21

STALLED

They had had Barry-the-cat shipped out from Colorado—heavily sedated—in October, when they thought they would have a home to offer him imminently. And they had just acquired a companion for him, a girl cat named Smoky that Ginny had adopted rather than see her sent on a one-way trip to the pound.

The rains came on in November, with the foundation in and the masonry walls only partly finished. They finished the walls and got the roof on in the middle of the rainy season and began using the Bonny Doon address on correspondence before the end of November.

Now that they had actual covered storage, it was time to pack up the contents of the old house in Colorado and ship everything to California. They had been making do with house-sitters—a pleasant young woman who had to leave for the World Figure Skating competition. It was time to push on the sale of the house.

The problem, June Compagnon told them, was not that the property was undesirable—or even that the real estate market was slow or the asking price was too high: Buyers had a hard time arranging financing for this particular property. Having the house free and clear of debt put a huge up-front burden on a new buyer. Money was tight and expensive.

What would probably work best, Compagnon told them, was a half-year lease (to keep the house occupied and to prevent deterioration over the winter—and to help defray expenses) while they looked into the possibility of mortgaging the property. A point or two under the going rate of 7 percent would be ideal. That would allow a buyer to assume a mortgage on attractive terms.

By January 2, 1967, June Compagnon had found a renter for them, one Marshal Herro—a skating mom. The Heinleins flew to Colorado Springs on January 4 for an anticipated four days of packing and were surprised and very pleased to be met at the airport by Pete and Jane Sencenbaugh—along with a new Chevrolet sedan with snow tires, for their use while there. Even better, they found a hot dinner—service complet—vodka, whiskey, and mixers on hand, and breakfast makings in the refrigerator. They were very touched: Warm and thoughtful friendships like that are an irreplaceable asset, and a life spent making that sort of relationship is well spent, no matter what else you do in the meantime.

All Ginny’s medical symptoms came back, but she worked through the pain, sorting and packing. They wound up with eleven thousand pounds of books and possessions—seventy packing cases just of books—and gave away or junked as much more. Robert also thinned out his working files: About a quarter of the working papers altogether went up in smoke.

On Sunday, January 8, their new renter showed up unexpectedly—before they had even signed the lease—and demanded without preliminaries that they clear themselves and their possessions out right now as she intended to sleep there that night. The woman actually began threatening, and it took over an hour to get her out of the house. Robert and Ginny were speechless: Apparently, civility—even basic sanity—is not universal even among ice skaters.

The next day Robert went downtown to arrange with the bank for a mortgage.

I arranged for us to be able to advertise it as “low down payment, buyer assumes 25-yr loan at 6%; owner will accept 2nd mortgage for balance.” All very involved and I had to pay through the nose to arrange a 6% loan when the going price is 7% and up—but the house should sell now.1

While he was gone, Herro let herself in without knocking, and Ginny had to deal with her alone. This time, Herro told Ginny, she was not leaving under any circumstances: She had “taken counsel” and would get a court order if the Heinleins did not vacate immediately, and then have the sheriff throw them out.

Not likely.

This went on for two hours with much vilification and screaming, during which time June Compagnon arrived, extremely embarrassed, and then Robert arrived. Eventually the intruder left, and Robert immediately got a locksmith in to change the locks.

They flew out on Saturday, January 14, sending the movers on, to rendezvous the following Monday, January 16, at the Bonny Doon site. Rex and Kathleen met them at the San Francisco airport, and they spent the night in Palo Alto. The weather was clear and dry, and they had just gotten out ahead of a huge blizzard that blanketed the entire Midwest. They arrived at the Bonny Doon house to find that the windows had not been put in during their absence, or the doors hung: The factory would not even ship their double-glazed windows for another three weeks. Their belongings were delayed in the blizzard: The tractor unit broke down twice en route and did not arrive until Thursday, January 19—just before a typhoon that hit the Oregon coast and moved south, dumping ten inches of rain in two days.

The unfinished driveway (which would not take sealant, no matter how much plastic cement they poured in) became a cataract of mud—but the big van inched up to the doorway as the sky clouded over, and the packing cases were stacked neatly in what would one day be their dining room.

The water system was sabotaged the following night.

