25

ON TO OTHER THINGS

Editors and publishers had always sent Heinlein manuscripts hoping to get a comment to use on the book jacket. Most of the time he was able to talk himself out of doing it, although sometimes a little treasure fell into his lap that way: He always appreciated Ted Sturgeon sending him the galleys for Edgar Pangborn’s Davy (1964), for instance. For friends and acquaintances he often put a lot of work into technical critiques. One of their friends in Colorado, Dottie White, had written a novel in 1960 about an interracial marriage—from personal experience. Her Negro husband, George White, was a major at one of the local Air Force establishments at Colorado Springs. Heinlein had given her what advice and help he could, and tried to help her find an agent for the book. In 1973, Arthur Clarke’s publishers wanted a puff for the paperback issue of Rendezvous with Rama, and he was happy to oblige with that one.

In June 1973, Jerry Pournelle sent him a gigantic manuscript for a science-fiction novel he had written in collaboration with Larry Niven, Motelight, and Heinlein girded up his mental loins for another job of analysis and technical critique. As he read, though, he found himself turning pages, getting involved with the characters and the story. But it had a major fault as a book that urgently needed to be addressed.

He spent three days going through the manuscript almost line by line, and finally, on June 20, sat down at the typewriter to frame his critique. His first note to the authors was:

“1. This is a very important novel, possibly the best contact-with-aliens story ever written.… (best aliens I’ve ever encountered, truly alien but believable and one could empathize with them, every ecological niche filled, total ecology convincing, etc.—grand[.])”1

With Pournelle, he knew he could be straightforward and even blunt—and there simply was no “delicate” way of saying some of the things he thought needed to be said—

We are in a highly competitive market, battling each year against not only thousands of other new novels but also TV and a myriad other things … in the late XXth century one simply cannot use up 30,000 words before getting down to business with the main story line.…

How to correct the major fault? I don’t know. It’s your story. But cutting the bejasus out of those [first] 100 pp would help. It is all featherdusting, not story, and you need to determine just what supporting data must be saved to keep the plot intact—then see how much of it can be tucked away into corners after page 100, and what is left that must be on stage before page 100—and what is left be told in such a way as to grab the reader and pull him along, not lose him.2

Heinlein’s experience with this kind of hard-love advice was not encouraging: “People seldom take advice—and this advice you did not ask me to give. I shan’t be offended if you don’t take it; I hope that you will not be offended that I proffer it.”3

He sent off the long letter to Niven and Pournelle and turned to another public-relations chore on June 26, 1973—another newspaper-article interview, this time by telephone. The interviewer, J. Neil Schulman, was a young journalist in New York, clearly one of the “New Right” libertarians The Times had been touting for the last few years, bright and curious, and thoroughly immersed in the movement literature—and in any case Robert felt the need metaphorically to walk up and down the Earth, and to associate with a stimulating wide variety of people and viewpoints.4

[I]solated as I am in this study far out in the mountains, if I do not reach out through my typewriter to cultivate new friendships, I will inevitably grow old and crabbed and lose touch with the human race … and thereby become not only useless to myself but incapable of writing copy worth printing. If I am to stay young in my mind while my body grows older, I must seek out new human relationships.5

On June 26, Schulman phoned to discuss the interview, and Heinlein gave the most “personal” interview he had ever done—far more material than Schulman could use for his article, so he willingly granted permission to use any “leftover” material for a piece in New Libertarian Notes, one of the new libertarian magazines that had been springing up. One subject in the news at the time did not make it into this interview: That summer of 1973 the Nixon administration began melting down in scandal. Vice President Spiro T. Agnew was investigated for extortion, tax fraud, conspiracy, and for taking bribes while in office—on which latter charge he was criminally indicted (and later allowed to resign the vice presidency): “Agnew—English fails me, it would take Turkish or Russian or Yiddish to express my disgust. A slap on the wrist—for eight times as much as my recent (’38) opponent for the Legislature got sent to San Quentin for.”6 By the time of the interview, the Watergate break-in was being investigated by the Senate. Nixon, Heinlein said, had terrible judgment at picking his associates—but, he noted, “Watergate was a peccadillo (whether he knew about it or not); I had that and more done to me when I was an active politico.”7

Many of the interviews he gave did not get published. Heinlein was not, therefore, unduly surprised when Neil Schulman reported a struggle with his editors to get “Looking Upward Through the Microscope” published.

