32

AFTER 1984

As soon as he got back from Los Angeles, Heinlein went back to work on The World Snake.1 This book had turned out more complicated and possibly more confusing than most, because of the different time-travel methods all used simultaneously, and he took care with it.2 There was no hurry to finalize the manuscript while the sales of Job were peaking; he spent five months revising the text and sent it off to New York in the first week of January 1985.

Leon Stover’s proposal to Twayne’s U.S. Author Series was approved for a book to come out in spring 1987. Both the Heinleins agreed to read Stover’s manuscript, if he promised to tell no one. They feared being once again swamped with reading requests. “So let’s keep it secret between us,”3 Ginny wrote to Stover.

At the end of March 1985, Heinlein was formally diagnosed with emphysema—a progressive, degenerative lung disease in which the oxygen-absorbing tissues are destroyed. His lung capacity was hovering around 28 percent. It had been long enough coming that he was used to the idea and accepted it. More distressing, actually, was that Pixel had been diagnosed with feline leukemia around the same time. In the past, that would have been a death sentence. But he was getting treatment now. Pixel was such a character that he was a great comfort to them both—the most communicative and intelligent cat they had ever known.

They had acquired Pixel in 1982, when Taffy (Taffrail Lord Plushbottom) died—an eighth-generation descendent of Pixie, The Only Cat (feline hero of The Door into Summer) and the last of his line. Pixel was Shelley Pixilated Antarctica, a marmalade tom with tortoise-shell markings who looked like the original Pixie and was named for their guide in Shanghai and for the continent they had just visited. Pixel was a Robert’s-cat, sleeping like the original Pixie in the crook of his arm or leaned up against him. For five years.

The World Snake sailed through the editorial process, except for one point: Eleanor, Ginny, and his editor at Putnam’s, Susan Allison, all hated the “snake” in the title. The Reluctant Knight, a metaleptic reference to Don Quixote, didn’t play well, either. Robert asked Ginny for help coming up with a new title. Pixel, who was a minor character in the book, was naturally on Ginny’s mind at the moment.

I said “how about ‘he walks through walls?’” and Robert said, “No, but you’ve got an idea there,” and he went into the study and he wrote and wrote and wrote. Finally came out with The Cat Who Walks Through Walls.

And everybody said, “Don’t you mean The Cat That Walks Through Walls? And he said, “no, I mean The Cat Who Walks Through Walls.4

Pixel was definitely a person.

Heinlein prepared a gummed label and fixed it over the title page instead of retyping it.

It was an unusually hot summer in 1985, and an unusually dangerous fire season. They kept emergency flight bags loaded in the car in case they had to evacuate. There was no birthday cake that year: Ninety-five degrees was simply too hot to bake. Instead he celebrated by making a $20,000 donation to High Frontier.

Heinlein was stirring up a new book, taking cards out of the idea files and shuffling them together. If what he came up with is an indication of his thinking at the time, he must have felt that the big meta-story of the World As Myth that had been shaping up for some time needed a parallel and complement to the Future History narrative, which was, after all, the master story (myth)—and which was also to some degree a myth of the America of the twentieth century. His new book was told through the eyes of a woman with enough perspective to be able to see it all—Lazarus Long’s mother.

The basic story structure was probably coming together in his mind in mid-August 1985 when Jayne Sturgeon visited the Heinleins to ask for Robert’s help.5 Theodore Sturgeon had died on May 8, 1985. He had been working at a novel, Godbody, for more than fifteen years. The book was substantially finished but neither polished nor edited.6 Jayne Sturgeon was a writer and professional editor herself, but she told Heinlein she could not get started putting Godbody in shape to send to its posthumous publisher, Donald A. Fine, though she urgently needed the money this manuscript represented.7

When Jayne mailed the Godbody manuscript8 he read it over and was able to make suggestions about technical issues such as reworking the paragraphing.9 Sturgeon had been playing with the same technical problem that Heinlein had been working: multiple-first-person. Godbody was something more along the lines of A Night in the Luxembourg:10 A sylvan deity—a kind of Pan—touches the lives of eight people. It was regrettably poorly written in Heinlein’s opinion11—though he would not say so to Jayne. He recommended some cuts and minor changes.