The contractor they had hired for the water system, and then fired for incompetence, had hired German students on a “profit-sharing” basis. One of them was threatening now to sue Heinlein for three months’ back wages. Nobody could prove anything, but the saboteur knew how to avoid the “booby-trap” klaxon and spotlight alarm at the gate, knew how to find that particular pipe in the dark (not easy), and was not interested in the house. He went straight to the vulnerable part of the water system and wrecked it.

The damage to the water system was repairable, but this incident highlighted the fact that the house-building project was in a very vulnerable state at the moment, with piles of expensive building material heaped around and the house essentially wide open. The only real solution was to move over from the cramped, cold cabin so they could keep watch over the place themselves. And get that property fenced at the earliest possible opportunity, with a six-foot cyclone fence, topped with angled barbed wire. “We may wind up with a moat and drawbridge and portcullis,” Heinlein wrote to Blassingame, “—and piranha in the moat. Ginny strongly favors the last although she is willing to settle for hungry alligators.”2

The German “mechanic” lawsuit was coming up for a hearing on February 24, 1967, so they got together all their documentation to defend the ludicrous action. But the rainy season was nearly over, and Ginny projected they would stay out of the red: June Compagnon had found a buyer for the house in Colorado Springs—$36,000 cash.

On January 27, 1967, a fire in the Apollo 1 capsule killed astronauts Virgil “Gus” Grisson, Edward White, and Roger Chafee. The setback was stunning—the first fatality among America’s astronaut corps—and put the program on hold until safety redesigns could be put in place.

And two more inquiries came in for film rights for Stranger—prompted, Blassingame thought, by a mention in a New York Times book review on February 19. Putnam’s finally started filling back orders on The Moon Is a Harsh Mistress in February, but Robert was fed up. He instructed Blassingame: No more sales to Putnam’s.

Once they were actually in the house, they could begin unpacking the shipment from Colorado—if they could get any time to work on that. The clock was ticking on the tax deduction for a gift of his papers to the UC Santa Cruz library’s Special Collections. Ginny had recovered her health immediately on returning to sea level, so at the end of January she took over supervising the construction: “Right now she is bossing the job,” Heinlein wrote to Blassingame.

I am officially ill, an acute attack of hypochondria in fact. This enables me to keep out [of] sight and tackle a mountain of paperwork while Ginny does some rawhiding over on the job as “lady boss.” We both think that this is going to result in faster action—her idea[,] with which I agree. If the contractor comes over here to consult, he will find me in pajamas and robe, with three days of whiskers and a sad look. But for the next few days he is going to learn that it is far easier to hustle and give Ginny what she wants than it is to talk her out of it—my God, that gal of mine can be difficult when she puts her mind to it!3

Heinlein spent eight days unpacking and inventorying a large batch of story files, creating a detailed set of accession notes (so detailed, in fact, that he assigned the accession notes their own opus number in his filing system). Donald Clark had told Heinlein—and his own lawyer had confirmed—that this constituted a valuable gift he could claim on this year’s taxes if the gift were inventoried and at least some of the papers actually in the hands of the university before taxes were prepared and the tax laws changed, eliminating this deduction. What with the sudden increase in the royalties, he could use the extra deduction this year.4

He would have to get the whole lot appraised to get a firm figure, so in the spring he contacted Robert Metzdorf, a New York appraiser of book and manuscript collections—who told him it would take at least a year before he could schedule this work. But he was the best: Rita Berner told him Metzdorf’s valuations had repeatedly stood up to IRS challenge.5

The work on the house was making visible progress, but they were not ready to move in until July. A sale of movie option to The Door into Summer that month, to Reed Sherman and Barney Girard, funded the rest of the material purchases.6

Poul and Karen Anderson dropped by the site on their way driving to Westercon7 in San Diego. That visit must have been virtually a campout, as the Andersons wound up leaving behind their air mattresses and drop cloths.8 By the end of August, the Heinleins had their first real houseguests: Cal Laning and Robert Cornog both paid them quick visits, now that they were able to entertain after a fashion. On Labor Day The Moon Is a Harsh Mistress won a Hugo Award—his fourth Best Novel Hugo—more than any other science-fiction writer, ever.

“This one surprised me,” he told Dan Galouye when congratulations started coming in early in September. “I had not known that my story had been nominated.”9

The Hugo was flattering, of course. So, in an awkward way, was a bit of plagiarism—the second-sincerest form of flattery—that came to his attention that fall. Hollywood again. He was passing through what would become Ginny’s office when the phone rang—not another supplier, but someone who identified himself as Gene Coon, one of the coproducers, with the creator Gene Roddenberry, of a television show that had been airing for about a year now, Star Trek. Heinlein knew about the show, but did not at that time own a television set; he had not seen it.

