AND THE GOOD DAYS WANE

by Bob Tucker

The North American invasion started running out of steam, time and money. By train, plane and car the stragglers returned to Sydney and the Kingsgate Hotel for a last time, having spent the last ten days or two weeks wandering the continent. Several had flown to Hobart. Tasmania, to see bibliographer Don Tuck; others visited the inland places of Alice Springs and Ayres Rock; while still others scattered to Adelaide. Canberra, and Brisbane. Tuesday, August 26th was the beginning of the end. Jack Chalker returned his rental car and discovered the agency crooks had raised the rates on him during his absence. Some fans bought boomerangs and opals and made elaborate plans to smuggle them past Customs; others investigated booze prices in duty-free shops while contemplating the long voyage home. A last farewell party was held in Robin Johnson's suite, attended by most of the visitors and dozens of Australians who lived nearby. Radio reporter Jan Sharpe put in another appearance (with the ever-present fifty-pound recorder slung over a shoulder) and taped more interviews. Lynn Hickman went to bed early, sober.

They went with us to the airport: Shayne McCormack, Eric Lindsay, Keith Curtis, Robin Johnson, and Marea Ozanne, all wearing expressions similar to ours -- or perhaps they were being polite, and were secretly glad the invasion was at last repelled. Shayne gave each of us a yellow daffodil and we climbed aboard the DC-10 like florists returning from a daffodil convention. There was a long delay before take-off, while the Aussies stood at a terminal window and fidgeted (two of them were ready to buy tickets and join us on board.) At first a stewardess couldn't close a cabin hatch; next someone in the cockpit announced a vital piece of equipment wasn't functioning. My carefully suppressed alarm began rising. and I had an urge to help the woman with her balky hatch. Half an hour later things seemed to be fixed and away we flow into the sunset -- with orange juice and a lecture on behavior when crashing at sea.

Auckland was still in the icy grip of winter.

New Zealand's North Island was anti-climactic. The island and the people and the weather couldn't help it, but they were no match for the good times and the measurably better weather left behind in Australia. It was colder and wetter In New Zealand and it seemed to rain all the time we were there. I came down with a head cold and a wretched sore throat, causing me to miss some of the activities, and had it not been for Dr. Birkhead and her ever-ready bottle of miracle cures I might have been tempted to go jump in the ocean and put an end to the miseries.

We played the tourists; buses took us everywhere to see everything the short timespan would allow: the city and suburbs of Auckland, the extinct volcano atop One Tree Hill (the hill was the volcano, and we sacrificed the only virgin in our party to insure our safety in the city,) and to a museum filled with Maori artifacts. Unlike the habit practised in Australian cities, I did very little walking -- the exploratory mood had vanished. It was more rewarding one night to stand at the hotel room window (we were on the waterfront) and watch the ocean-going freighters tie up just across the street. I speculated on what the clerk might do -- and I might do -- should the tugs miscalculate the distance and permit one of those ships to plow across the street and into my hotel? My window would probably fall out again.

Friday morning everyone (well, almost everyone) boarded two buses for the trip down-country to Rotorua, the land of the Maori, steaming geysers, boiling mud pools, and fish hatcheries where one could watch a thousand trout copulating at once. (I thought I had seen everything.) The buses were delayed for a time while the forgetful were sent back inside to cheek out and relinquish room keys, (fans are not slans) and then we were away in the rain. One fan was left behind, a star-begotten lad who simply hadn't paid attention when Don Lundry announced departure times. The lad may be there ret, wandering the docks searching for the science fiction buses. Rotorua was cold, windy. and rainy. The rains had caused flooding in the interior, preventing us from visiting the glow-worm caverns which Boyd Raeburn had recommended to me. but another attraction was substituted: a twinkly-eyed farmer-type got up on the stage and sheared a sheep in three minutes flat. Or maybe it was five minutes. Well, sir, that made my day. and I went to bed to dream of busy trout, naked sheep, and boily bubbly mud pools.

Back at Auckland airport Saturday night. our party was split in two. Twenty-some fans flew back to the States that night, after a last-minute scramble for standby seats, and the remaining forty were put up at the posh Logan Park Hotel for the night (at the airline's expense) because Air New Zealand had goofed by not reserving sixty seats on the same plane. I didn't mind. I stayed over an extra day in beautiful. rainy, cold New Zealand and whiled away the time by eating tea and crumpets (free) in the hotel suite (free) and watching a 1915-vintage Charlle Chaplin feature film on the TV (free). The last of us flew out Sunday night, with orange juice and a demonstration on what to do when we crashed into the sea.

NASFiC was nearly over, and me with it.

