The Pursuit of the Pankera: A Parallel Novel About Parallel Universes

by Robert A. Heinlein

  “ ‘Pregnant,’ I certainly do know. Sharpie, how did you vote?”

  My wife shrugged. “I was euchred out, same as Deety.” I felt momentarily let down. But Hilda’s answer was honest.

  “Copilot.”

  “Yes, Captain?”

  “I asked you all to reach consensus. You’ve done so, on the nature of the contact. I agree, so that’s our policy. But I did not ask for volunteers. I’ve picked the scout I consider best qualified.”

  “Very well, sir. I hope you have selected me.”

  “I haven’t, Jake. Nobody doubts your courage, you know that. But this chore is spying, not fighting. Jake, you’re a genius in mathematics but you’ll never be an actor. I’m doing this job myself, right after breakfast.”

  My daughter interrupted. “Zebadiah, where you go, I go! That’s settled!”

  The captain said gently, “Deety, I hope you don’t stick to that … because, if you do, we won’t attempt contact here. We’ll go straight back to our picnic island on Teh-Five-Plus. As soon as we ground there, I’ll resign as skipper and we’ll elect a new one. Sharpie, you are my candidate.”

  “In a pig’s eye, buster!”

  “Nevertheless, I plan to vote for you. Deety is too sentimental, Jake is too reckless. But when it comes to a crunch, you’ve proved that you think fastest and most dispassionately of any of us. Oh, I’ll still pilot if you tell me to … but you can command from your seat at the perceptron as well or better than I can from my seat. Deety, are you sticking to the ultimatum you handed me?”

  “Yessir!”

  “Even though your stubbornness could result in damage or even death for your father and Sharpie? Even in my death? I love you, dear, but on a spying mission you would simply be a drag on me—you’re even less of an actor than Jake. What happened to that old ‘One for all and all for one’ spirit?”

  “Uh ….”

  “Cap’n Zebbie!”

  “Yes, Sharpie?”

  “I hate to interrupt a family fight ….”

  “We’re all one family. I hope.”

  “… but you said ‘best qualified’ and for ‘spying, not fighting.’ ”

  “Just a moment, Sharpie. Deety—do we head for Picnic Island?”

  My daughter’s face took on an utter lack of expression with which she has always met her deepest emotions even as a baby girl. Shortly, her eyes brimmed and two tears started down her face. “Zebadiah … you are my captain. I will obey you without argument.”

  “Thank you, Deety. Go ahead, Sharpie.”

  “Zebbie, you’ve just proved that you can get tough with Deety: now let’s see if you can get tough with yourself. You said ‘best qualified.’ You said ‘spying, not fighting.’ Now look me straight in the eye and tell me that you know more about obstetrics than I do and that you can be less conspicuous in a crowd than I can be and that you can sweet-talk your way out of a rumpus better than I can.”

  I interrupted. “Hilda, I absolutely forbid you to—”

  “Copilot!”

  “Sir?”

  “Pipe down! Or set the controls and take us at once to Teh-Five-Plus and be ready to run for skipper against your wife. I’ve had a bellyful of crew members giving captain’s orders in this bucket. I don’t mean you, Sharpie; you were presenting a case. Tell me how you would swing this job and why you think you can do it better than I can. I planned to be a German tourist with a horrible accent, who can just barely understand English but reads it fairly well.”

  “Not bad, Zebbie, not bad at all. But I can do better. In the first place, you don’t have any clothes that would be inconspicuous here—and Deety and I would have trouble tailoring for you; tailoring for men is very different from dressmaking. But Deety and I can whip up a street dress for me that would get by here in a couple of hours; I photographed some of the perceptron screen for that very purpose. That ‘horrible accent’ idea is good; I’ll swipe it. But French rather than German; I can do it easier. Besides that I’ll be wearing a hearing aid—a walkie-talkie button in my ear and the walkie-talkie slung under my arm—but I’ll pretend it’s a hearing aid because people speak more clearly to anyone wearing a hearing aid and aren’t surprised when they don’t understand everything.”

