Robert A. Heinlein, In Dialogue with His Century, Volume 2

by William H. Patterson, Jr.

  After they got home, they received a phone call from Judy-Lynn del Rey, in New York. Arthur C. Clarke was in town, and she had taken him and Isaac Asimov to dinner earlier in the evening. She had a brainstorm, talking with them in her living room, about getting all of “the big three” of science fiction together virtually, if not in the flesh, and phoned Robert at home. At one point, Asimov jocularly said, “Come on, fellows. We’ve been the big three now for decades, and people are getting tired of it. Don’t you think, in order to give a break to the other writers, that one of you two (since you’re older than I am) should step aside?” They all got a good laugh when Heinlein cut through the indirection: “Fuck the other writers!” he said.57

  OctoCon, October 21 to 23, 1977, in nearby Santa Rosa (about 150 miles north of Santa Cruz), was the last SF convention blood drive of the year for them, and they were both tired but satisfied with the progress they had made in just a year and a little more. They were getting reports of repeat donors they had recruited early on, so it looked like they could count on the effort reaching a point where it would sustain itself.58 They could go to Atlanta for an American Association of Blood Banks convention in November with a good report to make.

  Heinlein was able to write “The End” on the new novel before the trip to Atlanta. He finished it early one morning and left the completed manuscript on the kitchen counter for Ginny to read, as usual, and went to bed.

  Ginny read through The Panki-Barsoom Number of the Beast with growing puzzlement. The story was straightforward enough—two newlywed couples fleeing across alternate realities from alien villains he called “Black Hats” (the Barsoomian name for these “vermin” was Pankera, pl. Panki). She put down the manuscript. While it was perfectly competent yard goods, it just wasn’t a Heinlein novel.59

  She knew what she had to do—and she could not bring herself to do it.

  Over the years, Heinlein had always sat down at the typewriter wondering if he could pull it off one more time, and maybe he had just reached the point where he couldn’t. This could be the end of his writing career. It would be devastating for him. It was “not best work,” she told him.60 “I took that responsibility very seriously,” Ginny later said. “The idea that I just had to tell him not to try to publish it was—almost a death-knell for us.”61

  This was the first time Heinlein had to confront his faculties failing in some important way—and it meant more for him than simple old age. The possibility he would go like his father or his mother—mind gone for years, or flickering in and out—was disturbing. “We just thought it would be that way,” Ginny said simply.62

  There was absolutely nothing that could be done about it—except to accept the reality as he found it and adjust accordingly. He would carry through with the arrangements he had already made for that year, while he still had the ability. Neither of them said anything to anyone. Thanks to Ginny’s careful management, their savings would be adequate to keep them comfortable, and even if he did not produce any new books, the writing business continued to expand.

  The AABB presented him with an Award of Merit dated November 15, 1977. He had essentially accomplished with the blood drives what he had set out to do. They could be happy with the successful results of their efforts. The AABB and the CCBC were already taking his legacy seriously, and the Red Cross would come around in time, even without his direct supervision.

  But for the first time in years, he caught a post-convention respiratory infection and spent time in bed. They took another South Sea Island cruise in mid-December—Heinlein was going to investigate the blood services situation in Papeete now that they had a hematologist reorganizing blood services on the island.

  They were in Tahiti by the first of the year, and Heinlein visited the clinic on January 3, 1978. He had another of those “attacks” where his eyes went blurry for a second, but he sat down and waited it out, again not saying anything to Ginny.

  The next day, he and Ginny took time off to walk the beach at Moorea, strolling the landing’s road, enjoying the view. Robert turned to look at the mountain, and things went blurry. He didn’t quite collapse, but he couldn’t walk, either. Balancing on his left leg, he told Ginny: “I am very sorry, darling, but I must ask you to take me back to the ship. I have gone into double vision and I’m partly paralyzed on my right side.”63

  28

  “HUMAN VEGETABLE”

  Ginny half carried, half dragged him back to the ship. She got him settled in their cabin and called the ship’s doctor.