They had bought a terrific comic script from a brand-new young writer—his first sale, in fact—and it was not until production was actually under way that someone noticed a couple points of similarity with an episode in one of Heinlein’s Scribner juveniles. Coon conceded the similarity, but—pulling out the violins—asked if Heinlein would not waive his claim, as it would throw people out of business and might even mean the end of Star Trek.

Heinlein was not naïve: He was reasonably certain that Coon and Roddenberry had already “taken counsel” and were trying to find out how hard-nosed he was going to be about the acutely serious (for them) matter.

But he had other things on his mind and did not want to get embroiled in another plagiarism suit—and the opportunity to give a new writer a boost probably weighed in as well. He agreed to waive the “similarity.”

They sent him the script for David Gerrold’s The Trouble With Tribbles a week later, and Heinlein realized he had been “overly generous, to put it mildly.”10 The “Tribbles” were his flat cats from The Rolling Stones. He was mildly conflicted because he knew he had created them fifteen years ago by “filing off the serial numbers” of Ellis Parker Butler’s comic story “Pigs Is Pigs.”11 This might be unconscious plagiarism: Gerrold had not even reworked his flat cats—just given them a different name and exploited the same comic turns.

Robert let it go—and even wrote Gerrold a letter telling him not to worry about it. The episode aired on December 29, 1967. He was less pleased when, after the show went off the air, Gerrold began selling stuffed fake-fur and velour Tribble dolls at science-fiction conventions, substantially the same as the props used in the show, some of them with bladders to fake movement. That kind of merchandising was not covered by his original waiver—and when Gerrold printed the “permission” letter in another bit of gratuitous merchandising, a book for the series’ rabid fans, Heinlein found it harder to maintain a cheerful attitude.

If the matter had simply been dropped after that one episode was filmed, I would have chalked it up wryly to experience. But the “nice kid” did not drop it; “tribbles” (i.e., my “flat cats”) have been exploited endlessly.

Well, that’s one that did “larn me.” Today if J. Christ phoned me on some matter of business, I would simply tell him: “See my agent.”12

Dan Galouye’s other news after the Worldcon was more disturbing: the “liberal wing” of SFWA (the Science Fiction Writers of America) had started circulating a petition opposing the war in Vietnam, with about seventy of their colleagues’ signatures so far. The petitions were going to be published in several of the science-fiction magazines. Soon after, Poul Anderson wrote saying he and Dan Galouye and Sprague de Camp were thinking about a counter-petition, supporting the war—temperate and concilatory in tone.13

The idea of the counter-petition distressed Heinlein, and he counseled against it as promoting unnecessary—and ultimately futile—divisiveness within SFWA.

I am most sorry that this thing ever came up. It is not that I object to either side having their say, in print, or otherwise, and anywhere—I am for utter free speech and free press at all times without any reservations whatever. Nor am I afraid of the effect of your ad … [sic] it won’t have the slightest effect on Mr. Johnson’s decisions; he is a prisoner of his own policies and their political consequences.

What I do regret is the effect it has already had on SFWA and the greater effect it is likely to have, and that is why I am trying to damp out the movement to answer it; it can only widen the split.

If such ads could have any effect on National policy, I would not mention the welfare of SFWA in the same breath. But they won’t.… [and] I hate like the devil to see it rent by a political schism.14

As to the war itself, the public news was “too distressing to discuss.”15

No, I don’t like this war. It’s a proxy war, and I don’t like proxy wars. It’s a war fought with conscripts, and I don’t like conscription at any time under any pretext … Slavery is not made any sweeter by calling it “selective service”.…16

Nor was it possible to reconcile the conduct of this conflict with any concept of truth, justice, or national honor:

I can’t stand the thumb-fingered way Mr. Johnson and Mr. McNamara run this war. What the hell do they think men are? Lead soldiers to be expended at a whim? What the devil are we doing fighting an infantry war in a rain forest.… 17

I think Mr. Johnson has handled this war very badly. But I’m damned if I’ll add to his troubles by public criticism—especially when my misgivings, if expressed publicly, could give some aid & comfort to the enemy. I took part in electing Mr. Johnson by voting against him; therefore I owe him full support during his tenure.18

