27

“I VANT YOUR BLOOD”

As useful and important as the National Rare Blood Club was, it could not make even a dent in the problem of blood collection services in this country—appalling and an international embarrassment. Prior to 1976, most blood banks in the United States bought their blood stocks mostly from derelicts and the destitute—the population segment most likely to have untreated blood-borne diseases. Viral screening was almost nonexistent, and even bacterial and biochemical screening was limited and primitive.

The painfully obvious solution was to stop buying blood, and the American Blood Commission (ABC) was set up in 1975 to supervise the National Blood Policy Proposed Implementation Plan, changing over to an all-volunteer blood donor program, as many other countries had already done. The ABC expected the Big Three—the American Red Cross, the American Association of Blood Banks (AABB), and the Council of Community Blood Banks (CCBB)—to take the lead in developing the all-volunteer donor corps.

The blood banks had set about the project in the obvious ways—holding recruitment drives by placing notices of blood-mobile appearances in newspapers, and so forth. That, Heinlein concluded, was a souped-up way of preaching to the converted: “Donors do show up … [sic] but they are the same donors who showed up last time; such a notice rarely recruits a new donor.”1 What was needed—and what his casual polling of the blood-collection professionals led him to think they really hadn’t grasped—was that they needed to recruit new donors.

And this is where Heinlein could put his shoulder to the wheel. He had found recruiting donors ridiculously easy on a retail basis. He had run a test of his ideas at their usual “at-home” at the Tuscany while they were in New York. That casual chat recruited Robert Erburu—president and chief executive of the Times-Mirror conglomerate—who was a Basque by heritage and therefore more likely to be in one of the rare groups. Heinlein had proved his suspicion, to his own satisfaction.

… I think I’ve discovered the secret of recruiting donors. Ask him. Ask him. Some specific person.…

I’ve recruited taxi drivers, strangers at parties, people I’ve just met. All it takes is to ask them … [sic] explain the need and ask. If he or she meets the requirements, the answer is Yes. Not one person in 50 is so unsocial, so little integrated into his tribe that he will say No to a direct request once he understands the need.2

Heinlein had some other ideas about activating volunteers, and he decided to run a series of experiments of his own, to see whether he could duplicate by intentional effort the incidental recruiting that had happened as a side effect of other activities.

He had already concluded that his initial focus on recruiting rare blood donors was misplaced. The true “rare” blood, from a practical point of view, was the one you need right now and don’t have—which means the two commonest types—O/Rh+ and A/Rh+: Blood banks routinely run short of these on every three-day holiday weekend.

That means recruiting any healthy person, seventeen to sixty-six, for the entire United States.

His own circle of influence was principally in the science-fiction community—and he would work that source—but he had others, too: A note he wrote for Shipmate (the U.S. Naval Academy alumni magazine) turned up a surprising number of new recruits from his fellow alumni of the Naval Academy.

His hometown of Kansas City was hosting the 34th World Science Fiction Convention over the Labor Day weekend in 1976—“MidAmeriCon”—and they had asked him to be their guest of honor in the bicentennial year. He planned to use that as his place to stand.3 The last time he had been guest of honor at a WorldCon, in Seattle in 1961, the convention had topped out at six hundred. Now they were talking about a possible attendance of more than seven thousand! It was an opportunity not to be missed. He kicked off his campaign with a full-page letter-ad in the convention’s winter 1975 progress report, laying out his basic strategy:

… I am especially anxious to meet personally every blood donor.… If you are not a donor simply because no one ever asked you to become one … [sic] simply phone the Red Cross, any blood center, any blood bank, any hospital, your own doctor, or your local medical society and ask how and where—then donate a pint of blood. (Ask for written receipt as proof.) I want to meet blood donors because five of them, strangers to me, saved my life.4

With these arrangements, Heinlein could probably spend a few minutes with each donor … but the circumstances would have to be rigidly structured in order to make it happen at all. Blood recruitment was becoming his “job.” He would have to put off another novel for at least a year.

He wrote two more ads—for the last progress report and the hardcover program book—and made arrangements with local blood services in Kansas City—and had special red-drop-of-blood donor lapel pins made up, to give out as premiums5—and then, since relations with the MidAmeriCon committee had turned rocky,6 rented the necessary suite and function rooms himself. The sponsoring committee’s change of attitude was inexplicable: Polite requests were met with incomprehensible refusals, and the chairman was not speaking to them anymore. Ginny asked Jerry Pournelle to step in as diplomat and things did smooth over: The problems were mostly misunderstandings, which he cleared up by being blunt where Robert had been overly polite.7

The Compton Yearbook came out in February 1976, and they were scheduled to leave for another South Sea cruise in March. The replies and correspondence and files of arrangements for MidAmeriCon took over the dining room, with piles and drifts of papers. Ginny saw that Robert was struggling to answer each letter individually with another letter, which was an impossibly cumbersome way to handle a project as massive as this was turning out to be. She sat down to help, starting by sorting the piles and drifts of paper into some more coherent order, and Robert snarled at her. Clearly he was overwhelmed. Gently, she told him he was going about it the wrong way—and after a while, he agreed with her. Ginny put her long-disused precinct-organization skills to work on the project and set up an invitation system, reducing the incoming mail to check-off lists: Anyone who had donated got an invitation automatically. Anyone who had tried to donate but was turned down also got an invitation.8 That left only the usual, irritating assortment of time-wasters who tried to wriggle around the restrictions on the receptions—but since this was his pilot project, and coming out of his pocket, Heinlein did not feel the necessity of being nice to people who were not being nice to him.

