The Counterfeit Heinlein

by Laurence M. Janifer

  COPYRIGHT INFORMATION

  Copyright ©2001 by Laurence M. Janifer

  Published by Wildside Press, LLC

  www.wildsidebooks.com

  DEDICATION

  This adventure is

  for my dearest treasure,

  who dislikes to see

  her name in print.

  CHAPTER ONE

  THERE WAS ONCE something called science-fiction. (I know, I know, there is now, but it’s not the same—this was preSpace.) It began more than a hundred years before the Clean Slate War, and for a while it concentrated on what it kept calling exciting stories of science—look at all the wonders today’s mad scientists are going to bring us any decade now, that sort of thing. There was a Julius Verne, for instance—some of his things have survived, but not 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea, which irritates me; I’ve always wondered how many of those Leagues were red-headed, like the one in Sherlock Holmes. And there was The Foot of the Gods by Herbert Wells, which also hasn’t survived (although War of the Worlds did, and is actually fairly exciting, if you can get hold of a copy somewhere).

  But science-fiction started to change; things do. It began to concentrate more on people and on ideas (it was a commonplace of the time to say that science-fiction was a literature of ideas, though I am damned if I can imagine anything else for a literature to be of), while the detailed science surrendered the steering wheel and slowly slid into the back seat.

  Just a little while after that, science-fiction began to deal in matters that were scientific only by the most haphazard of definitions—everything from parapsychology (not just telepathy; telepathy exists, but this was something else again), a charming superstition a few especially wishful ancients thought of as psychology, and eventually such things as witchcraft, numerology and the Great Beyond.

  And then ... well, you get the idea. After the Clean Slate War, when enough pieces had been picked up and shoved back together, there began to be science-fiction again, but it had very little to do with science—any more than a great many comic-books or comic-tapes have to do with comedy.

  Now, there are people who know all this in great detail, or in as great detail as the surviving, and often confusing, records allow. (Was there really an author named Spider Callahan? Alfred Blishter?) I know it in fits and starts, because I did have a scrappy sort of Classical education once upon a time, and some of it has stuck. More, I took the quick course, so to speak, when Ping first mentioned his job to me; I collected all the information I could get at, and three or four sorts I hadn’t really thought I could get at until I tried.

  That, after all, is what a Survivor does—that’s what it says on my business cards: Gerald Knave, Survivor—in spite of what you’re used to seeing on your 3V. Up there, a Survivor is a grim, wordless sort of hero with a hot beamer in each hand and a great willingness to kill off half the cast on no very special provocation.

  A Survivor, and I’m sorry to shatter such illusions as you may be harboring, is essentially an information collector. You never know, in my trade, just which bit of information you are going to need in the Hell of a hurry, but you do know that, when the red signal lights up, you are not going to have the time to find it. Therefore, you gather in everything available, as long beforehand as you can manage, and you keep gathering in more information, more or less all the time.

  This particular job—Ping’s job, for which I read up on my preSpace sf, as it was called—actually began rather suddenly, and pre-Ping, with someone taking a shot at me.

  There I was, sitting quietly in a leased apartment on Ravenal—where I had gone to hobnob with some of the friends I have in high places—drinking coffee out of a china cup, watching my rented Totum direct two rented Robbies in the fine points of apartment-cleaning, and trying to decide which of several interesting restaurants I was going to invite Jamie Arthur to, later that evening. The coffee was Sumatra Mandheling, which Ravenal imports for a few discerning Nobels and suchlike. The time was fifteen-eleven, City Two local time; Ravenal has a twenty-four hour day, almost exactly, and even a twelve-month year. I take my coffee with cream and sugar, not in excessive amounts.

  Well, how did I know which fact might be the important one? It was a coolish late-Spring day, and I had my window open, and just at fifteen-eleven (which I am always going to think of as three-eleven P. M., since I do not have the Scientific Mind) something went whizz-crash-tinkle, and my lap was full of hot coffee. I was holding the cup’s handle; the rest of the china had left it, to complicate the apartment-cleaning situation.