Aid and comfort to the enemy, however, was a ship that sailed when the left-wingers’ petition was published. The U.S.S. Pueblo surrendered to the North Koreans without a fight on January 23, 1968, becoming the first U.S. naval vessel to be hijacked by a foreign military power in 150 years. Student riots were hitting the news all around the world. Heinlein gave in and agreed to lend his name to Anderson’s and Galouye’s and de Camp’s efforts, and underwrite whatever portion of cost of publishing the counter-petition could not be raised by subscription. As it happened, the support from traditional liberals—and conservatives, as well—to this anti-anti-war statement was more than sufficient to cover publication in Galaxy. Himself, he was “neither right wing nor left wing—I believe in freedom under the Constitution … [sic] as written and not as rewritten by Lord Warren. In short, I am obsolete—and if you don’t believe it, pick up any newspaper.”19

With winter coming on, and the house 95 percent done,20 Heinlein was thinking about settling in to do some writing again.

I have not been able to write any fiction at all for more than two years.… Being unable to work has not produced a financial crisis—I’ve taken in more money each of the past two years than ever before in my life and this project is free of mortgage or debt. But it has produced a serious spiritual crisis; I have grown enormously frustrated at not being able to do anything with the story notes I am constantly making.21

The last 5 percent of the house-building went agonizingly, maddeningly slowly. They were able to purchase their own flagpole in February 1968,22 and his insurance company demanded they put a locking gate on the fence to protect the swimming pool. It also helped keep out the deer.23

Heinlein continued to receive complaints by every post from readers who could not find copies of Stranger—and the university bookstore said the book was no longer even in Avon’s—the paperback publisher’s—catalog:24 They had allowed it to go out of print in the middle of an incredible demand. But Putnam’s had pulled the book from Avon and let it to Berkley Books, the paperback house they had acquired in 1965. Berkley brought out 250,000 copies in March 1968—the forty-third impression of the book.25 It was gone almost before they could get it on the stands. And Putnam’s still would not reissue it in hardcover:26

My real grouse against Putnam is not over the pbs but over their refusal to keep Stranger in print in hardback—damn it, if they would reprint, they could now sell copies to every public library and every college library in the country, plus many private purchasers, as I constantly get letters asking me where hardback copies may be found. (So far, I know of six college courses which use Stranger.)27

Willis McNelly was using the book to teach one of his college courses and had one hundred copies on back order for the winter term that year; the seventy-five copies he had bought for the last year’s course were long gone, and he could not find any supplier.28

Heinlein’s sister, Mary Jean, sent them a clipping from the UCLA Daily Bruin (in Los Angeles), showing a listing of an experimental class offered by Dr. Carl Faber on “Guru-ism,” listing Heinlein with J. D. Salinger and Lawrence Ferlinghetti as “personal gurus.” Salinger’s name he knew, but not Ferlinghetti’s (Ferlinghetti was the owner of City Lights Bookstore in San Francisco and a specialty publisher who kept Beat poetry and novels alive). But the idea that he was regarded as a “personal guru” made Heinlein absolutely livid: Guru was exactly the opposite of what he was trying to get across to these people.29

And yet—

And yet—

These people who were writing to him seemed to find in Stranger … certainly things he had put into it, things he had learned the hard way over the course of his life, and things that could not be found anywhere else. Drafted as a personal guru, he could refuse to serve. But Stranger out in the world seems to have been adopted as a voice for the “ethos of disaffiliation” from the conformist mainstream—the process Marxist social critic Herbert Marcuse called “the Great Refusal.” Heinlein had his own continuing refusals to make, frustrating and wearing.

Some of them were relatively easy: When the fan letters started talking to him as if he were Jubal Harshaw, he could gently steer them away from it. To one boy, one of those who wrote him a long and rambling “poem of comment,” he wrote:

How does one answer a poem? With another poem? But, being “Jubal” quite as much as I am “Mike,” if I wrote a poem, long habit would force me to sell it, rather than use it in a letter. Jubal, you may remember, did not fully approve of Mike’s open-handedness (while going on being open-handed in his own cantankerous fashion).

But I am also “Patty” of the snakes, who never wrote a line in her life.