They started out with three receptions to handle all the donors who RSVP’d. And they had to add a fourth before the convention, each catered by the hotel with finger sandwiches and punch.9 The expenses of these events made Ginny blanch. She was in charge of paying for things, and she was not allowed to say “we can’t afford that,” so she sometimes felt quite faint when the bills came in.10

The March trip was another working vacation—blood collection research in New Zealand and Australia. Just before they left to meet Mariposa in Honolulu, they got a pleasant, if frustrating, surprise: They would be at sea when Jack Williamson would be named the SFWA’s second Grand Master at the Nebula Awards banquet in 1976. Heinlein wrote a warm and funny congratulatory letter:

Two writers have influenced my writing most: H.G. Wells and Jack Williamson. But you influenced me more than Mr. Wells did.

(I hope not too many readers noticed how much I’ve leaned on you. You spotted it, of course. But you never talk.…)

I’m going to tell on myself just once. I took your immortal Giles Habibula, mixed him with your hero in Crucible of Power … [sic] and made another, after carefully filing off the serial numbers and giving it a new paint job. You invented the hero in spite of himself, the one with feet of clay, human and believable—and I knew a good thing when I saw it. The result? Lazarus Long.11

Mariposa ran two days behind schedule throughout the trip—which gave Heinlein more time for necessary study-prep. Blood-collection services in Australia and New Zealand were models the United States could use, and he had illuminating working discussions with the Secretary Organizer of the New Zealand Blood Transfer program in Dunedin.

The delay put them returning to Hawaii on Ginny’s birthday, and the route took them zigzagging across the International Date Line and back as midnight passed, so that Ginny got two sixtieth birthdays. They docked in Hawaii, made a little time to visit, and flew back home: The MidAmeriCon project wouldn’t wait—and the writing business was stacking up, too.

Ginny’s friend Ward Botsford of Caedmon Records had decided to offer spoken-voice disks and had set up Leonard Nimoy to read “The Green Hills of Earth” and “Gentlemen, Be Seated.” Heinlein wrote a set of liner notes that gave him a chance to get Tony the blind machinist before the public: “My lead character is obviously not Tony—but without knowing Tony I could not have written it.”12

And there was more travel: Ginny had been referred by Alan E. Nourse to a specialist in Seattle, to consult about the tinnitus she had picked up in Rio de Janeiro in 1969. She scheduled the doctor’s appointment in July, to coincide with the American premiere performance of Wagner’s complete Ring cycle. Robert felt topped off with Wagner. Instead, he wanted to go to Pasadena for the Mars landing. NASA was going to have live pictures of the landing.

This resulted in one of the few real conflicts of wills Robert and Ginny had over the years. Ginny wound up simply taking off for Seattle on her own on the thirteenth of July, Robert furious and not speaking to her. He left for Southern California on the sixteenth, staying with Larry and Marilyn (Fuzzy Pink) Niven in at their large home in Tarzana. Ginny joined him in Pasadena. They were both at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena the next night, which happened to be the seventh anniversary of the lunar landing—in the special lounge the NASA PR flacks had set up for VIPs. Jerry Pournelle had brought them even though there hadn’t been time to get the proper press credentials: Heinlein was so obviously appropriate for this event that Pournelle thought nothing of it. According to an informal poll Pournelle had conducted, somewhere between one-third and one-half of the working scientists on the Viking Project told him they had been recruited into their careers by reading Heinlein—particularly the juveniles. But just before the lander was to touch down, they were approached by the senior NASA official at the Von Kármán Center, who told them Heinlein could not stay there, but should instead go up to the cafeteria where large television monitors had been set up for the general public admissions.

Pournelle was furious, but Heinlein would not let him make a scene, saying simply, “You will not do that.” He took Pournelle by the arm, “and he essentially frog-marched me up the hill with him.”13

They were just getting settled in—a very good view of the proceedings—when network news camera crews from NBC and ABC appeared and gathered around, cameras trained on Heinlein. They had followed them from the Von Kármán Center in order to interview Heinlein for first actual touchdown on an alien planet, leaving all dignitaries behind, including the governor of California and James C. Fletcher, the NASA administrator, wondering why no one was covering the event.

The first pictures of Mars started coming in around dawn the next day.

This event gave Pournelle an opportunity to talk with Heinlein about another project he was becoming interested in—the new L5 Society. In the 1970s Gerard K. O’Neill’s space habitat concept—giant farmland stations in high Earth orbit—caught the imagination of some technically savvy young people, who had founded the L5 Society to put the ideas before the public. Getting the space message before the public was a subject Heinlein was always very interested in. Heinlein was on board with L5.

