Haggopian and Other Stories

Slater didn’t wait until Saturday but went up to London that night. He booked into a local hotel and checked the registration book. This was nothing more than habit, but it produced results. Cindy Patterson’s name was in there, along with Hank Merne’s and Darrell le Sant. Slater guessed they’d be her two from Moribund. “A convention?” he innocently inquired of the receptionist.

“Something of the sort,” she answered. “At the Horticultural Society Hall. Greycoat Street. We have a half-dozen of them staying here. They’ll probably be in the bar later.”

“Oh?” he said. “A quiet lot?”

She sniffed. “A funny lot! We’ve had ’em before. But they’re no trouble.”

He dumped his case in his room, left the hotel and inclined his face into the fine, drifting rain, heading for Greycoat Street. At the Hall: there was no missing or mistaking the gamers. They were setting up, getting organised, fixing up their tables and props. Some were dealers, with their stuff in boxes piled under their tables, not yet displayed; others were players, moving through the crowd looking for their friends; very few of them would be more than twenty-two or twenty-three years old. It was a pretty much male-

dominated scene, but there were some girls there: girl-friends most of them, but also one or two players, Slater guessed.

Slater hung his overcoat over his arm, stood to one side and smoked a cigarette. He knew he stuck out like a sore thumb, and that it was a big disadvantage, but the fact was that even if he wasn’t “an old guy” still he couldn’t have pictured himself as part of this crowd. Even if he were young again, you wouldn’t find him here.

A good many of the youths were just that: pimply, gawky, gangling, uncoordinated and mainly out-of-work youths. Respectable, most of them, Slater supposed, by their looks, anyway. Not criminal types, he’d stake it all on that. But who could go on looks anymore? The young man with the dark, brooding eyes and the black, waxed, pointy beard, for instance: he was probably respectable. And the two overweight guys who could be brothers, like a pair of mobile haystacks, hairy, ungainly and unwashed, but probably respectable. In their way. And there were rich kids, too, all smartly if casually dressed, fairly well-groomed, poised and polite, with plums in their mouths and their pockets full of money. A crowd that cross-sectioned the spectrum, this one. And the games seemed innocuous enough.

But…of course there were the freaks, too. Not physical freaks, RPG freaks. Like that bunch there with the green-dyed faces and Spock ears: Trekkies, obviously. And the little tubby guy with the rubber mouth-mask fringed with bouncing, writhing tentacles. Old Tootle-tootle himself. The latter, meeting friends, invariably greeted them with: “N’gah, R’lyeh, Cthulhu fhtagn!” Terrific…

And how about the one with the gold and silver balloons clustered about his head? He wore a T-shirt printed with “Yog loves Lavinny”, and behind the balloons a rubber mask festooned with boils and quivering, protruding pustules. Slater thought: but I’ll bet your Mum loves you.

“Mr. Slater?” Someone touched his elbow. The voice was quiet, almost shy. But it was quietly confident, too. Slater looked down a little from his seventy four inches at a slight, unassuming, bright-eyed specimen who couldn’t be more than twenty or twenty-one. He wore middle-length hair and an inquiring half-smile. “I’m Karl Ferd. Er, I suppose you are Mr. Slater?”

“Right first time,” said Slater, offering his hand. “I won’t ask how you picked me out of this lot!”

Ferd grinned, glanced all about. “Good crowd, innit?”

“Is it? Look, er, Karl: you’d better treat me as an ignoramus. I’m here on assignment, remember? I’m gathering information and atmosphere on behalf of someone else. This is all very strange to me. In fact, it’s strange period! So you’re the expert and I’m the novice. Which means that if I just seem to stand here and let you rattle on, don’t think I’ve been struck dumb or something. It’s just that I’ll be trying hard to follow what you’re saying, OK?”

“Sure,” said the other, still scanning the crowd. He was beginning to look a little disappointed.

“Something wrong?”

“Er, no. I’d hoped to see a few more foreigners, that’s all. I was hoping there’d be a lot of ’em this time—to buy up the latest Dugong and take it home with them, spread the word abroad. So far there are a couple of Krauts—er, Germans. And a few Frenchies.”

“Frogs?”

Ferd grinned again. “They’re all right,” he said. “Thing is, if Guttmeier had won in Milan, he might have showed up. That would have been interesting.”

Slater played dumb. “Guttmeier?”

“Hans Guttmeier, yeah. It seems he quit before play started—in Milan, I mean—and just walked out. They say he chickened out, but I can’t see it. He knew his stuff.”

“Oh,” Slater nodded. “He was some sort of champion, right?”

“World’s finest player!” said Ferd.