Nonpaying chores were taking up more and more of Heinlein’s productive time: There were two more major critiques that spring for writers just starting out, and Ginny finally extracted a written promise from him forswearing all such unindentured servitude.

Blassingame agreed—but gave him G. Harry Stine’s Third Industrial Revolution to puff soon thereafter, so Ginny agreed to temper the agreement with generous exceptions, when and as appropriate.

Turning back to his own outstanding business, Heinlein came to a decision about the releases Scribner wanted from him. He instructed his accountant to return the $1,900 they had given him to quitclaim the dispute over outstanding royalties (they had used a different, and smaller, royalty percentage figure for the paperback editions than their original contract with Heinlein specified). There would be no new agreement with Scribner until and unless they made a reasonable offer at market rates.

In early August, Larry Niven and Jerry Pournelle surprised him with a revision of Motelight. He was shocked to see that they had taken his criticisms not merely in the spirit in which they were given, but as blueprints, even withdrawing the book while they reworked it:

I am pleased (and much flattered) that you took my comments on the earlier version seriously. I cannot remember this ever happening in the past (and for this reason I long ago quit commenting on other writers MSS; it is almost always a waste of time—but I tried once more because I liked almost all of the earlier version so well). I know all too well how dear to a writer are his brain children; most writers usually will not accept criticism—and usually should not, as creativity is usually not helped thereby.8

The writing business handed Heinlein new problems. One was a homegrown menace in Hollywood, the “fascinatingly terrible” television show Starlost.9 Harlan Ellison had been involved in the show at the start and told the producers at Twentieth Century Fox that it was clearly based on an idea in Heinlein’s “Universe”—the generation starship that has lost its purpose over the centuries and reverted to an agricultural society. But Fox ignored the information and sold the show to a low-budget Canadian developer who was busily gutting the concept—to say nothing of the copyright infringement. Ellison walked off the show—he had in fact been banned from the set—and required the new producer to take his name off the credits and substitute his “Cordwainer Bird” pseudonym. Ben Bova, hired as a science advisor for the series, also resigned in disgust but did not have the same contractual right to remove his name from the credits. Robert and Ginny missed the show’s premiere, but they asked all their friends who had contacts in the industry to monitor the show as they put together the necessary documentation to pursue the copyright infringement.

The contracts and rights situation in England had gotten snarled in the last few years. The issue was brought to a head in 1973 when Sphere Books issued unauthorized paperbacks of an anthology assembled by Angus Wells and published by Sidgwick & Jackson in authorized hardcovers, The Best of Robert A. Heinlein. Heinlein’s British agent, Innes Rose, didn’t seem to have any concern about protecting the value of the rights—and in fact they understood that Rose neither liked science fiction nor had any particular special interest in or knowledge about marketing it.10 He was a haughty Oxford man who despised anything American, but he handled all Blassingame’s clients for English rights,11 so they had kept their opinions to themselves. Their relationship with Rose and his agency, Farquharson’s, dated all the way back to 1946, when Rose had initiated the unwanted Gollancz issue of Beyond This Horizon.

One of the book contracts Rose had let a few years ago, with Dennis Dobson, had never paid any royalties. Ginny raised the issue of nonpayment with Rose and was told she should get a lawyer and pursue the matter herself. They retained the London firm of Field Fisher and Martineau and spent a great deal of time for the remainder of 1973 preparing the finicky detail documentation a royalty suit requires—but they got into court early in 1974 and were awarded full back royalties, which Farquharson forwarded them, less their 10 percent agency cut. Requiring the client to do their job of enforcing the contracts, and then taking a cut, offended Ginny (and therefore Robert): not even the slightest suggestion that they share the legal fees (small in any case—a total of seventy-five dollars) or that their carelessness with their client’s interests should in any way be acknowledged or mitigated.