  Dr. Armando Fortuna diagnosed a Transient Ischemic Attack, TIA—not a stroke per se, but a momentary blockage of blood to the brain that can be a precursor to a stroke, an early warning. Heinlein needed to make immediate lifestyle changes—starting with giving up cigarettes. He had an unlit cigarette in his hand at this exact moment: He had smoked for nearly sixty years—since the very first Armistice Day, in fact, November 11, 1918. He put the cigarette back in its pack and never smoked again.1

  They spent the rest of the trip keeping quiet. Heinlein had numbness and tingling on his right side that came and went, even when his vision was clear. They were in Lahaina on January 11—and did not even let local friends know they were there. Nevertheless, he had another TIA in Hawaii.

  Back in Santa Cruz by January 19, 1978, a round of doctor’s visits commenced almost immediately. Dr. MacKenzie, their internist, took him off alcohol as well as tobacco and gave him an even more restricted diet than he had been following. He also ordered exercise. In March, Ginny told friends, “Robert has been taking daily exercise for about a week now. He hates it; but does it in the same spirit in which he flosses his teeth—do it and get it over with.”2

  MacKenzie sent Heinlein to Dominican Hospital for an MRI of his brain. Tomography—a series of X-rays combined and interpreted by computers—was a very exotic, high-tech procedure in 1978. The tomography revealed no tumors or evidence of strokes; Dr. MacKenzie said there was a 55 percent chance he could live another five years without a stroke—if and only if he reduced lifestyle stress to zero at once and permanently. “Act your ages,” he told them. He specifically forbade any more conventions or blood drives.

  Dr. MacKenzie suspected a blockage of the carotid artery, so a neurological specialist was called in, Dr. S. Allan Dorosin, at the Sutter Hospital in Santa Cruz. Dr. Dorosin told them that their best strategy was to wait and see for six months, because the surrounding blood vessels might take up the increased load. He prescribed aspirin and Dipyridamole as blood thinners.

  They tried to get on with their lives. Ginny began working on organizing the handbook on conducting blood drives for which she had been collecting notes.3 She took to wearing earphones so that she could listen to the classical station on the radio all day without disturbing Robert, either because he was sleeping or because it was, as he said, “too emotional” for him to concentrate.4

  Ginny had told a few friends and business associates about her husband’s medical situation, enjoining them to keep quiet about it, as they would be flooded with mail and phone calls if word of his condition got out.

  Even with the medication, Heinlein’s condition continued to deteriorate. By the first of April 1978, his sense of balance was seriously impaired, and he had to hold on to the walls just to get around the house. Worried, Ginny called Dr. Dorosin just two months into the six-month waiting period: Robert wasn’t going to make it at this rate.

  Dr. Dorosin needed to get better information. He referred Robert to Dr. Wylie at the UC San Francisco hospital, who was a specialist in the operation that scraped out the carotid artery, reducing the plaque that accumulated on the walls of the blood vessel so that the blood flow could be restored.

  Ginny did not tell Heinlein, because he had enough on his mind as it was, that Rowan Thomas, their general partner in the Montana mining operation in which they were so heavily invested, fell ill early in April and went into the hospital with a stomach ache. Four days later, he was dead of advanced metastatic cancer
. He was fifty-five years old and apparently in good health, right up till he died.

  Heinlein found himself on the other end of the process he had witnessed last year in Tucson, on a dog. The surgical staff positioned the television monitor so that he could see it as well, and he watched the catheter travel up his own veins for two hours on April 16, 1978. The only irritant was that the head of the team performing the angiogram (four doctors, three nurses) was a fan of his and wanted to talk about his stories. Robert mostly could ignore him, interrupting—frequently—for a medical question.