  I sprang up with many an eager curse, dropping the handle and dabbing at my pants with both hands. In something under a full second, sanity returned, and I dropped to the floor, where I lay with my face in the luxurious carpet for ten full minutes. The Totum directed the Robbies to clean around me, not over me; Ravenal’s rental machines, as one would expect, are fairly bright.

  Any sensible marksman, I kept telling myself angrily, having missed the first shot by a reasonably thick hair, would have potted me in that endless second before I dropped. I kept muttering that into the damn carpet while I waited. For ten solid minutes. Of course it’s not especially helpful to set time limits on a marksman’s patience when you have no idea who the Hell he is, but ten minutes seemed about right as a wild guess, even adding in a safety factor.

  So I struggled upward, let my machines get on with their work, and didn’t get shot at again.

  And nothing else of vital importance happened that day or that night. Jamie and I had a pleasant dinner and a pleasant few hours of chat (I’d finally chosen an “old-fashioned British pub” with surprisingly good food, if all too predictable atmosphere—the name had at the least a definitely ancient feel: the Rose & Corona).

  I did not, just by the way, spend my time waiting nervously to get shot at again. My hopeful assassin had had his one shot, and he hadn’t taken any more. It seemed unlikely that he’d be bucketing around all over City Two (that’s Ravenal for you: extraordinarily bright and accomplished people, with no literary imagination whatever—not even Twin City or Doubleville) angling for another try.

  No, I relaxed and enjoyed myself, and Jamie seemed to enjoy himself, and I went to bed in a calm and fairly peaceful mood.

  I did make quite certain to shut and lock all the nice, unbreakable-glassex windows.

  And the next day at ten-thirty—somebody had asked round about me, and discovered that I keep civilized hours—the telephone rang, and it was Ping, whom I’d never so much as heard of before, offering me a job.

  * * * *

  HIS NAME WAS Ping Boom, and I am not making that up—my God, who would? It is amazing, if not downright sickening, what some parents will do to saddle their offspring with lifelong jeers and scars. Admittedly Boom is a surname that does cry out for ridicule, but would Abraham Boom, or Callian Boom, get quite the reaction I gave Ping Boom when he told me who he was? I doubt it.

  But when I was persuaded that he wasn’t trying to spoof me somehow, he turned out to be a very businesslike fellow. I agreed to meet him after I’d treated myself to a lovely, hand-crafted small breakfast, and, nicely cleaned up, was in his office by noon, or noon-thirty. “We want you to do a very specific job for us, Knave,” he said. He was a short, thin fellow with sparse whitish hair, large, ancient-looking eyeglasses, and a mouth that was better than halfway toward Pursed Disapproval.

  I told him to specify away.

  “We want you to find a missing manuscript. It’s quite valueless, but enormously important.”

  I asked him, as calmly as possible, just how that combination worked out; at first glance, it seemed just a trifle odd.

  “It’s a forgery,” he said. “A counterfeit. It
purports to be the work of a preSpace writer named Robert Heinlein.”

  I’d known more than the average reader about Heinlein even then—my Classical schooling—and he wasn’t quite preSpace; when the first moon landing was made (by Armstrong and Harriman, I believe) Heinlein had still been alive.

  “If it’s a forgery,” I said in a reasonable tone, “then why is it valuable?”

  “We can’t yet determine just how the forgery was managed,” he said. “It’s so nearly a perfect counterfeit that it fooled our experts for over four years—and our experts, Knave, know their business. Or businesses, of course.”

  We were, after all, on Ravenal, home of the Ravenal Scholarte (where Ping Boom was co-chief librarian, Manuscript Division). I agreed that Ravenal’s experts knew their businesses; they always do.

  “So you want me to track down the manuscript,” I said.

  “Exactly,” Ping Boom said. “It’s been stolen—very neatly, too. There’s been some talent at work here.”