There was a similar violation of paperback rights in Germany. All of Heinlein’s juveniles had gone to Gebruder Weiss Verlag as they came out in hardcover; Gebruder Weiss was interested only in the juveniles, so the sales and therefore the royalty statements sagged over the years. Blassingame had reported struggles with Gebruder Weiss for years, going back to 1960, but in 1973 Robert and Ginny discovered Gebruder Weiss had made secondary contracts with a paperback house—not allowed by their contracts. The royalties were split fifty-fifty between Gebruder Weiss and the paperback house—and Gebruder Weiss simply did not notify them of subsidiary contracts or report those royalties at all. Blassingame’s local agent found them a German law firm, and they instituted suit to get back royalties and declaratory reassignment of the rights back to them. It was to drag on for seven years.

Robert was developing a new skin cancer and wanted it taken care of at the superficial stage. He was given a new drug in the form of a salve—“Efuxed, or 5, fuschian, uracil.” The treatment was no pleasure, since the salve stung going on and burned and itched while it was working—but it was a complete nonsurgical cure and didn’t even leave a scar.12

In May 1973 Alexei Panshin wrote to Rita Bottoms, asking for access to the Heinlein Archive. Apparently he was getting ready to write more about Heinlein. Bottoms called Heinlein to discuss the matter on August 7, 1973.

As it happened, Panshin was on Heinlein’s mind at the time. When Putnam’s had announced Time Enough for Love in Publisher’s Weekly in April, with no more information than the subject matter, size and price of the book, and the expected issue date, Panshin had written a recap of his view of Robert’s psychology and guesses at what “more of the same” they might find in the new book—all wildly off the mark. This article had just appeared in the most important fanzine then being published, Richard E. Geis’s The Alien Critic, no. 9.

Panshin’s article was generating a lot of controversy already—which is, of course, meat and drink for the fanzines. Heinlein was professionally committed to ignoring such things:

I was hurt when the fanzines started panning me—after years of praising my work. It took me quite a while to realize that it proved I was on the right track … those fanzines don’t even influence the organized fans enough to matter; I was awarded three of my four Hugos for “best novel” after the fanzines started panning me.13

When you write an adult story, he had concluded, the fanzines will always pan it—and that is good news, not bad news, he continued:

… even the organized fans who attend conventions and vote on Hugos are only a few thousand—while you are shooting for a market of millions … and I am only one of several writers who have proved that the general market will accept a well-written SF yarn quite as readily as any other type of fiction …14

Heinlein’s feelings about Panshin made it difficult for him to be objective about the prospect of his coming to Santa Cruz. Ginny was alarmed and angry when she saw how disturbed Robert was over this. She got out her household miscellany and made Voodoo dolls of Panshin to stick pins in—to no apparent effect.15

Although such archives are normally open to the public with only minimal qualifications, that is a matter of practice rather than of policy: Bottoms had a certain amount of latitude in this case and a professional policy of not placing obstacles in the way of donors. When Heinlein told her Panshin was persona non grata with them, she wrote Panshin a brief and succinct reply: “I am sorry to inform you that the Robert Heinlein Archive is open by special permission and it is not being granted to you.”16

Panshin naturally wrote back asking why permission was being denied him. This put Heinlein into an emotional tailspin, and he agonized over it for days. He even got out his copy of Heinlein in Dimension and read it. This was something, he decided finally, that he was not competent to decide: He drew up a long letter to Bottoms—eight pages—laying out his history with the Archive and his personal history with Panshin, and put the matter back in her hands.

To his credit, he acknowledged, Panshin had not published any fact about him not already in the public record. But, he concluded:

I do not like Mr. Panshin. I judge him to be neither a careful scholar nor a competent literary critic. I think he lacks judicial temperament and the proper scholarly coolness of approach. I know that he frequently misunderstands the clearest English I can write—then jumps to unfounded conjectures that he then treats as if they were proved conclusions.17

He concluded if it were anyone but Panshin, he would have allowed the access without a second thought—but he couldn’t be emotionally objective in this case. He knew there was ample material to support the access: Panshin had a legitimate college degree and was both a published writer18 and a member of SFWA. Heinlein withdrew his objection to Panshin accessing the Archive.

