The Counterfeit Heinlein

by Laurence M. Janifer

  “The Heinlein forgery, of course. What do you need of me?”

  There are days when I am not at speed with the entire rest of the universe. This never feels comfortable. “You’ve heard about the theft,” I said.

  “I have,” the unoiled camshaft told me. “Gerald, put out the cigarette. The smoke does not of course come through this connection, but the signal of it, your changes in breathing, discomfits me.”

  I stubbed out the Inoson Smoking Pleasure T. Why could I not need someone else?

  Because, damn it, there wasn’t anyone else. Not like the Master. “I need a full consult,” I said. “Examination of scene, questioning of some people. Everything. And a running consult with me on all aspects—all but one.”

  “You will handle one aspect alone, Gerald?” he said. “If so, which one?”

  “Not alone,” I said, and he said:

  “I will call her in—sixty-three minutes. The soonest possible. She will then call you.”

  “Direct? Herself?” I said. “Robbin has changed.”

  “Improved, they think,” he said. “To some degree.”

  I nodded at the phone. I was not wholly sure the Master couldn’t detect that in some way. Changes in pressure, perhaps. The sound of my head moving in the air. After a second I said: “I’ll be waiting. We’ll arrange a meeting after you’ve both been around the block on this. I’ll give Robbin names and places—writing them down will give her something to do, and she can tell you, giving her something more.”

  “You are learning, Gerald,” he said. Distant approval. I seldom got anything that warm and cozy from the Master. “When we spoke last, you would not have thought of that.”

  “Thanks,” I said. I wanted to ask him once again if he were still sure he would not have his eyes restored, and decided against it. It would be badgering, a very bad thing.

  “I will call you when we have—been around the block, Gerald, and we will all meet. It has been good to hear from you. Finished.”

  The connection broke. I sighed yet again and put the phone away, and made myself a cheese sandwich (eight minutes) and a pot of coffee (twenty-two minutes, and worth it). I ate, drank, washed the dishes, and did a little light dusting while I waited for the phone to ring. There are times when I am just too busied, too frantic or too damned lazy, but, most days and weeks, I do my own housekeeping. It’s a bit like a hobby—restful, and a way to free the mind while the body occupies itself. Home or away, any Totum and Robbies I have around are just a tad underworked, I think. They don’t complain of it.

  Forty-eight minutes later, dustrag stored away and an edge of boredom starting to set in, the phone rang. I got it on the first blip, and there she was, or her voice anyhow, after sixty-one months Standard, the Master’s figures, the usual breathless childish soprano bleat.

  “Hello there, thank you so much for thinking of me, Sir, do you want me to help with your work? Master Higsbee says you do.”

  I was always rethinking it, but I felt just then that I liked Sir a few hairs less than Gerald. “I do want your help, Robbin,” I said. “Do you know the situation, love?”

  Robbin was thirty-two Standard years old. At times she very nearly looked as old as twenty. At times she very nearly acted as old as eighteen, but not often. “Of course I do, Master Higsbee told me about it,” she said. “We were on the phone for a long time.” She giggled. I don’t get to hear giggles very much, and prefer my life so arranged. “Sometimes I think he likes me,” Robbin Tress said in her teeny breathless voice.

  “Well, good, I’m sure he does,” I said. The girl could reduce me to babbling banality in any twenty-second space of time. “Then you know you’re to take down names and places?”

  “My pen is right here, Sir, all ready.” I gave her a list, from B’russ’r B’dige through Ping Boom (she giggled) to a few police officers male and female. The Master, I knew without thinking about it, was going to have to interview the females, and try to get Robbin what she needed from them.

  And the few important places as far as I knew them: the room where the manuscript had been, the lawn outside, the Berigot perches for that building. There would of course be more. I had the sudden lost feeling you get when you’ve forgotten something important, and added just in time my apartment and the stretch of street near the portable-wall shop. “Do you want me to see your apartment while you’re in it?” the breathless little voice asked.

  I stared at the phone. “Do you do that now?” I said.

