The Counterfeit Heinlein

by Laurence M. Janifer

  “I’m starting to see just what the data is going to attach itself to,” I said. “That may help your assorting job.”

  “Do you mean—ah—that you begin to see daylight?”

  The Master sounded amused. I wasn’t at all sure why. “It’s more like seeing—oh, three o’clock in the morning,” I said. “I wouldn’t call it daylight. But I do see something. And this is no place to talk about it—I’m in some sort of waiting-room for a set of offices. I’ve been talking to Paula Shore.”

  “Three o’clock in the morning,” he said. “If that is so—if you have seen some of the darkness—then I am pleased, Gerald. And I agree that we should talk, if only to ensure that you are seeing the correct darkness. Go home. Call from there. You will have privacy and ease—and I will be enabled to continue my work with minimal interruption.”

  “Well—” I said.

  “Finished,” he said.

  Click.

  So I went on home.

  * * * *

  I SETTLED IN, made a pot of Sumatra Mandheling, drank the first half-cup, arranged pot, cup, sugar and cream on a low shelf near the phone, lit an Inoson cigarette—why not give the Master all the time available to get on with his assorting?—and punched in the number. As I heard the two forwarding beeps I remembered, cursed under my breath and put out the damn cigarette.

  “Who?” he said, a second or so later, and I said:

  “Me again.”

  “Ah,” he said. “The darkness. Yes. You have begun to see reason behind the forgery, and the theft.”

  I hesitated a second, and took in a little more coffee. “I wouldn’t exactly call it reason,” I said.

  “Then you are beginning to see,” he said. “I am pleased, Gerald. It has been only a few days, in all; you have indeed developed.”

  I swallowed. Hard. “You know something,” I said.

  “I know a good deal,” the unoiled camshaft told me. “You also know something, Gerald. Tell me why the forgery was created, and why the counterfeit Heinlein manuscript was stolen.”

  Could he be bluffing? I thought. Could it be that he had no idea, was waiting for me to lay it out for him, and would then say calmly that he’d known all along?

  No, damn it. But I tested the idea anyhow; I gave him an answer that would make sense only if he did know. “Because it was there,” I said.

  “Exactly, Gerald. Because it was there—in at least two senses.”

  All right, he knew. And why not? He was, after all, Master Higsbee, who knew everything that could possibly be known. I took in more coffee, looked at the pack of Smoking Tubes lying on the shelf, decided that lighting one would only display childish rancor, and said: “To begin with, because the technique, whatever it was, was available.”

  “Available to the forger,” he said. “Which argues a base of knowledge—though not necessarily his own knowledge.”

  “In other words, either our forger had the technical facility to cobble up such an assortment of isotopes—or he knew someone who did.”

  “Have you a preference, Gerald?” he said.

  I nodded into the phone. “Of course I do,” I said. “He knew someone. If Robbin is right, and I’ve met the person responsible, it can’t be a physicist with a specialty in isotopes—the only one I know, and I’ve done lists of people I know on Ravenal, is Mac. And I will not believe it of Mac. He’d have done a better job, or no job at all.”

  “He is not a specialist in that particular small corner of his field,” Master Higsbee said. “But I agree he might be able to do the job—and further agree that, if he had, it would have been done more capably.” He paused, and gave me a small chuckle. “But you have forgotten one person who might manage the task, Gerald.”

  “I have?” More coffee. One more glance at the cigarettes. “Who?”

  “Myself,” the rasp said. “Though old and blind and almost helpless, Gerald, I believe I could, with some thought, manage such a task. It requires no advance in physical theory, but merely refinements of existing methods; it would be difficult and demanding, but quite possible. It is an invention—but not, Gerald, an invention beyond capability.”

  Oh, God. “Well,” I said, “you didn’t.”

  “I will not spoof you, Gerald,” he said. “I did not. If I had, once again, I believe the forgery would have been more capably managed.”

  “Agreed,” I said. “And if you didn’t do it, and Mac didn’t do it, then whoever did this thing—”

  “Led the small group which did these things,” the rasp corrected me.

