The Counterfeit Heinlein

by Laurence M. Janifer

  “She didn’t get herself involved,” I said, “I involved her. The Stone Pillow.” And there was a little hiss of indrawn breath at the other end.

  “I should have known,” Mac said. “Forgery, theft—of course, your sort of thing exactly.”

  “I am not,” I said stiffly, “either a thief or a forger.”

  “Nor am I,” Mac said. “In case you were wondering. I was the man who blew the whistle. In fact—” A brief pause. “Oh. That’s why you’ve called.”

  “Not exactly,” I said. “There have been developments. I need to hear exactly how you found out enough to blow the whistle.”

  “Developments?” he said. “Knave, tell all. Where can I meet you? I’ll come to your place, whatever luxurious harem it is you’re currently inhabiting—”

  “In a bit, perhaps,” I said. “I know there were differences, when you finally got to doing a complete isotope assay. But why did you decide to do one? The things are complicated, and expensive—”

  “Money is no object,” he said, and the sentence brought me back to the day I’d met him. He’d said that then, and it hadn’t been, and I’d taken on a very odd job on the strength of it—well, on that, and the urging of Marietta Tree, and one thing and another. I found myself briefly regretting Marietta, all over again. There is something about Charles Hutson Bellemand MacDougal that could irritate me greatly, if I didn’t like him so much.

  And the job had been worth doing for its own very odd sake, anyhow.

  “Even so,” I said. “You’re a careful man—but that careful?”

  “That careful,” he said flatly, and there was a little pause while he realized that I knew perfectly well he was lying through his teeth. He sighed. “Very well, then, Knave, I will come clean for you—but you must promise not to noise this abroad anywhere; I have a reputation to maintain.”

  “I will be as silent as any one of several gravestones,” I said. “Tell me all.”

  “I have,” he said slowly, “low tastes.”

  I grinned into the phone. “Haven’t we all?”

  Another sigh. “You don’t understand,” he said.

  I said: “Of course I understand. And while I don’t want to pry into your personal enjoyments, I don’t really see what they could have to do with isotope assay on a manuscript that—”

  “No,” he said. “You really don’t understand, Knave. The fact is, I read science-fiction. A good deal of it. Privately for the most part—oh, there is a group, a fan club one might say, and we do meet once a month, but for the most part—”

  “Wait a minute,” I said. “Wait a minute. Is it some deep, dark crime, some sort of manic perversion, to read science-fiction? I do myself, now and again—when it doesn’t get too fancily adventurous. I doubt there’s anybody working just now to compare with the greats—Heinlein, Sturgeon, Robinson, Haldeman—but a few moderns have written some interesting—”

  “It’s different for you,” Mac said. “Nobody cares what you read—or, unless it becomes necessary for one job or another, if. But there’s a spotlight on me, Knave—two Nobels will do that. Even one. Even—well, what you might call a normal Ravenal reputation; in the group, we’re all a bit shy of admitting our reading habits. A spotlight has advantages, but it makes trouble as well: if it were generally known that I actually read science-fiction, it would injure me—lower my status, if you like. And I like my status. Silly as it sounds, and silly as it undoubtedly is, I enjoy being looked up to, admired, catered to—being at the top of my particular tree.”

  I said: “I like it myself, the little I get of it.” Then I was quiet for a bit. “You’d think the prejudice would have died out by now,” I went on. “It’s a harmless pastime, after all.”

  “It is among the moderns,” he said. “Fun and games. Almost none of it is really science-fiction any more. Among the greats—well, the ones you mentioned, and Anderson, and Budrys, and—” He cut himself off with what seemed an effort. I understood; the list could go on for a bit—”among the greats, it was often a means of questioning the way things are. To be exact about it: The Way Things Are.” He made the capital letters very audible. “That is never going to be fashionable—or, in my set of intellectuals, acceptable.”

  He had a point. The ruling intellectual set, throughout most of the Comity, said loudly again and again that they were tolerant of, even glad to hear about, opinions other than their own; and they kept being surprised that there were any opinions other than their own. Surprised, and scornful.

