The Counterfeit Heinlein

by Laurence M. Janifer

  They come from a planet called Denderus (their name for it; humanity has politely agreed to stick with it, since humanity can pronounce it), which has a Standard gravity of .89, and air as thick as, say, Earth’s—this is possible because the stuff isn’t air, it’s a denser set of compounds. The Berigot can’t breathe our air, and sensibly don’t try; even if you have seen a Beri or two, you’ve never seen one without his transparent head-bubble. The exchange technique isn’t quite beyond human skill, but it is said that only four men on Ravenal, and perhaps two more elsewhere, understand how the bubbles transform Ravenal’s air into stuff a Beri can breathe.

  There’s a small human presence on Denderus, and an equally small Berigot presence in the Comity Worlds, almost all either on Earth where the diplomats live or on Ravenal, where the Berigot have found appropriate work. They are probably the best librarians in the galaxy (Kelans might dispute this, but the Kelans aren’t much on really big libraries, preferring to carry their massive knowledge around inside their rather small heads).

  People do tend to think of a librarian as someone who will direct you to the spools for Non-human Dance Troupes, and who spends a staggering proportion of his time saying Shhh. This is not quite the whole picture; librarians are a vitally important part of any search for knowledge, though virtually nobody knows this except other librarians, and a scattering of searchers.

  I know it because I have had to search for some odd things now and again, in the course of an active life. Ravenal knows it because the Ravenal Scholarte and all its associated cities are always searching, though they seldom have any clear idea of what they’re searching for; if they knew, they’d already have it.

  And Berigot know it because collecting facts is what Berigot do.

  I’ve said a little while ago that a Survivor—me, for instance—is first of all an information collector, and as an information collector, I’m fairly good—for a human being. For a Beri, I would be classified as Deeply, even Laughably Defective. The Beri collect information the way human beings invent weapons—with constancy, facility and blinding speed. They would make me feel horribly inferior—if they did anything else.

  Oh, they eat and sleep and mate (four sexes, two He and two She, all needed not only for reproduction but for a normal social life), but their reproductive (and social) life is passionless and managed pretty well by rote, they have no hobbies except those associated with information-collecting, and they have only very recently begun to wonder whether there is anything in the world at all except information-collecting. Human beings are the bit of information that has started them wondering, and Ravenal has contributed most heavily, since Ravenal is the sample of humanity a Beri is most likely to see.

  Someone on Ravenal, about seventy years ago, awoke to the fact that a race of information-collectors would make marvelous librarians, and began talks with the Berigot. And the Berigot have been working on Ravenal ever since.

  Well, what does a librarian do, except point you at the spools you need, or tell you to shhh?

  He—and if the pronoun has been irritating you, I’m afraid you’ll just have to be irritated; it’s all I can do, and I’m robbing the Berigot of two pronouns as it is—he puts one piece of information together with another piece of information.

  I’ve heard of that process as the one absolute definition of intelligence. I agree: the ability to take two facts and make a third fact is intelligence, and everything else is something else. Unfortunately, it would take either the Kelans or an even brighter race to come up with a useful test for it.

  But the Berigot are very good at it. It’s what librarians do: they look into Non-Human Dance Troupes for a bit, and remember something they noticed the last time they looked into Molar Physics a bit, and they see that the two things have some common features.

  Then they tell people about this—either personally or, much more frequently, by filing a cross-index note. Molar physicists can now get a bit of help from non-human dance troupes, and vice versa.

  This goes on all the time, in fields even more widely separated than my examples. Librarians are the great cross-pollinators of the universe, and they make things grow—things like ideas, and inventions, and discoveries, and civilizations.

  Ravenal, naturally, has the best librarians known. And I was off to see one.

  I’d met a few Berigot, on a previous stopover, but for me the meetings had just been a few minutes of casual chatter. For a Beri nothing is casual (which means that nothing is important, either; if you don’t have a scale, you don’t have a top to it), and I felt sure somebody would remember me—though possibly not at Berigot Services, which is staffed by human beings.

