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

by William H. Patterson, Jr.

  Clarke was stunned: “‘He accused me of typically British arrogance,’ said Clarke, ‘and he really was vicious. It really hurt me. I was very sad about it.’”39 But it was Heinlein’s position that Clarke’s “moral doubts” about SDI were outrageously misplaced, since it was a move to make nuclear war technologically obsolete, and it was past bearing for Clarke to be shaking a moralistic finger at people who were trying honorably to work their way out from under the gun—a gun, moreover, not pointed directly at him and his.40

  Heinlein figuratively turned his back on Clarke, who spent the rest of the meeting talking with others and trying to regain his equilibrium. “As the meeting broke up, Clarke approached Heinlein and said, ‘I can’t help the British [sic], but I’ll try to do something about the arrogance.’”41

  And in fact Clarke did change his position after that meeting (he still did think the “umbrella over the U.S.” was silly and unworkable—but so did many of the CAC participants: that “perfect defense” was not on the technical agenda). He ceased speaking out against SDI.42

  32

  AFTER 1984

  As soon as he got back from Los Angeles, Heinlein went back to work on The World Snake.1 This book had turned out more complicated and possibly more confusing than most, because of the different time-travel methods all used simultaneously, and he took care with it.2 There was no hurry to finalize the manuscript while the sales of Job were peaking; he spent five months revising the text and sent it off to New York in the first week of January 1985.

  Leon Stover’s proposal to Twayne’s U.S. Author Series was approved for a book to come out in spring 1987. Both the Heinleins agreed to read Stover’s manuscript, if he promised to tell no one. They feared being once again swamped with reading requests. “So let’s keep it secret between us,”3 Ginny wrote to Stover.

  At the end of March 1985, Heinlein was formally diagnosed with emphysema—a progressive, degenerative lung disease in which the oxygen-absorbing tissues are destroyed. His lung capacity was hovering around 28 percent. It had been long enough coming that he was used to the idea and accepted it. More distressing, actually, was that Pixel had been diagnosed with feline leukemia around the same time. In the past, that would have been a death sentence. But he was getting treatment now. Pixel was such a character that he was a great comfort to them both—the most communicative and intelligent cat they had ever known.

  They had acquired Pixel in 1982, when Taffy (Taffrail Lord Plushbottom) died—an eighth-generation descendent of Pixie, The Only Cat (feline hero of The Door into Summer) and the last of his line. Pixel was Shelley Pixilated Antarctica, a marmalade tom with tortoise-shell markings who looked like the original Pixie and was named for their guide in Shanghai and for the continent they had just visited. Pixel was a Robert’s-cat, sleeping like the original Pixie in the crook of his arm or leaned up against him. For five years.

  The World Snake sailed through the editorial process, except for one point: Eleanor, Ginny, and his editor at Putnam’s, Susan Allison, all hated the “snake” in the title. The Reluctant Knight, a metaleptic reference to Don Quixote, didn’t play well, either. Robert asked Ginny for help coming up with a new title. Pixel, who was a minor character in the book, was naturally on Ginny’s mind at the moment.

  I said “how about ‘he walks through walls?’” and Robert said, “No, but you’ve got an idea there,” and he went into the study and he wrote and wrote and wrote. Finally came out with The Cat Who Walks Through Walls.

  And everybody said, “Don’t you mean The Cat That Walks Through Walls? And he said, “no, I mean The Cat Who Walks Through Walls.4

  Pixel was definitely a person.

  Heinlein prepared a gummed label and fixed it over the title page instead of retyping it.

  It was an unusually hot summer in 1985, and an unusually dangerous fire season. They kept emergency flight bags loaded in the car in case they had to evacuate. There was no birthday cake that year: Ninety-five degrees was simply too hot to bake. Instead he celebrated by making a $20,000 donation to High Frontier.

  Heinlein was stirring up a new book, taking cards out of the idea files and shuffling them together. If what he came up with is an indication of his thinking at the time, he must have felt that the big meta-story of the World As Myth that had been shaping up for some time needed a parallel and complement to the Future History narrative, which was, after all, the master story (myth)—and which was also to some degree a myth of the America of the twentieth century. His new book was told through the eyes of a woman with enough perspective to be able to see it all—Lazarus Long’s mother.