  “Maybe things were different, back when Heinlein was alive and working,” I said.

  “I doubt it,” Mac said. “What we have—what managed to make it through the Clean Slate War and the troubles after, until someone could find and preserve it—complains often enough of the same sort of attitude. Take If This Goes On ... for instance. Now there—”

  I headed him off. A long chat about the classics would be fun—science-fiction had been one of the highlights of my own scrappy Classical education—but we really didn’t have the time for it, and both of us knew it. “You may be right,” I said. “But—about the isotope assay—”

  He sighed. “Back to business, yes,” he said. “Well, I did have a chance to read The Stone Pillow. It sounds a great deal like Heinlein. There are some oddities, but even in work we know is his, work that survived in published form, there are oddities now and again, sentences that sound a little off, images that don’t come clear—”

  “True of any writer,” I said. “Even Shakespeare had his off days. Even Chaucer. Even Morgen. Even—”

  “Agreed,” he said. “Such things didn’t make me suspicious. Heinlein was very conscious of style—far more conscious than he appears to be—but even more conscious of substance. He might well let pass a small stylistic discontinuity, might not even realize it was there. But the fact is, Knave, that he never wrote The Stone Pillow —never could have.”

  I blinked. “Why in Hell not?” I said.

  “Because he said he didn’t—years later. Concerning Stories Never Written. You may never have seen it, a short essay meant to be published with the Future History chart.” I never had. Mac had clearly read even more science-fiction than I had. “There are arguments that he simply packed the thing away, dissatisfied with it or unwilling to let a story so gloomy actually be published—but the arguments don’t ring true to character, to Heinlein’s character as we can know it from his work. He’d never have lied about the thing; he’d have avoided mention of it, or told the truth.”

  I nodded at the phone. “Well, as it turned out,” I said, “he didn’t write it. And that—the essay, I mean—was enough to make for a full isotope assay?”

  “I hesitated for a long time. A very long time. But—Knave, this is Heinlein we’re talking about,” he said. “How was I to let some odd scribbler’s work go down to the next generation of fans and readers as the work of Robert A. Heinlein?”

  I nodded again. “True,” I said. “It would never do, not at all.”

  We gave the thought a little silence. Then I looked at my list of questions.

  “I want to know something about the history of the manuscript,” I said. “Was it found in the dig itself, at the same time as everything else? And just what was ‘everything else’? Or was it perhaps discovered later, by one of the researchers who went back just to make sure they’d gotten the whole load? Was there a lot of other Heinlein material, a lot of other science-fiction material?”

  “I wasn’t there,” he said.

  “But you know who was,” I said. “You might be able to ask them.”

  There was about a second and a half of silence, and then he chuckled, a low cheerful sound from a man of low tastes. “We might both ask them,” he said. “Come along with me, and we’ll find at least one of them—Bitsy will be there for certain, she never misses.”

  I said: “Bitsy? Where? What?”

  “At the club meeting,” he said. “Tomorrow night, which is convenient—you won’t
have to wait too long to start getting a few answers. Bitsy Bowyer. She was one of the dig team, and a valued club member.”

  It was a big moment for one-word questions. “Club?” I said. “Bitsy?”

  “The science-fiction club,” Mac told me. “The Ravenal Misfits. Bitsy’s a member. Do come along, Knave—you might enjoy this.”

  I might at that, I thought. And someone actually on the dig was going to be a necessary item of my workload, at the very least.

  “Where and when?” I asked Mac, and he told me.

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  THE MEETING WAS the next night—which left me with minimal material to think about, unless I did something. I stared into space for a few seconds, drew a deep breath, and began trying to get Detective-Major Gross on the line.

  It didn’t take nearly as long as I’d been very sure it would; a mention of Ramsay Leake, and a mention of Gerald Knave, seemed to work fairly well as a combination for the usual bureaucratic lock. In about four minutes I had Gross on the line and was asking him about the bullet. Had it come from the same gun that had been tearing up Berigot five years before?