Ten days before MidAmeriCon, August 20, 1976, Robert’s brother Rex died in Palo Alto. He had endured emphysema for years and had been struggling to stay alive for Kathleen, one breath at a time, as she suffered through chemotherapy on her own, ultimately losing battle for survival against metastatic lymphoma—cancer.

All his life, Rex had been the one Heinlein had to measure himself against—in a sense, he could mark when he became a man when he no longer had to compare himself to Rex and could come to like and admire his brother as a person.

Robert took on the sad but cathartic task of writing Rex’s obituary. Rex was cremated at once, and his ashes were scattered in the Pacific Ocean. The Anglo-Catholic church Rex and Kathleen attended in Palo Alto held his memorial service:

By the arrangements the priest had made, I read my brother’s favorite psalm, the 23rd. Got up to the lectern and found that the revised Book of Common Prayer used a version worded quite differently from that of the King James Version. So I pretended to read while in fact quoting the King James Version, that being the one that I knew my brother knew and certainly preferred. It went off all right … when I had been much fretted by the unavoidable duty of taking part in this—when highly emotional I tend to choke up and can’t talk … which I was, not from sorrow for my brother, as to him it was a victory and a release; his body was worn out and every moment was a pain-filled burden—no, I feel bereft; I shall no longer have his warm company and his wise counsel.14

MidAmeriCon was not what anybody expected. The committee’s efforts to discourage attendance worked too well: Instead of the seven thousand that had been projected, on-site attendance was closer to two thousand, and a good many of them were disenchanted with the committee. This did not seem to lessen the numbers Robert and Ginny had to deal with, however: Almost everybody wanted into the receptions. They both were quite frazzled by the time the convention opened.

This was a very different experience from his last appearance as a WorldCon guest of honor in 1961. This time, he seemed surrounded by a phalanx of committee people and rarely made contact of any sort with the convention attendees. Heinlein tried to keep a pleasant demeanor as they were whisked through back corridors and up and down service elevators, feeling isolated and sometimes a little disoriented, overworked and overcommitted. “The truth of the matter is,” Ginny wrote after it was over,

aside from the official events, Robert and I saw very little of the convention. Whenever Robert was in public he was busy signing books until his hand could practically no longer write. I did a lot of the inscriptions which people wanted and also some book-signing when I was asked. We did not go to any of the panels; there was always something else demanding our presence … Several days we got nothing to eat from breakfast until after midnight.15

Family commitments added to the pressure: Relatives he had, perhaps, not seen in years could not understand that he could not get away from the convention to have a reunion dinner and remember Rex with family. Robert and Ginny had invited Lurton Blassingame to spend the convention with them, and he was using one bedroom of the Truman Suite. They were not able to spend much time with him as it was.16 Heinlein’s brother Larry brought an entire suitcase full of his books to be autographed: It was either sign Larry’s books or write his guest of honor speech.17 He signed books for Larry; when the time came to give his guest of honor speech, he made up an impromptu speech using his accumulated repertoire of bits and anecdotes—and made it more interesting by using a gimmick of setting his watch’s timer at the start of the speech and then simply chopping off in the middle of a sentence when the time was up. The speech—indeed many of the events of the convention—were “cablecast” in the hotel’s in-house television network.18

The Community Blood Centers of Kansas City (whose Dr. Bayer was organizing the on-site blood collection at the convention) gave him an award plaque—as did the convention itself. Both he and Ginny were made honorary citizens of Texas, which was odd but pleasant. Heinlein was organizing three new groups at this convention: Science Fiction Blood Donors International, to take advantage of the worldwide attendance at WorldCons; The Future Donors of America and Canada (he had set this one up because some youngsters trying to donate had been brushed off when they should have been given deferral cards); and the SFWA Blood Club.

Making the arrangements for the special SFWA blood drive, he found the blood-donor proportions astonishingly high among his colleagues—fourteen times higher than the general public’s rate. Dr. Bayer assured him, higher than the rate even among doctors and nurses. Heinlein took special pains to acknowledge his colleagues at this convention. He had been warmed to find that not only was he mistaken about the general attitude of his colleagues to him, but the fraternal feeling in the SFWA in general was much more pronounced than he knew—or could reasonably have expected.

After one reception, he had a chance to chat briefly with Spider Robinson in a receiving line. Spider stammered that “The Man Who Traveled in Elephants” was his favorite story. Heinlein looked surprised and leaned in to whisper that it was his, too—and no one had ever told him that before.19

On the last day of the convention, they had a book signing; Ginny intercepted books before they got to him, and wrote out the inscriptions so that Robert could just sign—and spend additional seconds chatting with people. Ginny flew back to Santa Cruz, leaving Robert in Kansas City for a few days to complete the blood-banking discussions he had started with Dr. Bayer. He made it home on September 11.