  More coffee. I’d finished the second cup, and poured myself a third. “Just so,” I said.

  “Gerald,” he said, “you are drinking too much coffee today. You will suffer for it in your nerves.”

  All right. He’d heard the stuff being poured, and stirred after I’d put in the cream and sugar. Did coffee make a different set of sounds from tea? Or had he simply deduced that, before noon, I wouldn’t be drinking tea?

  I sighed. “The leader of the pack, then,” I said, and heard that dry chuckle again at the Classical allusion, “had to know a specialist.”

  “Not difficult, on Ravenal, if you are yourself a scholar in virtually any field of science,” he said. “There are many such acquaintances; it is not true here that molar physicists, for example, consort only with other molar physicists.”

  “He heard about the technique, then—heard it was possible, that someone could do such a job and was thinking of doing it—and made the someone a proposition.”

  “Fame and fortune,” the Master said. “But how fortune, for a manuscript that was certain to be given to the Scholarte, that was certain to reside in First Files Building, all unpaid for?”

  “How fame, for that matter,” I said, “if the forgery were to be undetected?”

  “Exactly,” the Master said.

  I said: “It makes no sense.”

  “We might enunciate a rule,” the Master said.

  “We might?” More coffee.

  “If it doesn’t make any sense,” he said, “it doesn’t make any sense.”

  I said it that time. “Ah.”

  “Which brings us to the second application of your statement: because it was there. First, because the isotope technique was there. Second—because the plan was there.”

  “But there was no plan,” I said. “Not in the sense we’ve been discussing, since we started.”

  He said, quietly: “Ah, Gerald, stop and think. Of course there was a plan. But most of it has not yet come to fruition.”

  “Right,” I said. “I was thinking of what has happened—not what was going to.”

  “And now certainly will not,” he said, “as we are armed against it.”

  “The shootings,” I said suddenly. “The Berigot. Five years ago.”

  “And yourself, more recently,” he added. “We must put Mr. Leake in another category; that shooting was meant to kill, and did so. Though perhaps—well, never mind it just now, Gerald.”

  “All right, but we’ll get to it, we’ll have to, whatever it is,” I said. “Master—how much do you know? Have you been carting the whole answer around with you, waiting for somebody else to find it before you said anything?”

  The chuckle again. And a fourth cup of coffee. “I have not,” he said. “I should feel myself criminally responsible, were that the case. I have seen this much for some time—but not more. The identity of the forger and thief—and murderer—is unknown to me. So is the means by which the theft was accomplished. Getting through the grounds is not difficult—”

  “No?” I said. “A pulsating field, with a look every twentieth of a second, from three feet below ground to six feet above?”

  “Even below ground, let us say four feet below, there exist tunnels—tunnels can be dug, and later perhaps filled in,” he said calmly. “But I doubt the necessity for so laborious—and almost certainly traceable—a means. There exists sailplaning.”

  I stared at the damn phone
. “A group of Berigot thieves?” I said. “I refuse to believe it. Everything we know about the Berigot—”

  “The Berigot are not thieves,” the Master said. “They lack the incentive; their sins are of a different sort.” He paused. Maybe he was drinking coffee. Or assorting something. I didn’t have the ears to tell. “But human beings can also sailplane; in the presence of a race which can do so without special equipment, one tends to neglect the obvious. Equipment is not difficult to come by, Gerald, nor difficult, if it come to that, to manufacture.”

  Well, it was obvious. Obvious—as a classic science-fiction story has it—as all Hell. “I suppose so,” I said. “A band of thieves, sailplaning over the grounds, right to the window—”

  “Where they stop,” he said. “And somehow come through the window without leaving a trace.” He paused. “Gerald, a group of three people, say, sailplaning, might carry a few pounds of equipment. Several pounds, perhaps—imagine each equipped with sailplane wings, holding ropes or having ropes tied to their bodies, the ropes attached to a bag or hammock filled with whatever items were necessary. They would sailplane to the Berigot perch, which is near that window. But what equipment could simply—cancel out wholly unbreakable windows, windows, like all here, which are sealed permanently into place?”

