His name, Mac had told me—he was one of the twenty or so I hadn’t shaken hands with yet—was Maxwell Glatz, and he was a short, very hairy type—black coarse hair virtually all over his head and face, with no moustache—in a severe dark-grey jumper that had seen many, many better days. He glared fiercely around at the crowd of people and banged his antique on the table again, and the buzz of conversation slowly died.
“The Sixmonth meeting of the Ravenal Misfits will please come to order,” he said. He had a voice that fit his appearance, loud and rasping, an Emergency siren calling for its mate. He waited a few seconds, looking around some more, and then nodded. “Glenda couldn’t make it tonight,” he said in a more conversational tone; “her stoats are acting up again. She did send over details, if anyone wants to hear the Treasury report.”
There was a general groan.
“Dispense with the Treasury report, okay,” Glatz said. “Is there any old business?”
“Crain,” someone said from the back of the room. I looked around, but which of six or seven men there had made the comment I couldn’t tell; it might even have been a deep-voiced woman.
“We are not going to discuss Crain any further,” Glatz said firmly. “By the Almighty and All-Powerful Ghu, enough is enough.”
“Well,” the same voice said, “is he or isn’t he?”
This time I caught the speaker, a small, mild-looking fellow in a wool sweater, clenching an unlit pipe that looked to be authentic briar. His expression was a sort of disappointed determination, as if he had been bringing Crain up at every meeting for five or six years.
“He is not,” Glatz said. “And he won’t be.”
Mac—sitting up front, and big enough to block the views of a couple of smaller people behind him—stirred in his chair. “Do you think that’s entirely fair?” he said.
“Crain broke the rules,” Glatz said. “There are rules, you know.”
“Everybody breaks rules, sometimes,” Corri Reges said. For a very wide woman she had a surprisingly narrow voice, middle-register viola for tone. “That’s no reason to ban him from meetings.”
“It all depends on which rule you break, Corri,” Glatz said, very mildly, “and why you break it. Crain broke an important rule, and he broke it for no good reason.”
“Like calling me Corri,” Corri said. “If this is official business, Mr. Glatz, I’m Ms Reges.”
Glatz sighed. “That’s different,” he said. “That’s procedure. Crain—well, we all know what Crain did.”
“He talked to a reporter,” Mac said. “That was a mistake. It doesn’t seem to have been fatal.”
“Something may appear any day,” Glatz said. “In the name of the Great Ghu—any minute.”
“I think you’re overstating things here,” Mac said. “The reporter was a friend of Crain’s, he was drunk at the time, he took no notes—”
“Have you ever heard of recording devices?” Glatz put in.
Mac sighed. “He was drunk at the time,” he said. “Very. To an extreme. From all I have reliably heard, I don’t really imagine he could have worked a recording device. He may not have been able to work a pencil. He was not sober.”
“Even so,” Glatz began, and Mac said:
“The truth of the matter is, you don’t like Walt Crain, and you’ve been looking for a reason to bar him from the Misfits, and you think you’ve found one.”
Corri put in, in a tender little viola-d’amore voice: “And I, for one, am not going to stand for it.”
“Nor I,” Mac said, and the man at the back of the room said, around his briar:
“Hear, hear.”
“I say he’s out,” Glatz told them all, “and what are you going to do about it?”
Mac rose and looked around him at the rest of the Misfits. “Who,” he said, “is ready to hold a new Presidential election?”
Glatz said: “Hey—”
There was a general murmur of Yes and No. To my ear, the Yesses had it, but the margin was not large.
“Or,” Mac said into the dying murmurs, “we might just vote on whether to expel Walt Crain.”
The Yesses had that one, three to one or better. Mac nodded very curtly at the room, turned back to the Misfit President, and said:
“We could do that, you know. There’s precedent.”
“In the history of sf fandom,” Chandes Washington said—the dark-brown man with all the white hair, in a voice like a sad, lost trombone, “there is precedent for damn near anything.”