Ginny’s wrists ached for days after they got back home, and she had to wear a wrist brace for weeks longer—but it was a wonderful experience, memories to be cherished and individuals met and to be cultivated. The blood drive was a terrific success; his pilot program worked out better, even, than he had expected.

Four days after he got back—September 15, 1976—Bam passed away. It was another “release,” and a final cadence of sorts for the Heinlein family. She had been almost completely senile for the last five years. Her lucid periods showed that she was living in her youth; nothing after 1899 (the year of her marriage to Rex Ivar) existed for her, and she did not recognize her own children, not even MJ, who took care of her daily needs. Bam’s body was shipped back to Kansas City; she wanted to be buried with Rex in the family plot. Robert and Ginny flew back to Kansas City for the burial.

Heinlein’s appearance at MidAmeriCon had opened a floodgate, and invitations gushed in. He subscribed to Andy Porter’s Algol for its reliable listing of science-fiction conventions, adding:

If this is of any interest to your readers, let me add that Mrs. Heinlein and I intend to attend as many SF and/or ST [Star Trek] conventions that hold blood drives as possible—i.e., subject to health, strength, and conflicting dates while continuing to average three months per year for writing fiction (that being the average time I have devoted to fiction for the past 39 years) and while continuing our on-site investigation of blood services abroad (one or more months each year). But those restrictions will still permit us to attend many conventions; we are already signed up for seven in ’77–’78, and each of us is in excellent health.20

They had set a policy to pay their own expenses, since they didn’t want to be beholden to whatever deals the local sponsoring organizations were embroiled in. In October alone they were scheduled for a trip to Alamogordo, New Mexico, for the dedication of the International Space Hall of Fame, then to San Francisco for a blood bank convention. In 1977 they were scheduled for a Star Trek convention in Seattle and then across country to Atlanta for an important joint Red Cross–Community Blood Centers meeting on “The Human Element in Blood Services,” specifically to discuss volunteerism in blood collection.

The blood bank conference in San Francisco was unusually productive for Heinlein. The blood professionals were struggling—floundering, really—with the volunteer donor concept. The regional director of the CCBC approached him to organize a Bay Area blood drive the following year, which he was delighted to undertake. Since Heinlein was a member of the American Association of Blood Banks—a “rival” blood banking organization—this was particularly welcomed as an example of cross-association cooperation.

He also took the opportunity to meet with David Gerrold and R. Faraday Nelson in their suite in the Hilton to set in motion the arrangements for the ongoing SFWA Blood Drive.

Local blood centers around the country had seen the rare blood article for the Compton Yearbook and were asking for offprints. The initial supply furnished by Britannica of one hundred offprints was soon exhausted, and they had to find a source of paper in order to fill those requests. But it was a high priority: That article was Robert’s professional entre into the field, until such time as his work with volunteer donors earned the respect of the Big Three. He had been working closely with the Council of Community Blood Centers, and he had a certain amount of credibility built up with them; the American Association of Blood Banks and especially the Red Cross were going to be tougher: So far, they were not part of the solution …

The American National Red Cross was in charge of administering this joint conference with the Council of Community Blood Centers coming up in Atlanta from January 31 to February 4, 1977. What happened at that conference would affect what Heinlein would be able to do in the real world. But their application form stated bluntly that the conference was open only to professional staff members of the ANRC and CCBC plus officially invited guests. That left him out entirely, since the blood organization to which he belonged (AABB) was not part of the conference.

It was utterly ridiculous—but also utterly typical of the profession’s failure to grapple with the realities—that the conference on “The Human Element in Blood Services” excluded “the human element” from their deliberations. Nevertheless, the Heinleins sent in their applications and prepaid the conference fees, including a special fee for a seminar scheduled early in the conference, on recruitment efforts.21

They did not receive even an acknowledgment of the application.

They left for a Star Trek convention in Seattle on Friday, January 28, 1977. The Red Cross had eventually come across with an official “invitation”—for Robert only, and only for the last two days of the conference, the CCBC meeting after all the Red Cross people had left.22 Enough was enough. They dropped it from their schedule, canceled plane and hotel reservations for Atlanta, and concentrated on having a good time at the science-fiction and Star Trek convention in Seattle. Instead of visiting Atlanta, Robert now intended to let Ginny go home directly from Seattle while he took a dogleg side trip to inspect their investment in a Montana gold mine. Heinlein was interested in typical arrangements for blood supply when they were snowed in. The mine was too high for Ginny, at nine thousand feet.23

Seattle was their fifth blood drive since MidAmeriCon, but Robert found that working the blood drive didn’t seem to take as much out of him as plain convention work. The example of these young people put as much—more—into him as the drain on his energy. He stayed in the recovery room, signing books and chatting, while he took the opportunity to observe closely how the entire process, as administered by the local Red Cross, worked.

