Arkwright by Allen Steele Page B

invitations to attend SF conventions had been routinely ignored.
    Once Nat sat down at the table—by himself, thankfully, with no authors he didn’t know sitting beside him—things got better. One by one, fans stepped before him, each bearing copies of his books to be signed, mainly Beyond the Event Horizon , but some also brought old and valuable editions of his earlier books, including one collector with a mint-condition copy of the May 1940 issue of Startling where he’d made his debut. Nat was standoffish at first, saying little if anything to the people who approached him, but he gradually warmed up to the task. He began talking to the fans, chatting with them as he signed his name with the onyx Montblanc fountain pen that Maggie had given him when he’d signed his first million-dollar contract, even talking a little bit about the Galaxy Patrol books although this was a subject he was usually reluctant to discuss with anyone who wasn’t professionally involved with their production.
    As she quietly sat beside him, Maggie saw a glimmer of the Nat she used to know. Deep down inside the lonely old man still mourning the death of his wife was the young writer she’d met at the first Worldcon a half century earlier. It was a pleasure to see him return, if only for a few minutes.
    The signing went well, and when it was done, she escorted him up another level to the greenroom so he could get out of the public eye for a little while before his next program event. But even there he was the center of attention. Once they heard that he was in the building, longtime friends who hadn’t seen him in many years—Hal Clement, Robert Silverberg, Kelly Freas—made a point of coming by, while younger writers for whom he was only a legend either shyly came up to shake his hand or stood off to the side, pretending to play it cool but actually delighted to be in the company of one of the Big Four. Nat sat on a couch, sipping a Diet Coke as writers, artists, and editors gathered around him, and for a little while, it seemed to Maggie that the Nat she knew and loved was coming back.
    It didn’t last. A couple of hours later, Nat made the second of three appearances the convention had scheduled for him that day, a panel discussion with the vague title “The Future of the Future.” Again, Nat was among friends: Bob Silverberg and Fred Pohl, along with the moderator, Stanley Schmidt, the Analog editor for whom Nat had written a rare Galaxy Patrol short story a couple of years earlier. The panel was held in the main ballroom, and it was filled to capacity; every seat was taken, and fans stood along the walls and sat in the aisle. So things should have gone well.
    Yet they didn’t. Once again, Nat was the center of attention, but what had been a novelty earlier in the day was now an unwanted task. From the first row, Maggie watched as Nat seemed to fade before her very eyes. As the hour went by, he slumped lower and lower in his chair, and he seemed incapable of engaging the other panelists in conversation but instead spoke past them, veering off topic to talk about things that had little to do with the subject at hand. When Fred spoke about emerging awareness of an electronic dominion called cyberspace, for instance, Nat responded with a rambling complaint about how hard it was to find someone in the Berkshires to repair his daisy wheel printer when it broke down. But it wasn’t until the hour was nearly over that matters went from bad to worse.
    A bearded fan with Brillo Pad hair and wearing a black T-shirt and baggy jeans—seeing him, Maggie mourned the bygone era when no self-respecting young man would go out in public without a haircut and a tie—had stood up to ask why anyone even bothered to write about space anymore. “It’s all about computers, y’know,” he said. “The Challenger disaster just shows how dangerous space is. Can’t we do the same thing