  How many people ever get a chance to watch their own hearts beat? Utterly fascinating! I could see my heart beating, see my diaphragm rise and fall, see my lungs expand and contract, see the dye go up into my brain … [sic] see the network of blood vessels in my brain suddenly spring into sharp relief. It was worth the trip!5

  The flush of X-ray-opaque dye pinpointed the blockage, high in his skull, above the branching of the artery. The other tests ruled out problems with his heart and the rest of his circulatory system, but this blockage was too high in his skull for the reaming-out operation Dr. Wylie specialized in. Dr. Wylie came to his room while they were both there, and shook his head, saying nothing could be done about it. The prospect of going like his father, fading out for years, was now a reality.

  A little later, though, Dr. Wylie stuck his head in the room: “There is one hope,” he said. There was a relatively new operation—by chance it was featured in Scientific American that month, and Ginny had just read about it—called a “bypass”—in Heinlein’s case a carotid bypass. They were mostly done in Zurich, but by chance the world’s expert in this new operation, Dr. Norman Chater, was in San Francisco at the nearby Franklin Hospital. Dr. Wylie set up an interview.

  The tests showed Robert’s other arteries were in good shape: This operation would take a section from an artery servicing the surface of the skull on his temporal lobe and reverse it, joining the cut end to the main artery in the Sylvan fissure of the brain, and jumping around the obstruction (hence “bypass”). Dr. Chater gave him an 85 percent chance of improvement, but the risks were great: They would be operating through a hole in his skull, very near the language and creativity centers of the brain. And there was a 2 percent mortality rate.

  He should think about it, Dr. Chater told him—but it should be done quickly; he was especially vulnerable to strokes right now, and any damage to the other blood vessels in a stroke would cut his chances.

  This was risking everything on one throw of the dice.

  “Well, Honey,” he told friend and archivist Rita Bottoms, “it’s either sit on a couch for the rest of my life as a vegetable, and never write again, or go through this and take care of it so I can write.”6 He asked Ginny what he should do, but she declined even to give input. There was a sizeable chance of losing him—and she wasn’t ready to let go7—but, it was something he would have to decide for himself: She would go along with whatever he chose to do.8 “Was it worthwhile?” Heinlein later wrote:

  Yes, even [were] I [to die] at one of the four critical points … [sic] because sinking into senility while one is still bright enough to realize that one’s mental powers are steadily failing is a miserable, no-good way to live … I was just smart enough to realize that I had nothing left to look forward to, nothing whatever. This caused me to be quite willing to “Go-for-Broke”—get well or die.9

  They scheduled the operation for April 28, 1978, at the Ralph K. Davies Medical Center, Franklin Hospital, UCSF. Dr. Chater was a little apprehensive: He had done over two hundred of these operations, but he had never before had so prominent a patient. A few days before the surgery was scheduled, Heinlein contracted a cold. They were reluctant to put off the surgery, so he was “dried out” with antihistamines.

  The procedure began with trephination: They peeled back a flap of the scalp and drilled a two-inch-diameter hole into the skull over the left ear, exposing the brain. Heinlein joked to Dr. Chater that a hole in the head was no handicap to a science-fiction writer—a line too good to use only once; he repeated that joke to others, for months. When the bypass was finished, without incident, the surgeons covered the hole with a plastic plate and replaced the scalp.

  Jack Williamson had come to San Francisco for a visit, and Ginny took him in to see Robert the morning after the surgery. Even with his short night (there was a period of four hours when he was disoriented and could not speak—postsurgical aphasia—but it passed), the improvement was obvious. Williamson had seen him last in 1976, at MidAmeriCon, and was disturbed then by his “old man’s walk and look.” Now, “In bed, with a bandage around his head, he greeted us with a strong voice and a vigorous handshake.”10 Ginny put an index card in Robert’s hand and told him to write his name: It was the first time in more than a year that his handwriting was legible. The recovery was instantaneous: “It was the difference between a light that’s turned on and a light that’s off.”11

  Medicare was not covering more than a fraction of the expenses. The supplemental insurance they carried paid only 20 percent of what Medicare paid—and the amount of bookkeeping required to get even that covered was staggering.12 They were not destitute—but it must have been on Ginny’s mind that Robert’s retirement from writing might be permanent, and their accountant had warned them that reprint income tends to dwindle away once a writer goes out of production.