It was a disillusioning experience. The professionals were … well, professional—competent, detached … and completely unprepared for any of the “new” donors they were getting. While Heinlein gave autographs outside the phlebotomy room at the Seattle blood drive, he saw a young woman sit down and collapse in on herself in a faint—a clear case of syncope. Feeling faint and woozy is a well-known side effect of giving blood. Experienced donors knew this syncope was not serious, knew what to do about it—slow down, eat something, wait it out. But no one here seemed to know what to do. Heinlein got her stabilized and took her back to her room with the help of a convention gofer, gently explaining to her exactly what had happened to her, why it need not happen, why it was not dangerous but merely unpleasant, how to avoid it the next time she donated—blandly assuming that she would donate again.24

The Red Cross—the professionals—weren’t using even good sense in their setup, and the waste of human resources he saw offended him: The out-of-state medical people, who were not licensed to practice in the convention’s state, could help out with care and feeding of the new donors. “A first donation must be a happy experience,” he wrote, “or you have failed to create a repeat donor.”25 Worst waste of all, though, was the volunteer donors simply turned away. With his recent insights about the emotional importance of the opportunity to be of service, Heinlein realized that this would have a deadening effect on the entire process. Instead, they should be allowed to serve in whatever capacity they could. He explained his thinking to the coordinator for the SFWA Blood Club:

Since the blood centers can’t supply the degree of T.L.C. a steady flood of first-timers needs, we must be prepared to supply it ourselves. Fortunately the job does not require medical professionals; any intelligent layman can be taught all he needs to know about what sort of trouble to expect, how to avoid it, what to do if something slips. But the job must be done or our new recruits will not become repeat donors. So we must do it ourselves.

The rejected or deferred volunteer offers the best source of helpers in this—with the double bonus that this work not only creates repeat donors but also creates that other indispensable factor: enthusiastic, industrious, volunteer blood workers. Hurt pride has been healed by the chance to be useful.26

On Sunday night, the last day of the convention, they received a telephone call in their hotel room from William Kyler, the executive director of the Council of Community Blood Centers. He wanted them at the meeting in Atlanta.

By this time, Robert had certainly lost any enthusiasm for the conference—and he was getting fed up with the “professionals” anyway (Kyler personally was a special case; they were on a very friendly basis). He gave Kyler to Ginny and told him he would do what she decided. They talked for half an hour, and in the end she said “we go.” They dropped by home late Monday evening to pick up some more clothes—and Ginny’s ice-skates—and took a flight to Atlanta the next day, having missed the “recruiting seminar” they had paid for. But they were there for the plenary session, and what Heinlein saw there—27

This learned group of truly intelligent people talked nonsense for hour after hour … [sic] and were not aware that they were talking nonsense.…

Most of them seemed puzzled that anyone should question their right and their authority to make moral decisions about your blood and mine. They were the experts. “Father knows best.” We were just so many milch cows who must give down when told to do so.28

They seemed quite offended when people didn’t respond with enthusiasm.

These people simply did not get the concept of volunteerism, and were sabotaging their own efforts by mismanaging the human resources they depended on. Now Heinlein understood how it could be that his and Ginny’s minor but actual volunteer donor programs were flooding the blood centers every time they held a drive. He did now what he always did: pointed out the realities, bluntly: “In general, I made myself highly unpopular.”29

After the session, the medical director of the Red Cross’s largest blood center buttonholed Heinlein to set him straight, laying down the law. Robert would have preferred to let it go, since the prospect of public arguments always made him ill. But he was representing the “human element” here: He girded up mental loins and stopped the doctor in mid-sentence. “We do not have to take your instructions. You have to get along with us. If the volunteer workers and the volunteer blood donors walk out on you, you … ain’t … got … no … job!”30

After the doctor indulged in a bit of face-saving bluster, Heinlein volunteered to make good the “misunderstanding” by not coming into his district to recruit, leaving them to their own devices, which would have been a disaster—for them. Once the implications began to sink in, Heinlein invited him up to their suite for drinks and to continue the discussion on a more rational basis.

The next afternoon, all the Red Cross people left for home and the CCBC went into its sessions. At first, general talk-talk focused on donor recruiting—the one subject always on the minds of blood professionals. Heinlein expressed an opinion, based on his experience in Seattle, that the ARC’s methods left something to be desired. He was quite blunt, unaware that the senior vice president of the Red Cross was present—and deeply offended.

After that meeting, the local Bay Area director of the CCBC, who had approached him the previous November to set up a blood drive, sought him out with his medical director—to jawbone him about badmouthing the Red Cross.

“No problem. Don’t give it another thought.”

“You won’t talk that way about the Red Cross?”

“I can’t think of any reason why I would be talking about the Red Cross in your district. But that wasn’t what I said. There is no problem because I won’t be in your district; the drive is canceled.”

“Now wait a moment! Let’s discuss this.”