“True,” Mac said. “It’s all in Moskowitz somewhere.”
(The name was strange to me, but Mac explained it later on; Moskowitz was, I was told, the great historian of early sf fandom, and source of the rule that the main constituent in any sf fan group was a tendency toward faction. “He never actually said that, quite,” Mac told me, “but it’s written between every lovely, strange line of his histories.” Much of Moskowitz, apparently, hasn’t survived, but there is enough, according to Mac, to provide a fair notion of the preSpace history, not of sf but of sf fandom. “The dear man lived in a world of his own,” Mac said, “and one with only tenuous connections to the rest of the planet at that time—so much the better for fandom.”)
“Put the question, then,” the man in the back of the room said around his briar.
Somebody called: “Question,” and Chandes Washington said, mournfully:
“Hear, hear!”
There was a little silence. Glatz gave an enormous sigh.
“Very well,” he said. “The question is: Shall Walton Crain be excluded from all participation in the affairs of the Ravenal Misfits?”
“All official affairs,” Corri Reges put in instantly. “However the vote goes, he’s going to be welcome at my place.”
Small murmurs of agreement.
“All official affairs,” Glatz said. “The question is put; show of hands.”
Mac made quite a production of turning and counting the hands for exclusion, but he didn’t have to; there were a total of five, counting both of Glatz’s.
In a defeated little voice, Glatz said: “Those against?” About thirty people raised hands. Some of the Misfits, I noticed, had stayed out of the voting altogether—well, maybe they were guests, like me. Or members of a non-voting faction.
“The motion is not carried,” Glatz said.
“And Crain is not barred from the place,” Corri Reges said. “Thank God for a little sense, and thank you all, ladies, gentlemen and others.”
Glatz sighed. Deeply. “New business?” he said, and Mac stood up again.
“I’ve brought a guest I’d like to introduce,” he said. “He’s interested himself in an affair that should be close to all our hearts, and he may want to ask some questions of a few of you. I vouch for him personally—he will be no danger to the club, and will not disclose anyone’s membership, or endanger any member.”
That sounded just a hair too sweeping, as a guarantee, but I let it pass, looking just as trustworthy and dignified as I felt I could manage.
“If you vouch for him, Dr. MacDougal,” Chandes Washington said sadly, “that’s good enough for me.” There was a general murmur of agreement, and with no further ado whatever Mac turned, motioned for me to stand up, and introduced the members of Ravenal’s sf fan club to Gerald Knave.
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
I made it very showy. I walked slowly to the long table, and went around behind it to stand in front of the unused second chair—the Treasurer’s chair, I supposed, but Glenda wouldn’t be using it, her stoats were acting up again. There had been a little murmur of conversation when Mac gave my name—he hadn’t given much else, apparently figuring I’d do my own explaining from scratch, which was nicely helpful—and I looked at the small sea of faces—well, the pond of faces—until the murmur began to die away. Then I said it. I actually did say it.
“I suppose you’re wondering why I’ve called you all here tonight.”
They were a dream audience. Laughte
r, chatter, applause. I think I have had older lines draw better reactions, but not many and not often. I waited for a lull, got a small one, and said:
“I’m here to talk about Robert Anson Heinlein.”
Chatter, applause. This time I rode over it. “You all know his work. You all know about The Stone Pillow. I’m not sure how many of you know that The Stone Pillow is not by Robert Heinlein, but is a forgery concocted by person or persons—”
“Unknown,” somebody called out. “We all know that, Mr. Knave.” I peered into the pond of faces and found Chandes Washington, still looking lost, but somehow also looking belligerent.
“Knave,” I said mildly. “I need to find out a lot about that forgery. How it was planted, how it was dug up, how it was transported here to Ravenal—”
“Ask the police,” someone else called. A woman I hadn’t met—small, brass-blonde, skin the color of copper and bright, bright blue eyes. She was wearing a tight-fitting, very dark jumper, and she was sitting away over to my right, looking tense.
