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A Sober and Reasoned Consideration of Dr. Charles Sheffield or Ill Met by Goonlight 

(1) Let Me Tell You A Tale I have been asked by the Baltimore Worldcon committee to provide an introduction to Charles Sheffield, our Toastmaster. First off, let me say that I am deeply and sincerely proud to name Charles Sheffield as a friend. It is a pleasure simply to be around him. There are few kinder, more thoughtful, or more entertaining people out there.

There are, however, certain drawbacks to knowing Charles. One of them is interesting phone calls. It is not wise to call Charles and ask him for Fred Nurk's address unless you have at least forty-five minutes to spare for the call. Now, there is nothing unusual about someone prone to long phone calls. What is remarkable about Charles is that you spend those forty-five minutes being entertained. You spend them, not desperately trying to say goodbye without offending, but instead wishing you didn't have to get off the line Talk to Charles and you get juicy gossip, accurate quotations of poetry that are on-point to the conversation, generous offers of help, sensible advice, two or three citations you didn't know you needed, which he quotes accurately from memory, combined with thoughtful and witty analyses of three or four subjects of increasingly remote relevance to the reason you wanted to writ Fred Nurk in the first place.

Charles is always interesting. If you ever get the chance to engag him in conversation, don't. Instead, just sit back and listen to him talk. About anything. About everything. Any time. Anywhere.

Charles and I shared a room at the Nebula Awards a few years back. As the evening drew to a close and we toddled back to our room for the night, Charles commenced a monologue on the night's happenings. Who was in, who was out, relative editor-sobriety levels, standards of magazine cover illustration, the degree of camaraderie and organization or absence therein thereof between SFWA members, whether there was any need for a second "F" in "SFWA," the blatant way a certain person crashed a certain young lady into the banquet and seated her next to the banquet organizer. On he swept as we took turns using the bathroom, wrassled the fold-out bed open and played Alphonse-and-Gaston over who should have to use the fold-out in lieu of the real bed. We got into our sleeping togs (Charles into sensible, neatly ironed, powder-blue pajamas, myself into a rumpled t-shirt and shorts).

Charles insisted on taking the fold-out, got into bed, lay down, and kept talking. The market share available to a new magazine. The relative pros and cons of various professionals living or dying. The relevance of the speaker's remarks to the banquet audience. Folk-stories and urban myths of the Nebulas. All of it fascinating, and it just kept going, up to and including the moment he fell asleep in mid-sentence. And a darned interesting sentence it was, too.

(2) Here's Where the Story Really Begins

Charles is also capable of completely subversive acts. When the DJ decides to play avant-garde non-rhythmic atonal dance music, Charles is there in the back of the room, shouting for some Rolling Stones to be played. Whe Norman Spinrad can't make it, Charles is there, wandering around the room holding a red fright wig, looking for someone willing to play the part of Norman Spinrad.

At a recent convention, Charles didn't feel like moderating a panel discussion he had been put on, so he asked me to cover for him. I agreed, and at the panel was forced to explain to the audience that Charles could not be on the panel because a prior commitment required him to be in the front row of the audience, listening to the panel.

The thing is that Charles looks so normal. So sensible. He is dapper, well-groomed, well-dressed, urbane, courteous. He is actually comfortable in a tie and jacket. And that British accent doesn't hurt, either. In short, he does not look or act like the typical shambling gonzo rumpled fanboy-made-good science fiction writer. This, I am convinced, is the key. Charles looks like the eminently trustworthy president of an entirely respectable small college, or the sort of absolutely reasonabl expert on the subject of This Week's Scandal who goes on Nightline and calmly destroys the lies, deceits, and evasions of the spokes-weasel for the National Federation of Toxic Waste Manufacturers as Ted Koppel looks on in dispassionate approval.