  “Sometimes,” Robbin said. “For people I know a long time. The Master would have to come too, though, if you don’t mind, Sir.”

  I nodded, and then said: “Fine. When?”

  “An hour and a half, Sir?” she said. “I will call him, and then wait for him here.”

  Robbin had improved out of all belief. “An hour and a half,” I said, and began to give her directions.

  “Oh, Sir, don’t bother about that, please don’t trouble yourself,” the breathless voice said. “The Master will know, he’ll take me. Closed car, Sir, I really have done it before.”

  “Fine,” I said. “I’ll see you both then.”

  “Goodbye, Sir,” Robbin said, “and thank you so much again for thinking of me.”

  Finished. It might be that the Master’s way of ending a phone talk had a point. I said goodbye politely, put the phone away and thought about refreshments. Coffee of course. And—

  I had time for one fairly speedy shopping trip. Nobody shot at me.

  CHAPTER SIX

  AND THIRTY-FIVE minutes after I came back weary and heavy laden, as the Bible says, there they were, actually sitting in my living-room. The Master took his coffee black. Robbin Tress took hers with cream and sugar, as I did, and if something as small as that could have made me doubt the habits of a lifetime, little Robbin’s taste in coffee would have. I’d settled on a sort of local fruit-cake, sticks of hard cinnamon bread, a few cheeses, and some fruit, which turned out to be a mistake: plums, from what were advertised as actual descendants of actual Earth plum trees. They might have been—who am I to argue with advertising?—but if so, a great deal had happened to the family in the intervening centuries, all of it terrible.

  Robbin was delighted by the exotic plums, which didn’t make up for the look that crossed Master Higsbee’s face when he bit into one. But the cake was good, the cheeses acceptable, and the coffee Indigo Hill, the emperor of coffees, from my own stock. And the talk rapidly became helpful.

  “The first question, of course,” the Master said while refilling his cup, “was why the forgery had not been detected earlier. This is, after all, Ravenal. These people can be expected to know their business, and indeed they usually do. One notes the occasional exception, but one does not note many.”

  “Maybe it just cost too much to find out,” Robbin said dreamily. I remembered just in time not to object, or to wonder where she’d gotten such a notion from. “Dreamily” was the key, of course; Robbin in that sort of tone was being Robbin.

  A long time ago, back when there was real science-fiction, there was also a place called Boston, which was supposed to be stiff with tradition of several sorts. Maybe it was—at this distance how can anybody tell tradition from random habit? At any rate, the traditional Boston ladies, if that’s what they were, wore some perfectly terrible traditional Boston hats, and one day (according to an old story) somebody asked one such lady where she got her hats.

  “In Boston,” she said, “we do not get our hats. We have our hats.”

  Robbin did not get her ideas. She had her ideas. I had once described my two guests to an interested lovely to whom I was spinning a tale, and hoping for Othello’s satisfactions, if you remember (and there is no good reason why you should): if my lovely would only love me for the dangers I had passed, I was more than willing to love her in return, for she did pity them. Master Higsbee (I told the lovely, who was indeed fascinated, and if not wholly loving toward me, certainly in frenzied like) knew everything that coul
d possibly be known. (That was perhaps just a touch exaggerated. Not really very much.) Robbin Tress knew the things that couldn’t possibly be known.

  The people on Cub IV, where she’d been born and, so far as the phrase was applicable, brought up, looked on her as a sort of wild psi talent, and on Cub IV, where there’d been a history of difficulty—open damned warfare, in fact—with psi talents among non-humans, this did not make her popular. How much of little Robbin’s personality was originally built in by manufacturer, and how much was the result of social strain—to put it very, very mildly—during her childhood and teener years, nobody may ever know, though small dedicated crews on Ravenal do keep trying to find out. What she has doesn’t seem to be psi, exactly—it doesn’t follow any of the normal rules for such things, even where there are any rules. Robbin doesn’t seem to know anything she isn’t asked about, or somehow prodded by interest into thinking of. And she doesn’t reach the answer by any process anybody has ever been able to understand; the answer isn’t reached at all; it is simply going to be there. As closely as anybody has ever been able to see, if you don’t ask the question (or otherwise engage her interest), the knowledge isn’t going to be there; if you do, it is. Maybe.

