Deep Secret by Diana Wynne Jones Page A

again.
    Later on, these memories of Wantchester struck me as decidedly inauspicious. Maybe they did even at the time. If so, I dismissed them, because I was tired of looking. Wantchester fitted our requirements. Stan and I both knew the town. That was sufficient.
    “Wantchester it is, then,” we said.
    The next step was, of course, to go to the place and check it out. “I wish you could come too,” I said to Stan.
    “You don’t need me to help you look at a town,” he said, threatening huffiness. I was beginning to see that Stan got irritated whenever I went somewhere without him. I said no more.
    The next day I drove up to Wantchester and found the place still very pleasant, despite a one-way system and the cold wind of late February. I even took a walk by the river for old times’ sake. There were willow trees, currently bare, and brown water swirling under the bridge, just as I remembered, but the river walk was curtailed since that far-off holiday by the new factory built on the riverside. So I walked back into the town, to the large hotel I had seen standing across the end of the main square. The hotel I remembered dimly, although we had stayed in a guest-house, but my chief memory was of the way the square was more like a very wide street, with a market in it. To my joy, the square (or street) was full of stalls that day too, and I stared at crockery, fruit and clothing, much as there had been when I was a nine-year-old, all the way to the hotel.
    I was rather disconcerted to find it was called Hotel Babylon.
    There is no such thing as coincidence, thought I, and pushed through the large glass doors. Inside it was large and hushed and a queer mixture of modern décor with traditional market-town habits. There seemed to be mirrors everywhere and the receptionist was foreign, but the place was filled with huntin’-and-fishin’ types who were here for the horse sales, and lunch was traditional and nourishing, served by staff with local accents. As I ate chicken and mushroom pie among the mirrors, I realised that the building was actually on the node. Better and better. After lunch, I enquired about booking a room for the Easter weekend. Stan and I had settled on Easter because that is a powerful time-node.
    I could get no sense out of the foreign lady. I asked to see the manager. His name was Alfred Douglas, but that was not his fault. Easter weekend? he said. He was very sorry, but all the rooms were taken by a convention over Easter.
    I nearly went away. Possibly I should have done. Things would certainly have turned out very differently if I had. I was within a whisker of deciding to try another town when it occurred to me to ask what kind of convention – expecting the reply to be Freemasons, Social Workers or some kind of Business Training.
    A book-lovers’ convention, Mr Alfred Douglas told me. Science fiction and fantasy – or he believed the term might be speculative fiction. That kind of area, sir, anyway.
    There is no such thing as coincidence! I thought, marvelling. Mervin Thurless wrote science fiction. According to my American contacts, Fisk had once taught a course about writing it. I didn’t know how Punt and Gabrelisovic felt about this genre, but there were half my candidates at least ready to fit in. Two of them could come here in the most natural manner possible.
    “But that’s just what I was looking for!” I said.
    Deeper enquiries elicited the fact that the convention guaranteed to fill the hotel for five days and did the booking for its members. But Mr Alfred Douglas was happy to let me have the name, address and telephone number of the organiser. He was called Rick Corrie. I phoned him from the hotel.
    He was very pleasant. I liked at once the voice that answered, “PhantasmaCon hotel liaison here.” We had a very agreeable conversation, in the course of which I discovered that Corrie, like me, worked with computers from his home. Certainly I would join the convention, he said, and