“There’s nothing to discuss. Did you really think you could tell an unpaid speaker what he must not say? I don’t permit that even when I’m charging all the traffic will bear.”31

They both took on worried expressions and went into a huddle. As he later told R. Faraday Nelson, the head of the SFWA Blood Club,

I never intended at any point not to do that drive; it is still scheduled. But I was not going to let them tell me what to say … blood politics in this country are very complex, and no SFWA member should ever let a blood professional boss him. If you surrender one iota of your independence you are all too likely to find yourself being used politically. Blood professionals are a peculiar breed. They are almost invariably fanatically devoted to saving lives—and they fight among themselves just as fanatically. Let’s not get involved in it.32

The blood professionals absolutely could not be permitted to perpetuate their current policy of sabotaging their own recruitment efforts. If you want things to change—then you have to actually change.

And then he helped them help themselves into an arrangement they could all live with.

But the experience was very wearing.

Atlanta was followed a week later by an appearance as Fan Guest of Honor at SpaceCon, at the San Francisco Civic Auditorium. The real headliners were cast members of Star Trek. SpaceCon was another lesson—as if he needed it—in the professionals sabotaging themselves. The drive, run by San Francisco’s Irwin Memorial Blood Bank, ground to a complete standstill. Two volunteers, Sondra and Myrna Marshak, took charge, and things began happening.33 The Heinleins also noticed that there was less sheer pressure on Robert at the Star Trek conventions than at science-fiction conventions:

Robert can go around in a Star Trek convention without being bothered, buttonholed, and so on. It’s wonderful! I don’t think that we met a single rude, self-interested-only individual in the entire group. Everyone was so cooperative and helpful that I find myself stunned by it all.34

It was at this convention, in one of the blood donor lines, that they met and were enchanted by Nichelle Nichols, who played Lt. Uhura on Star Trek. They were scheduled for another Star Trek convention in March. Ginny started collecting material for a handbook on recruiting blood donors and holding blood drives.

Heinlein was having a hard time settling down actually to write a new book.35 On the evidence of what he eventually did write, he wanted to do a romp, revisiting the exciting fictional worlds of his youth—Oz and Wonderland, the Barsoom of Edgar Rice Burroughs, and the universes of the Lensmen. Instead he wrote another “appreciation” letter for the next SFWA Grand Master, Clifford D. Simak—another writer he had learned much from as a young pup writer. Part of the letter he spent marveling at Simak’s technique:

Mr. Simak, I realize that you have done almost everything in newspaper work from printer’s devil to publisher … but I know also that you have spent much of the past half century either on the beat, in the slot, or on the rim—then have gone home and written highly effective fiction that same day. How did you do it?

That is a rhetorical question, as I would be incapable of understanding the answer and would continue to be amazed.…

Let me close by saying that, since the earliest thirties, to read science fiction is to read Simak. A reader who does not like Simak stories does not like science fiction at all. So it gives me great pleasure to join in this celebration.

With admiration and respect, I remain—

—Robert A. Heinlein36

Heinlein had been “working on” his new book since the previous fall, but he had barely gotten anything actually written down by the time they had to pack up for the next blood drives. A major Science Fiction Exposition was scheduled in Tucson, Arizona, early in June, and they had agreed to do two blood drives in Phoenix before driving to Tucson, 120 miles south—numbers six, seven, and eight for the year. One was a fee-arrangement: Robert agreed to give an after-dinner speech for a meeting of the recently formed Libertarian Party, for a fee of fifty pints of blood—which they paid by a sheaf of donor slips put in his hand as he came into the hall.

Robert thought of himself as a libertarian-with-a-small-l—Judith Merril had once called herself a democrat and a libertarian. “I think that describes me, too,” he told her—

—still a democrat not because I love the Common Peepul and not because I think democracy is so successful (look around you) but, because in a lifetime of thinking about it and learning all that I could, I haven’t found any other political organization that worked as well.

As for libertarian, I’ve been one all my life, a radical one. You might use the term “philosophical anarchist” or “autarchist” about me, but “libertarian” is easier to define and fits well enough. But I’m glad you didn’t use the term “liberal” which used to mean much the same thing and with which I once tagged myself. But today “liberal” means to me a person who wants to pass laws and use coercion to force other people to live in his notion of utopia—the word “liberal” no longer seems to have any connection with its root “free”—it always means “Pass another law! Make the bastard do it our way.” Whereas my solution to almost everything is “Let’s repeal that law” or, possibly, “Let’s not do anything—let’s wait.”37

But he came this time to kick some over-upholstered butt. Most of these new converts had been brought in by Ayn Rand and suffered from a peculiar kind of mental arthritis. Robert had no use for theoretical doctrinaires, so he decided to play advocatus diabolus and took as his text the lifeboat problem: You are ship’s officer in a lifeboat, in freezing, choppy seas, he posited, with the only gun. There are too many people for the boat’s supplies to sustain, and more in the water. What do you do?

This was a good test problem, because it requires you to take a position on an extremely fundamental question: the moral relationship of the public and the private. “I find that if a man can face up to the ‘lifeboat problem,’ find a solution that makes sense, I can deal with him.”38 But the simplistic, doctrinally pure answers favored by this generation of libertarians gave no help.

Any libertarian so doctrinaire that he cannot find a pragmatic solution to this problem deserves no tolerance from others. His opinions on “rights” in space are worthless; the rest of us are under no obligation to let him waste our time.