This does not change my opinion of Mr. Panshin as a man nor my opinion of his competence as a critic. But in fairness I must treat him in this professional matter exactly as I would treat a stranger having equivalent credentials.…

I urge you to ignore my personal animus and to do exactly that which you judge to be professionally correct—as if it had not been possible to consult me … you will never hear any objection now or later from me or Mrs. Heinlein.19

There were two “professionally correct” solutions: Accepting the gift bound the university morally as well as at law to abide by the donor’s understanding of the terms of the gift: Panshin should be forbidden access. Yet the function of the Archive is to be a public repository: Panshin’s access should be allowed. Bottoms reached a Solomonic decision: She wrote Panshin the next day, September 11, 1973, sending him Heinlein’s letter and permission—but now Panshin was reluctant to make the trip to California, and Bottoms would not, as a matter of policy, copy and mail out any of her collections. Later, a researcher named Paul Crawford came to Special Collections, to research some of Panshin’s questions.20

Ginny was ready to move into the “reconstruction” stage of her oral surgeries in mid-October. Before she went under the knife again, Robert had something to take care of: A scaly patch on his chest developed into an actual lump during the Panshin hoo-raw. Sensitized to skin cancers, Robert went to his doctor to have it biopsied. While he was anesthetized, they decided to remove the entire tumor, just to be on the safe side. The biopsy came back negative—it was a benign growth21—and it gave him opportunity to write teasingly for a few months, until the amusement palled, to various female correspondents, asking whether in view of his recent bout with “breast cancer” he should consider joining women’s liberation or gay liberation. The sampling of opinion he collected thus lightly did not surprise him: theoretical agreement and aesthetic dislike of both. He agreed with one (female) correspondent: “I think I find Gay Lib distasteful for much the same reasons you find Fem Lib not to your taste: Each is raucous. Not that I am disdainful of either one; they are doing valiant fighting for personal freedom.”22 And to another, he wrote:

Surely you know my views, as shown in Stranger in IWFNE and in TEFL: Anything at all between two or more freely consenting adults is good, and no damn business of government, of neighbors, of churches, or anyone else—but in the culture in which we live one has to be reasonably careful not to get slammed for some (utterly harmless) acts, and be especially careful not to harm the public reputations of others.23

But the lingering scar from his biopsy was the final straw. When the dressings came off, he made a conscious decision that his “practicing nudist” days were over, at least for “public” purposes. His scars would either frighten the children and horses, or else be used as a horrible example.24 He allowed his and Ginny’s already long-unused memberships in various nudist associations to lapse, one by one.

Vexations continued to accumulate. Copyright infringement was becoming an accelerating problem as his name and reputation grew outside of science-fiction publishing. Ignoring the new piracies created a presumption they could get away with more and more—and they did. He was doing the preparatory work for not less than five copyright infringement actions: “If I can work up just one cleancut one, I shall make the outcome quite public—as a warning. The money does not matter (I’ll show a net loss anyhow, through loss of working time)—but I must abate this nuisance.”25

“I’m not anxious to make money on infringements,” he wrote to Walter Minton; “I just want to put one head on a spike at the city gates as a warning to others.”26

Late in 1973, another egregious infringement hit the stands: A new science-fiction magazine was launched in large, glossy format, Vertex, the Magazine of Science Fiction. The first issue, dated April 1973, had an unauthorized reprint of Heinlein’s 1941 guest of honor speech at Denvention. The editors at Vertex had contacted him for an interview, but he declined.27 They contacted Forrest Ackerman on a consulting basis, and he gave them the transcription he had published (also unauthorized) in 1941.

Heinlein was furious: He had intended the “Channel Markers” editorial in Analog (January 1974) to be his highly publicized comeback to the SF magazines. This upstart had spoiled the publicity Bova could make of it. Heinlein wrote the Vertex editor, who offered to assign the copyright to him. That was satisfactory to amend their part in the piracy. Heinlein agreed to make up for their embarrassment by giving them an unpublished story for their second issue. The logical candidate was the “Three Brave Men” story he had revised and retitled after Harlan Ellison rejected it for Dangerous Visions. It had subsequently been rejected by another raft of magazines, and Blassingame had retired it again. The matter closed, he never dealt with Vertex again. He wrote directly to Ackerman in unequivocal terms: “You will not use that property again nor permit, encourage, or sell any ‘right’ to reproduce it. I will take any violation to court.” He concluded, “Keep your hands off my property.”28

Looking forward to the end of Ginny’s surgery, they booked a cruise to the South Sea Islands. Their travel schedule for next year was already starting to fill up: the forty-fifth reunion of his Naval Academy class would take place in May 1974, and he had already lined up two speaking engagements in New York. Ginny’s preparatory school, Packer, was having a reunion about the same time, and Robert wanted to see the institution that had put its mark on her.