In fact, I am none of these, but simply myself, who knows as much as you do—but not a whit more—about the Martian rite of sharing water. If you are offering me friendship, then Asmodeus knows that, at my age, a man needs all the friends he can win. Thank you.30

Those were the easy ones. One request to define “grok” in seven words came from a student teacher, and it was possible to make a polite (but pointed) reply:

Having neither “flappers” nor secretary I must answer your letter myself;

1. I used ca. three pages to define “grok.” Had I been able to define it in seven words I would have done so. See the discussion in the story.

2. Any religious message you may find in the story is up to you—or to any reader. What I try to offer is entertainment, as that is what the cash customer pays me for. If he gets something more out of the story, that is a bonus not in the sales price.31

And to a Methodist preacher who offered extravagant thanks for the book—and wanted to talk theology:

Inasmuch as I am not a theologian but simply a writer of fiction I have most carefully refrained from trying to “Explain” Stranger In a Strange Land. My implied contract with my readers requires me to entertain him sufficiently to compensate him for the price he paid for the story.… if he gets six-bits worth of amusement out of the story, I have dealt honestly with him—I did not contract to save his soul nor to unscrew the inscrutable.

But this story is a fantastic allegory, more complex than a bang-bang cops & robbers; inevitably each reader reads it differently and what he finds in it depends as much on what he brings to it as on what I wrote into it. I have not tried to interpret the mysteries of the Universe for him nor solve the ancient problems of Good and Evil—at most I have tried to say that such questions are real and overwhelmingly important … [sic] and that they cannot necessarily all be solved by three o’clock this afternoon.

As to my own guesses, suspicions, or inner convictions as to the final problems I think I had best keep them to myself; I could so easily be wrong. Waiting is.32

But there were others; he patiently and earnestly answered cries for connection that went well beyond “fan letters.” A young woman wrote to him about an argument the book had prompted with her (West Point cadet) boyfriend, who argued Stranger said sex brought people closer together—engendered love. Wrong, he told her. Her view was the correct one:

I ordinarily do not discuss my own stories in any fashion but your letter leads me to think that in this case there may be a very practical reason to bend that rule.…

It seems to me that it is made emphatically clear in Stranger that it is your viewpoint which is being expounded, not his. I am not going to stop to dig into my own writings in order to cite line and paragraph but in every case in that book the sharing of sex takes place after and only after the two persons already share love. Always.

Furthermore, the word “love” is precisely defined. It does not mean physical attraction.… If a male and a female each loves the other, it is almost a certainty that they will also feel physically attracted—in which case, if they choose to do something about it, the safest arrangement is contractual marriage, our society being what it is. Any other arrangement is hazardous, especially for the female. If a male truly does find that a certain female’s happiness is essential to his own he will be very careful what risks he urges her to take in this cultural matrix we have today.

Anybody who suggests Stranger urges sex as a way of attaining love hasn’t understood what he has read.33

And on and on and on. One day Ginny answered the door to a young man who had travelled from Texas to confess to Robert that he had been having an affair with his minister’s wife, and wanted Robert to shrive34 him. Creepy and disturbing. Ginny wrote, “The whole thing was quite upsetting to both of us.”35

You could not fume and storm when someone was in such deep spiritual distress and you could help. No good, either, to fume and storm when Blassingame received a postcard announcing the book publication of Alexei Panshin’s “unauthorized biography,” Heinlein in Dimension. Panshin had published fragments of the book in fanzines over the last several years, and Advent, now operated by George Price (Kemp had gotten himself in trouble with the postal authorities for mailing “pornography” as social criticism and was now in jail), was bringing out the book. Heinlein resented the commercial exploitation of his name in the title, he told Blassingame, though he would not do anything about it. He particularly asked Blassingame not to send him a copy of the book when it came out, as he would not read it, and “am particularly anxious that Ginny shall not read it; it would just make her froth and set this house in turmoil for days on end.”36 Blassingame skimmed the book and assured him there didn’t seem to be anything actionable in it—not even anything that could be deemed an “invasion of privacy.” He could relax and spend his money on the house instead of lawyers.

The threat to privacy coming just from the neighborhood was becoming a bother.

