Since the blood centers can’t supply the degree of T.L.C. a steady flood of first-timers needs, we must be prepared to supply it ourselves. Fortunately the job does not require medical professionals; any intelligent layman can be taught all he needs to know about what sort of trouble to expect, how to avoid it, what to do if something slips. But the job must be done or our new recruits will not become repeat donors. So we must do it ourselves.
The rejected or deferred volunteer offers the best source of helpers in this—with the double bonus that this work not only creates repeat donors but also creates that other indispensable factor: enthusiastic, industrious, volunteer blood workers. Hurt pride has been healed by the chance to be useful.26
On Sunday night, the last day of the convention, they received a telephone call in their hotel room from William Kyler, the executive director of the Council of Community Blood Centers. He wanted them at the meeting in Atlanta.
By this time, Robert had certainly lost any enthusiasm for the conference—and he was getting fed up with the “professionals” anyway (Kyler personally was a special case; they were on a very friendly basis). He gave Kyler to Ginny and told him he would do what she decided. They talked for half an hour, and in the end she said “we go.” They dropped by home late Monday evening to pick up some more clothes—and Ginny’s ice-skates—and took a flight to Atlanta the next day, having missed the “recruiting seminar” they had paid for. But they were there for the plenary session, and what Heinlein saw there—27
This learned group of truly intelligent people talked nonsense for hour after hour … [sic] and were not aware that they were talking nonsense.…
Most of them seemed puzzled that anyone should question their right and their authority to make moral decisions about your blood and mine. They were the experts. “Father knows best.” We were just so many milch cows who must give down when told to do so.28
They seemed quite offended when people didn’t respond with enthusiasm.
These people simply did not get the concept of volunteerism, and were sabotaging their own efforts by mismanaging the human resources they depended on. Now Heinlein understood how it could be that his and Ginny’s minor but actual volunteer donor programs were flooding the blood centers every time they held a drive. He did now what he always did: pointed out the realities, bluntly: “In general, I made myself highly unpopular.”29
After the session, the medical director of the Red Cross’s largest blood center buttonholed Heinlein to set him straight, laying down the law. Robert would have preferred to let it go, since the prospect of public arguments always made him ill. But he was representing the “human element” here: He girded up mental loins and stopped the doctor in mid-sentence. “We do not have to take your instructions. You have to get along with us. If the volunteer workers and the volunteer blood donors walk out on you, you … ain’t … got … no … job!”30
After the doctor indulged in a bit of face-saving bluster, Heinlein volunteered to make good the “misunderstanding” by not coming into his district to recruit, leaving them to their own devices, which would have been a disaster—for them. Once the implications began to sink in, Heinlein invited him up to their suite for drinks and to continue the discussion on a more rational basis.
The next afternoon, all the Red Cross people left for home and the CCBC went into its sessions. At first, general talk-talk focused on donor recruiting—the one subject always on the minds of blood professionals. Heinlein expressed an opinion, based on his experience in Seattle, that the ARC’s methods left something to be desired. He was quite blunt, unaware that the senior vice president of the Red Cross was present—and deeply offended.
After that meeting, the local Bay Area director of the CCBC, who had approached him the previous November to set up a blood drive, sought him out with his medical director—to jawbone him about badmouthing the Red Cross.
“No problem. Don’t give it another thought.”
“You won’t talk that way about the Red Cross?”
“I can’t think of any reason why I would be talking about the Red Cross in your district. But that wasn’t what I said. There is no problem because I won’t be in your district; the drive is canceled.”
“Now wait a moment! Let’s discuss this.”
“There’s nothing to discuss. Did you really think you could tell an unpaid speaker what he must not say? I don’t permit that even when I’m charging all the traffic will bear.”31
They both took on worried expressions and went into a huddle. As he later told R. Faraday Nelson, the head of the SFWA Blood Club,
I never intended at any point not to do that drive; it is still scheduled. But I was not going to let them tell me what to say … blood politics in this country are very complex, and no SFWA member should ever let a blood professional boss him. If you surrender one iota of your independence you are all too likely to find yourself being used politically. Blood professionals are a peculiar breed. They are almost invariably fanatically devoted to saving lives—and they fight among themselves just as fanatically. Let’s not get involved in it.32
The blood professionals absolutely could not be permitted to perpetuate their current policy of sabotaging their own recruitment efforts. If you want things to change—then you have to actually change.
And then he helped them help themselves into an arrangement they could all live with.
But the experience was very wearing.
Atlanta was followed a week later by an appearance as Fan Guest of Honor at SpaceCon, at the San Francisco Civic Auditorium. The real headliners were cast members of Star Trek. SpaceCon was another lesson—as if he needed it—in the professionals sabotaging themselves. The drive, run by San Francisco’s Irwin Memorial Blood Bank, ground to a complete standstill. Two volunteers, Sondra and Myrna Marshak, took charge, and things began happening.33 The Heinleins also noticed that there was less sheer pressure on Robert at the Star Trek conventions than at science-fiction conventions:
Robert can go around in a Star Trek convention without being bothered, buttonholed, and so on. It’s wonderful! I don’t think that we met a single rude, self-interested-only individual in the entire group. Everyone was so cooperative and helpful that I find myself stunned by it all.34
It was at this convention, in one of the blood donor lines, that they met and were enchanted by Nichelle Nichols, who played Lt. Uhura on Star Trek. They were scheduled for another Star Trek convention in March. Ginny started collecting material for a handbook on recruiting blood donors and holding blood drives.