“I have, I am, and I will,” I said. “And I need to ask a lot more than the police. I need to ask some real experts.”
“Flattery noted and filed,” a smooth little voice said: Corri Reges.
“Most of you are experts on Heinlein, so far as there are any experts,” I said. “A few of you may be experts on this particular work—helped to find it or transport it, maybe. Helped to assess it, in one way or another, from reading the thing to doing the final isotope assay.”
“That’s MacDougal,” Washington said unhappily, “and you know him—you must have talked to him already.”
A dream audience—and a little more. I thought of a classic remark made, many times, by the preSpace philosopher Will Durant: “Everybody wantsa get inta de act.”
“I’ll want to talk to more people than Mac,” I said. “Individually. I was told that the best way to ask for your help was to come here and do it. So I’ve done that.”
“Why should we?” That was Glatz, at my side but sitting down.
“You’re Misfits,” I said, turning partway to him for half a second before returning to address the pond. “So am I—in spirit. I’ve read a little sf myself—” I pronounced it properly, sci-fi—”and I’ve been reading it since I was a lot younger than anyone here tonight. I won’t claim expertise, but—”
“What do you mean by sf?” Corri Reges said. “Today’s junk? The sort of thing they adapt for 3V and sell to fools?”
I shrugged. “I mean sf,” I said. “Heinlein. Anderson. Niven.” A little murmur. I was giving signals, and hoping for “Advance, friend, and be recognized”.
“The fast three-week course?” Corri Reges said sweetly.
“I started when I was twelve,” I said. “But that’s not the important thing.”
I was lying about the importance; for this crowd, a history of sf reading was the important thing. Without it I was nobody at all. This time I waited for reaction, and got it, from the brass-and-copper blonde. “The thing is forged,” she said. “We have no interest in it; why should we have? Why should you have, for that matter?”
“Someone is trading on the reputation of Robert Heinlein,” I said. “That gives me an interest. How about you?”
Murmurs. Chatter.
A full minute of it, rising and falling.
Then Max Headroom asked: “But what can we do about it?”
Advance, friend, and be recognized. I relaxed, without moving a visible muscle.
“We can find the forger,” I said, “and make the whole thing public.”
“But the fact of forgery will be public no matter what we do,” the brass-copper blonde said. “That will be enough—and if it isn’t, it isn’t; putting a name to the forger won’t do anything more.”
“But it will,” I said.. “It’ll be a better story—a detective story with a caught criminal at the end of it. The news nets will eat it up. It’ll be spread all over—the forgery by itself will only get into library bulletins, a few meetings like this one, and nothing more. Special-interest coverage only.”
Mac put in his two cents. “He’s right, you know,” he said without getting up. “A story like this would be a very big item, for a time.”
“But if I’m going to find the forger,” I said into the murmurs that followed, “I need a lot of data. From any of you who have it. Some, we can take care of here. More—Mac has my address and phone, and he’ll pass it on to any interested parties.”
“I don’t know,” the brass-blonde said. “If it means publicity for us—for the Misfits—well, I wouldn’t want people to know I—I was a sf fan, you know. None of us would, Knave. That’s why we’re careful of outsiders.”
Walton Crain and his reporter friend. “I know,” I said. “You’ll be as anonymous as I can make you—and if you’re ever quoted, it will be as experts in your public fields, if that’s even remotely possible. I don’t mind being known as a fan—”
“For you it’s different,” Corri Reges said sadly.
“I know it is,” I said. “Who cares what I read, as long as I keep moving? But I know it’s tougher for you, with reputations to preserve, and I’ll do my best to preserve them. Mac can testify that my best has at times been pretty fair.”
A small murmur, and a smaller silence. Mac got up, unfolding slowly and spectacularly. “Better than fair,” he said carefully. “If there were Nobels for Survivorship, fellow Misfits, Knave’s collection would outnumber mine.”