  We discussed some other matters—payment, for instance. I won’t bother you with the whining and screaming on both sides, so common in such discussions, but we finally managed to arrive at a mutually unsatisfactory figure, and I agreed to come down and take a look at the scene of the crime, as the first step in finding the missing non-Heinlein.

  “There’s nothing to see, Knave,” Ping Boom told me.

  “That’s exactly what I want to look at,” I said, and we settled on a time.

  CHAPTER TWO

  THE LIBRARY OF Ravenal Scholarte (more Nobels per square cerebrum than anywhere else in the universe), or the part of it I went to visit, was a large and very odd building, about six or seven standard stories high, the usual perches on two big windows per floor, and the general feel of a museum. Many of Ravenal’s public buildings are fairly showy—the place tends to substitute tradition for imagination—and in the library they had a fair imitation of the ancient Grand Central Station, sitting, unfortunately, exactly in the middle of a sizable square of space planted with greenflower, and (as in the old joke) much larger. Grand Central Library, as I christened it (the Scholarte called it First Files Building) seemed to own something on the order of a hundred entrances, each leading into a maze of echoing corridors lined with doors. The doors looked like velvet-bordered wood—a nice, expensive touch; it’s not on the regular settings—but weren’t really there, of course; they were the usual hologram shows covering lock-and-unlock fields. Technologically, Ravenal is a bit more up-to-date than the date; half the improvements in the known systems seem to start there. I waited for Ping to unlock the Special Exhibits door, halfway down the hall on the left, and followed him inside.

  Everything was laid out under actual glass. “We try to fit the period,” Ping whispered to me, and I wondered just how he’d present, say, any bits of the Dead Sea Scrolls. I nodded, and we tiptoed around for a few minutes, getting accustomed to the glass and to the lighting.

  Glass isn’t glassex—it’s transparent and it comes in sheets, but it has a shine to it that just isn’t there for glassex. The wildly old-fashioned fluorescents that lit the room did not mate nicely with the glass; glare was everywhere, and your head had to be at one of a few particular angles for you to see inside the manuscript cases.

  But they were worth the effort. There was a notebook—one of the Future History notebooks, and open to a page on the ancestry of “Andrew ‘Slipstick’ Libby.” In Heinlein’s own handwriting—a decisive, clear written hand, not at all the sort of scribble one associates with mid-Twentieth holographs.

  There was a printed copy of The Man Who Sold the Moon, the original Shasta edition—some collector back before the Clean Slate War had had the remarkable good sense to bag it and either put it in vacuum or get caught in his own shelter airlock with it when the war began. The case was sealed (“Argon atmosphere,” Ping whispered), but I thought, romantically and inaccurately, that I could smell the original, actual paper and boards and glue.

  There was a manuscript copy of a very early Heinlein—”And He Built A Crooked House”—also in a sealed case, of course—and there was a disk that contained, according to the case label, a few of his headnotes for his final collection—that one has been lost, damn it—and a job lot of personal letters.

  And there was more. I won’t tantalize you with it—except to mention a color photograph (long faded, and almost as long restored) of Robert and his wife Virginia, taken, according to the label, somewhere in California at some time between 1960 and 1972.

  Of course, California is more mythical today than Heinlein—at least some of Heinlein has survived. The little 2D photo got to me, somehow, and I was dabbing at my eyes, just a bit, when I turned away from it. Ping nodded.

  “It does seem to affect people that way,” he said, and I told him it was the dust in the room. He nodded again and we let it go.

  At last I tore myself away from the damn precious relics, and asked: “Where was the forgery?”

  “The manuscript that was stolen?” Ping said. “Over by the window,” and he walked me over past a row of cases to a big window—glass like all the rest in the 20th-C wing, shining into my eyes very disturbingly—that looked out on a grove of trees. Maple, I thought, and those things from Rigel IV—walking-trees, the ones that used to stampede. I was sure of the walking-trees, since I’d been the one who had put an end to the stampedes.