  “How do you know what a hearing aid looks like here?”

  “I don’t. But neither will the Americans in the small town you’re going to drop me in know what a French woman’s hearing aid looks like—but they’ll know that’s what it is from my behavior. Now one question, Zebbie: I’ve seen upwards of two hundred babies born—how many have you seen?”

  “Uh … none.”

  Twenty-four hours later I was biting my nails and sweating. Captain Zeb had a permanent scowl and spoke only in monosyllables and grunts while he held us cruising in cloud cover over a small Midwestern town. My daughter was in my wife’s seat and said nothing other than brief reports.

  “Captain, she’s entered a large building. I can’t read the sign on it. If I shift scale to read it, I may miss her as she comes out.”

  “Don’t shift magnification. Watch the entrance.”

  An endless time later we heard Hilda’s sweet voice: “I’m heading for rendezvous. You don’t have to be cautious about being seen picking me up; we’ll be leaving this world at once.”

  Five minutes later she was inside and we bounced, in full view of many natives—possibly causing a Fortean mystery. As soon as we shifted seats and belted down, we translated to the next analog. Zeb asked, “Any trouble, Sharpie?”

  “Not a bit. People were almost too helpful. Don’t you want a report?”

  “You reported. Down check.”

  “Captain Marvel, you’re going to get one whether you like it or not. Zee bewilder’ French lade, she zink les American’ veree gentile.’ Mais les art’ medical’—poof! More than a century out of date, for us. About 1900, at a guess. No drugs worth mentioning. No hint of knowing anything about blood types—at least the article on ‘Blood’ in the Encyclopedia Britannica in the public library did not mention them but did mention blood-letting as therapy. Infant mortality high, same for childbirth mortality. I could have left sooner but I got gruesomely fascinated.”

  “Hilda,” I protested, “you had us all worried to death!”

  “I’m sorry, Jacob—truly I am. But I did have to make certain; it’s such a nice world otherwise.”

  Two days later our “bewildered French lady” made another first contact and I managed not to bite my nails, telling myself—correctly—that she was safer in daylight on the streets of a small town in a strange world than she would have been at night on the streets of New York in our native world.

  We have been here slightly over a year now. Hilda had a rough time bearing Jacob Zebadiah—a long labor and one unit of blood needed afterward. But my daughter gave birth to Hilda Jane without anesthesia, under hypnotic suggestion (although Deety claims that she was fully conscious throughout and can’t be hypnotized—I venture no opinion).

  We did manage to slide in quietly, both through the efforts of our “bewildered French lady” and through Zeb’s unmalicious chicanery. Sometimes he was our French lady’s husband, with even poorer command of the local language than she had; other times, working alone, he spoke English slowly with a strong Bavarian accent but understood it readily. But wherever either of them stopped, they changed gold bullion into local money—as Zeb believes, and so do I, that a man with plenty of cash on hand is armed against most hazards.

  The details of this are hardly worth recording. This analog of the United States (called that, although the boundaries are somewhat different from those of our native place) is not nearly as laden with laws, regulations, licensing—and taxes—as the country from which we fled. In consequence, “illegally entered aliens” (which we are) do not find it too difficult to hide, once they learn to “sling the lingo,” as Zeb calls it, and understand the local customs.

  Hilda and Zeb learned both rapidly during our first two weeks spent ac
quiring cash and knowledge in dozens of Midwest small towns, they on the ground, Deety and I “riding shotgun” in the sky. Deety and I learned more slowly, from them and from radio. But we learned. Then we moved to the Northwest, as “natives” from back east, and there coped with the only difficult problem: how to keep Gay Deceiver always out of sight, without hiding her, camouflaged, on some remote mountain.

  Zeb and Deety did hide her in the Cascades for some three days during which Hilda and I found and leased a large warehouse on the outskirts of Tacoma. That night we moved Gay Deceiver into it, slapped white paint on the glass of the building’s windows, and slept in Gay, with a feeling of being home again. We had a foot to the ground; the rest was mere detail.