At my side, Glatz said: “But—”
That sound was the deciding one; waverers apparently felt they didn’t want to be wherever Glatz was. The word fell into dead silence, and then Washington and the brass-copper blonde spoke at once, bass and alto:
“Well, then, let’s start work—”
“I suppose it should be all right—”
“All right,” I said. “Now, suppose you go on with your meeting, while I take one of you at a time over to a corner somewhere—we’ll drink coffee and talk.” I didn’t wait for approval, because it wouldn’t have been approval, it would have been discussion. It is one of my firmest rules: never, unless absolutely unavoidable, ask more than two people to approve of anything at all at the same time. “First, I’d like to talk to a woman named Bitsy Bowyer.”
The brass-copper little blonde stood up. “That’s me,” she said. “Or I, I have never been able to remember which. Shall we go, Knave?”
I gave her a big smile. “Lead on, Ms Bowyer,” I said. “I’m right with you.”
* * * *
I dragged a couple of empty chairs with me, and followed her to the furthest corner of the big place—furthest both from the meeting and from the book-and-magazine table. The refreshment table was between us and the crowd, and much nearer the crowd—we were off in a corner full of old faxprint paper or some such, with enough space to sit and talk. And the first thing she said to me was: “You should know, by the way, that my name isn’t Bitsy.”
“Sorry,” I said. “I thought—”
“Mac must have mentioned me,” she said. “I’m Bitsy to old friends. The name is Tabitha Bowyer. And it’s not Ms, either.”
“Miss?” I said. “Mrs.?”
“Dr.,” she said. “Reconstructive archaeology.”
“Mac said you were part of the dig team that—”
“That recovered The Stone Pillow,” she said. “Right, so I was. But we didn’t know what we had.”
“I’m sure you thought it was genuine—”
She shook her head. “No,” she said. “I mean it perfectly literally, Knave: we didn’t know what we had. None of us did. We took it out without any really clear idea what it was.” She hesitated, and then sighed a little. “Coffee?”
Anything in a good cause, I told myself, and agreed to sample the stuff. She went over to the refreshment table and came back with two coffees—she never asked about milk or sugar; many black-coffee drinkers don’t, and whether it’s forgetfulness or the assumption that people who
drink coffee want to drink nothing but coffee, no additions being possible, I have never quite figured out. She handed me one.
It was even worse than I’d thought it was going to be—weak, tepid, slightly bitter and in a reusable plastic cup. I took two sips, held the cup patiently, and said: “Would you mind terribly explaining that a little?”
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
“IT WAS ALMOST your usual bomb-shelter,” she said. “I’ve been on twelve different reconstructive digs, Knave, and they all look the same—details differ, and after all it’s the details that are going to count for us—it’s the details we want to dig out—but it was your basic armored hole in the ground, supplied with air, full of detectors that were all fairly useless—knowing whether the ambient temperature is 900F or 250F isn’t going to matter to you too much in your armor, after all; what you want to know is, when does it drop below, say, 130F, and a much simpler rig can tell you that—stocked with food containers of some sort, water recycling equipment of some sort, waste disposal—and, of course, the treasures.”
“And the corpses.”
“Better than half the time,” she said, “we don’t find the corpses.” She took another gulp of her coffee—her fourth or fifth, I thought. The woman was either remarkably tolerant, or had no taste buds at all. “Either whoever owned the hole didn’t get to it in time, or left it when things calmed down a bit—some did live through, and leave, you know, though almost all of those were dead within weeks of rejoining the surface—or, to be perfectly frank, God knows what.”
I thought about it. “But if they left,” I said, “then the hole wouldn’t still be waiting to be discovered and dug up, would it? I mean, someone would have found the exit hole, or door, or whatever. Hatch, I suppose.”
“Sometimes,” she said. “And sometimes the hatch—or exit hole—whatever—has been drifted over since. Sand. Mudslides. Earthquakes. There were quite a lot of earthquakes for the first fifty to seventy years after the War.”
“I can see how there might have been,” I said. “But in this case there was a corpse.”
The Counterfeit Heinlein Page 7
