A well-endowed young woman, wearing a tight Star Trek T-shirt and a round yellow strategically-placed button proclaiming “I Am a Personal Friend of Chip Livingstone,” raised her hand and got a nod from the moderator.

“I’d like to ask Gideon where he got the idea for his Lost in Time series,” she said with a shy smile.

The moderator nodded toward Gideon, who mentally went through his standard list of responses not unlike the way Arnold Schwarzenegger’s “Terminator” was depicted as electronically going through his in a movie that had only grown more popular since its release more than four years past. He chose number three.

“I was involved in some government physics research that I can’t really elaborate on,” he said. “But a branch of it involved time-travel theory. I simply adapted that to create my series.”

He smiled in satisfaction. That was enough of a pseudo-answer, he thought, to satisfy this Trekkie without really saying anything. The fifth Star Trek movie had just come out last month, and Gideon wondered if that would finally put an end to the franchise.

Another hand went up, a young man with a jacket, a Dr. Who scarf and…was that a nose ring? Some of these con attendees were getting weirder by the day.

“Where can I get the first book in that series? I’ve looked in the paperback racks in newsstands and even a bookstore, and I can’t find it. I want to start with the first one.”

Gideon nodded sympathetically. “I know. It keeps selling out. But keep looking, it should be reprinted in the near future.”

The young man spoke again. “I’m having trouble finding the TV version, too.”

“Yes, they keep changing the time, no pun intended,” he said, drawing some dutiful chuckles from the audience. “I hope they’ll soon settle on a permanent slot instead of having it jump all over the schedule. Keep looking,” Gideon said, and then couldn’t help adding: “Keep watching the skies,” which brought appreciative laughter from those few who remembered the original The Thing from 38 years ago, and not the 1982 re-do.

Those last two questions were the ones Gideon got most often, and he’d become quite good with answers by now. Sometimes when the TV question was asked, another member of the audience would pipe up and say he’d caught it last month at such-and-such a time on such-and-such a network. Gideon would always nod encouragingly. And it was a good trick, he thought, given that there was no such series anywhere on TV. It was amazing what someone would be certain he or she saw when there was nothing to see. Maybe that explained flying saucers.

Questions began going to the other panelists, a magazine editor, a paranormal romance novelist and a games marketer. Gideon’s mind wandered. This year had still more movie clones coming out. Batman got a reboot last month, with Michael Keaton of all people. Indiana Jones had just teamed up with cinema’s first James Bond. Ghostbusters, Lethal Weapon and Back to the Future even had sequels coming out.

By the time they circled back to Gideon, time was up and they all made way for the next panel.

On his way out, Gideon sneaked a speculative look at the young woman in the T-shirt, wondering idly if he could parlay his celebrity into a dinner date. But he saw she already had an attentive male escort, younger and more handsome than Gideon, and decided not to press his luck. Such encounters were wonderful when they happened, but one had to be discreet.

Gideon consulted his program book, and found he had no more panels until after the banquet, and late enough so it would probably be sparsely attended. Good. He might not have the gift of writing, but he did have the gift of gab, and it was always helpful when his listeners were on their way to somnolence.

He was constantly astonished at how, after half a year, he was still getting away with this stuff.

He supposed he could thank his Uncle Ott, the most impassioned sci-fi fan he ever knew—at least until he started attending these conventions. His folks had foisted him off on Uncle Ott for a month each summer, and Uncle Ott was relentless in trying to interest his favorite nephew (probably because Gideon was his only nephew, since Gideon’s older brother had been killed in Vietnam) in his own favorite reading matter.

Uncle Ott was a confirmed bachelor who had made his money in the book and magazine distribution business, back when every newsstand and pharmacy had rows of magazine shelves and at least one paperback spinner-rack. Now retired, he would babble endlessly about his favorite genre. Gideon absorbed it over many summers without even trying. The main attraction, for him, was drooling over the scantily-clad babes on the pulp magazine covers being pursued by robots, tentacled aliens or giant bugs for reasons that he never quite understood. Uncle Ott also had the later magazines and even some of the old comic books.

His uncle also had a private collection of 16-millimeter films from what he called the “golden age” of science fiction. (He objected to the term “sci-fi” for some reason.) So, Gideon got a crash course in old black-and-white movies ranging from Metropolis and Things to Come to The Thing and The Man from Planet X. Truth to tell, he rather enjoyed them, almost as much as Uncle Ott enjoyed proselytizing them.

After high school, Gideon became what could only be called a professional college student, not unlike the protagonist of Roger Zelazny’s Doorways in the Sand, one of the many books his uncle got him to read during those summer visits. In fact, Uncle Ott had left him an endowment that would keep paying for his college courses until he earned a degree in something. By constantly changing majors, Gideon hadn’t yet gotten that degree, but he did develop a vast enjoyment of college social life. Never having gotten to know his father, who’d died in Korea, and then losing his brother in another war, Gideon sometimes wondered if Uncle Ott’s college setup hadn’t been planned as a deferment in case the draft came back.

In an attempt to impress Amy, one of his constantly-changing array of college girlfriends, he had slathered on a little of his favorite after-shave and driven them to a regional science fiction convention she’d mentioned about two hours away.

Amy loved paranormal romances. While he wasn’t up on all the current sci-fi movies and novels, he found he must have absorbed enough about the early material from Uncle Ott to hold his own in con chats, and hopefully impress Amy.

“Yes, Isaac wrote all those Foundation stories originally as magazine serials,” he would pontificate. “It was the publisher who grouped them into three books. Thus was born the tradition of the science fiction trilogy.”

“Wasn’t the Lord of the Rings a trilogy?” someone demanded.

“And how about C. S. Lewis’ Out of the Silent Planet trilogy?” said another. 

That was when Gideon learned how to be more careful when spreading his so-called knowledge. There were some sharp attendees at this convention. But he managed to fuddle his way out, mumbling that those examples were more fantasy than sci-fi.

Many young folks at these things had practically memorized the three Star Wars movies, or even The Return of Swamp Thing and The Trial of the Incredible Hulk from a couple months ago, but he could flummox them on a lot of the genre’s history. They couldn’t believe there had been as many as fifty sci-fi magazines published in the years since the first one in 1926, for example, even if some lasted only a few issues.

The next thing he knew, one of the convention staff was recruiting him for a panel on magazine science fiction, to replace a scheduled guest who had missed a connecting flight. Never one to shun the spotlight, Gideon agreed.

He found that his audience blithely accepted most of what he said, even when he stopped relying on things he’d learned from Uncle Ott and started making up some of it.