  I had the answer. I really did; the Master had handed it to me, right there and then. And I was damned if I’d give it to him. Talk about neglecting the obvious—well, I’d have that piece to shove into place when the rest was ready for it. “The basic question is unanswered,” I said. “Who.”

  “Indeed, Gerald,” the Master said. “And I have not the faintest idea who.”

  CHAPTER THIRTY-FIVE

  “WHO” HAD TO WAIT. We needed either more data, or more thought.

  But “how” was beginning to be clear. And “why”—

  The Master had said it: If it doesn’t make any sense, it doesn’t make any sense. There was no reason to forge a manuscript by Robert Heinlein, if the manuscript were going to go—with no financial profit to anybody—straight to First Files Building, alias Grand Central Library, and sit there in an antique glass case.

  There was no reason to steal the damned manuscript, either; it was already known to be a forgery, so the theft couldn’t have been to hide that fact or somehow cover it up. And since it was a forgery, there would be no chance of finding an eager buyer for it under a counter somewhere. There are always secret collectors—people who buy things they can’t show the world, or even their dearest friends, just for the pleasure of owning a piece of somebody’s life, even if they have to take that piece out and look at it in secret. A buyer for an authentic Heinlein manuscript would not have been impossible to find—probably two or three of the Ravenal Misfits would leap at the chance, if offered.

  But a buyer for a fake Heinlein manuscript didn’t exist. So why steal the thing?

  Ping Boom had given me most of the answer, long before, and I’d outlined it myself: Education.

  If the manuscript had been left lying around, once it was known to be a forgery—it would have offered a large assortment of clues telling any investigator just how the forgery had been managed—how the paper and ink had been so carefully counterfeited. The technique was (according to Master Higsbee, whose word I was willing to take, God knows) difficult, but not impossibly so; somebody could have come up with it, and created the stuff.

  And finding out just how the technique worked might very well tell an investigator who had worked it. Specialists in isotope work weren’t fantastically rare on Ravenal, but there weren’t six hundred of them, either; it’s a fairly small splinter of a field. Previous work by one of the members of that splinter group would certainly point the way to the technique, once you saw in detail what the technique was.

  So the theft did have a reason: to interfere with the education of investigators. To keep the technique a secret.

  It had that reason—and another reason, too.

  As the Master had been pointing out, most of the plan hadn’t happened yet. The counterfeit Heinlein had been step one. Step two was going to be—a counterfeit Shakespeare? Villon? Dead Sea Scroll?

  Something, at any rate. As the bugs were worked out of the isotope technique—and perhaps even if they weren’t; let a little time go by, and people would be just as unwilling to spend money on doing a full assay, and the technique as it stood could defeat a limited one, as the counterfeit Heinlein had—anything you could do a fair imitation of could be forged, and accepted as ancient.

  And that forgery would, somehow, not get to First Files Building at all. Despite the laws, there would be an unfortunate disappearance somewhere along the road, or a copy passed off on the librarians after examination and testing had been completed. There exist, as I’d just been saying to myself, private collectors, even for objects they can’t display at all.

  The Master had seen that much. It struck me that somebody else had seen it, too.

  Ping Boom, of course.

  Which explained both his need to get the manuscript back, and his secrecy about his reasons. He needed to be able to find out how the job had been done—both in order to locate the perpetrator, and to guard against a future counterfeit—and he wanted very badly not to put ideas in anybody’s head. Not even mine. He didn’t want to mention the specter of a future forgery.

  I knew the why of the forgery and the theft—the forgery had been a test run, so to speak, to make sure everything worked even in the imperfect state of the technique. The theft had been to protect the secret of the forgery, with a bigger one in prospect.

  And it had had to be a forgery that would get attention. It had to be an important work by an important figure, one still loved and collected and read. If the technique were to be tested, it had to go up against the sort of testing that would be done on that sort of manuscript—because the next job would be that sort of manuscript.

  It might even be—why not?—another Heinlein. Given The Stone Pillow, why not The Sound of His Wings? Why not Word Edgewise?