Heinlein was having a hard time settling down actually to write a new book.35 On the evidence of what he eventually did write, he wanted to do a romp, revisiting the exciting fictional worlds of his youth—Oz and Wonderland, the Barsoom of Edgar Rice Burroughs, and the universes of the Lensmen. Instead he wrote another “appreciation” letter for the next SFWA Grand Master, Clifford D. Simak—another writer he had learned much from as a young pup writer. Part of the letter he spent marveling at Simak’s technique:
Mr. Simak, I realize that you have done almost everything in newspaper work from printer’s devil to publisher … but I know also that you have spent much of the past half century either on the beat, in the slot, or on the rim—then have gone home and written highly effective fiction that same day. How did you do it?
That is a rhetorical question, as I would be incapable of understanding the answer and would continue to be amazed.…
Let me close by saying that, since the earliest thirties, to read science fiction is to read Simak. A reader who does not like Simak stories does not like science fiction at all. So it gives me great pleasure to join in this celebration.
With admiration and respect, I remain—
—Robert A. Heinlein36
Heinlein had been “working on” his new book since the previous fall, but he had barely gotten anything actually written down by the time they had to pack up for the next blood drives. A major Science Fiction Exposit
ion was scheduled in Tucson, Arizona, early in June, and they had agreed to do two blood drives in Phoenix before driving to Tucson, 120 miles south—numbers six, seven, and eight for the year. One was a fee-arrangement: Robert agreed to give an after-dinner speech for a meeting of the recently formed Libertarian Party, for a fee of fifty pints of blood—which they paid by a sheaf of donor slips put in his hand as he came into the hall.
Robert thought of himself as a libertarian-with-a-small-l—Judith Merril had once called herself a democrat and a libertarian. “I think that describes me, too,” he told her—
—still a democrat not because I love the Common Peepul and not because I think democracy is so successful (look around you) but, because in a lifetime of thinking about it and learning all that I could, I haven’t found any other political organization that worked as well.
As for libertarian, I’ve been one all my life, a radical one. You might use the term “philosophical anarchist” or “autarchist” about me, but “libertarian” is easier to define and fits well enough. But I’m glad you didn’t use the term “liberal” which used to mean much the same thing and with which I once tagged myself. But today “liberal” means to me a person who wants to pass laws and use coercion to force other people to live in his notion of utopia—the word “liberal” no longer seems to have any connection with its root “free”—it always means “Pass another law! Make the bastard do it our way.” Whereas my solution to almost everything is “Let’s repeal that law” or, possibly, “Let’s not do anything—let’s wait.”37
But he came this time to kick some over-upholstered butt. Most of these new converts had been brought in by Ayn Rand and suffered from a peculiar kind of mental arthritis. Robert had no use for theoretical doctrinaires, so he decided to play advocatus diabolus and took as his text the lifeboat problem: You are ship’s officer in a lifeboat, in freezing, choppy seas, he posited, with the only gun. There are too many people for the boat’s supplies to sustain, and more in the water. What do you do?
This was a good test problem, because it requires you to take a position on an extremely fundamental question: the moral relationship of the public and the private. “I find that if a man can face up to the ‘lifeboat problem,’ find a solution that makes sense, I can deal with him.”38 But the simplistic, doctrinally pure answers favored by this generation of libertarians gave no help.
Any libertarian so doctrinaire that he cannot find a pragmatic solution to this problem deserves no tolerance from others. His opinions on “rights” in space are worthless; the rest of us are under no obligation to let him waste our time.
Unfortunately a large percentage of those who describe themselves as “libertarian” are indeed that doctrinaire, and would thereby be a mortal danger to their shipmates.39
He would not let them change the terms of the problem, or tap dance out of it. One older man became so angry he cursed Robert and stomped out of the meeting; a younger man became so upset that he began to stammer and could not talk.40
His work there was done. On to Tucson.