Sure, I’ve known for years that I was a competent commercial writer. I have lots of check vouchers to prove it. But now I suddenly find I am an “Author” with my work taken seriously and used in many college courses—and the change from obscure pulp writer startles me … [sic] and while it’s flattering, it’s not very comfortable.37

But all was not completely irritating: Lee Atwood, the president of North American Rockwell, issued a warm invitation for them to view the Apollo Project equipment Rockwell was working on that March. Since it could coincide with a niece’s wedding (Mary Jean’s daughter, Kathy), they made a weekend of it. Atwood, they discovered, was an incorrigible check-grabber. He tried to pay for everything (but Heinlein outflanked him on the air tickets). They were somewhat embarrassed to find that Atwood had saddled the head of the Space Projects division with them as escort-cum-valet, it seemed, giving them “split-second service everywhere.”38

Atwood took us to dinner the evening between the two days. We stopped at his home for drinks first, and I got him aside and asked him why we had received such extraordinary treatment. He looked thoughtful and said, well, he had read Starship Troopers.…39

They were barely able to see Kathy (now Petty) at her wedding reception, and had to go directly by taxi to the airport.

The next month they were in Berkeley for the West Coast version of SFWA’s annual Nebula Awards banquet on March 16, 1968, at the Claremont hotel. The Nebula Awards are given by vote of the members, to honor their colleagues. In the 1970s, SFWA held one Nebula banquet each year in New York and a second somewhere on the West Coast. This was the first time since SFWA was founded in 1965 that Heinlein would be on one of the coasts at the appropriate time—and not tied up with house-building. He enjoyed meeting his colleagues again—though, sadly, A. P. White—“Anthony Boucher” to mystery and science-fiction fans—was dying of lung cancer and passed away on April 29, 1968.

Heinlein was contacted by David Gerrold on April 28: Gerrold had been hired to write a screenplay for Stranger and wanted to talk to Heinlein about the project. “You are personally welcome,” Heinlein wrote Gerrold, but both his lawyer and his agent advised him not to discuss the script—or read it once written, unless specifically hired by the optioners, since to do so might prejudice his ability to re-option the property freely if they allowed the option to lapse—again.40

In any case, Heinlein didn’t have time at the moment. His mother, Bam, had come up the coast from Southern California to visit with his brother Rex and with Robert and Ginny early in May 1968. She arrived at Rex’s house in Palo Alto, and Robert phoned to make arrangements to come up to see her that day. While they were on the phone, Bam cut off in the middle of a sentence, and he could faintly hear moans of pain. After a moment, Rex came on the line and promised to call back—

The long bone in Bam’s right leg, the femur, had snapped spontaneously, and she had collapsed to the floor. Bam was nearly ninety, and her bones had lost a great deal of calcium over the years. Dr. David I. Hull, one of the top orthopedic surgeons in the country, was at Stanford Medical Center. He operated that same day, securing the break with a metal pin and plate. Recovery at such advanced age, with such an advanced case of osteoporosis, would be long and slow—and problematical. She might eventually walk again, with a cane. She might not walk again—ever.

This hospital stay lasted three weeks, and Bam required skilled nursing for an indefinite period after that. They really had no other option but a geriatric nursing facility. Rex and MJ (Mary Jean Heinlein-Lermer’s family nickname) argued about whether it would be in Palo Alto (close to Rex and to Robert) or in Pasadena (closer to MJ). Robert firmly stayed out of the argument.

Mortality. The old world was passing away that summer of 1968—a cousin wrote that Uncle Oscar’s Heinlein Mercantile general store building had been torn down in Butler recently—and a new world was coming painfully into being. Martin Luther King and Robert Kennedy were assassinated. There were race riots in 125 cities across the United States that summer. Russian tanks rolled into Prague bloodily to suppress a relatively liberal reform movement in one of the Soviet Union’s “buffer states.” Lyndon Johnson declined to run for a second term as president, his entire social program for a second New Deal, the “Great Society,” run aground on the anti-war movement that was growing in size and volume. “Hey! Hey! L.B.J.! How many kids did you kill today?!” The New Left turned to violence, and the old left responded in kind: Mayor Daley’s notoriously corrupt Chicago police waded into anti-war protestors, mainly students, outside the Democratic National Convention—war of the government against its citizenry—as the convention nominated an anti-war candidate for president, Senator Eugene McCarthy. “Let’s review the bidding,” Heinlein wrote that summer to a friend in Colorado Springs:

—USS Pueblo was surrendered without a fight. Hanoi has agreed to negotiate the ending of all our aggressive acts against them. Mr. Johnson decided to be noble and statesmanlike and let Bobby have it. A Nobel Peace Prize winner [Martin Luther King] has been killed by person or persons unknown; today our leaders throughout the nation are beating their breasts and claiming the guilt for you and you and You. The White House is barricaded and the National Capitol is surrounded by machine guns. The United States has gone off the gold standard—except that it will continue to sell to France all it wants at $35/oz without being so rude as to mention 50-yr-old debts. We solemnly agree never to use space for warlike purposes and the FOBS41 doesn’t matter because we have a new radar that turns corners. And Stassen42 and Dick Gregory43 are running for President.