Jayne asked him to write an introduction for the book, and he wrote an affectionate and thoughtful memorial to the man, not quite three thousand words, August 30 to September 1, 1985: “Agape and Eros: The Art of Theodore Sturgeon.”

In Godbody he tells us still again, and even more emphatically, the same timeless message that runs through all his writings and through all his living acts—a message that was ancient before he was born but which he made his own, then spoke it and sang it and shouted it and sometimes scolded us with it.

“Love one another.”

Robert Silverberg, who was assembling the volume for publication, thanked Heinlein for an “absolutely perfect” introuction.12 Jayne thanked him properly, and that was the compensation for this job—as he had planned.13

Heinlein started writing Maureen Johnson: An Irregular Autobiography of a Somewhat Irregular Lady in September 1985, passing the manuscript section by section as he wrote it, not to Ginny this time, but to longtime fan friend Betsy Curtis for an outsider’s perspective.

Just as Curtis finished up her first-reading, they received word that Judy-Lynn Benjamin del Rey had suffered a brain hemorrhage in New York. She did not die right away, but it did put to an end a brilliant career as an editor. She had shepherded the acquisition of Robert’s remaining juveniles from Scribner in 1975 and 1976, getting them into paperback. Robert called frequently to cheer her up.14

The book business was changing drastically; all the book people were being replaced by bean-counters and button sorters. Heinlein was happy that the individuals who had taken a chance on him and stood by him during the time when his market was developing should have the benefit of the increased profitability—but when they were forced out and conglomerates took over, the sense of dealing with individuals as a small businessman disappeared.15

For decades now, Signet had been jiggering the reprints on their paperback issues to keep the market starved. Signet kept the automatic renewal options at the old, and very low, royalty rates. Heinlein’s new contracts were offering royalties on the high end of the scale—10 to 12 percent—while the old contracts were paying the 1950s rates, 4 to 6 percent.

Mac Talley was long gone from Signet, and they had no debt of gratitude to whatever conglomerate held the stock in NAL this season. Ginny and Eleanor Wood finally had enough of it. When the next contract renewal came up in October 1985 they forced Signet/NAL into arbitration over the automatic renewal16 and won their point for any contract that had a term clause—all of them except Beyond This Horizon. They were able to place the four Doubleday books with another paperback house right away, and that gave them a pile of galleys to check.

The Cat Who Walks Through Walls was released and hit the New York Times bestseller list on November 11. At the same time, the paperback release of Job was on the bestseller lists for both the B. Dalton and Waldenbooks chains. Since he couldn’t do book tours of any kind anymore, due to his health, Heinlein wrote and recorded a short audio “Message to the Berkeley Sales Staff Concerning The Cat Who Walks Through Walls.”17

Spider Robinson was the first to notice this book was part of a continuing story.18 The New York Times Book Review review stressed Heinlein’s iconoclasm, designating Heinlein “a master craftsman as he looks back over nearly half a century of labor, most of it in the fields of literature [there’s the L word] rather than in its plantation house.”19

The fan mail also started coming in. “[P]ractically every letter asks for a sequel,” Ginny wrote to a friend. “I would have thought everyone would want Robert to bring Mike [the self-aware computer of The Moon Is a Harsh Mistress] back to life, but no, they’re all interested in saving the kitten! A fictional kitten at that.”20