  Long, long ago ... it was a shock to realize how long ago, and the odd thought gave me a very distant feeling of kinship with Robert Anson Heinlein, of much longer ago.

  A few steps before we reached the window, Ping stopped at an empty space just big enough to fit a case. “We haven’t yet replaced it with anything,” he said. “A late-Twentieth word-processor keyboard, perhaps, with its own attachments, just to give the feel...”

  I agreed that would be nice, and asked after the case the manuscript had been in. Ping looked at me in surprise.

  “Oh, that,” he said. “The Pigs have it.”

  It took me a few seconds. “The police?”

  He nodded, looking a little shamefaced. “One does get carried away,” he said. “I become so late-Twentieth in here...”

  “I’ll have to see that case,” I said. “Carefully and extensively. I’ll have to have some other people see it.”

  “I’m sure the—the police will be reasonable,” he said. It was more than I was; in my experience the sort of people who choose policing as a career are also the sort of people who are only as reasonable as they absolutely have to be.

  “You’ll have to tell them I’m officially in your employ,” I said. “Otherwise, I’m just some Joe from Kokomo.”

  Ping stared. “Some what from where?” he said.

  “Slang,” I said. “Somewhere in the Twentieth, probably pre-Heinlein.”

  “Ah,” he said, and nodded again. It was one of his strong points. “To be sure. I’ll speak to the police. Anything else, Knave?”

  “I want this room sealed off,” I said. “It’s probably too late—when was the theft?”

  “Two days ago,” he said, and I stifled a curse. Well, the police would have a lot of details, and perhaps they really could be persuaded to share.

  On the other hand, I was going to have to take their word for all those details, many of them now long gone. I have, as it happens, a strong dislike for taking anyone’s word, at any time or place, but my own—but there was no help for it on this job. I was arriving late, the first-act curtain had gone down, and as Act II started I was going to have to do the best I could with my printed program and whatever help I could tease out from the other spectators.

  “One more thing,” I said, concluding that I’d also get a better picture of the actual mechanics of the theft from the police, and tucking away sixty or seventy questions for them, later on. “Who handles Berigot assignments for this floor?”

  “B’russ’r B’dige,” he said, and I filed the name away. He was certainly around the building—it was nearly two in
the afternoon (fourteen, if you have the Scientific Mind), the building was open, he’d be working—and I could locate him through Berigot Services for the library. I wished Ping a polite good-afternoon, took one last look around at the priceless collection—I like Heinlein, however many fashionable people tell me he’s dated—and walked away, heading toward Berigot Services.

  And it occurs to me just here that you might not even know what the Berigot are. We’d better get that in first, because we’re going to need it.

  CHAPTER THREE

  EVERYTHING IN THE universe looks like something we already know, even when it acts very differently—which may be a statement about the universe, and may be a statement about the way we know things. Walking-trees look like trees, though they’re not, and the Berigot—

  Well, when you tell someone they’re a race of sailplaners, for some reason the immediate reaction is Bats, and you start hearing a lot about Dracula and other ancients. The Berigot don’t act like bats (except that they do flock—but even people flock), and they don’t look like bats—they look like giant flying squirrels. They’re large, and they’re furry rather than, say, hairy, and their arms do look fairly small and fragile for the size of a Beri. Their heads even seem to be pouched, although the shape isn’t due to a pouch system but to twin air-bladders; that’s how they speak. The whole breathing system is reserved for breathing.

  The wingspan is very large, of course, though even so they can’t really fly. They walk at times, with a whole range of mincing gaits that look as though they ought to be very painful, and they swoop and dip at times—they prefer swooping and dipping, and so would I, but that sort of thing needs height and clear space, which are not always available. At home, they live in what some people call nests and other people call perches, and use the ground for large storage buildings; at work they enter and leave from perches set high enough from the ground to allow of some sailplaning.