  Today we own six hectares (fifteen acres here) of much cheaper land, farther out, and Gay is housed in a windowless hangar built to fit her; and the six of us live in an old farmhouse in front of her hideaway. But even this is temporary. With plenty of land to work in, Gay will eventually be underground, surrounded by reinforced concrete; her hangar will become a machine shop. A new and better house will be built over her bunker. But there is no hurry.

  One might think that a country so easy for strangers to settle in, without going through immigration, would be ripe for invasion by Panki. Not so. But first let me say that we could have entered legally, had we been able to claim a country of origin … and had we not had an embarrassingly large, incredibly advanced vehicle to smuggle in. This analog United States has a low population (under a hundred million) and accepts immigrants rather freely. At one point Zeb considered buying us phony papers and using them to let us enter “legally”—but decided that it was simpler to use Gay to smuggle us while we smuggled Gay. The outcome is the same; we will never be a burden on the state—once we get that machine shop and electronics lab set up, Zeb and I will “invent” hundreds of useful gadgets this country lacks.

  Panki—even if those deadly vermin find (or have found) teh-axis, the climate and the customs here give them no way to hide. We seem to be at about the warmest part of the interglaciation period. Winter wheat grows where our native world had frozen tundra; the Greenland ice cap has almost vanished; the lowlands of our world are under water and the coastlines are much changed.

  Both climate and custom encourage light clothing, and the preposterous “body modesty” taboo does not exist. Clothing is worn for adornment and for protection—never through “shame.” On the contrary, total nakedness is symbolic of innocence—and these people derive that symbology from the same Bible that was used (in my native culture) to justify the exact opposite. The same Bible—I have checked the relevant passages, word for word. (But this will be no surprise to any unbiased student; the Holy Bible is such a gargantuan collection of conflicting values that anyone can “prove” anything from it by selective quotation.)

  So this is not a world where Panki can hide—wolves in sheep’s clothing. A man who at all times kept his arms and legs fully covered by long sleeves and long trousers would be as conspicuous and as eccentric as one in full armor. But a Pankera infiltrates by being inconspicuous.

  This world does have its taboos (I suppose every culture does) and one of the oddest (to me, with my background) derives directly from reversing the “modesty” taboo. The religious sects here are mostly Christian, of one flavor or another—and on a Saturday morning one may see whole families headed for church in their finest clothes. But, since nakedness is symbolic of innocence, they remove it all in an unconsecrated anteroom, then enter their temple unadorned. One need not attend their service to note this; the climate favors light, airy structures that are mostly roof and slender columns.

  The Bible strongly affects their penal system, again by selective quotation: “Eye for eye, tooth for tooth—”

  This results in a fluid criminal code, with no intent to rehabilitate whatsoever, but to make the punishment fit the crime as closely as possible. I saw one horrible example of this not long after we settled in the Northwest. I was driving our steam wagon south on the main highway out of Tacoma and encountered a roadblock. A policeman told me that I could take a (rather long) detour, or I could wait about twenty minutes; the highway was being used to punish a reckless driver.

  I elected to pull over and wait, and then I joined a crowd of spectators, I being curious as to what was meant.

  I learned too much! A man was staked out on the highway with one leg stretched out by a line at a right angle. A police wagon then drove down that cleared highway and ran over that leg, turned and drove back over it a second time.

  There was an ambulance waiting at the site—but nothing was done for a timed seventeen minutes. Then surgeons got out and performed an emergency amputation right on the spot, then the ambulance took him away, and the roadblock was removed.

  I went back to my steam wagon and shook for about thirty minutes. Then I returned home, driving most cautiously, my errand forgotten. At first I didn’t tell our family about it, just said that I felt ill. But it was reported on radio and the evening paper had it, with picture—so I admitted that I had seen it. The paper noted that the criminal’s insurance had been insufficient to cover the court’s award to the victim, so the reckless driver had not only lost his left leg (as had his victim) but also had had most of his worldly goods confiscated.

  There is no speed limit here and traffic regulations are advisory rather than obligatory—but there are extremely few traffic accidents. I have never before encountered such polite and careful drivers.