Heinlein had, about that time, a letter from Keith Henson, one of the founders of the L5 Society, who had just moved to San Jose. Henson had been trying to interest him in cryonic preservation, because of the “cold sleep” he had written about in The Door into Summer (people were always assuming—and still assume—that Heinlein had a special personal interest in things he put into his stories, though it usually just meant he saw possibilities for a good story in them).21 At a conference banquet, he had been overheard remarking to a dinner companion “How do we know it won’t interfere with reincarnation?”22 That was, of course, at least half facetious, but he had just enough leftover conviction from his childhood to treat it as a serious possibility. He didn’t talk about it anymore, except, very occasionally, with Ginny. If it were true, he promised Ginny he would wait for her on the Other Side, just in case.23

L. Ron Hubbard passed away at Whispering Winds Ranch in San Luis Obispo, a few hundred miles to the south. His intimates withheld the news for a few days, but the New York Times obituary ran on January 28, 1986.

January 28, 1986, is one of those days that is etched into the memory of everyone who lived through it: the Space Shuttle Challenger blew up seventy-five seconds into liftoff. It was a great setback for NASA and the space program.

The publisher Jeremy Tarcher wrote on January 31 asking Heinlein to verify biographical details in a new Panshin book, The World Beyond the Hill. He declined. He and Ginny were reviewing Professor Stover’s manuscript as it came in, chapter by chapter, and sending back comments. The impression Heinlein had gotten when the Stovers had visited, that this was a possible biographer, must have been growing stronger. There were things Stover got wrong24—but he was the first commentator in Heinlein’s experience who seemed at all able to see some of the major thematic currents in his work, to understand even a little of who he was as a human being.25

Gradually, Heinlein was able to get back to his own work. He finished the first draft of Maureen Johnson early in March 1986, at 158,000 words—the longest thing he had written since Time Enough for Love.

As the Congressional hearings on the Challenger disaster wore on, the perennial arguments about “wasting money” in space surfaced again. When Heinlein was approached by the grassroots Challenger Campaign to underwrite an appeal to the American people, he enthusiastically donated money and the use of his name for a full-page “A Letter to the American People” ad that appeared in the Sunday New York Times on March 30, 1986, urging that NASA be encouraged to honor their memory by carrying forward the aspirations of these fallen heroes.

A trip to another Citizens Advisory Council meeting, on May 7, exposed Robert and Ginny to the “Russian flu” that was going around that year. Heinlein was not really up and around for three weeks: The influenza made his emphysema worse.

On his first partial day up he wrote a long autobiographical letter for Leon Stover. He had more “fiddling carpentry”26 to do with the new book—fact-checking mostly. While he was down with the flu, he had decided to retitle the new book. Possibly taking a cue from that open letter “to the American People,” he chose a title from Tennyson’s “Ulysses”—about picking up and moving on, as humankind has always rolled on:

Come, my friends.

‘Tis not too late to seek a newer world.

Push off, and sitting well in order smite

The sounding furrows; for my purpose holds

To sail beyond the sunset, and the baths

Of all the western stars, until I die.27

He titled the book To Sail Beyond the Sunset.

Robert’s seventy-ninth birthday was spent quietly. He celebrated by making another $20,000 donation to High Frontier.

Ginny was up and around early in the morning July 26, 1986, getting her morning orange juice, when she heard a noise in Robert’s bathroom. She went to investigate and found him in his pajamas, with blood flowing from his nose and down his chest. There was blood everywhere.28 She went into overdrive and tried to stanch the flow. Robert told her he had simply turned over in bed, and the nosebleed started.

Ginny got his service to ring their local doctor on an emergency basis: She should take Robert to the Emergency Room at Dominican Hospital—while he called an EENT specialist to meet them there. Within minutes she hustled Robert into the car, still in his blood-soaked pajamas, with a box of Kleenex and an armful of Turkish towels (and a sack for the used tissue).

The drive took about forty-five minutes, and he was losing blood at an alarming rate (but an ambulance would have taken even longer). Robert was able to walk in under his own power. The specialist, Dr. Seftel, took charge of him.

Dr. Seftel positioned a balloon at the top of the nasal passage and inflated it, to put pressure on the artery that was bleeding, and then packed the nose. The whole procedure took about forty minutes.

