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I found a quiet spot in an empty seminar room at the basement level of the convention center. I put my gloved hand on the Dimensional Diamond. A year ago I would have called myself criminally stupid to blindly trust my life to a comic book device. What I had experienced then had made me a believer. Comic book “science” made little or no sense to a scientist, but under certain unique circumstances, it worked anyway.
I touched the diamond, and I thought about going back in time to the specific incident in 1977. A cloud of nothingness came over my brain. When I returned to consciousness, I was in a corridor filled with people.
I must be back in 1977. The men all had long shaggy hair, or big poufy hair, or big droopy mustaches. Or beards. Lots and lots of beards. I was standing in a hotel corridor. I could tell because the wallpaper was so gaudy. Young men in wildly patterned shirts—I recognized them as polyester from having seen the movie Saturday Night Fever—rushed around from one seminar room to another. They were mostly skinny teenage boys at the awkward stage where their faces didn’t fit their bodies. Some carried hard-sided briefcases, attachés. Others held ring binders cradled in their arms, the binders in which they placed the free sketches they asked artists to draw for them.
Some girls and women moved through the hall, too, but very few. They were geeky types, the kind who didn’t wear makeup and never got a good haircut. Most of them could stand to lose a few pounds and were in dire need of a gay friend to help them choose more flattering clothes.
Was I being a total bitch? I was merely observing. This was what Roland told me comics fandom had been like back in the day. Far from the cross-section of typical Americans I’d seen at the comicon this weekend, these fans were what used to be called the nerds. They were the ones who didn’t get dates on Friday nights, so they went to the public library or they read their comic books and dreamed of a different life. They also were the ones who would soon invent the computers and the apps that changed everybody’s lives.
As these thoughts flowed, I peeked into each meeting room. I eventually found a small banquet room. Waitstaff was setting up. I kept looking, and discovered a cocktail party being held next door. The sign at the door proclaimed it a Pro Party. Security guards at the door kept fans out. How could I get in? I resorted to an old trick. I marched up and demanded, “What security measures are you taking to keep fans from crashing this event?”
The two guards fell all over themselves explaining that they checked everybody’s convention badge, and if it didn’t have a P on it, they didn’t let the person inside. I nodded curtly, not wanting to appear too satisfied. Around the corner, I pulled out a tiny marker from my utility belt and a card, and quickly designed a P similar to the badges others were wearing. Then I confidently walked up to another entrance. The guards there let me in with no problem.
I wandered the party. Too bad Roland wasn’t with me. He’d be thrilled to see all of his idols here, younger. Still alive. The old men from the CP party last night were all younger. They wore suits in this more formal era, and their wives were decked out in party dresses. I hoped I didn’t stick out too much in my superheroine uniform.
I finally located Jean Westover. She hadn’t changed much in nearly forty years. She was a bit thinner in 1977 and her hair was ash blonde. Clad in a pastel blue cocktail dress of chiffon over satin, she stood next to several men, all of them in suits. I edged closer to them. Then an even older man with grey hair at his temples joined them and put his arm around Jean. He must be Charles, her husband, the president of CP Comics.
How had the Dimensional Diamond taken me to the exact moment in time I needed? I didn’t know. This was also the first time the jewel had kept on working even after I wasn’t directly touching it. I couldn’t walk around the con holding a jewel in my hand. I’d look...nerdy.
As I edged nearer, I noticed someone else moving into their circle. Norman Krigstein. He wore the loud suit style popular back then, wide gangster pinstripes, and his hair—his real hair, not a toupee—was longish, with big sideburns and a ’stache. The room was full of them.
“I sense a disturbance in the force,” the guy standing between me and Jean said. I recognized Howard Hogarth. By July 1977, he would have seen the movie those words came from, the first Star Wars. Maybe seen it a few times already. Sad that he still quoted those words nearly forty years later. He was thin, and his hair was already grey. He wore a bolo tie with his suit.
“Norman,” Jean greeted the short man. He looked the part of a troublemaker, pugnacious and already angry, plus possibly a few sheets to the wind. He carried an old-fashioned glass.
“What the hell is this I hear about you dumping War Striker, Charles?” He addressed Jean’s husband.
Charles answered with seeming indifference. “The book’s not selling.”
“It would sell if you didn’t let your talentless wife make a hash of the art,” Norman replied. His tone of voice made his disgust clear.
Jean’s expression showed her mortification. Charles’s face turned red. He punched Norman, who went down like a lead weight.
Jean screamed.
“Take that back,” Charles snarled, standing over Norman. Norman’s mouth was bleeding.
Jean tried to drag her husband away. “Don’t. He’s not worth it.”
Norman wiped his face with his hand, “You can’t beat the truth into submission.” He lunged up and caught Charles with an uppercut to the jaw. Charles’s head snapped back and he collapsed into Jean’s arms. She wailed and screamed for a doctor.