  When word of Robbin got to Ravenal (as word of most oddities does seem to, sooner or later) a state of fascination ensued, and after a little backing and filling (and not very much) Robbin had a new home, and many new friends. People who did, in fact, actually like her, and did their level best every minute not only to solve the set of very frustrating puzzles she presented, but to help her.

  Which was why Robbin Tress was on Ravenal when I needed her.

  Master Higsbee was on Ravenal, of course, because where else would a man who knew everything knowable be?

  And both, as I say, were being helpful. Master Higsbee nodded when Robbin mentioned the high cost of finding out about the forgery, and told me:

  “In fact that was the reason, Gerald. The normal tests were run. Isotope assay was conducted on the paper and the ink for carbon-14, and for some quicker decay isotopes. A full run on all checkable isotopes simply represented too much of an expense on a very, very slight chance.”

  “The chance being that somebody had figured out a way to beat some isotope patterns, but not others,” I said. The Master gave me a faint nod. I was doing well.

  “Exactly,” he said. “As far as was known, isotope assay was infallible even in limited form. Why, then, not simply agree that assaying some distributions would be enough?”

  “And it wasn’t,” I said.

  “A friend of yours, Gerald, is a great admirer of Heinlein. He is also a thorough man, and it worried him that a thorough job had not been done. He contributed his own funds, in part, for a full assay, persuading First Files Building to pay the remainder. And the forgery became obvious.”

  “A friend?” I said.

  I have never heard anybody give Mac’s name the way the Master did. “Charles MacDougal,” he said. Apparently he really is immune to a lot of normal human itches.

  It’s a name most people want to shake full out, like a flag: Charles Hutson Bellemand MacDougal, B. S., M. S., Ph. D., this, that, and the other, full Professor of Molar and Molecular Physics, Ravenal Scholarte, a holder of two Nobels and, I am happy to admit, an old friend. I’ve heard people say C. H. B. MacDougal, and I’ve heard a lot say Mac. But Charles MacDougal was a first that night, and has remained an only. In fact it took me about two seconds to figure out who the Hell the Master was talking about—I was as dislocated as I’d once been when a Professor of Ancient Literature, years ago in my boyhood, mentioned Francis Fitzgerald instead of F. Scott.

  “Mac was involved in this?”

  “‘Mac’ was the cause of the forgery’s being discovered,” he told me testily. A little testily. “In fact, I have now said that twice.”

  Robbin said suddenly, and dreamily, breaking the Master’s irritated mood: “They counted all the isotopes, and some of the numbers didn’t add up right.” Which is an inelegant sort of way of describing what had certainly happened.

  The ancients knew about isotope assay, in a typically-ancient, half-hearted fashion. Carbon-14 dating, well known before the Clean Slate War, is an isotope-assay process: you see what percentage of carbon atoms in your sample are carbon-14, and you know (within limits) how long the sample has been around, because carbon atoms decay from carbon-14 to carbon-12 at a known rate.

  By now the process has been extended to very small sample numbers of virtually every isotope possible in nature (or created by that most unnatural product of nature, Humanity, before, during and after the Clean Slate War), and it is possible to pin down a date for a physical object pretty closely—lots of isotopes disappear more rapidly than carbon-14 does. But the process is still expensive, and every element has to be assayed separately. Some day we’ll have a simple one-step snapshot process, but probably not, I am told, within the next century.

  A one-step snapshot would have identified the forgery instantly. As it was, identification had to wait four years, for Mac’s worries to happen. But it was absolutely certain: isotope assay is not a horseback guess.

  Robbin was finishing off the fruit cake piece by piece—the woman has the metabolism of a forest fire, and when in the mood eats large restaurants out of house and home without even blurring that sticklike figure of hers—and looked up from her digestion to ask one question of her own. Robbin does ask questions, not so much because she wants to know answers, but because she likes being told stories. And this felt to her like a good one.