Robert had lost a lot of blood—most of it on the bedroom and bathroom floors; probably two units, nearly a liter. He went directly to the Intensive Care Unit with an intravenous drip and oxygen and a battery of monitors. The bout of Russian flu might well have triggered this incident by inducing vascular fragility.

Later that afternoon, with a critical care doctor and nurse in the room, Robert’s blood pressure began to drop precipitously. He could feel himself sinking, he told Ginny. She called out to the doctor and nurse as his blood pressure sank to 40/20. They got his head lowered, and Ginny tried to stay out of the way, while holding his hand.29 He needed a transfusion.

Transfusions in 1986 were not the automatic thing they had been ten years earlier. The blood supply was known to be tainted, and there were risks—significant risks—of hepatitis and even AIDS.

When Ginny got back to the Bonny Doon house the next day, the bathroom looked, she said, like an abattoir, splashed with blood drying on the tiles.30 Dr. Seftel tried to take out the packing and the balloon, and another massive hemorrhage started. Hastily Dr. Seftel reinflated the balloon and repacked the nose.

This was clearly going to require surgery—and Robert would once again need the surgical expertise at the UC Medical Center hospital in San Francisco. He was transferred the next day, in an ambulance. Ginny followed in the car.

They managed on July 28 to get the new hemorrhage under control and gave Robert two units of packed cells to replace the blood he had lost. By July 30 Dr. Crumley decided to give him a week of observation to regain some strength before surgery to tie off the artery on the right side of his face, top and bottom beside the nose, with silver rings.

On August 6, they actually got to the stage of prepping Robert for surgery. But about 12:30 that afternoon, Dr. Crumley found Ginny waiting in Robert’s room and told her they wouldn’t need to operate, after all: When the packing and the balloon were removed this time, the bleeding did not resume. A lucky stroke—the Maxillary Artery had closed itself off spontaneously.

If his blood pressure stayed stable, she could take him home.

On Thursday, August 7, they made the trip back to Santa Cruz. Ginny could not leave him unattended while she picked up his prescription in downtown Santa Cruz, so she called the local Visiting Nurses, just to have someone on hand to call an ambulance if needed—but the LVN they sent had a cold, and Ginny sent her away: They could not risk another respiratory infection for Robert. The pharmacist, who happened to live nearby, offered to bring the prescription with him that evening.

That was the most unpleasant and nerve-wracking day of Ginny’s life. She fell into bed exhausted about 9:00 P.M. after rigging a “wake-me-up” cable tied to a radio with the volume turned up to full blast, so Robert could roust her out of bed if need be.

Two days later, Ginny wrote a circular letter to send out to all their friends, keeping everybody abreast of Robert’s condition.31 She was getting ready to mail out the second batch when the radio-alarm sounded. Robert was having another hemorrhage—his third. Back to Dominican, where Dr. Seftel installed a new balloon dam, and then back to San Francisco by ambulance, Ginny again following in the car with clean clothes and miscellanea.

This time, Dr. Crumley decided, they would perform the surgery no matter what. By the time Ginny found a hotel and got back to the hospital, about 11:00 A.M., they were already prepping him for the surgery.32

On the way up Ginny had noticed a flickering in her vision—like the “schlieren” refraction slips in the visual field she had noticed when she was studying microsurgical technique, years ago. It went away, and there didn’t seem to be anything to be done about it; she did not mention it to Robert at all while he was sick.

The surgery went very smoothly, Dr. Crumley told her around 3:30 in the afternoon when they got him into post-op. By 6:30 that evening he was back in his room, cheerful and alert, though still weak, and of course his nose was bruised and painful. He needed two shots of Demerol that evening to get to sleep.

