28

“HUMAN VEGETABLE”

Ginny half carried, half dragged him back to the ship. She got him settled in their cabin and called the ship’s doctor.

Dr. Armando Fortuna diagnosed a Transient Ischemic Attack, TIA—not a stroke per se, but a momentary blockage of blood to the brain that can be a precursor to a stroke, an early warning. Heinlein needed to make immediate lifestyle changes—starting with giving up cigarettes. He had an unlit cigarette in his hand at this exact moment: He had smoked for nearly sixty years—since the very first Armistice Day, in fact, November 11, 1918. He put the cigarette back in its pack and never smoked again.1

They spent the rest of the trip keeping quiet. Heinlein had numbness and tingling on his right side that came and went, even when his vision was clear. They were in Lahaina on January 11—and did not even let local friends know they were there. Nevertheless, he had another TIA in Hawaii.

Back in Santa Cruz by January 19, 1978, a round of doctor’s visits commenced almost immediately. Dr. MacKenzie, their internist, took him off alcohol as well as tobacco and gave him an even more restricted diet than he had been following. He also ordered exercise. In March, Ginny told friends, “Robert has been taking daily exercise for about a week now. He hates it; but does it in the same spirit in which he flosses his teeth—do it and get it over with.”2

MacKenzie sent Heinlein to Dominican Hospital for an MRI of his brain. Tomography—a series of X-rays combined and interpreted by computers—was a very exotic, high-tech procedure in 1978. The tomography revealed no tumors or evidence of strokes; Dr. MacKenzie said there was a 55 percent chance he could live another five years without a stroke—if and only if he reduced lifestyle stress to zero at once and permanently. “Act your ages,” he told them. He specifically forbade any more conventions or blood drives.

Dr. MacKenzie suspected a blockage of the carotid artery, so a neurological specialist was called in, Dr. S. Allan Dorosin, at the Sutter Hospital in Santa Cruz. Dr. Dorosin told them that their best strategy was to wait and see for six months, because the surrounding blood vessels might take up the increased load. He prescribed aspirin and Dipyridamole as blood thinners.

They tried to get on with their lives. Ginny began working on organizing the handbook on conducting blood drives for which she had been collecting notes.3 She took to wearing earphones so that she could listen to the classical station on the radio all day without disturbing Robert, either because he was sleeping or because it was, as he said, “too emotional” for him to concentrate.4

Ginny had told a few friends and business associates about her husband’s medical situation, enjoining them to keep quiet about it, as they would be flooded with mail and phone calls if word of his condition got out.

Even with the medication, Heinlein’s condition continued to deteriorate. By the first of April 1978, his sense of balance was seriously impaired, and he had to hold on to the walls just to get around the house. Worried, Ginny called Dr. Dorosin just two months into the six-month waiting period: Robert wasn’t going to make it at this rate.

Dr. Dorosin needed to get better information. He referred Robert to Dr. Wylie at the UC San Francisco hospital, who was a specialist in the operation that scraped out the carotid artery, reducing the plaque that accumulated on the walls of the blood vessel so that the blood flow could be restored.

Ginny did not tell Heinlein, because he had enough on his mind as it was, that Rowan Thomas, their general partner in the Montana mining operation in which they were so heavily invested, fell ill early in April and went into the hospital with a stomach ache. Four days later, he was dead of advanced metastatic cancer. He was fifty-five years old and apparently in good health, right up till he died.

Heinlein found himself on the other end of the process he had witnessed last year in Tucson, on a dog. The surgical staff positioned the television monitor so that he could see it as well, and he watched the catheter travel up his own veins for two hours on April 16, 1978. The only irritant was that the head of the team performing the angiogram (four doctors, three nurses) was a fan of his and wanted to talk about his stories. Robert mostly could ignore him, interrupting—frequently—for a medical question.

How many people ever get a chance to watch their own hearts beat? Utterly fascinating! I could see my heart beating, see my diaphragm rise and fall, see my lungs expand and contract, see the dye go up into my brain … [sic] see the network of blood vessels in my brain suddenly spring into sharp relief. It was worth the trip!5

The flush of X-ray-opaque dye pinpointed the blockage, high in his skull, above the branching of the artery. The other tests ruled out problems with his heart and the rest of his circulatory system, but this blockage was too high in his skull for the reaming-out operation Dr. Wylie specialized in. Dr. Wylie came to his room while they were both there, and shook his head, saying nothing could be done about it. The prospect of going like his father, fading out for years, was now a reality.