  “How was the manuscript supposed to have been found, anyhow? I mean, not who forged it and everything like that, we don’t know that yet, do we? But what did somebody say happened?”

  She was right. It was the Hell of a good story.

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  IT SEEMS THERE was a man named Norman W. Nechs. In fact there probably was—it seemed simpler even at that point to assume a real Norman W. Nechs, and a story for the forgery grafted onto him, than to assume that the forgers had invented and built the entire structure. And the assumption turned out to be good; there had been such a fellow.

  Norman was alive during the ancient days, before the Clean Slate War. He lived in a state then called Uta, and what he did to make his living we do not really know. He may have been a State Patrolman, and according to the experts there are signs that he was, though there are stronger signs that he was a dentist, as we’ll see—and if we only knew what a State Patrolman was or did, in the State of Uta, we would be much further along in making Norman’s acquaintance. We do know what a dentist was, and did, and it sounds perfectly awful.

  As it is, what we know for certain about him is that he liked science-fiction.

  Remember, this was back in the days when there really was such a thing—when the giants like Benford and Sturgeon and all the Smiths were alive and actually writing all those wonderful stories we don’t have any more, and a very few we do. Norman undoubtedly liked, and disliked, and felt strongly about, a thousand other things, like everybody else at any time, but what we remember now is that he liked science-fiction—and was something of a Survivalist.

  Survivalists were not some primitive incarnation of Survivors. I don’t have much in common with Norman, not that way. We share an affection for Heinlein (apparently he really did like Heinlein, but then most sensible people do), but not much more.

  A Survivor is a person who goes out to survive on a new planet, mostly, in order to prove that it can be done by a wave of willing, if less capable, colonists. Bringing the fight to the enemy, so to speak. A Survivalist was a person who’d had the fight brought to him, and who was trying, every passive way he knew how, to live through it.

  “Passive” is the key. Your Survivalist didn’t go out to do battle with the things that were threatening his survival. That’s what I do. What a Survivalist did was take one deep breath, tell himself those things could not possibly be fought, and try to figure out a way of li
ving through them.

  All the ways Survivalists did think up involved digging immense holes in the ground, surrounding them with armor of every available sort, making sure nothing could get in to the eventual armored space (air was allowed in only when cleaned, taken apart and put back together), and stocking that space with everything you were going to need to continue living—food, water, video games, spare pajamas. Everything. For periods of up to ten or twelve years.

  That is Earth years. Comity Standard years. A Survivalist was a person who was determined to live in an armored hole in the ground for three times as long as it takes the light of Proxima Centauri to reach him on Earth Twelve years.

  Most of these people, naturally, were crazy. A few did survive, came out of their holes ten or twelve years after the Clean Slate War, and were more or less immediately wiped out by natural processes; in ten years most germs and viruses mutate. Few of them had much stamina left in any case; some had rigged exercise spaces in their holes, but none had continued grimly exercising for ten years, and it is hard to imagine any human being who would. And all were ten to twelve years older, something few had apparently figured out would happen in ten to twelve years. Many had jungled up, so to speak, at, say, 40. These people came tottering out at a prematurely aged 50-or-above. The rest of humanity—such of it as was left, and of course there were people left, protected from immediate blast and radiation and firestorm by any six of a thousand possible accidents—living out of a fallout pattern, surviving the two to three years of truly Biblical weather—this rest of humanity sometimes killed them, and sometimes tried to help them. A few Survivalists lived as long as seven years after coming out of their holes. One, male, is recorded to have had a child by some woman less particular than most; survivors didn’t much want to mate with Survivalists, feeling that insanity was not a welcome part of the gene pool.

  Were there other ways of surviving? Survivors proved there were. And a little simple thought would have given some answers. Take all the money that was sunk into one hole-in-the-ground after another, barrel it up, and fund a research program with it. Take your pick of research objectives, active or passive: a) Go after the causes of such insane behavior as the Clean Slate War was clearly going to be, or b) build real and functioning force fields.