  A poisoner is killed by poison; an arsonist is burned to death. I’m not going to describe what is done to a rapist. But poisoning, arson, and rape are almost unknown.

  My first encounter with this brutal system of “balancing” (they don’t call it “punishment”) almost caused me to think that my dear wife had been mistaken in picking this world—that we should move on, or return to Prime Base. But I am no longer certain. This place has no prisons, almost no crime, and it is the safest place to raise children I’ve ever heard of.

  But there are other things I don’t understand. We are, of course, having to relearn history. “The Years of Rising Waters” explain themselves. The critical point in the change of climate came shortly after 1600; by 1620 the new shorelines had stabilized. But that had endless consequences—mass migrations, political disorder, a return of the Black Death, and a much larger immigration from the lowlands of northern Europe to the Americas while the waters rose.

  One obvious result was that human slavery was never established here. Indentures, yes—many a man indentured himself and his sons to get his family away from doomed land and across the Atlantic. Indenturing is still legal, I think, but defunct in practice. But the circumstances that created “King Cotton” were destroyed by rising waters and warmer climate. There are citizens here of African Negro descent but their ancestors were never slaves. Some indentured ancestors, no doubt—but everyone claims some indentured ancestors even if they have to invent them.

  But other aspects of history seem to be taboo. I’ve almost given up trying to find out what happened in 1965: “The Year They Hanged the Lawyers.” That year is mentioned—and glossed over. When I asked a reference librarian for a more detailed account of that year and the ensuing decade, he wanted to know why I needed to refer to records in the locked vaults. I left without giving my name. There is free speech here and free press—but apparently some subjects are not discussed. Since they are not defined, we will continue to be careful while we feel them out.

  But there is no category “Lawyers” in the telephone book. The legal profession, in all its many ramifications, seems not to exist. Zeb claims that this simply means that it is a Black Market—but Zeb is more cynical than I am. I simply don’t know, as yet.

  Taxation is low, simple—and contains a surprise that could be distressing. The federal government is supported by a head tax paid by the states and seems to be mostly for military and foreign affairs. This state (not necessarily the others) derives most of its r
evenue from real estate taxes. It is a uniform rate set annually, with no property exempted, not even churches, hospitals, or schools—or roads, as all the best roads are toll roads. The surprise (to me) lies in this: the owner appraises his own property.

  But here is the sting in the tail: anyone, including the state, can buy that property against the owner’s wishes at whatever appraisal the owner had placed on it. The owner can hang on only by raising the appraisal at once to a figure so high that no buyer wants it—and paying three years back taxes at the new appraisal.

  This strikes me as being loaded with inequity. What if it’s a family homestead with great sentimental value? But Zeb just laughs at me. “Jake, if anybody wants six hectares of unfarmable land and second-growth timber, we’ll take his money, accept the profit, climb into Gay, bounce out of here—and buy more worthless land elsewhere. In a poker game, you always figure what’s in the pot when you bet.”

  XLVI

  Hilda

  Deety got me alone while our husbands were busy in their shop. “Hillbilly, have you noticed that Pop and Zebadiah are getting fidgety?”

  I went on cutting shortening into pie crust. “Men are always fidgety, Deety girl.”

  “Uh … you’re not fidgety?”

  “Meaning you are.”

  “I didn’t say that!”

  “Deety hon, don’t kid your old Aunt Sharpie. When your face has no expression, something is on your mind. Are you expecting again?”

  “No. You and I have each had a girl and a boy. I don’t intend to raise the subject until Zebadiah does. Unless he waits too long.”

  “If Jacob waits too long, it may be a long wait. The years are crawling over me.”

  “That’s just it, Aunt Hilda—the years are crawling over all of us!”

  “Happens, dear. But anytime we want to stop the clock for a while, there is always Oz. Want to go stay with the Tin Woodman again?”

  “No.”

  “Then why the fidgets, dear? We’ve found our Snug Harbor and fitted ourselves into it. Our men are making money; we’re no longer dipping into our capital—are we?”