During several days of observation, Ginny occupied her time at his bedside checking the galleys for a new edition of The Green Hills of Earth. On Sunday the 17th of August, they were allowed to leave the hospital. The next day, Ginny wrote a continuation of her circular to their friends:

We came home in a very luxurious limousine; it gave Robert plenty of room for his legs, and he came through the trip very well. And is now back in his own bed. He’s eating better than he did in the hospital, and seems to feel quite well considering that the operation is less than a week in the past. In fact, through many operations, I’ve never seen him come through so well. He’s cheerful, cooperative, and seems happy to be home. And Pixel will be home soon, and will assist in nursing Robert.…

Now all there is to worry about is hepatitis and AIDS from the transfusions—wish us luck! I suspect that by this time the $25,000 nosebleed has reached around $50,000.33

Gradually they got back to their recuperation routine. The operation had left Robert with an ache on the right side of his face, for which he took codeine—which had given him a saintly and beatific demeanor, somewhat dreamy, but also seemed to confuse him and leave him unable to distinguish reality from his internal life34—alarming at first, but Ginny got used to him staring at the ceiling for hours at a stretch.

Heinlein’s publishers decided to delay issuing To Sail Beyond the Sunset until his eightieth birthday—a longish delay, but justified considering how well Cat and Job were both still performing. In his lucid periods, Robert acknowledged it unlikely he would ever write again.

He never had the chance to bring his big vision for the World As Myth books to fruition—never even got his protagonists to the battle with the “villains” of the piece—even though he did get in Jubal Harshaw casting doubt on the whole idea of the villains.

By the end of August he was sitting up in bed and working—reading the galleys for The Green Hills of Earth that Ginny had read through while he was recovering in the hospital. He was even getting a little exercise: Ginny took him on daily walks around their atrium.

And now Ginny told him this business of being forty-five minutes from the closest hospital could not continue. She had turned seventy this past April and was feeling her age: She just couldn’t take the anxiety of driving so long with him fountaining blood; they had to find a place closer to a hospital.

And she had been having eye trouble and needed to see an ophthalmologist. She left it at that. Living in Bonny Doon depended on her being able to drive, since Robert had let his license lapse. She had learned well enough from him how to conceal the truth by telling the truth so that he did not pursue the details. Her vision had gone from schlieren to a nearly complete loss of vision in her right eye.

Ginny was fed up, she said, with the taxes and crowding in California, but Robert did not want to get too far out of the area. When he got some of his strength back, they would start looking in the Carmel area, twenty miles down the coast—probably in the spring, if he continued to improve. This meant he had to eat more, no more nonsense. He needed to get up and take exercise as soon as he reasonably could.

Heinlein improved gradually. As the doctors isolated side effects, the meds were replaced, one by one. And Ginny began fiddling with his diet, trying to tempt his palate—anything that would get him to eat was ichiban. Ensure milkshakes three times a day. He liked a molasses cake she could make within his dietary guidelines, and she was relieved when persimmon season came on and he would eat them with enthusiasm—another revenant from his boyhood: Persimmons are practically the state fruit of Missouri.35 When the fall weather came on, and fresh, crisp apples started appearing in the supermarkets, she started making homemade applesauce, which he relished.

By the end of September, he was able to get up once an hour and do something for himself—anything. It was notable when he stood in the doorway one day in September and called for Pixel.36 And now that Robert was off codeine, he was cheerful and working.37

By the end of October, The Cat Who Walks Through Walls was on all the mass market paperback bestseller lists. An article in The Economist—a magazine Ginny read religiously—said that one in ten novels sold nowadays were science fiction, almost directly due to Robert’s influence, together with Clarke and Asimov.38

Heinlein had been saying for decades that science fiction for the mass market could not be the same as science fiction for a small and highly interactive readership of genre enthusiasts.39 He began after World War II to pare away genre conventions. Over the years, his fiction moved toward a general audience and evolved away from standard genre science fiction, though nobody within the field seemed really to recognize it, and was moving toward something like the relationship H. G. Wells had with the contemporary fiction audience of his day. An academic in 1986, using Friday to ponder the literary/subliterary paradoxes of Heinlein’s career, concluded simply he was “a leading contemporary novelist” without genre qualification.40

By December Heinlein was taking enough interest in things around him to read again. When Leon Stover phoned on Christmas Eve, he was surprised nearly speechless when Robert picked up the phone himself.41

Robert’s oldest brother, Lawrence, died on January 17, 1987. Lawrence had always been his favorite big brother and an inspiration in a way he could not quite articulate. “They’re all going,” Robert told Ginny42 and drew in on himself—which was not good for his recuperation.