None of it is put-on. None of it is an act. But it is this appearance of utter rationality that lets Charles get away with murder. For example:

(3) Here's Where the Story Really Begins

At the Winnipeg Worldcon a few years back, a dinner party conglomerated itself Included in the group were Charles, Betsy Mitchell (editor-in-chief and Grand Poobah of Warner Aspect) and myself, along with various innocent bystanders who may not wish themselves to be identified. (Come to think of it, Betsy was an innocent bystander too, and she probably wouldn't want to be identified either, but what the hell.)

Anyway, for reasons that defy explanation, it was decided that, since w were in Winnipeg, Canada, the thing to do was to go to a Mongolian restauran that was about 642 miles away. Since no one knew exactly where the restaurant was, we sort of drove at random for a while, on the look-out for yurts

It turned out to be a buffet-style Mongolian restaurant, where you got i line, chose some slabs of meat, and then had the chef (who was behind a sort of medium-security glass wall) set fire to it for you. This meant that people were constantly getting up from the table to get more meat incinerated, and for the most part not all of us were at the table at once.

The conversation bounced around with all the logic and order of a herd of kittens chasing a dozen ping-pong balls, and at one point Charles and I got onto the subject of The Goon Show, that seminal British radio comedy show. The Goons—Harry Seacombe, Spike Milligan, and Peter Sellers—were unquestionably the great-granddaddies of Monty Python, The Firesign Theater, and most of the other surreal comedy of the last thirty years. (The alternate title and sub-heads of this essay are lifted straight fro The Goon Show.) At one point, while I was away from the table, Charles got it into his head that he would tell Betsy that he could cause me to say the phrase "Did sport madly with Mrs. Fitzsimmons." This obscure phrase is a recurring line from a Goon Show send-up of the Pepys diaries, of all things.

I would regale Betsy with the plot of the Goons' Pepys episode—includin the sound effects that interrupted the show at random intervals—rapid footsteps headed away, then a door opening and shutting, then a pause, another door open and shut, rapid footsteps returning, and then the scratching o a pen on paper under as the actor spoke the words of Pepys's entry in his diary—"Did sport madly with Mrs. Fitzsimmons.

Charles' evil scheme seems obvious, in hindsight. Needless to say, I ha no idea of any of this at the time. Betsy returned and I floundered my wa into the pitch. Unfortunately for Charles' scheme, I decided to steer clear of things Goonish, in the hopes of making this loony idea sound more reasonable. I got further and further into the pitch, while Betsy stared at me as if I was something that had crawled out from under a rock carrying an unpublishable manuscript.

Again and again, I turned to Charles, inviting him to come in on my side and say something about the whacked-out idea he had urged me to pitch—but, for once, Charles stood silent, hoping against hope that I would turn Goonward once more and say the magic words. But Mrs. Fitzsimmons sported not at all, and the others around the table started trying to find ways to hide under it, or remembered urgent appointments in Alberta, and I melted down into a small puddle of humiliation. Tendrils of bemused smoke began to eddy ou of Betsy's ears as she was forced to listen to my endless monologue on the virtues of one of the worse anthology ideas in recent millennia.

(4) Have A Gorilla Perhaps it only went on for five minutes, or ten, or twenty, but in my memory it went for hours, as I flailed about, trying to convince Betsy that a science-fiction satire of a 17th-century British diarist would be a sure-fire all-American best-seller. By this time, the rest of the party was staring at me like a herd of jacklighted deer, unable to tear their eyes away from the fascinating, horrifying, road-accident of my hopeless sales pitch.

It was only after Betsy was on the verge of signing the commitment papers that Charles confessed. The entire brain-rattling incident had been for his private amusement. As I recall we threw buns at him, but I think I might simply have wished I had thrown buns.

No one but Charles could do that sort of thing and get away with that sort of thing. Of course, no one but Charles would want to do that sort of thing in the first place, but that's another story.

And, around Dr. Charles Sheffield—scholar, scientist, author, raconteur, and all-around good egg—there's always another story.

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