A little later, though, Dr. Wylie stuck his head in the room: “There is one hope,” he said. There was a relatively new operation—by chance it was featured in Scientific American that month, and Ginny had just read about it—called a “bypass”—in Heinlein’s case a carotid bypass. They were mostly done in Zurich, but by chance the world’s expert in this new operation, Dr. Norman Chater, was in San Francisco at the nearby Franklin Hospital. Dr. Wylie set up an interview.

The tests showed Robert’s other arteries were in good shape: This operation would take a section from an artery servicing the surface of the skull on his temporal lobe and reverse it, joining the cut end to the main artery in the Sylvan fissure of the brain, and jumping around the obstruction (hence “bypass”). Dr. Chater gave him an 85 percent chance of improvement, but the risks were great: They would be operating through a hole in his skull, very near the language and creativity centers of the brain. And there was a 2 percent mortality rate.

He should think about it, Dr. Chater told him—but it should be done quickly; he was especially vulnerable to strokes right now, and any damage to the other blood vessels in a stroke would cut his chances.

This was risking everything on one throw of the dice.

“Well, Honey,” he told friend and archivist Rita Bottoms, “it’s either sit on a couch for the rest of my life as a vegetable, and never write again, or go through this and take care of it so I can write.”6 He asked Ginny what he should do, but she declined even to give input. There was a sizeable chance of losing him—and she wasn’t ready to let go7—but, it was something he would have to decide for himself: She would go along with whatever he chose to do.8 “Was it worthwhile?” Heinlein later wrote:

Yes, even [were] I [to die] at one of the four critical points … [sic] because sinking into senility while one is still bright enough to realize that one’s mental powers are steadily failing is a miserable, no-good way to live … I was just smart enough to realize that I had nothing left to look forward to, nothing whatever. This caused me to be quite willing to “Go-for-Broke”—get well or die.9

They scheduled the operation for April 28, 1978, at the Ralph K. Davies Medical Center, Franklin Hospital, UCSF. Dr. Chater was a little apprehensive: He had done over two hundred of these operations, but he had never before had so prominent a patient. A few days before the surgery was scheduled, Heinlein contracted a cold. They were reluctant to put off the surgery, so he was “dried out” with antihistamines.

The procedure began with trephination: They peeled back a flap of the scalp and drilled a two-inch-diameter hole into the skull over the left ear, exposing the brain. Heinlein joked to Dr. Chater that a hole in the head was no handicap to a science-fiction writer—a line too good to use only once; he repeated that joke to others, for months. When the bypass was finished, without incident, the surgeons covered the hole with a plastic plate and replaced the scalp.

Jack Williamson had come to San Francisco for a visit, and Ginny took him in to see Robert the morning after the surgery. Even with his short night (there was a period of four hours when he was disoriented and could not speak—postsurgical aphasia—but it passed), the improvement was obvious. Williamson had seen him last in 1976, at MidAmeriCon, and was disturbed then by his “old man’s walk and look.” Now, “In bed, with a bandage around his head, he greeted us with a strong voice and a vigorous handshake.”10 Ginny put an index card in Robert’s hand and told him to write his name: It was the first time in more than a year that his handwriting was legible. The recovery was instantaneous: “It was the difference between a light that’s turned on and a light that’s off.”11

Medicare was not covering more than a fraction of the expenses. The supplemental insurance they carried paid only 20 percent of what Medicare paid—and the amount of bookkeeping required to get even that covered was staggering.12 They were not destitute—but it must have been on Ginny’s mind that Robert’s retirement from writing might be permanent, and their accountant had warned them that reprint income tends to dwindle away once a writer goes out of production.

And nights, in the hotel, without mentioning it to Robert, Ginny was long-distance managing their Montana mining investment, taking matters into her own hands to prevent the whole thing from collapsing after Rowan Thomas’s sudden death. Using Robert’s proxy, she appointed a lawyer to represent them at the general partnership meeting and saw to it that the new general partner was an experienced lawyer with a background in mining. She made small, direct loans—a few thousand dollars—to keep the payroll current while probate tied up the funds. Rowan Thomas’s widow, Barbara, called her several times, long and uncomfortable pleas to save the partnership by taking more of the investment. This, however, Ginny was not prepared to do: They could not even contemplate throwing good money after bad. The losses on the mining investment, together with the surgery, had wiped out their savings.