The SF Expo was very badly conceived and executed. Instead of the thousands expected, only about five hundred showed up, and the blood drive (they had dragooned the young Michael Cassutt to run it) collected only thirty-five pints of blood. But if the Red Cross was happy, Heinlein was happy. He gave a television interview promoting the Red Cross to KGUN TV41 and on a tour of a hospital at the University of Arizona, observed an experimental heart catheterization done on a dog, the fluoroscopic television monitor showing the tube moving up the dog’s arteries to its brain where they injected an X-ray opaque dye. The dog didn’t seem to mind, which was mind-boggling.42
Back at home, Robert went to work, writing. Ginny noticed that he was abstracted quite a lot of the time, which was usual while he was writing. But he also went off on talking jags sometimes, which was not usual at all.43 By the end of June 1977, he was two hundred pages into the manuscript. Years earlier, as the projects got larger, Ginny had stopped reading the “dailies.” Heinlein said he got more useful feedback from her if she read it all at once, when he was finished with the first draft.44 This one was going slowly; when the manuscript reached five hundred pages, he told her it might take two years to write!45
They had been contacted by David Hartwell for Gregg Press’s line of hardcover science fiction for libraries.46 Heinlein always was interested in keeping his books in hardcover—and knew they sold well to libraries. Despite a very small advance,47 Heinlein and Hartwell contracted for two books to appear in 1978, Double Star (with an introduction by Joe Haldeman) and I Will Fear No Evil (with an introduction by Paul Williams, founder of Crawdaddy, the first U.S. magazine of rock music criticism).48
At the urging of Lloyd Biggle, Heinlein finally decided to accept an honorary Doctorate of Humane Letters from Eastern Michigan University on September 23, 1977. Ginny arranged three blood drives in conjunction with the trip to Detroit and Ypsilanti—to keep him busy while she made some stealth arrangements of her own: The artist Frank Kelly Freas had done a very sexy portrait of Nichelle Nichols as Lt. Uhura that was destined for the Smithsonian’s permanent collection. Ginny wanted a copy—a duplicate painting, actually—to give Robert for his birthday. Freas was dubious about being able to complete it in time, but his wife, Polly, assured Ginny she would see to it. Ginny recruited Kelly to help out with the upcoming SunCon blood drive at the end of the month, sketching to entertain the donors waiting for the doctors.
For the ceremony Heinlein was decked out in academic regalia, with gown and mortarboard. President Brickley of the university gave the principal address:49
[H]is work has endured remarkably. In an era when a bestselling, prize-winning novel may be forgotten within a decade, virtually everything Robert Heinlein has written in the field of science fiction is still in print, still being bought and read with high praise, wherever people read books and in whatever language.
Doc Smith’s daughter Verna Trestrail was there, and Betsy Curtis—and Denis Paradis came down to Detroit from Montreal, to meet in person for the first time. Denis noticed something “not quite right” about Robert’s health, but could not put his finger on it exactly.50
SunCon, over the Labor Day weekend of 1977, plunged them back into big science-fiction conventions, so much more stressful than the Trek conventions. On the way to the registration desk, they were stopped half a dozen times by autograph seekers, and finally had to beg off, saying that because of Robert’s medical problems with balance he could no longer sign standing up; he really needed a table set up to give autographs these days.51 On another occasion, they were seated in the lobby talking with some friends, and Ginny looked up to realize they were surrounded by a ring of fans trying to listen in to the conversation. It was tiresome—and not a little creepy—to be so constantly on display.52
On one occasion, a bearded young man marched up to Heinlein in the middle of the hotel lobby, obviously having screwed up his courage to the act. His name was Jim Baen, he explained, an editor for Ace Books. He had noticed that Ace had just one Heinlein property, the old (1966) Worlds of Robert A. Heinlein collection, that had an unaccountably low royalty: 4.5 percent. He had persuaded the powers-that-be at Ace to increase the royalty rate, he said, to 8 percent. Heinlein had paid almost no attention at all to the royalty reports on this “bottom-of-the-barrel” collection, so he was surprised by the news, but properly grateful: He thanked young Baen, but before he could invite him to sit down and chat, Baen marched away, having successfully surmounted his personal crisis.
Between the blood drives, Robert kept plugging away at the new novel, The Panki-Barsoom Number of the Beast. Working on it one day, he had a brief moment of disconnect, and his vision doubled and went blurry. He sat quietly until it passed. He was overstressed, he knew—but he had too much lined up for the immediate future to take a break now. He did not mention the incident to Ginny at that time.53
On October 13 they flew to Salt Lake City for two blood
drives in Utah. The first was in conjunction with a small science-fiction convention, Saltcon, where two local Mormon hospitals were collaborating on the blood drive. Just three weeks after the doctoral ceremony, he was obviously tired. At one point, Jerry Pournelle solicitously offered to help him getting down a stairway. “Of course I can get down the stairs!” Heinlein snapped. “I can always fall down!” He was articulate and witty in private conversation, but Karen Serassio (the chair of the convention) observed that the prospect of giving his public guest of honor speech seemed to distress him, and that he was nervous and ill at ease during the speech. She later heard audience members speculate that he was going senile.54 The announcement that Bing Crosby had just died was in the news that morning, so he led off with a prayer. The high percentage of Mormons in his audience was obviously on his mind, but he was not articulating well. Ginny sat in the front row so she could prompt him, if necessary—and did when he said “LSD” instead of “LDS.” At the end of his speech, he led the convention singing “Come, Come Ye Saints.”55
The next leg of the trip, a blood drive in Logan, Utah, was disastrous. When they got to Logan, they found that none of the conditions on which they had agreed to come had been accommodated: The Red Cross did not want them there in the first place; the library told him to talk about science fiction—and refused to limit the audience to blood donors (which was an absolute condition so far as Heinlein was concerned).56
This was exactly why they made a policy of paying their own way: Heinlein told them bluntly that he would not be bullied by them, and he and Ginny went home a day early.
Robert A. Heinlein, In Dialogue with His Century, Volume 2 Page 50