  And nights, in the hotel, without mentioning it to Robert, Ginny was long-distance managing their Montana mining investment, taking matters into her own hands to prevent the whole thing from collapsing after Rowan Thomas’s sudden death. Using Robert’s proxy, she appointed a lawyer to represent them at the general partnership meeting and saw to it that the new general partner was an experienced lawyer with a background in mining. She made small, direct loans—a few thousand dollars—to keep the payroll current while probate tied up the funds. Rowan Thomas’s widow, Barbara, called her several times, long and uncomfortable pleas to save the partnership by taking more of the investment. This, however, Ginny was not prepared to do: They could not even contemplate throwing good money after bad. The losses on the mining investment, together with the surgery, had wiped out their savings.

  Some of the other limited partners called, too, with the same requests, but she rapidly reached the stage where she told them bluntly, “Don’t be silly.”13

  “I know there’s money in mining,” Robert had told her: “We’ve put a lot into it.”14 And so they had. And that was enough: They had realized some tax benefits from the investment, at a time when they needed the write-offs to control their tax burden, and Ginny decided not to continue with risk investments.

  They let him go home a week after the operation, on May 6, 1979. The following morning he resumed his normal schedule, coming into the kitchen to let Ginny know he was ready for breakfast. He fainted, falling against Ginny, hard enough to bruise her.15 Alarmed, she caught him and wrestled him into a chair, putting his head between his knees until he recovered,16 “and then he was all right, and he never fainted again after that, but that was a near thing.”17

  They found out immediately that they would have to make more adjustments in their living/working arrangements: Robert called for Ginny that day, and she couldn’t hear him because she was wearing her earphones. She began carrying a walkie-talkie with her everywhere.18

  Heinlein was anxious to get back to writing.19 After only a few days of bed rest, he got out the manuscript for Panki-Barsoom and read it over. It was worse than bad, he told Yoji Kondo later that year: It was mediocre.20 But he must have seen possibilities in it.

  Heinlein had been interested in a specific technical problem for a very long time: multiple first-person viewpoint. Before his mind started to fade, he had drafted experiments with this sort of thing—fragments just to work on the technical problem—and shuffled them into what he called his “laboratory,” a drawer in his desk where he kept his writing experiments. There was a lot of noncommercial stuff in his la
boratory—including an entire shelf in his closet of porn he had written for his own amusement. Some time ago, he had written a letter of instructions to Alan Nourse, effectively making him their nonofficial literary executor in case they should both be killed while they were traveling together. In the letter, he had told Nourse where their various concealed caches of money and such were to be found and asked him to dispose of both the porn and the laboratory—use it for his own amusement if he wished, but Robert would prefer he destroy it.21

  John Masters had done something with multiple first-person in Bhowani Junction (1954), but it wasn’t quite right: Heinlein had for years been thinking about applying cinema technique—fast, rapid cuts, a kind of different approach to stream of consciousness22—and he had learned enough by his decades of private experimentation to give it a try.

  He had moved, over the last decade, toward a more literary denseness of structure, always keeping more or less within the bounds of science fiction. For The Number of the Beast, he devised a test platform, an extended argument among his four viewpoint characters. In Panki-Barsoom, the character Zebadiah had naturally gravitated into leading the little band of explorers, but in The Number of the Beast, they had a rotating captainship, arguing out the problems of command as they went along. The gestation period for The Number of the Beast extended from May to October 1978.

  Lurton Blassingame had recently been diagnosed with Parkinson’s disease, and he took on some junior associates and combined agencies with another agent, Kirby McCauley, to take some of the workload off his shoulders. It was only a matter of time until he would retire, bringing Heinlein’s close association of more than thirty years to an end.

  Blassingame brought Kirby McCauley out for a visit late in July 1978, to introduce him in person. McCauley did not leave a good impression: Some of the decisions he had made seemed overhasty to them23—and he simply could not get it through his head that Ginny was the business manager for this team. It grated on Ginny’s nerves.