Some of the other limited partners called, too, with the same requests, but she rapidly reached the stage where she told them bluntly, “Don’t be silly.”13

“I know there’s money in mining,” Robert had told her: “We’ve put a lot into it.”14 And so they had. And that was enough: They had realized some tax benefits from the investment, at a time when they needed the write-offs to control their tax burden, and Ginny decided not to continue with risk investments.

They let him go home a week after the operation, on May 6, 1979. The following morning he resumed his normal schedule, coming into the kitchen to let Ginny know he was ready for breakfast. He fainted, falling against Ginny, hard enough to bruise her.15 Alarmed, she caught him and wrestled him into a chair, putting his head between his knees until he recovered,16 “and then he was all right, and he never fainted again after that, but that was a near thing.”17

They found out immediately that they would have to make more adjustments in their living/working arrangements: Robert called for Ginny that day, and she couldn’t hear him because she was wearing her earphones. She began carrying a walkie-talkie with her everywhere.18

Heinlein was anxious to get back to writing.19 After only a few days of bed rest, he got out the manuscript for Panki-Barsoom and read it over. It was worse than bad, he told Yoji Kondo later that year: It was mediocre.20 But he must have seen possibilities in it.

Heinlein had been interested in a specific technical problem for a very long time: multiple first-person viewpoint. Before his mind started to fade, he had drafted experiments with this sort of thing—fragments just to work on the technical problem—and shuffled them into what he called his “laboratory,” a drawer in his desk where he kept his writing experiments. There was a lot of noncommercial stuff in his laboratory—including an entire shelf in his closet of porn he had written for his own amusement. Some time ago, he had written a letter of instructions to Alan Nourse, effectively making him their nonofficial literary executor in case they should both be killed while they were traveling together. In the letter, he had told Nourse where their various concealed caches of money and such were to be found and asked him to dispose of both the porn and the laboratory—use it for his own amusement if he wished, but Robert would prefer he destroy it.21

John Masters had done something with multiple first-person in Bhowani Junction (1954), but it wasn’t quite right: Heinlein had for years been thinking about applying cinema technique—fast, rapid cuts, a kind of different approach to stream of consciousness22—and he had learned enough by his decades of private experimentation to give it a try.

He had moved, over the last decade, toward a more literary denseness of structure, always keeping more or less within the bounds of science fiction. For The Number of the Beast, he devised a test platform, an extended argument among his four viewpoint characters. In Panki-Barsoom, the character Zebadiah had naturally gravitated into leading the little band of explorers, but in The Number of the Beast, they had a rotating captainship, arguing out the problems of command as they went along. The gestation period for The Number of the Beast extended from May to October 1978.

Lurton Blassingame had recently been diagnosed with Parkinson’s disease, and he took on some junior associates and combined agencies with another agent, Kirby McCauley, to take some of the workload off his shoulders. It was only a matter of time until he would retire, bringing Heinlein’s close association of more than thirty years to an end.

Blassingame brought Kirby McCauley out for a visit late in July 1978, to introduce him in person. McCauley did not leave a good impression: Some of the decisions he had made seemed overhasty to them23—and he simply could not get it through his head that Ginny was the business manager for this team. It grated on Ginny’s nerves.

We tried out Kirby I think for three or four months, and Robert told me that I would end up in tears after a conversation with him on the telephone. He had an attitude toward women that was Medieval. And you know: “There, there, little girl. Everything’s all right. Now, you just do as I say” …24

She also found he was too careless with details—and their business affairs were all details.25 She found herself taking on more and more of even the most minor tasks, and growing increasingly frustrated with trying to deal with him. Robert told her bluntly they should change agencies, and Ginny began asking discreetly around, finding out who had what agent.