  “We can’t be wholly sure,” he told me.

  I shut my eyes for a second. “Weapons ballistics is more or less an exact science,” I said.

  Gross said, patiently: “It’s been five years, man. There may have been other firings from the weapon. There’s been some degradation, after all. Any defense lawyer in the city—”

  “I’m not asking what a City Two court will accept,” I said. “I’m asking what you know.”

  He grunted. “Oh, it’s the same weapon.”

  “Then there is a connection,” I said.

  He grunted again. “Unless the gun itself had been passed on,” he said. “Three or four times, it might be. It does happen, you know. The person who used it on Leake may not even have known the person who used it five years ago.”

  It was possible, but: “Most gun owners keep their weapons,” I said.

  “Most gun owners involved in highly illegal activities—like murder and attempted murder, to give you two—do not.”

  He had a point, damn it. I admitted it to him.

  “We’ve a weapons registration law in force here,” he went on. “Any adult person can buy a gun—but every gun is test-fired, and the records of that firing are filed. We can identify any particular gun as having fired any recognizable bullet.”

  “And?”

  “This one doesn’t show up in the records, Knave,” he said. “A good many illegal-use weapons don’t, after all—there’s the usual black market.”

  Well, there would be. “Another argument against the same shooter being involved,” I said sadly. Everything had seemed much simpler ten minutes earlier.

  “Right,” Gross said. “An illegal gun—and so, very likely to have been passed on quickly. A sensible man would have destroyed the thing five years ago, when he stopped trying to bag Berigot.”

  “Any other news?” I said.

  “Not one single new,” Gross said, and hung up.

  And the phone rang.

  B’russ’r, with news. The Berigot who had been shot, five years before, had all been working, at the time, in the same wing of the library from which The Stone Pillow had been so neatly lifted.

  That, of course, pinned down the connection—not that there had been any doubt in my mind, but it was something even Detective-Major Hyman Gross would have to swallow—as if the news on the bullet hadn’t, all by itself, been wholly persuasive.

  Now all I had to figure out was what the connection was. Five years before, the manuscript of the Heinlein probably hadn’t been so much as a gleam in an archaeologist’s eye; it had only been sitting in the Scholarte for four.

  But of course the plan to forge that manuscript might have been a great deal more than a gleam, might have been a full-fledged mote, or even a sizable beam, in somebody’s eye. And the first step, obviously, had been to wound (and not kill) three Berigot from the library wing that was going to house the forgery years later.

  This did not make the Hell of a lot of sense, when I looked at it calmly. It didn’t make any more sense when I threw it down on the floor and screamed at it.

  I made some more coffee, an odd variety originally from Queensland, and lit a cigarette, and sat down and thought. And all that day, and all that night, God damn it, nothing of any interest whatever happened, either outside my head or within it.

  The next day was, in general, even duller. I poked around the Library trying to find something worth thinking about; I bothered Gross and a number of technicians down at the Police buildings—and I’d have done equally well trying to strike up a conversation with one of my Robbies. Even on Ravenal the things aren’t geared for chatter, though many Totums talk well enough, when they’re not busy supervising Robbies or doing the heavy work; I finally reached the point at which I could have a small dinner, and went out to find one, being thoroughly sick of my own company.

  On Ravenal, as I’ve said, they make tradition do for imagination a good deal, so I was not entirely surprised to find a nicely expensive place called Blackjack, after a preSpace, equally expensive (for its time) New York City restaurant. I fell in there and ordered Classically: a cheeseburger, fries and a large beer.

  The fries brought me back to Heinlein—Fries was Poddie’s last name (Podkayne of Mars, if you’re not keeping up, a short novel that exists in two versions, one Heinlein’s and one, in part, his publisher’s)—and the cheeseburger, though it was clear that the Blackjack chef was trying hard, didn’t quite have the authentic tang of cheap meat. The beer deserves a little paragraph or so to itself, if you don’t mind.