Upon arrival in Los Angeles, some fans walked across the terminal and immediately booked another flight to somewhere else, but being a true-blue 101% fannish fan I elected to stay and visit the tail-end of Chuck and Diane Grayne's convention -- and besides, I'd left a suitcase there three weeks before. I almost regretted that decision, almost rushed back to the airport twice to book passage with some friendly fan flying out to Vancouver or Cherry Hill. The first blow fell on the Marriott Hotel airport bus. A very young, very excitable fellow had come out from the convention to greet us and now he proceeded to give us a blow-by-blow description of every single thing that had happened since the con opened four days earlier -- and all of the long recital was delivered in a shrill, much too loud voice that grated on the captive cars. He was of the reasoned opinion that NASFiC was the very best convention over held in the 20th century, and if we thought Aussiecon was good, just wait until we got a load of this one. I shut off my hearing aid and sat glowering at him, but I could still see his mouth working. The next convention greeter was lurking in the hotel lobby. He was an ersatz dracula, an overdressed Hollywood-type dracula. and he jumped from a chair when I entered and ran across the lobby at me, laughing and gurgling and flicking his eight, ten, or twelve fingers at my throat. I spat in his goddam eye and walked around him.

Good people soon restored my faith in mankind. Bob Bloch and Mari Beth Colvin were waiting in my room with liquid refreshments, where we were soon joined by Sue and Jim Merriam. Frank Robinson. Walt Liebscher, and my old dad Rusty for an old-fashioned room party -- the kind grandma used to have before hotel managers got uppity. Later in the evening we went downstairs where I caught the only part of the con I was destined to see: Harlan Ellison's speech. but what the hell, Chuck, that was worth five bucks, wasn't it? (No.) Harlan introduced me to his lovely lady and that was worthwhile. During the course of the evening I met Bill Rotsler and his lovely, and then in quick succession Fred Pohl, A.E. van Vogt, Allan Wilde. Don and Elsie Wollhein, Jack Williamson, Ken Kruger, and aren't you impressed by all this glib name-dropping? (Well, we 101% fans are like that. It raises our status in Iowa City.) (Hello, Steve.)

I stayed a week or two in Los Angeles, soaking up the sun and shedding the New Zealand soggies, and as might be expected it was a party a night until we were all exhausted. Bob and Ellie Bloch hosted a dinner party, as did Lil and Arnold Shindler; Dave Locke hold a 'Petards' meeting at his house and I met more faces for the first time in many, many years: Dean and Jean Grennell, Gy Condra,, Len and June Moffatt. Ed Cox. Trina Hensel, and Craig Miller. (To be sure, Dave and the Moffatts were at the pre-flight party before we left town three weeks earlier, but that didn't count beause I couldn't see them.) This was a solemn occasion for the Grennells and myself; we meet every ten years like clockwork (1955, 1965, and now 1975) and of course we made tentative plans for the next meet. Another night, Frank Robinson and Larry Shaw settled down in Walt Liebscher's apartment to dissect the editing and publishing business, and my innocent eyes were opened to the wicked world. Both men had been magazine editors, had written books and long been involved with behind-the-seens publishing, and the tales they told were marvelous to behold; marvelous, funny, and highly inflamatory. A guy could get sued by repeating them in print. or be punched out by any of the characters who were verbally assassinated. (But I missed the Thursday night meeting of the LassFass. Several people were ready to run me out of fandom for that failure.)

Suddenly it was lonely in the city.

People had gone home, leaving me on a wind-swept terrace overlooking the paved canyon floor below. The sixty fun-loving fans of the Aussiecon trip had long since dispersed, their daffodils wilted and discarded. Rusty had grown impatient with Los Angeles and had flown away to ace a lady about a book. A day or two later, Frank Robinson returned to San Francisco to resume work on his new book. Mari Beth Colvin left in mid-week, flying back east on vacation to visit her ancestral home. On a quiet Monday afternoon, Liebscher drove me to Abby Lu Fuller's house and I stopped off for a while to share tea and a farewell talk with a beautiful lady I had known in the long, long ago. Her eyes were bright and alive, as vivacious as I had known them thirty-five years before when Battle Creek's Slan Shack was in full flower. For a short time, for a very little while, it was possible to go home again.

The visit Downunder had been educational in many more ways than one. I learned there were Ugly Canadians as well as Ugly Americans and one was as obnoxious as the other; I learned that signs reading "This Job is Black" meant the labor force was on strike and picketing the place, not that a colored-labor problem existed; I learned that in New Zealand the average wage for males was $96 weekly, and for females $54; and also in that country, income tax rates rose to fifty percent when salaries reached $12,000 per year. Hotels in New Zealand scatter refrigerators about the halls like ice machines in American motels, and stock those fridge's with free cream and milk for their guests' coffee and tea -- which was also free in each room. (Milk was about 10¢ a quart in stores.) There were many islanders with dark skins in Australia and New Zealand, but I didn't see one Negro. One of our party -- name unknown to me -- liked it so well in Australia that he jumped ship and stayed there. He may be there yet unless the Immigrations people have found him.

I'd been away from home seven weeks, on what was to have been a three-week trip; I had about a hundred dollars left of the money given me by Jackie Franke and Leigh Edmonds, and people were looking at me with the "What! You still here?" expression. It was time to go.

Susan and Jim Merriam provided the dinner and then tranportation to the railway station, where they threw me onto a train for Chicago and slammed shut the door.

The good days were done.

- Bob Tucker, November 27, 1975