  Services greeted me as a total stranger, and called Ping to check on me. They’re a deeply suspicious bunch, and they should be; five years ago, Ravenal (just about five and a third, Standard), according to report, some nut decided to get dangerous, and tried shooting at Berigot. He made a nice, if somewhat ragged, hole in each of three Berigot—in each case puncturing some part of the strong webbing with which a Beri sailplanes; only natural, as it’s the biggest target in flight, and all three were hit while off the ground.

  Police built up a fair picture of the nut, who had been using an unfashionable, but very damaging, slug gun, and their final working theory was, believe it or not, that he’d been a sports maniac, and had decided the Berigot were fair game, like ducks or some such. They’d never managed to snare him, despite some helpful data (by Berigot, of course, who notice things), and since that little series of incidents Berigot Services has been just a hair paranoid.

  The Berigot themselves take things more calmly; their feeling seems to be that nuts happen, the way earthquakes and economic depressions happen, and one has to get on with life.

  So when I knocked on the door of the Frontier Worlds History room, B’russ’r B’dige simply unlocked the field and poked his head out to see who’d come along.

  “Gerald Knave,” I said.

  “My goodness,” he said. His voice was clear, with a slight echo, and a little high even for Berigot, who tend to the tenor ranges. “I know of you, Knave. Have you come to add to my knowledge? Come in, please come right in.”

  “I’ve come to borrow from it,” I said. “I’m here about the Heinlein manuscript.”

  B’russ’r smiled. Berigot have rather pinched, open smiles, and they look more pleasant than my description does. “Ah, Heinlein,” he said. “‘What are the facts? Again and again and again—what are the facts? You pilot always into an unknown future; facts are your single clue.’ Our attitude exactly, Knave.”

  He stepped aside and I went in, and he closed the field firmly behind me.

  “Now, then,” he said. “A phrase, by the way, whose oddity has always appealed to me—now, then—well, what do you want to know?”

  I found a chair and sat down. B’russ’r remained standing, of course, his legs locked; a Beri can’t sit and doesn’t want to. I took out a cigarette (Inoson Smoking Pleasure Tubes, Guaranteed Harmless—no Earth tobaccos—but most people do seem to call them cigarettes) and offered him one. He nodded and took one and stuck it through his head-bubble (I’d had no idea it passed Inoson Smoking Pleasure Tubes as well as sight and sound) into his mouth. “I have never understood why humans burn these things,” he said, and began to chew, slowly. “I don’t think I have ever seen cigarettes dyed red before, Knave.”

  I explained that I had them made, lit mine while B’russ’r found a handsome ashtray—map of the Ravenal Scholarte pressed between glassex panels, in gold—and explained matters to him. He grew very grave, munching away at his cigarette.

  “Someone should have been on duty,” he said. “Someone should have taken notice.”

  “Notice of what?” I said. B’russ’r shook his head.

  “Of the actual theft,” he said. “The process itself—it must have taken appreciable time, after all.”

  “Now that’s what I want to know,” I said. “How was it managed? What do
you know?”

  “Know? Very little,” he said. He was still chewing thoughtfully. Apparently Berigot don’t spit. “We have some deductions, and the police have told us of a very few—ah—clues.”

  I asked for a consecutive story first, and then got down to details and went back and forth. I made notes as we went along, and B’russ’r watched me do that with a curious resignation. When I asked him why, he said: “We use a better method: upload data directly to the nervous system, as non-sensory input, for classification and filing. Automatic, but humans somehow won’t take to it.”

  “I wonder why not?” I said, not even wanting to think about shoving megabytes of strange data into my nervous system.

  “I think it must be the loading system,” he said. “It is bulky, but we found room by shrinking parts of our reproductive systems. I’m sure humans could do that.”

  “Well,” I said, smiling with some effort, “maybe they will. Some day.” A dedicated race, the Berigot.