  The object of alcoholic drinks, Blackjack apparently felt (and it seems to be a common feeling on Ravenal generally, damn it) is to intoxicate the user. Some do this quickly; some, like beer or champagne, do it slowly and, more or less, gently, and there an end of it.

  This is wrongheaded. It is function without form. The idea of an alcoholic drink is to assuage thirst and create relaxation at the same time; it is, like most pleasures, a multipurpose gimmick. In order to do this well, the stuff has to taste good.

  Most beers don’t, though a truly bad beer is not easy to find. A few are worth drinking, and fewer still are worth actually hunting up. The beer provided at Blackjack was none of these things; it was very nearly not there at all.

  I drank sixteen ounces of something that reminded me dimly of beer, in a generic sense, provided me with a faint alcoholic glow, and vanished, to reappear later on as waste. I resented the glow; if I’d had no pleasure in the stuff going down, I didn’t want some tiny additional pleasure sneaking into me by a back door.

  I paid a bill that was not quite as staggering as it might have been in the original Blackjack—I’m reasonably sure that was the name of the old New York City place, though it might have been 21; well, I told myself, I suppose people on Ravenal would know—and went out into the night, found a taxi and gave him the address of the Ravenal Misfits. He actually found the place, which took a bit of doing: it was a warehouse, ancient by Ravenal standards and not very well kept up, with a second floor one-third filled with old crates of something or other—faxprint paper, from the smell—and two-thirds filled with a scattering of chairs, and three long tables. One of the tables had two chairs behind it, and some stacks of paper and books on it, as well as a pile or two of computer disks and other antiquated material. One, off in the left-hand corner as I came in, was filled with ancient magazines in seal, faxprint flyers about events I couldn’t quite figure out (TERTIUS WEEKEND 17-20 SEVENMONTH: BYO TOGAE, RON MAGEE CHIEF STIMULATOR, one read), and the third had urns of coffee, setups for tea, and a selection of what seemed to be antique small cakes and cookies. Some of the chairs—arranged in two ragged blocks, about eight by ten chairs to a block—and a lot of the floor space was occupied by a collection of people who looked surprisingly normal; for some reason I’d expected fans of sf to look very odd indeed, and
this turned out to be true only of some of them.

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  THE NAME, MAC told me, was highly traditional. Away back before the Clean Slate War, a school or college or university or scholarte whose initials were M. I. T. (for Massachusetts Indefinite Techniques, I think) was the home of an sf club, the Massachusetts Indefinite Techniques Science-Fiction Society, or M. I. T. S. F. S. This was pronounced Misfits for some damn reason, and the Ravenal group was named in its honor. M. I. T. had been, in a very small way, the Ravenal of its time, Mac said, with all sorts of important ideas having been born there—the earliest cyberneticists were M. I. T. people, for instance.

  The Misfits, as I was saying, didn’t look too misfitted to the actual world. One or two, perhaps—there was a Chandes Washington, for instance, a tall thin fellow with an enormous shock of white hair, a dark-brown complexion, and the wide eyes of someone who had got lost on the way to somewhere forty or fifty years ago, and had never really found his way back to Go. And there was Corri Reges, whose hair was pale blue and who wore small ancient spectacles with wire rims; behind them her eyes glittered very strangely. Corri wasn’t fat nearly so much as she was wide; she seemed to be two or three people in extent, all pushed together somehow under one enormous bright-blue jumper.

  And there was a medium-height, square-jawed fellow who introduced himself as Max Headroom. I did get the reference—a preSpace show on flat TV, about a character who existed only as a computer construct—but he stood there and explained it to me anyhow, complete with a digest of plot lines from the ancient show, which made no sense to me at all.

  Mac did the introducing, for the most part, but there was little formality in the group; I’d walked into a buzz of talk that echoed a bit in the big space, shook some hands when indicated, and found a chair handy to an exit. It seemed the prudent thing to do.

  The buzz lessened a bit, but never quite died, when the chairman of the group—they called him President—banged on the central long table with what looked like an antique slide rule.