Unfortunately a large percentage of those who describe themselves as “libertarian” are indeed that doctrinaire, and would thereby be a mortal danger to their shipmates.39

He would not let them change the terms of the problem, or tap dance out of it. One older man became so angry he cursed Robert and stomped out of the meeting; a younger man became so upset that he began to stammer and could not talk.40

His work there was done. On to Tucson.

The SF Expo was very badly conceived and executed. Instead of the thousands expected, only about five hundred showed up, and the blood drive (they had dragooned the young Michael Cassutt to run it) collected only thirty-five pints of blood. But if the Red Cross was happy, Heinlein was happy. He gave a television interview promoting the Red Cross to KGUN TV41 and on a tour of a hospital at the University of Arizona, observed an experimental heart catheterization done on a dog, the fluoroscopic television monitor showing the tube moving up the dog’s arteries to its brain where they injected an X-ray opaque dye. The dog didn’t seem to mind, which was mind-boggling.42

Back at home, Robert went to work, writing. Ginny noticed that he was abstracted quite a lot of the time, which was usual while he was writing. But he also went off on talking jags sometimes, which was not usual at all.43 By the end of June 1977, he was two hundred pages into the manuscript. Years earlier, as the projects got larger, Ginny had stopped reading the “dailies.” Heinlein said he got more useful feedback from her if she read it all at once, when he was finished with the first draft.44 This one was going slowly; when the manuscript reached five hundred pages, he told her it might take two years to write!45

They had been contacted by David Hartwell for Gregg Press’s line of hardcover science fiction for libraries.46 Heinlein always was interested in keeping his books in hardcover—and knew they sold well to libraries. Despite a very small advance,47 Heinlein and Hartwell contracted for two books to appear in 1978, Double Star (with an introduction by Joe Haldeman) and I Will Fear No Evil (with an introduction by Paul Williams, founder of Crawdaddy, the first U.S. magazine of rock music criticism).48

At the urging of Lloyd Biggle, Heinlein finally decided to accept an honorary Doctorate of Humane Letters from Eastern Michigan University on September 23, 1977. Ginny arranged three blood drives in conjunction with the trip to Detroit and Ypsilanti—to keep him busy while she made some stealth arrangements of her own: The artist Frank Kelly Freas had done a very sexy portrait of Nichelle Nichols as Lt. Uhura that was destined for the Smithsonian’s permanent collection. Ginny wanted a copy—a duplicate painting, actually—to give Robert for his birthday. Freas was dubious about being able to complete it in time, but his wife, Polly, assured Ginny she would see to it. Ginny recruited Kelly to help out with the upcoming SunCon blood drive at the end of the month, sketching to entertain the donors waiting for the doctors.

For the ceremony Heinlein was decked out in academic regalia, with gown and mortarboard. President Brickley of the university gave the principal address:49

[H]is work has endured remarkably. In an era when a bestselling, prize-winning novel may be forgotten within a decade, virtually everything Robert Heinlein has written in the field of science fiction is still in print, still being bought and read with high praise, wherever people read books and in whatever language.

Doc Smith’s daughter Verna Trestrail was there, and Betsy Curtis—and Denis Paradis came down to Detroit from Montreal, to meet in person for the first time. Denis noticed something “not quite right” about Robert’s health, but could not put his finger on it exactly.50

SunCon, over the Labor Day weekend of 1977, plunged them back into big science-fiction conventions, so much more stressful than the Trek conventions. On the way to the registration desk, they were stopped half a dozen times by autograph seekers, and finally had to beg off, saying that because of Robert’s medical problems with balance he could no longer sign standing up; he really needed a table set up to give autographs these days.51 On another occasion, they were seated in the lobby talking with some friends, and Ginny looked up to realize they were surrounded by a ring of fans trying to listen in to the conversation. It was tiresome—and not a little creepy—to be so constantly on display.52

On one occasion, a bearded young man marched up to Heinlein in the middle of the hotel lobby, obviously having screwed up his courage to the act. His name was Jim Baen, he explained, an editor for Ace Books. He had noticed that Ace had just one Heinlein property, the old (1966) Worlds of Robert A. Heinlein collection, that had an unaccountably low royalty: 4.5 percent. He had persuaded the powers-that-be at Ace to increase the royalty rate, he said, to 8 percent. Heinlein had paid almost no attention at all to the royalty reports on this “bottom-of-the-barrel” collection, so he was surprised by the news, but properly grateful: He thanked young Baen, but before he could invite him to sit down and chat, Baen marched away, having successfully surmounted his personal crisis.