Normally Analog comes out around the twentieth of the month preceding its issue date, but they got the January 1974 issue, with the Forrestal Lecture, on the stands early. Heinlein began receiving mail on it as early as December 2—and Ben Bova forwarded a letter of comment written for the letters column of Analog, “Brass Tacks,” with a November 26 date, that called it “deeply moving.” The sentiment was echoed almost unanimously in Heinlein’s mail. Some said simply “Bravo!” or even just “thank you.” The second half of the speech appeared in the tabloid Human Events as “Politics of Patriotism.”29 Almost immediately there were requests to both Analog and Human Events for offprints, which neither magazine could provide. Versions of “Politics of Patriotism” eventually appeared in several magazines. A broad range of people liked the piece and wanted to give it wider distribution: In addition to the usual places, it appeared in a Star Trek magazine, Dimensions,30 a college paper enthusiastically titled Right On!,31 and Heinlein granted permission to a group that made up flyers titled “Jesus to the Communist World.”32 He also made an extremely condensed, eight-hundred-word version, for Family Week, a Sunday-supplement magazine of the Jefferson City (MO) News and Tribune.33 One State Farm insurance agency wanted to use excerpts in their monthly circular to policyholders.34

Over the next year, Heinlein was contacted by each of the service academies in turn, to reprint “The Pragmatics of Patriotism” (an alternative title Heinlein had provided) for their own use—by the Army’s Commandant of Cadets at West Point, by the Air Force Academy, and twice by the marines—the first time for reprint in the USMC Gazette; the second time to be printed in the service manual. At Admiral Mack’s suggestion, Heinlein gave it to Naval Affairs.

Just before Christmas in 1973, Heinlein received a prospectus from Rowan Thomas, their friend and former lawyer in Colorado Springs. He had been investing in mines himself, as the price of gold and silver floated up again, and now he was putting together a mining limited partnership venture for Red Pine Mine in Montana. Robert looked over the prospectus—doubtless mindful of his disastrous experience with a Colorado silver mine in 193435—and was impressed by Thomas’s thoroughly practical plan.

The paperback for Time Enough for Love was going to be released in January, about six months earlier than usual—and in an issue of one million copies.36 The extra income would probably push them into a higher tax bracket next year. They decided to take 5 percent of the mining investment as a hedge against inflation and as a tax shelter, as well.

Heinlein had never bothered with tax-avoidance planning before, content to pay whatever the government said he owed them that year. But since 1970 they had gone from living from royalty statement to royalty statement to having a plutocrat’s income. The royalties from Stranger in a Strange Land continued high (though not at the peak they had achieved in 1970), and were no longer being eaten up by hospital stays and experimental periodontal work—and the “ripple effect” he had noted earlier, of people discovering Stranger and then seeking out his other books, had raised the level of royalties overall—just as Scribner finally allowed all his juveniles to go to the large paperback market. Time Enough for Love had earned as much in the first month of its release as each of his books had earned in total over sometimes decades. For the first time in his life “too much money” was not a mildly ironic joke.

The winter skies in the coastal part of Northern California are often clouded over or shrouded in fog, but driving back from one of Ginny’s last dental appointments on January 2, 1974, they caught a glimpse of the comet Kohoutek for four minutes just after sunset, just over a cloud bank. And that was the last of relatively clear skies they had for a while. The next day, January 3, 1974, at about noon, the power went out over the entire area. And stayed out, day after day.

Winters around Monterey Bay tend to be rainy, rather than snowy, but without heating it gets very chilly. As the heat drained out of the house they moved into the living room, where they could use the Swedish fireplace. Robert wore a parka over layers of shirts and pants, over pajamas, while Ginny got out her Gore-Tex “Alaska pants.” They brought in firewood, kerosene lamps, and sterno for their camping stove. Ginny cleared out the freezer and put a big iron pot of stew on the fireplace. By the fourth day, their firewood was running low. Fortunately, the telephone was still functioning, and they were able to order in another cord delivered. It was still piled on the front steps when the power came back on, after 124 hours and a bit, though the lights were flickering and the power supply not constant for yet more days. Stacking the cordwood gave them both backaches. The greenhouse was completely dead. Then there were decayed freezer contents to dispose of, and cleaning and disinfecting—and load after load of laundry.