There had been a sprinkling of academics publishing papers on Heinlein over the last few years: George Slusser, a literature professor at UC Riverside, had published two little monographs in 1976 and 1977.26 A whole book of academic essays about him was about to be issued by Taplinger Publishing Company.27 Many of the academic pieces they had seen simply misrepresented what he wrote, either ignoring or misconstruing the clear language of the texts. Now, another academic, H. Bruce Franklin, had written asking for an interview, but Ginny put him off.28 Robert would not, Ginny knew, be enthusiastic about another academic, even though Franklin had a commission from Oxford University Press to do a book entirely about him—and Franklin had named Sam Moskowitz as a personal reference, which was a point in his favor. Ginny replied that Robert’s health was uncertain, but Franklin could write again when he actually got to San Francisco later in the summer of 1978. Possibly by late August Robert would be up to receiving.

Dr. Chater was pleased with Heinlein’s progress and discontinued his Dilantin. He was in good spirits, but tired easily, and sometimes the balance problems returned unexpectedly. Heinlein despised the daily exercise routine and said he got enough exercise attending the funerals of friends who did exercise,29 but by mid-June he could walk up the steep driveway from the road in front of the house—a pull that sometimes winded Ginny—without stopping in the middle to rest. By the end of July, he seemed nearly recovered.

Heinlein was sticking to the regimen this year—no conventions, to keep the stress down; no flying at all. Ginny was going to fly to Phoenix this year for the World SF Convention, IguanaCon II. Blassingame had heard about her discreet inquiries for other agencies and had suggested, instead, that she give a try first to the younger associate he had taken on, Eleanor Wood.

They were already pleased with the new associate who was handling all the foreign business, Ralph Vicinanza: He was on top of the details of all their hundreds of foreign contracts (350 altogether, Ginny found when she went through the files and prepared status summaries for Vicinanza’s use) and was even able to do what Ginny had not—get some movement on the Gebruder Weiss lawsuit that had stalled in the German courts. And when their English agent, Innes Rose, announced his retirement later that year, she and Vicinanza were able to move Heinlein’s entire backlist to Robert Tanner, the former head of the paperback house New English Library (NEL), who had gone into agenting. Vicinanza swept through their entire list, making several changes, and new foreign contracts rose to startling numbers in 1979. Ginny concluded it was better for them if she did all the fiddling bookkeeping, leaving Vicinanza more time to market the properties.

Eleanor Wood was an unknown quantity—a younger, less experienced agent—but it was certainly worth trying, if for no other reason than to preserve the relationship with the new Blassingame, McCauley & Wood agency.

Heinlein was much better by August—“He’s doing things which he hasn’t done for several years,” Ginny wrote at the time, “driving, working with his hands to make minor repairs, and so on.”30 He was even back at the typewriter, though not yet writing The Number of the Beast.

H. Bruce Franklin was in the Bay Area, and the problem of whether or not to give him the interview was now imminent. Heinlein made inquiries and found out two facts, which pointed to opposite conclusions: (1) Franklin was one of those very public academic Marxists—a Maoist, in fact, and (2) he was a former Strategic Air Command pilot and intelligence officer. Heinlein wanted to question him about actual conditions in SAC—but there was a genuine concern about how much usefulness could come out of any serious interaction with an academic Marxist.31

Franklin had contacted Rita Bottoms as archivist for Heinlein’s papers at the University of California, Santa Cruz, and asked her to intercede on his behalf. Franklin was a respected scholar, currently at Rutgers University, though he had been dismissed from a tenured position at Stanford several years earlier because of his Maoist political activity. Bottoms presented the idea to Robert, and this kicked off nearly two weeks of soul-searching by telephone calls among Bottoms, Robert, and Ginny, much of it after hours. “Not fun,” Bottoms remarked succinctly: “It was excruciating.”32 This, she sensed, was his “process”—a long and agonizing process, but something he had to go through to get maximum clarity on a difficult problem. What struck Bottoms about this dialogue was how very principled it was33—and so like him personally, working from principles to ethical behavior. Most of the time, the process was not so difficult. Heinlein felt something like an obligation to cooperate in Franklin’s process of collecting the material from which his opinions would be framed. Against this, he did not like Franklin’s confessedly Maoist politics.