  Oh, probably not—the objections that Heinlein couldn’t have written The Stone Pillow, because he’d said he hadn’t, would apply to the others just as well, and the forgers, having tripped over those once, wouldn’t want to trip over them again—why make extra difficulties for yourself? Shakespeare would be safer.

  But I will admit to a pang of shamefaced regret. The little bit of The Stone Pillow I’d seen had whetted my appetite for the rest, and according to those who had read it, from the Master to Mac to (well, with severe reservations) Corri Reges, the thing had read like good Heinlein. I was going to miss the other Heinlein stories, damn it, even if they weren’t Heinleins—when there’s no real coffee, even instant becomes drinkable.

  Well, as Heinlein himself had said, we pilot always into an unknown future. Who knew what might be out there?

  Maybe there were some undiscovered Heinleins out there. If not those three stories, then some other story. Maybe an unpublished story or two, somewhere. Maybe that last collection, the one that hasn’t survived, is sitting in some Survivalist burrow that hasn’t been dug up yet. Who can say?

  A man can hope.

  CHAPTER THIRTY-SIX

  THE BIG QUESTION, of course, still sat there, as unanswerable as ever.

  Who?

  For that, nobody had even the ghost of an answer. It was clear, more or less, that finding the manuscript and digging into it to see how the isotope trick had been worked would identify our target, or at least identify the part of it that had done the tech job. But finding the damn manuscript was going to be possible only if we could identify our target first—which was nicely circular.

  It was weirdly frustrating. There were several people involved—by hypothesis, a planner, a technical wizard, and almost certainly one more at the very least, to help with the theft if nothing else—any one of whom might have been the actual forger, the writer of the thing.

  And with at least three people to look for, we were sitting i
n the middle of nowhere.

  Well—it occurred to me that one small piece of this puzzle might benefit from the application of a little police work. Somebody, after all, had shot three Berigot five years ago—and checking alibis for that would be flatly impossible. But the same somebody had shot Ramsay Leake very, very recently; alibis might be checkable.

  It’s the sort of thing that turns up regularly on 3V, and very seldom anywhere else; in the average killing, either there are no alibis to deal with, or the alibis, when checked out, check out. Once in a long while an alibi is faked—and when that’s done with care, it will often pass as fully checked; there are some people, here and there, who are just as bright as some police officers, here and there.

  Alibis are not, in short, the first thing anybody grabs at, in an investigation, though if there is a handy bunch of suspects and nothing truly solid that points to just one of them, police will do the work. But we looked to be reduced to grabbing at some.

  All right: I went over a list of people I’d met on Ravenal—the suspect pool for the leader of the pack, so to speak, according to little Robbin Tress. I threw some of them out—Robbin herself, and the Master, and B’russ’r (impossible on grounds of motive if nothing else; I would not believe any of the shootings the work of a Beri), Mac (ridiculous on the face of it—and if that hadn’t been enough, the person who’d managed the forgery was not going to be the person who’d blown the whistle on the damn thing), Jamie Arthur and my City Two landlord and a few more here and there. I was left with some reconstructive archaeologists, some Misfits and a handful of technicians like Drang Mathias.

  Could we find out where all these people had been at the moment Ramsay Leake had been shot? We had that moment pinned down tightly, by Berigot witnesses. And we were looking, it seemed, for a Hell of a marksman—Leake had been drilled at some distance, stone dead with one shot.

  Or had he been? The picture of him grabbing at his chest had had me casually assuming he’d been drilled through the heart—which was not necessarily the case. Did it make any difference exactly where the bullet had gone? Not much, perhaps—any bullet that had him pitching over the roof railing would have done the same job. A ten-story fall would cancel Ramsay Leake thoroughly, no matter where he’d been hit. It wasn’t worth talking to Gross about, all by itself. But I had a list of suspects, and Gross was the obvious person to head up a nice, large, professional team and check them out. Police will do the work of checking alibis—if they have a list of suspects to start with. I could provide Gross with such a list, though he wasn’t going to like the fact that it depended, basically, on Robbin’s arcane damn talent.