  CHAPTER FOUR

  THE ROBBERY HAD taken place, as all good robberies should, at dark of night. The thief or thieves (and there was a general consensus that there’d been a small crew) had somehow a) managed to get across the grounds of the building, not easy because the place was sub-electronically guarded—a pulsating field (a look every twentieth of a second) from three feet below ground to six feet above—and b) managed to get through into the room where the manuscript had been on display, and remove it. The thing had still been on display—the forgery wasn’t quite public knowledge, though not hard to find out about, and the forged manuscript was to have been removed and stored under Curiosae two days later.

  Getting into the room had been quite a trick. The windows were locked from the inside (real and very old-fashioned window-locks, late-Twentieth in style but newly made of real metals). There was a Berigot perch nearby, but what difference it made nobody could see, since, if you somehow managed to get to it and onto it from the ground, you were still looking at the locked windows. Nothing had been broken. There were no fingerprints, no meaningful residual heat-spots, on the windows themselves. There were residual heat-spots on the inner sills, and on the floor leading to the case—as good as footprints, and showing two or just possibly three human people, the small crew already mentioned—and the case itself had been wiped clean of everything including heat by an alcohol mixture. The locks on the case showed signs of tampering.

  I asked B’russ’r: “Now, why would you expect someone to have noticed?”

  “Even late at night,” he said, “there are Berigot in flight. We enjoy to fly, and require the exercise. There were none on this side of the building—we will have to see about arranging our exercise flights with more care.”

  “Not your fault,” I said. B’russ’r nodded.

  “I know that, Knave,” he said. “It is not fault I consider. But someone should have noticed.” He did what Berigot think of as a disapproving motion; both small arms twitched forward under the webbing. “There must have been noise, even if faint. The alarm should have gone off.”

  “Apparently not,” I said. “These three, or however many, slipped through the alarm like ghosts. Through the window, too. Not a trace anywhere.”

  “And the case showed signs of tampering,” he said. He swallowed twice. The cigarette was gone. Mine had long been ash and a small red remainder, in the glassex ashtray. “No trace at the window. Definite traces at the case. Does this dichotomy suggest anything to you?

  I shrugged. “Insanity, possibly. Little else.”

  “Nor to me,” he said. “But it must mean something. It is too odd to be meaningless.”

  I thought about lighting a second cigarette, out of sheer frustration, and decided I didn’t want to see B’russ’r consume another one. “You have good instincts,” I said.

  He smiled again. “They are not instincts,” he said. “They are consequences of information upload.”

  “Whatever you say,” I told him, wondering idly what such a thing meant. Deduction from known facts? Echoes of gigabytes in the nervous system? “I’ll need you to talk to some other people, by the way. Within a day or so.”

  B’russ’r nodded and smiled. “Of course,” he said. “Master Higsbee, and I should think little Robbin Tress.”

  I stared at him. Those names were notions in my head, and nowhere else. I had mentioned neither of them to Ping, or to anyone else. I had seen I would need help with this job, and I’d thought of asking the Master and Robbin. Only thought of it.

  Berigot were not, as far as was known, telepathic. It would be the Hell of a secret for them to keep.

  “How do you arrive at those names?” I said after several silent seconds.

  One more smile. A friendly smile. “A consequence of information upload,” B’russ’r said. “I know of you—an amount about you. I know of many people on Ravenal. I said to myself: other people? The choices seemed predictable. It took me some time.”

  His response had been instantaneous. “I am impressed,” I said. I swallowed. Hard. “You will talk to them?”

  “Of course,” B’russ’r said, and positively beamed at me. “Who knows what I may learn from actually meeting them?”

  God knows I didn’t. I said my farewells—Berigot don’t shake hands, and it is better so, but we hissed politely at each other, and tilted heads in opposite directions—he left, I right.

  After that I went to see the police, who were much less unsettling.