Norman stood over Charles’s slack body. “Never start a fight with an Irish Jew.” He turned away. “I need another drink.” He ambled over to the bar, not noticing or caring that his hand was bloody.
Charles regained full consciousness and Howard Hogarth and another younger man helped support him to a chair. Charles pulled out a handkerchief and wiped his mouth. “I’ll see to it he never works again,” he vowed.
“Now, Charles,” Jean started.
“He needs to learn some respect,” Charles muttered, still angry. Jean gestured discreetly with one hand that others were to back away so she and her husband could talk in private. As she spoke what looked like soothing words into his ear, I insinuated myself between Howard and the other man edging away.
I asked Howard, “Has this ever happened before?”
The younger man said, “When Norman has a few, he’s a crazy man.”
Howard said, “He never lets being a dwarf stop him from trying to take down the bigger guy.”
“Is he really a dwarf?” I asked, wide-eyed.
“A dwarf Irish Jew with a bad attitude,” Howard said. “But a fantastic writer.”
The unknown man said, “We like to kid him.”
“We also duck when he’s drunk,” Howard said.
“Will the man he socked keep him from getting work?” I asked. “He hit him first.” Howard and the other man suddenly noticed my unusual appearance.
“Who are you?” Howard asked. “Were you hired to be in costume and advertise the con?”
“I’m Temporary Superheroine,” I said.
“Never heard of her.”
“I made her up,” I replied.
“Are you here with somebody?” the other guy asked. He was only in his thirties, maybe.
Uh-oh. Did he think I was some kind of rent-a-bimbo? “My boyfriend’s around somewhere.” I made a show of craning my neck and pretending to search for him. “Do you think your friend Norman will continue to get work in the comic book business?” I asked again.
The unnamed man, who was very ordinary looking, said, “Norman can always get work. If Charles bans him, Norman can script a newspaper strip under someone else’s byline.”
“Why was he so angry about War Striker?”
“He owned the copyright on it and sold the idea to CP Comics. He was hoping to cash in,” the man said.
Howard said, “That’s Charles all over. He’ll buy an idea for peanuts, promising the creator a share of the profits, but only on the comic book. After Charles kills the book, he’ll license the hell out of the character anyway and make a fortune.”
Frowning, the other man said, “I’m the one doing the licensing, not Charles.”
Howard said, “Same difference.”
Now I understood. Krigstein had a very good reason to hold a grudge, and to sue CP Comics over and over. If Norman thought Jean Westover was part of a well-worn scheme Charles routinely used to cheat creators, Norman would hold a grudge against her, too. Even if Charles was the one who punched him first.
Men were weird about fistfights, anyway. They could easily forgive each other once honors were even. What Norman Krigstein might not have forgiven was Jean Westover’s supposed incompetence as an artist that might have caused the book’s cancellation.
Was I in the same class, an incompetent artist who got her job through sleeping with the boss? An artist who drove her title into the ground?
If Charles had acted on his vow to make sure that Norman would “never work again,” was Norman so twisted he would blame Jean, not Charles? Or blame CP Comics, the corporate entity, not Charles?
I’d been lucky to get such detailed answers out of the guys I was questioning, probably because the fistfight had overridden their sense of discretion.
“I think I see my boyfriend,” I said. I said goodbye and took off. Strange, Howard Hogarth had spoken to me a couple of days ago, but never recalled our meeting previously. Then again, for him it had been nearly forty years.
Had I learned what I needed to know? Norman had a financial grudge against Jean and Charles. Jean might have a grudge against Norman for insulting her and decking her husband. But they’d gotten divorced later, so maybe not. Howard was a bystander. Yet Roland had called him a lunatic. Why? I’d thought Howard was a mere fan, but here he was at an exclusive pro party I’d had to fake my way into. He must have worked in the business in 1977. Now he was an old man Eric disdained, pushing a hopeless petition.
Very few of the fans in the corridor had been in costume. It must not have been common at comicons in 1977. Instead of fitting right in, I stuck out. Too many people noticed me as I strode across the room. I should find a quiet spot and activate the Dimensional Diamond. Always assuming it would work, and not send me to the wrong time.
These comic book power sources were weird. Logically, there was no reason for the jewel to have delivered me to the exact year and event I needed to see, but it had done so. Equally, there was no reason for the jewel to take me back to the exact moment when I left July 2015, but like a rubber band, it would do so.
I hoped my confidence was not misplaced.
I exited the cocktail party and found a quiet spot in a corridor leading to a maintenance area. I held and stroked the diamond, and thought myself back to my own time.
In a whoosh of air and nothingness, I returned. Proof I was back was immediately apparent once I turned the corner in the business complex in the convention center. The milling crowds included a significant number of people in costume, both males and females. The beards were a different length, for starters. The markers of an era were as simple as the ordinary clothes people wore and their hair styles, as I had learned last year.