They were so far behind they had to work doubletime to be ready to leave on February 4, 1974, for a now really much-needed vacation, a month aboard the ship Mariposa for a South Sea cruise. In fact, they missed Mariposa’s sailing date from San Francisco even though Robert worked fifty-two hours straight at the typewriter (on the documentation for the English copyright infringement matter) and had only a four-hour nap before they left the house. They were able to arrange a flight to catch up with Mariposa in Honolulu.37

They thoroughly enjoyed the cruise time, dancing every night, wonderful food, and an abundance of parties including dress-up and costume parties in which Robert took boyish delight. Ginny came to the Hat Party as Carmen Miranda, with real tropical fruit (heavy and awkward). At another costume party, they got an honorable mention when Robert came as the Ambassador from Arcturus in metallic green greasepaint and white dinner clothes, bearing Ginny as a Playboy Bunny on his arm. Robert spent as much time as he could in his favorite occupation—talking—or girl-watching by the pool. Ginny said she was a “shipboard alcoholic” since she rarely drank at home, and she engaged in some strenuous activities to keep her figure: dance classes, appearing in an amateur abridgement of South Pacific, and dancing in the chorus in a variety show on the way back. Robert played “pirate” in the King Neptune ceremonies crossing the Equator, harrassing the “pollywogs” at King Neptune’s bidding.

This was their first visit to many of the South Sea Islands, and also their first actual contact with many of the Polynesian island cultures whose anthropology Heinlein had for decades been raiding for his fiction. The islands they found exotic and glamorous—but more dirty and squalid than they had expected. In Papeete, the main city on Tahiti, Robert bought Ginny a daring dress in shades of green that almost covered her standing, but slithered apart when she sat, scandalizing any jaybirds in the neighborhood. They visited Moorea, Rarotonga, and Samoa, too.

Unpleasant memories of their 1954 travels in Australia and New Zealand almost kept them on the ship, but Heinlein did go ashore in Auckland. Reporters were on the ship literally as soon as they docked, and Robert found himself giving newspaper interviews and submitting to be photographed before having his morning coffee. The invitations began to pour in. He gave a telephone interview on Radio I. Fans actually came on board the ship and sent gifts—quite overwhelming. They had very little time left to see anything of Auckland (but did get to the zoo).

The performance was repeated in Sydney, almost beat for beat—(and when they got to Fiji on the way back to Hawaii, they found waiting for them a package. On Auckland radio he had talked about meeting a baby elephant named Kashin at the zoo there and mentioned the elephant charm he used to tape to his wrist for fencing and which he had lost in 1930. One youngster had expressed him a tiny plastic elephant as a replacement!).

They left Mariposa at Honolulu and flew to Los Angeles, arriving after midnight on March 7, to be met by a passel of boisterous Cal-Tech students and ferried to the campus to speak at a seminar. They had hoped for a visit to JPL, but they were so much in demand that it was out of the question. And then, abruptly, they were home again, with just enough time to wade through the accumulation of mail before going off to Heinlein’s forty-fifth reunion at Annapolis.

Time Enough for Love was nominated for a Nebula Award, up against Arthur C. Clarke’s Rendezvous with Rama: the very complex and experimental poised against a book extraordinarily retro, with nearly all story structure sacrificed to mood. Heinlein didn’t see the Science Fiction Writers of America honoring him with a Nebula under any circumstances whatever,38 which made a win for Rama inevitable this year.

When it was suggested he might accept the award on behalf of his longtime friend—since Clarke, for a wonder, was not on an American speaking tour this April—Heinlein furnished himself with an extra copy of Rama to take to the awards banquet in Los Angeles.

Keynote and acceptance speeches at a Nebula Awards banquet can be a very mixed lot. This year, in the era of the Club of Rome report,39 almost all were downbeat and depressing, even with the ever-entertaining Robert Bloch as toastmaster. As Heinlein was called to the podium to accept for Clarke, Ginny slipped him a note, “Give them hope,” and so he opened his remarks with Pandora’s Box and tried to find something cheerful to say about the future. Accepting the Nebula Award for Rama, he got all his colleagues to autograph it so he could send it as a souvenir to Clarke in Sri Lanka.

One colleague Robert had particularly looked forward to meeting at this Nebula Award banquet was Philip K. Dick. Dick was a long-established writer Heinlein had routinely kept an eye on because he was doing some interesting, though often uneven, experimental work. While they were away, Dick had written him a surprisingly shy and almost inarticulate fan letter:

I am trembling as I write this, to address a letter to you, and I see that my typewriter itself is laboring under the weight of what I want to say but probably will not be able to. When you entered the science fiction field it was an infantile field, written so and appealing so. Those days are gone forever and because of you. You made our field worthy of adult readers and adult writers. I have long wanted to tell you that I know this, but I’ve been blocked in saying so; I don’t know why. Perhaps there are some persons that one admires so much that one cannot even manage to express admiration—at least aloud. But my admiration for you and my enjoyment of your work has been in my heart for many years, unsaid. I want to say it now.40

Dick’s Hugo-winning novel The Man in the High Castle (1962—the year after Stranger had won) was, he said, a “thinly veiled encomium” to Heinlein.41 Heinlein wrote Dick a long letter of thanks and encouragement42 and brought copies of some of Dick’s books to Los Angeles. Heinlein asked Dick for autographs—which seemed to nonplus Dick.

The trip to Annapolis was coming up at the end of May, and to New York thereafter. In addition to his promise to give a talk at the Poetry Center at the Ninety-second Street YW-YMHA (Young Women’s-Young Men’s Hebrew Association), the National Rare Blood Club wanted him to speak at a banquet on June first, so he would be quite busy this trip. The Poetry Center was already publicizing the event, and Neil Schulman wrote that they were likely to meet Alexei Panshin there—a prospect they both viewed with distaste.

The reunion was leisurely this year, with parties each night, drinking and dancing too late. Ginny was excluded from some of the functions, but she did get to tour the facilities and saw that the Academy was now maintaining computer data storage for each of the midshipmen, on a vacuum tube computer they were timesharing with the Navy.43

Saturday, the second day of the reunion, they spent the afternoon sailing on the bay with Bob Kephart,44 a small-boat enthusiast and energetic shiphandler who kept one rail or the other underwater so much of the time Robert said it was the only tall-masted submarine he had ever seen. They were late in getting back and covered with salt spray, and so missed dinner. In fact, they were permanently behind schedule after that and missed breakfast and lunch on Sunday.

In New York, they had several days at the Tuscany, to see friends and transact business. Richard Pope, an editor for Encyclopedia Britannica, contacted Heinlein through Blassingame to write a short article on the physicist Paul Dirac for the 1975 Compton Yearbook—an interesting project, since he had wanted to do some “catching up” in the sciences anyway, and Heinlein regarded Dirac as one of the greatest mathematical physicists of all time. The fee was relatively small, but the perks made it very desirable anyway: A full set of the new EBIII. He accepted the assignment and went off to give a television interview about the National Rare Blood Club for the midday show and attend two other functions—a business lunch at L’Argenteuil with Blassingame and Robert Gleason and on to the Poetry Center at the Ninety-second Street Y, where they were fussed over by an elderly poetess who didn’t quite know what to make of this science-fiction writer foisted on her.

Heinlein had not prepared a speech specifically for this occasion, since they would want him to talk about writing, and the freelance writing portion of the Forrestal Lecture would do for that purpose.45 After the formal speech, he and the “hardcore fans” who remained retreated to a nearby room that had been set up with a table so he could autograph books, as at a bookstore signing. At one point, Panshin did try to introduce himself, but Heinlein refused to speak with him, saying just “Goodbye, sir!” several times and actually turning away.

This incident, mysterious to most of the fans who were present, and regarded as so minor by the Heinleins that neither of them mentioned it in correspondence, was written up in fanzines and discussed at tiresome length as “The Shoot-Out at the Poetry Center”46—which could only have reinforced Heinlein’s already low opinion of the social standards of organized science-fiction fandom.

While in New York, the Heinleins had habitually given “at-home parties” at the Tuscany Hotel, which had become their favorite home-away-from-home there. Two days after the Poetry Center, the Heinleins gave one of their “at-homes” with Herman Kahn and his family as guests of honor. The next day they moved to the Waldorf-Astoria. The National Rare Blood Club had furnished them with a suite in the same hotel where the banquet was being held that evening (June 1). The notice Heinlein had put into I Will Fear No Evil, publicizing the National Rare Blood Club had, he understood, doubled the donor base—a public-spirited achievement of which he was proud.