  CHAPTER FIVE

  THEY WERE ALSO less informative. They did open a bag or two out of their hoard on the case, but none of the bags contained anything I could think of any way to use. They had a few flakes of dried skin from a bit of floor near the case—people shed, and few beings outside police labs know it—but they’d been too small and too trampled to provide anything much in the way of data. They had the beginnings of a typing on the dried skin, just enough to limit the suspects to fifty-five million. With great good luck and much work, perhaps fifty-three million.

  After a while I left, feeling just a bit lost, and thoroughly inferior until I remembered that B’russ’r, certainly, had also had a chance at the police files, and had got no more help from them than I had.

  I was heading back to my rooms, to call the Master and get him to call Robbin—unless one is one of three people in the universe, one does not call Robbin. I was on a main boulevard, nicely tree-lined (maple again) and uncrowded. The time was eighteen-seventeen, or sensibly 6:17 P. M. I was not smoking, muttering or whistling, and I was wearing nothing unusual. I did need a haircut, and had for a few days.

  The slug hit the sidewalk less than a foot behind me. This time there was no hesitation; I leapt as if cued for the building line and dropped flat there, bruising my nose, one shoulder and both knees. I didn’t know about the bruises until some time later; I was much too busy listening and, as far as my position allowed, looking—though I neither saw nor heard anything helpful.

  A few passers-by stopped to help me. I lay still until I had collected a small crowd of hesitant Samaritans (“Don’t move him, you don’t know what’s wrong”), and then allowed them to raise me up, dust me off and help me to a nearby shop. I stayed in the middle of the crowd until well inside the shop, which sold portable walls.

  A nice portable wall sounded like a fine idea, but I didn’t really have time, and even if pressed couldn’t carry one everywhere; people would talk. Four or five Samaritans had given the shop-keeper the story of my rescue, very variously, and I sank down on a small chair over by one (permanent) wall and breathed for a little while.

  Ten minutes, in fact. It might have been eleven. In either case, I’d given my assassin more room than I had before, because all that Samaritan-collecting had taken time.

  Then I stood up, and thanked the wallman, and walked out into the early-evening light. It took me another ten minutes to amble on home, during which time nothing of any interest happened to me.

  And, once home, I made completely sure every u
nbreakable glassex window was shut and locked, told the Totum to take itself and both Robbies to somewhere restful until called for, dressed my small wounds a little, and got to the phone. Voice only, image available for some extra button-pushing and a nice steep charge, but I was not looking my best, and forwent it.

  I hadn’t spoken to Master Higsbee in five years, and it was a delight, in a way, to hear that rasp of his again—a sound like an unoiled camshaft with attitude. The phone rang twice (on Ravenal, by the way, it doesn’t ring—for some reason, it blips) and a voice said: “Who?”

  It is no damn way to answer the phone, and never will be. “Knave,” I said. “Hello, Master. How are you?”

  “Ah, Gerald,” he said. No one else in the entire Galactic collection of vocal races calls me Gerald. I think I dislike it. “A long time. And how should I be? An old blind man, helpless and alone, in a world made for the sighted and the fleet—Gerald, how should I be?”

  I sighed a little. The Master would always be the Master, after all. “You’ll be fine,” I said. “You always are.”

  A snort from the unoiled camshaft. “By dint of unceasing effort, Gerald, I remain alive and—so far as I may—functioning. In sixty-one months Standard, what have you done?”

  I took his word for the time; one could. And I knew what he meant. “Not much, Master,” I said. “I did learn how to lockpick a hologram safe, and I’ve had a few liaisons.”

  “Children may result from the liaisons, one cannot be wholly sure,” he said. “Good. The lockpick is too simple for you, Gerald—you must stretch yourself.”

  I refrained from saying that I’d stretched myself quite a lot in some of the liaisons. When talking to Master Higsbee, one lets the Master make the jokes.

  “I’ll look round for other things,” I said.

  He sighed. A cross between a wheeze and a derby-muted trumpet. “Well, enough,” he said. “What have you called to demand of an old man?”

  “I’ve got a problem,” I said, and Master Higsbee said at once: