"Mike Resnick - Roots and a Few Vines (2)" - читать интересную книгу автора (Resnick Mike)

men and women congregate there. They have long hair, and most of
them are either 90 pounds overweight or 50 pounds underweight, and
often they are carrying books under their arms. We decide they are
members of SNCC or CORE, which are pretty popular organizations at
the time, and that they are meeting there to figure out how to
dodge the draft, and that the books they carry are either pacifist
tracts or ledgers with the names and addresses of all the left-
wing groups that have contributed money to them.
We have to go all the way to Washington D.C. a year later and
attend Discon I to find out that they are not draft dodgers (well,
not _primarily_, anyway) but rather Chicago fandom, and that they
have been meeting 80 feet from our front door for 2 years.
***
So I wend my way back through the audience, and I find my
seat, and I hand Kris Rusch's Hugo to Carol, because I am also up
for Best Short Story, and I think I've got a better chance at
this, and when I run up to accept the award it will look tacky to
already be carrying a Hugo. Besides, Charles Sheffield is sitting
right next to us, and he is up for Best Novelette, and he is
getting very nervous, and wants to stroke the Hugo for luck, or
maybe is considering just walking out with it and changing the
name plates at a future date. (In fact, I am convinced that if he
does not win his own, neither Kris nor I will ever see _her_ Hugo
again. Charles will probably deny this, but never forget that
Charles gets paid an inordinate amount of money to tell lies to
the public at large.)
So Guy Gavriel Kay begins reading off the nominees, and
suddenly I realize that I am not nervous at all, that this is
becoming very old hat to me. I have been nominated for nine Hugos
in the past six years. I have actually won a pair. Worldcons are
very orderly things: you show up, you sign a million autographs,
you eat each meal with a different editor and line up your next
year's worth of work, and then you climb into your tux and see if
you won another Hugo.
It's gotten to be such a regular annual routine, you
sometimes find yourself idly wondering: was it _always_ like this?
Then you think back to your first worldcon, and you realize
that no, it was not always like this...
***
Right off the bat, we were the victims of false doctrine.
Everyone we knew in fandom -- all six or seven of them -- told us

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the worldcon was held over Labor Day weekend. So we took them at
their word.
The problem, of course, was the definition of "weekend". We
took a train that pulled out of Chicago on Friday morning, and
dumped us in the basement of our Washington D.C. hotel at 9:00