Did I miss anything?

Oh, yes, Hindu students are rioting. So also are Polish students British students South American students (several flavors) and California students and Howard students—each for different reasons, if you’ll pardon the word.

I swear that I am not and never have been a member of the human race—and just as fast as I can report to the Intergalactic Council I shall recommend in the strongest of terms, using all tendrils, that this entire sector be placed OUT OF BOUNDS.

Further deponent sayeth not.

I’m damned if I’ll make any comment on any of the above. After you are liquidated by a sniper while trying to put out a fire set by a looter somebody might go through your papers, find this, and I might face a People’s Court for thinking forbidden thoughts. I’m glad old Sarge Smith died when he did.44

He who sows the wind shall reap the whirlwind. This was the late and bitter fruit of undeclared war, waged indecisively, the reckless spilling of treasure and blood.

I try to stay calm and not fret about things I can’t correct. I find myself simultaneously angry at the Administration and even more angry at most of its critics—an attitude so complex that I try to avoid any political discussion with anyone but Ginny … [sic] who shares my views at a somewhat higher temperature.45

He decided to turn down all speaking engagements—except for librarian groups—“for the duration” and tried to follow Candide’s advice. The rare letter he received from soldiers on the ground in Vietnam he valued as actual data. To a friend relaying data from a son in Vietnam he wrote:

I’m glad I’m too old to be doing the sort of things that Alex is doing. But I certainly do treasure these reports. I can’t get anything out of the newspaper stories. Between the credibility gap, a conviction that we are fighting with one foot in a bucket for undisclosed reasons, and a dark suspicion that even the (presumably) uncensored “background” stories are heavily slanted, I just can’t take the newspaper accounts. This private and straight tell right from the spot does far more for me than do the four newspapers we take.46

In the hours he was able to work, Heinlein continued to sort and catalog his working papers for the University Library. He had asked Special Collections to hold off making any announcement of the gift until his fence was up, but Robert Metzdorf, their selected appraiser, was ready to come to Santa Cruz and survey the papers already in the archive. The new tax laws that would take effect in 1969 were going to eliminate the “commercial value” of these gifts for tax deductions, leaving only the value of the paper and other materials.

Metzdorf arrived on November 5, 1968, just after the election (Richard Nixon was elected president, on a pledge to end the war in Vietnam—“victory with honor”) and was with them to November 8. He valued the collection—the two consignments Heinlein had sent by that time, plus a third Metzdorf hand-carried to the University Library—at a staggering $30,230.00. Heinlein told Cal Laning he was shocked at the recent appraisal. He knew the papers had to be worth something because he had been asked for them by five or six universities—“but they were waste paper to me and had to thin them out constantly.”47

They finished their guest cottage in December 1968, and that was the last of the house-building.

Chesley Bonestell had just moved from the Bay Area to Carmel, fifty miles around Monterey Bay from Santa Cruz, and had gotten in touch with the Heinleins. They invited the Bonestells up for Christmas dinner and also invited a couple of local friends—widowers both, who for one reason or another couldn’t spend the holidays with family that year: Dr. Robert D. Calkins, lately president of the Brookings Institute and now vice chancellor at UC Santa Cruz, and Lionel Lenox, a retired banker, amateur photographer, and Ginny’s gardening buddy.48 Robert was glad to be able to show off the house. Bonestell, trained as an architect, was not impressed—and said so.49 The house suited them and that’s what counted.

It was wet and raining outside, but warm and dry inside the house. Ginny had spread herself for this feast, which featured a Swedish baked ham entree with this and that, and concluded with Crêpes Suzettes as they watched the launch of Apollo 8 on television.50

[S]o by combining forces we turned what would have been a grim and lonely day into a merry one. So the end of the year finds us in good mood, both in good health, all construction completed (thank God), and ready to enjoy life to the fullest.51