Between the blood drives, Robert kept plugging away at the new novel, The Panki-Barsoom Number of the Beast. Working on it one day, he had a brief moment of disconnect, and his vision doubled and went blurry. He sat quietly until it passed. He was overstressed, he knew—but he had too much lined up for the immediate future to take a break now. He did not mention the incident to Ginny at that time.53

On October 13 they flew to Salt Lake City for two blood drives in Utah. The first was in conjunction with a small science-fiction convention, Saltcon, where two local Mormon hospitals were collaborating on the blood drive. Just three weeks after the doctoral ceremony, he was obviously tired. At one point, Jerry Pournelle solicitously offered to help him getting down a stairway. “Of course I can get down the stairs!” Heinlein snapped. “I can always fall down!” He was articulate and witty in private conversation, but Karen Serassio (the chair of the convention) observed that the prospect of giving his public guest of honor speech seemed to distress him, and that he was nervous and ill at ease during the speech. She later heard audience members speculate that he was going senile.54 The announcement that Bing Crosby had just died was in the news that morning, so he led off with a prayer. The high percentage of Mormons in his audience was obviously on his mind, but he was not articulating well. Ginny sat in the front row so she could prompt him, if necessary—and did when he said “LSD” instead of “LDS.” At the end of his speech, he led the convention singing “Come, Come Ye Saints.”55

The next leg of the trip, a blood drive in Logan, Utah, was disastrous. When they got to Logan, they found that none of the conditions on which they had agreed to come had been accommodated: The Red Cross did not want them there in the first place; the library told him to talk about science fiction—and refused to limit the audience to blood donors (which was an absolute condition so far as Heinlein was concerned).56

This was exactly why they made a policy of paying their own way: Heinlein told them bluntly that he would not be bullied by them, and he and Ginny went home a day early.

After they got home, they received a phone call from Judy-Lynn del Rey, in New York. Arthur C. Clarke was in town, and she had taken him and Isaac Asimov to dinner earlier in the evening. She had a brainstorm, talking with them in her living room, about getting all of “the big three” of science fiction together virtually, if not in the flesh, and phoned Robert at home. At one point, Asimov jocularly said, “Come on, fellows. We’ve been the big three now for decades, and people are getting tired of it. Don’t you think, in order to give a break to the other writers, that one of you two (since you’re older than I am) should step aside?” They all got a good laugh when Heinlein cut through the indirection: “Fuck the other writers!” he said.57

OctoCon, October 21 to 23, 1977, in nearby Santa Rosa (about 150 miles north of Santa Cruz), was the last SF convention blood drive of the year for them, and they were both tired but satisfied with the progress they had made in just a year and a little more. They were getting reports of repeat donors they had recruited early on, so it looked like they could count on the effort reaching a point where it would sustain itself.58 They could go to Atlanta for an American Association of Blood Banks convention in November with a good report to make.

Heinlein was able to write “The End” on the new novel before the trip to Atlanta. He finished it early one morning and left the completed manuscript on the kitchen counter for Ginny to read, as usual, and went to bed.

Ginny read through The Panki-Barsoom Number of the Beast with growing puzzlement. The story was straightforward enough—two newlywed couples fleeing across alternate realities from alien villains he called “Black Hats” (the Barsoomian name for these “vermin” was Pankera, pl. Panki). She put down the manuscript. While it was perfectly competent yard goods, it just wasn’t a Heinlein novel.59

She knew what she had to do—and she could not bring herself to do it.

Over the years, Heinlein had always sat down at the typewriter wondering if he could pull it off one more time, and maybe he had just reached the point where he couldn’t. This could be the end of his writing career. It would be devastating for him. It was “not best work,” she told him.60 “I took that responsibility very seriously,” Ginny later said. “The idea that I just had to tell him not to try to publish it was—almost a death-knell for us.”61

This was the first time Heinlein had to confront his faculties failing in some important way—and it meant more for him than simple old age. The possibility he would go like his father or his mother—mind gone for years, or flickering in and out—was disturbing. “We just thought it would be that way,” Ginny said simply.62

There was absolutely nothing that could be done about it—except to accept the reality as he found it and adjust accordingly. He would carry through with the arrangements he had already made for that year, while he still had the ability. Neither of them said anything to anyone. Thanks to Ginny’s careful management, their savings would be adequate to keep them comfortable, and even if he did not produce any new books, the writing business continued to expand.

The AABB presented him with an Award of Merit dated November 15, 1977. He had essentially accomplished with the blood drives what he had set out to do. They could be happy with the successful results of their efforts. The AABB and the CCBC were already taking his legacy seriously, and the Red Cross would come around in time, even without his direct supervision.

But for the first time in years, he caught a post-convention respiratory infection and spent time in bed. They took another South Sea Island cruise in mid-December—Heinlein was going to investigate the blood services situation in Papeete now that they had a hematologist reorganizing blood services on the island.

They were in Tahiti by the first of the year, and Heinlein visited the clinic on January 3, 1978. He had another of those “attacks” where his eyes went blurry for a second, but he sat down and waited it out, again not saying anything to Ginny.

The next day, he and Ginny took time off to walk the beach at Moorea, strolling the landing’s road, enjoying the view. Robert turned to look at the mountain, and things went blurry. He didn’t quite collapse, but he couldn’t walk, either. Balancing on his left leg, he told Ginny: “I am very sorry, darling, but I must ask you to take me back to the ship. I have gone into double vision and I’m partly paralyzed on my right side.”63