If he had access to more detailed historical records, Heinlein might have been swayed more in one direction than another, for he was unknowingly enacting a historical crisis going on in American politics at the time—and playing the part of the traditional American liberal confronting the New Left. Franklin’s expression of his political opinions was not confined to academic papers: He had founded the Vinceremos splinter off the SDS (Students for a Democratic Society) specifically to start terrorist acts now (rather than the fifteen years in the future that was the “mainstream” opinion in the SDS)—and Vinceremos ultimately became the Symbionese Liberation Army, which had catapulted to national fame in 1975 when they kidnapped and “turned” heiress Patty Hearst. But that was years in the past by 1978, an occult detail of organizational history, and neither Heinlein nor Bottoms were aware of it.

The enactment played out with Heinlein just as it played out in American politics: If this was naïveté, it was the kind Americans specialized in, of granting goodwill and credence far beyond its rational due.

Finally, Heinlein outlined all the reasons he should give the interview and all the reasons he shouldn’t—and then told Bottoms, “Honey, you decide.”34

By that time, Heinlein and Bottoms had known each other for more than ten years and were on very friendly terms. She did some soul-searching of her own. Franklin’s politics clearly bothered both Robert and Ginny—but Franklin had outlined an interesting “take” on Heinlein’s work: Robert Heinlein was representative of America, in just the way that America was represented by science fiction. The title of his book would be Robert A. Heinlein: America As Science Fiction. There was too much possibility of good coming of this project: The very agony he put himself through meant Heinlein was exactly right as the focus of Franklin’s thesis, Robert Heinlein as America as Science Fiction …

Bottoms told him in her opinion he should do it. That was enough: They arranged the interview for the afternoon of August 21, 1978. Ginny put a cold lunch in the refrigerator and left by the back door as Franklin came in the front; she would not stand in the way of this, but she also would not give assent by acting hostess for this Maoist in her house.35

A week later Ginny flew to Phoenix to meet Eleanor Wood and to oversee the WorldCon blood drive. Heinlein settled in to do some writing—“must find out whether or not they put all the pieces back when they closed my skull.”36 By August 31, Robert had taken the first 250 pages of manuscript from the fatally mediocre Panki-Barsoom Number of the Beast and set the situation spinning in a new direction. When Ginny returned from the Phoenix WorldCon—highly successful blood drive with 160 units collected—Heinlein drove to San Jose airport to pick her up, the longest trip he had made on his own.

During the summer, a fan named D. F. Vassallo had sent them a series of beautiful illuminated mottos from the “Notebooks of Lazarus Long” that Robert had put into Time Enough for Love. Ginny enjoyed them so much she sent them to Walter Minton for his own enjoyment—simply because she knew he liked such things. Minton wanted to publish them as a gift-book for the Christmas trade. He was getting ready to sell Putnam’s to a conglomerate, MCA, and this would be the last of the old-style publisher’s way of developing a prestige line of books, to the highest standards.37 The first printing came back for proofing with the first page cocked: Something was wrong with the registration on the print run—not bad enough to bother anyone but him, but he had the entire run destroyed, which astonished Ginny. It was printed again, straight this time, and went on sale just before Christmas.38

At about the same time, Heinlein got another big project under way. In September, Eleanor Wood had routinely forwarded to them a request from Donald A. Wollheim,39 to do a Heinlein anthology for his paperback-original house, DAW—but Robert had another notion in mind, that might benefit many more people.

#153 [Worlds of Robert A. Heinlein] is a property I had long since washed out of my mind as being of no importance; the added items are all out of the “dead” file so far as any intention to exploit them farther is concerned. Then we got some wild ideas: I decided that I could get Jim [Baen] to revert the contract, Ginny thought you [Wood] might like to try ren[eg]otiating it instead—then it occurred to me that I could use this putatively worthless property to establish SFWA’s model pb contr[act].40

SFWA had drafted a “model contract” but had not yet been able to get any publisher to accept it. Robert realized he could get the SFWA Model Contract implemented for the first time, thereby setting a useful precedent (even though it meant taking a hefty reduction of his usual contract terms). At the same time, he could give a leg up to that young editor who had gotten his royalty rates raised at Ace Books. Ace had fallen on hard times and had been the subject of ongoing grievances on the part of SFWA for many years.

What Heinlein proposed was to create an expansion of The Worlds of Robert A. Heinlein for Ace that would turn it from a dead loss into a genuine producer. He still had a lot of unused material in his files, and he proposed to flesh out all the pieces in this collection with forewords and afterwords that would come as close as he ever did to autobiography—eighty thousand words of “new” material (some of it genuinely new), an entire new book’s worth.

