotiated its Transformation Crisis on

its own. That's the entrance test. That's why the galactic silence. The Galactic Brotherhood has no

interest in communicating with species who have not yet proven themselves worthy.

Dexter poured his heart and soul into this one.

It ended up taking over his life completely, became an obsession, a mission, a cause.

Before he even felt ready to begin, he felt he had to travel the convention circuit, pouring booze and

dope into scientists of his acquaintance and scientists oftheir acquaintance; flattering them, intriguing

them, conning them into serving as his brain trust, creating something not unlike the Transformationalist

cabal in his unwritten novel, at least in his own mind at the time.

By the time Dexter was ready to write page one, six months had passed in a blur since he had signed the

contract, he had gone through about $5000 in travel and entertainment, and he had a dossier of

speculative papers from cutting-edge scientists about 2000 pages thick.

The contract called for Dexter to turn in the manuscript in twelve months. He was eight months late. The

contract called for about 100,000 words, but Dexter turned in 250,000, and after three months of cutting

under editorial supervision, the final version still came in at 220,000. It took harder work over more

months to write than anything Dexter had ever done, and by the time he saw the galley proofs, the

$40,000 was long gone.

But such mundane economic trivia didn't matter. Dexter knew that THE TRANSFORMATION was his

masterpiece, his destiny, the work for which his name would be remembered for a thousand years, the

mission he had been born to fulfill.

It came out six months later, and it bombed.

Well, not exactly. Itdid sell 4500 hardcovers and the paperback reprintdid do 47,000 paperbacks

before it went out of print, not horrendous for a science fiction novel, but of course, not figures that were

going to change the world or earn out a $40,000 advance.

“Too intellectual for the kids who they're marketing sci-fi to these days, Dex,” his agent told him. “What

they want is space opera series, or likewise in wizards and dragons,Star Trek andStar Wars

novelizations, role playing tie-ins, and novels based on the laundry lists of Isaac Asimov and Arthur C.

Clarke.”

Broke, devastated, with Ellie now pregnant with Jamie, Dexter spent ten days smoking dope, listening to

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his wife whine, and staring into the black hole his life had suddenly become.

His agent had timed it perfectly. On the eleventh day, he called and dropped the other shoe.

“Hey, it's not like your career's over, Dex. You've got an established rep as a sci-fi writer with the

proven ability to turn in 100,000 words of solid stuff a year. I've been sniffing around. You get me a

strong outline for a trilogy, preferably fantasy, and I'm sure I can get you a contract for $30,000 a book,

maybe even more if there's game potential in it.”

“Fuck you!” Dexter snarled and hung up on him.

“Fuckyou , Dexter D. Lampkin!” was Ellie's take on it when he conveyed the gist of the conversation.

“What are we going to live on, your Polish serial rights?"

She kept hammering at him. Bills began to pile up. His American Express card got pulled. Dying inside,

Dexter was about to surrender his soul to the inevitable when he ran into Harlan Ellison at a convention in

Phoenix.

Ellison, a Los Angeles scenarist and short story writer who had flourished on a high economic level for

decades, set him straight in no uncertain terms.

“Are younuts , Lampkin, guy with your talent doesn't need that shit, you got to ream out crap to stay

alive, don't piss on the work that really matters to you to do it, and don't sell yourself short. Instead of

writing three hundred pages of sci-fi bullshit and ruining your reputation for $30,000 a pop, come down

to Hollywood and bang out 48 page TV scripts for $15,000 minimum. Buy yourself time to do your real

work and keep it separate from what you do to make the rent."

The Santa Ana ruffled Dexter's hair as he crossed Sunset and drove Laurel Canyon Boulevard up

through the hills. The night was warm, the canyon was heady with vegetal perfume, he kept the tach over

3000 as he whipped through the curves, just to feel those gees, just to hear the double-overhead-cam

engine growl, whoo-ee!

So it hadn't exactly worked out as smoothly as the picture Harlan had painted—prime time TV script

gigs were few and far between—but considering the alternatives, Dexter figured he was doing all right.

The Saturday morning cartoon shows were hot for a medium name sf writer like himself accustomed to

writing novellas in the time it took the usual derelicts to write a 30 page script, and while the money was

pretty shitty, it was usually there when needed. There was a certain amount of magazine work, futurology

bullshit he could write in his sleep. Dexter even found that he had a knack for writing album cover blurb,

ad copy, whatever, even gags for third rate comics.

Ellison's advice had rescued Dexter from hackdom. He made enough money via the Scam of the Week

to be able to spend half his time writing his real stuff, without being blocked by the thought that the novels

into which he poured his heart and soul probably wouldn't earn out their mediocre advances.

He was older and wiser enough to know now that most science fiction writers had a book like THE

TRANSFORMATION in them, the visionary masterpiece that would express the full brilliance of their

genius and enlighten the world. He was older and wiser enough to know that most of them were going to

bomb, that those who survived were those who licked their wounds and went on.

He was middle-aged enough these days too to know that the Alfa was an extended hardware metaphor

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for the state of his own life like unto having Sigmund Freud chuckling in his beard—the forty-three year

old one-time visionary with the expanded waistline zipping up over Mulholland towards his boys’ night

out with the ghosts of his youth in his equally superannuated red Italian dick on wheels.

But as he crossed Mulholland, though, destiny sent him a sign.

Up from the Valley side came another old red Alfa of approximately the same vintage. The top was also

down, and in the car was your prototypical California beauty, long honey-blond hair blowin’ in the wind,

could have been all of twenty-five.

She honked her horn.

Dexter honked back.

Her smile was radiant.

Dexter waved, and then she was gone.

But not before he remembered that it was old stogie-chomping Siggy himself, who, when tweaked by

some smartass as to the obvious symbolic nature of the cylindrical object perpetually stuck in his yawp,

had proclaimed: “On the other hand, sometimes a cigar is a cigar."

* * * *

“Kapplemeyer's?” said the Bimbo. “Not evenGrossinger's ? For the tenth time, Jimmy, what the hell are

we doing in theCatskills in November?"

“Scouting talent, kid,” Texas Jimmy Balaban told her, as he turned the rented Buick off the highway at

the splintery old wooden sign and up the drive that might have been last paved when George Burns was

still playing straightman to Gracie.

“Here?” said the Bimbo, whose name was Sabrina.

“Matter of instinct, babes,” Texas Jimmy muttered, successfully swerving the car around one of the more

major potholes. “The nose knows."

What was he supposed to tell her, that since Kapplemeyer's Country Club Resort Hotel was the kind of

dump that Texas Jimmy Balaban ordinarily wouldn't be caught dead in, he had reason to hope that

Marsha's soft-boiled divorce dick wouldn't think to look for the live item here either?

You're getting too old for this shit, Jimmy, he told himself as he pulled up in front of the hotel.

Yeah, sure, that's what he had been telling himself at moments like these for about twenty-five years.

You're getting to old to get married again, you're getting too old to get cleaned out again in the divorce

courts, you're getting too old to chase young pussy, you're getting too old to dodge house dicks and

keyhole peepers. Right. Learned my lesson. Never again.

Indeed, Texas Jimmy had had no intention at all, well hardly any, of chasing after any nookie on this trip

to New York. He reallyhad come to the Apple on business, not looking for new talent, maybe, but to

secure some bookings for a couple comics he already had under contract. All he had done was hang

around the hotel bar for a few drinks, he hadn't been looking for any action, not really.

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Norman Spinrad - He Walked Among Us

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