  The basic story structure was probably coming together in his mind in mid-August 1985 when Jayne Sturgeon visited the Heinleins to ask for Robert’s help.5 Theodore Sturgeon had died on May 8, 1985. He had been working at a novel, Godbody, for more than fifteen years. The book was substantially finished but neither polished nor edited.6 Jayne Sturgeon was a writer and professional editor herself, but she told Heinlein she could not get started putting Godbody in shape to send to its posthumous publisher, Donald A. Fine, though she urgently needed the money this manuscript represented.7

  When Jayne mailed the Godbody manuscript8 he read it over and was able to make suggestions about technical issues such as reworking the paragraphing.9 Sturgeon had been playing with the same technical problem that Heinlein had been working: multiple-first-person. Godbody was something more along the lines of A Night in the Luxembourg:10 A sylvan deity—a kind of Pan—touches the lives of eight people. It was regrettably poorly written in Heinlein’s opinion11—though he would not say so to Jayne. He recommended some cuts and minor changes.

  Jayne asked him to write an introduction for the book, and he wrote an affectionate and thoughtful memorial to the man, not quite three thousand words, August 30 to September 1, 1985: “Agape and Eros: The Art of Theodore Sturgeon.”

  In Godbody he tells us still again, and even more emphatically, the same timeless message that runs through all his writings and through all his living acts—a message that was ancient before he was born but which he made his own, then spoke it and sang it and shouted it and sometimes scolded us with it.

  “Love one another.”

  Robert Silverberg, who was assembling the volume for publication, thanked Heinlein for an “absolutely perfect” introuction.12 Jayne thanked him properly, and that was the compensation for this job—as he had planned.13

  Heinlein started writing Maureen Johnson: An Irregular Autobiography of a Somewhat Irregular Lady in September 1985, passing the manuscript section by section as he wrote it, not to Ginny this time, but to longtime fan friend Betsy Curtis for an outsider’s perspective.

  Just as Curtis finished up her first-reading, they received word that Judy-Lynn Benjamin del Rey had suffered a brain hemorrhage in New York. She did not die right away, but it did put to an end a brilliant career as an editor. She had shepherded the acquisition of Robert’s remaining juveniles from Scribner in 1975 and 1976, getting them into paperback. Robert called frequently to cheer her up.14

  The book business was changing drastically; all the book people were being replaced by bean-counters and button sorters. Heinlein was happy that the individuals who had taken a chance on him and stood by him during the time when his market was developing should have the benefit of the increased profitability—but when they were forced out and conglomerates took over, the sense of dealing with individuals as a small businessman disappeared.15

  For decades now, Signet had been jiggering the reprints on their paperback issues to keep the market starved. Signet kept the automatic renewal options at the old, and very low, royalty rates. Heinlein’s new contracts were offering royalties on the high end of the scale—10 to 12 percent—while the old contracts were paying the 1950s rates, 4 to 6 percent.

  Mac Talley was long gone from Signet, and they had no debt of gratitude to whatever conglomerate held the stock in NAL this season. Ginny and Eleanor Wood finally had enough of it.
When the next contract renewal came up in October 1985 they forced Signet/NAL into arbitration over the automatic renewal16 and won their point for any contract that had a term clause—all of them except Beyond This Horizon. They were able to place the four Doubleday books with another paperback house right away, and that gave them a pile of galleys to check.