The suite at the Waldorf was staggeringly luxurious—as large as their entire house. The bathroom alone was the size of their living room—and had a huge crystal chandelier of its own. The Associated Health Foundation gave a small cocktail party in the suite before the banquet, and Robert and Ginny were introduced to Harry Hershfield,47 who would be MC’ing that evening at the banquet. Hershfield was best known for his appearances on the Can You Top This? and Stop Me If You’ve Heard This One radio shows in the 1940s, but Robert remembered reading his newspaper comic strips in 1913. At the age of eighty-nine, Hershfield was frail and wheeled around by nurses, but lively and witty and entertaining. He obviously knew his audience, too: Later he told Heinlein a string of dirty stories during dinner—some Heinlein hadn’t heard before.

There were twelve hundred people at the banquet, all seated at their tables before they brought in the speakers. As Robert and Ginny came in and made their way to the table, the band struck up “Anchors Away,” and everyone rose and applauded. Gradually it dawned on Robert that the ovation was for him, that he was not just one of the guest speakers tonight, but the principal honoree: He was being recognized as “Humanitarian of the Year.” While he was still dazed, a spotlight picked out Ginny in black formal dress and jewels, and they presented her with a “gangster-size” sheaf of red roses, and Ginny cried. The program was a “This Is Your Life”–type presentation of Robert’s life, with a large, blown-up photo—and an elegant, engraved glass presentation plaque.

When it was Robert’s turn to speak, he told them how he had happened to place the notice in I Will Fear No Evil—and then fell ill and had his own life saved by five anonymous rare blood donors, and that the credit for this honor should go equally to the editors and publishers who got and kept that notice before the public—and he found in the audience and introduced Ejler Jakobsson, the editor of Galaxy; Blassingame; Walter Minton of Putnam’s, with the editor Bill Targ; Targ’s assistant Dorothy Rudo; and Col. Steve Conland, the president of Berkley Books.

The crush around the podium when the ceremony was over was overwhelming—more, even, than Robert’s trick memory for names could keep up with. They adjourned to the suite for another party. “You need to have people around to help you climb back down from those high points, you know.”48

The buzz was scarcely off three days later when Robert performed his last scheduled chore in New York—a taping for WOR radio of an interview with Patricia McCann for the National Rare Blood Club—and came back to earth and domestic matters in Santa Cruz. There was the usual accumulation of mail, including a big cardboard box with Ginny’s birthday present for Robert this year—now too conspicuous to hide, so she presented it a month early: She had had a thirty-inch Mars globe made up from the Mariner 9 survey photos.

That June Robert enrolled them both in astronaut Edgar Mitchell’s new Institute of Noetic Sciences, listing Ginny’s experience with parapsychological concerns “enough to make her very receptive, none of evidential value by the strict rigor of methodology required for science.” His own?

None of any evidential value to anyone else … [sic] but quite a bit of strong evidential value to me. Examples: Ginny and I make limited use of telepathy between ourselves. I have both experienced and seen some minor telekinesis. I have had numerous and surprisingly accurate forerunners as to my own future. I have, on several occasions, been aware of deaths of persons close to me before the news reached me through ordinary channels—and on three of those occasions the event involved death by accident of persons in good health. I have encountered idiots-savants with “wild talents.” And none of this is worth a hoot as scientific evidence.49

Ginny was having a run of forerunners: She would periodically get an intuition of an earthquake, which happen frequently enough in California to make a good test case. Robert encouraged her to write them down on three-by-five cards and seal them in an envelope. Her forerunners were surprisingly accurate as to timing and magnitude—for earthquakes in the news as well as those they experienced locally—though the information she got about the earthquake was almost uselessly variable.

A few of Ginny’s prediction cards were preserved in the Heinlein Archive at UC Santa Cruz, along with items like Cal Laning’s attempts to transmit telepathically while at sea during World War II. Heinlein might have closed out his teenaged Quest, with Laning and Allan Gray, in the 1930s, but he maintained a lifelong interest in disowned facts and the reality behind the reality that they represented.