And to tie this package up with a big, red bow, he would do it only if Tom Doherty at Ace accepted the SFWA Model Contract. That would bring Ace into conformity with industry practices—which would, if they looked at it right, benefit them in the long run. This would be a complex negotiation for Wood to handle—an excellent way for her to cut her teeth.

[L]et’s discuss the probable points of resistance. But first let me stipulate that your prime purpose and Ace’s prime purpose is profit … [sic] and profit has been my prime purpose for forty years—it just happens that today for this negotiation I can afford the luxury of a different purpose. But to succeed in my purpose I must cause the interests of all three, Ace, me, and my agent (you), to run concurrently … [sic] and this can be done only by maximizing $$$$$$$$ for all of us—sales, profits, royalties.41

And if Ace didn’t accept the deal, he instructed Wood to declare a cancellation of the contract and take it to another publisher. Somebody would want a new Heinlein collection.

Just then, one of the boutique publishers they dealt with asked casually if they were considering retiring. Ginny just laughed: They were working harder now than they were fifteen or twenty years ago. Their business affairs had become so complex that literally no one else could manage them. They had a tiger by the tail and could only hang on.42

By the beginning of October 1978, Heinlein was ready to begin writing his new book. “He feels that he wants to do another just to prove to everyone that he still can do it,” Ginny wrote to a friend. “I think that he can, but novels are pretty wearing on him when he’s in the best of health, and he’s been having some trouble with sleeping.”43 But he did settle down to the writing he had been planning out for the last six months.

The story he originally wrote for Panki-Barsoom started out, like the book before (I Will Fear No Evil), with a science-fictional cliché: “He’s a mad scientist, and I’m his beautiful daughter”—but he spun it differently this time, writing a book just as experimental, just as different, as anything he had ever done—only more so. Metafictive in a post-postmodern way, the distinction between reality and the worlds of fiction was not just blurred, it was obliterated, viewpoint among the protagonists shifting as often as they shifted from world to fictional world, arguing about who should lead and who follow, and how:

Tomorrow I will seven eagles see, a great comet will appear, and voices will speak from whirlwinds foretelling monstrous and fearful things—This Universe never did make sense; I suspect that it was built on government contract.44

And he enjoyed some other legendary writer’s tricks, self-conscious and self-referential. L. Ron Hubbard’s “Typewriter in the Sky” had made the case long ago (1940) that, so far as the characters in a story are concerned, the real villain of the piece has to be the author, jerking them about and causing suffering for the sake of the story. It was a literary principle older than Hubbard, of course—it was in King Lear: “As flies to wanton boys, are we to the gods; they kill us for their sport.”

The identity of their devil—The Beast—is given in anagrams in this great jeux d’esprit, starting with the first one, an academic: Neil O’Heret Brain—N.O. Brain—“Robert A. Heinlein” rearranged as an anagram (Ginny got in there, too, in various odd guises).

And at the end, there is a huge, idealized science-fiction convention that recapitulates the travelers’ wandering across continua, into the worlds of fiction. All the worlds of fiction and all the realities, parallel and not so parallel, came to visit and mingle with Ginny and him and his friends in this “consensus reality.” And here the writerly jokes become even more self-referential:

In one running thread, the central characters keep confusing other Heinlein characters—Oscar Gordon for Zeb Carter, the Empress Star for Ishtar, and so forth. (A common criticism of Heinlein is that his characters tend to fall into narrow categories, becoming indistinguishable from each other.)

In a second twist on reader assumptions, Heinlein keeps referring to “Robert, Isaac and Arthur.” In science fiction, these names are usually taken to be those of the “big three” modern sf writers. However, it slowly develops that Heinlein is referring to Robert Aspirin, not Robert Heinlein; the Venerian dragon, “Sir Isaac Newton,” not Isaac Asimov; and Arthur Conan Doyle, not Arthur C. Clarke.45

Heinlein finished The Number of the Beast early on the morning of December 17, 1978, completely worn out from working fourteen-hour days (“years ago,” Ginny told a friend, “he said, ‘If I could stay awake long enough, this thing would be done at one sitting.’”).46