  The Cat Who Walks Through Walls was released and hit the New York Times bestseller list on November 11. At the same time, the paperback release of Job was on the bestseller lists for both the B. Dalton and Waldenbooks chains. Since he couldn’t do book tours of any kind anymore, due to his health, Heinlein wrote and recorded a short audio “Message to the Berkeley Sales Staff Concerning The Cat Who Walks Through Walls.”17

  Spider Robinson was the first to notice this book was part of a continuing story.18 The New York Times Book Review review stressed Heinlein’s iconoclasm, designating Heinlein “a master craftsman as he looks back over nearly half a century of labor, most of it in the fields of literature [there’s the L word] rather than in its plantation house.”19

  The fan mail also started coming in. “[P]ractically every letter asks for a sequel,” Ginny wrote to a friend. “I would have thought everyone would want Robert to bring Mike [the self-aware computer of The Moon Is a Harsh Mistress] back to life, but no, they’re all interested in saving the kitten! A fictional kitten at that.”20

  Heinlein had, about that time, a letter from Keith Henson, one of the founders of the L5 Society, who had just moved to San Jose. Henson had been trying to interest him in cryonic preservation, because of the “cold sleep” he had written about in The Door into Summer (people were always assuming—and still assume—that Heinlein had a special personal interest in things he put into his stories, though it usually just meant he saw possibilities for a good story in them).21 At a conference banquet, he had been overheard remarking to a dinner companion “How do we know it won’t interfere with reincarnation?”22 That was, of course, at least half facetious, but he had just enough leftover conviction from his childhood to treat it as a serious possibility. He didn’t talk about it anymore, except, very occasionally, with Ginny. If it were true, he promised Ginny he would wait for her on the Other Side, just in case.23

  L. Ron Hubbard passed away at Whispering Winds Ranch in San Luis Obispo, a few hundred miles to the south. His intimates withheld the news for a few days, but the New York Times obituary ran on January 28, 1986.

  January 28, 1986, is one of those days that is etched into the memory of everyone who lived through it: the Space Shuttle Challenger blew up seventy-five seconds into liftoff. It was a great setback for NASA and the space program.

  The publisher Jeremy Tarcher wrote on January 31 asking Heinlein to verify biographical details in a new Panshin book, The World Beyond the Hill. He declined. He and Ginny were reviewing Professor Stover’s manuscript as it came in, chapter by chapter, and sending back comments. The impression Heinlein had gotten when the Stovers had visited, that this was a possible biographer, must have been growing stronger. There were things Stover got wrong24—but he was the first commentator in Heinlein’s experience who seemed at all able to see some of the major thematic currents in his work, to understand even a little of who he was as a human being.25

  Gradually, Heinlein was able to get back to his own work. He finished the first draft of Maureen Johnson early in March 1986, at 158,000 words—the longest thing he had written since Time Enough for Love.

  As the Congressional hearings on the Challenger disaster wore on, the perennial arguments about “wasting money” in space surfaced again. When Heinlein was approached by the grassroots Challenger Campaign to underwrite an appeal to the American people, he enthusiastically donated money and the use of his name for a full-page “A Letter to the American People” ad that appeared in the Sunday New York Times on March 30, 1986, urging that NASA be encouraged to honor their memory by carrying forward the aspirations of these fallen heroes.

  A trip to another Citizens Advisory Council meeting, on May 7, exposed Robert and Ginny to the “Russian flu” that was going around that year. Heinlein was not really up and around for three weeks: The influenza made his emphysema worse.

  On his first partial day up he wrote a long autobiographical letter for Leon Stover. He had more “fiddling carpentry”26 to do with the new book—fact-checking mostly. While he was down with the flu, he had decided to retitle the new book. Possibly taking a cue from that open letter “to the American People,” he chose a title from Tennyson’s “Ulysses”—about picking up and moving on, as humankind has always rolled on:

  Come, my friends.

  ‘Tis not too late to seek a newer world.

  Push off, and sitting well in order smite

  The sounding furrows; for my purpose holds

  To sail beyond the sunset, and the baths

  Of all the western stars, until I die.27

  He titled the book To Sail Beyond the Sunset.

  Robert’s seventy-ninth birthday was spent quietly. He celebrated by making another $20,000 donation to High Frontier.

  Ginny was up and around early in the morning July 26, 1986, getting her morning orange juice, when she heard a noise in Robert’s bathroom. She went to investigate and found him in his pajamas, with blood flowing from his nose and down his chest. There was blood everywhere.28 She went into overdrive and tried to stanch the flow. Robert told her he had simply turned over in bed, and the nosebleed started.

  Ginny got his service to ring their local doctor on an emergency basis: She should take Robert to the Emergency Room at Dominican Hospital—while he called an EENT specialist to meet them there. Within minutes she hustled Robert into the car, still in his blood-soaked pajamas, with a box of Kleenex and an armful of Turkish towels (and a sack for the used tissue).

  The drive took about forty-five minutes, and he was losing blood at an alarming rate (but an ambulance would have taken even longer). Robert was able to walk in under his own power. The specialist, Dr. Seftel, took charge of him.

  Dr. Seftel positioned a balloon at the top of the nasal passage and inflated it, to put pressure on the artery that was bleeding, and then packed the nose. The whole procedure took about forty minutes.

  Robert had lost a lot of blood—most of it on the bedroom and bathroom floors; probably two units, nearly a liter. He went directly to the Intensive Care Unit with an intravenous drip and oxygen and a battery of monitors. The bout of Russian flu might well have triggered this incident by inducing vascular fragility.

  Later that afternoon, with a critical care doctor and nurse in the room, Robert’s blood pressure began to drop precipitously. He could feel himself sinking, he told Ginny. She called out to the doctor and nurse as his blood pressure sank to 40/20. They got his head lowered, and Ginny tried to stay out of the way, while holding his hand.29 He needed a transfusion.

  Transfusions in 1986 were not the automatic thing they had been ten years earlier. The blood supply was known to be tainted, and there were risks—significant risks—of hepatitis and even AIDS.

  When Ginny got back to the Bonny Doon house the next day, the bathroom looked, she said, like an abattoir, splashed with blood drying on the tiles.30 Dr. Seftel tried to take out the packing and the balloon, and another massive hemorrhage started. Hastily Dr. Seftel reinflated the balloon and repacked the nose.

  This was clearly going to require surgery—and Robert would once again need the surgical expertise at the UC Medical Center hospital in San Francisco. He was transferred the next day, in an ambulance. Ginny followed in the car.

  They managed on July 28 to get the new hemorrhage under control and gave Robert two units of packed cells to replace the blood he had lost. By July 30 Dr. Crumley decided to give him a week of observation to regain some strength before surgery to tie off the artery on the right side of his face, top and bottom beside the nose, with silver rings.

  On August 6, they actually got to the stage of prepping Robert for surgery. But about 12:30 that after
noon, Dr. Crumley found Ginny waiting in Robert’s room and told her they wouldn’t need to operate, after all: When the packing and the balloon were removed this time, the bleeding did not resume. A lucky stroke—the Maxillary Artery had closed itself off spontaneously.

  If his blood pressure stayed stable, she could take him home.

  On Thursday, August 7, they made the trip back to Santa Cruz. Ginny could not leave him unattended while she picked up his prescription in downtown Santa Cruz, so she called the local Visiting Nurses, just to have someone on hand to call an ambulance if needed—but the LVN they sent had a cold, and Ginny sent her away: They could not risk another respiratory infection for Robert. The pharmacist, who happened to live nearby, offered to bring the prescription with him that evening.

  That was the most unpleasant and nerve-wracking day of Ginny’s life. She fell into bed exhausted about 9:00 P.M. after rigging a “wake-me-up” cable tied to a radio with the volume turned up to full blast, so Robert could roust her out of bed if need be.

  Two days later, Ginny wrote a circular letter to send out to all their friends, keeping everybody abreast of Robert’s condition.31 She was getting ready to mail out the second batch when the radio-alarm sounded. Robert was having another hemorrhage—his third. Back to Dominican, where Dr. Seftel installed a new balloon dam, and then back to San Francisco by ambulance, Ginny again following in the car with clean clothes and miscellanea.

  This time, Dr. Crumley decided, they would perform the surgery no matter what. By the time Ginny found a hotel and got back to the hospital, about 11:00 A.M., they were already prepping him for the surgery.32

  On the way up Ginny had noticed a flickering in her vision—like the “schlieren” refraction slips in the visual field she had noticed when she was studying microsurgical technique, years ago. It went away, and there didn’t seem to be anything to be done about it; she did not mention it to Robert at all while he was sick.