Leon Stover had held off telling Robert his bad news: Stover’s field editor for Twayne, Warren French, had arranged a session on Heinlein for the next year’s Modern Language Association meeting in December 1987, at which Stover was to give a paper. The Modern Language Association is the premier academic organization for literary matters, and such a panel would represent a major step toward recognition of Heinlein as an American writer. Stover was not a member of the MLA, so would be there as a guest, with both Robert and Ginny. But, Stover told Ginny privately:

You worried that Alexei [Panshin] might attend. That’s the least of it, as it turns out. A greater enemy has stepped in to cancel the session, that Marxist s.o.b. whose name I retch to mention [H. Bruce Franklin].

When he heard that the MLA had scheduled a special seminar built around a book sympathetic to RAH, he used his muscle within the organization to get it descheduled. And so it’s off, just like that.43

It was his impression that Franklin thought there was too much risk of the MLA appearing to endorse a “fascist” writer and his “fascist” critic. “It would besmear MLA’s liberal reputation,” Stover told Ginny.

You certainly judged aright the character of this SOB when he came calling at your place. Prof. French confirms to me that his [Franklin’s] intentions were duplicitous from the start, which were to make RAH exemplary of everything wrong about America—Fascism, imperialism, racism, sexism, etc., etc. The usual Marxist nonsense. In warning the MLA program committee of the ideological error, he was acting as the defender of the One True Faith (and perhaps also to protect the preeminence of his own book).44

Heinlein gradually recovered his strength, and was able to perform an annual ritual: He called in to Jim Eason’s regular fund-raiser for the Leukemia Society. Eason was a popular talk-radio host on station KGO News Talk 810. As Eason explains:

Every year, at some time during the broadcast, Robert Heinlein would call in, chat briefly, and pledge a large sum of money.…

He would identify himself to the producer when he called, but only to the producer, not to the audience. I would get a note that “A Robert Heinlein is on the phone.” I would answer the same way I answered every caller, “Hi, this is Jim Eason, and you’re on KGO.”

I would hear a beautiful, clear, strong voice saying, “Hi, Jim, this is Bob.” That was it—no showboating, no big deal, just a caller named Bob. We would chat for a couple of minutes, mostly about his health, how his wife was doing, what he was writing at the moment. He always ended the calls with a heartfelt pitch for listeners to pledge money to fight leukemia.45

The American galleys for To Sail Beyond the Sunset came in April, and Heinlein had to be chivvied into reading proof on them, though by the time the English galleys came, in June, he was interested enough to read proof without prompting. They cautiously began traveling on day trips down the coast to the suburbs of Carmel, to look for housing closer to hospitals.

After a false start with a co-op in Pebble Beach that rejected them because the condominium association didn’t want anybody running a business from the condo (even a writing business), they found a place about a mile east of Highway 1 outside Carmel but within less than three miles of the Community Hospital on Highway 68—a ten-minute drive: “It’s very pleasant, perched on a hill, with the most glorious view of the Pacific Ocean and Point Lobos. Robert will have the master bedroom for his study, which looks out on that view, as does the living room.”46

The first purchase for the new house was a cat door for Pixel so he could come and go as he pleased.

They listed the Bonny Doon house with a real estate agent—in a depressed market, since the federal government was closing down so many nearby military installations. The first thing to do in preparing for the move was to collect all the bits of paper they had been holding on to for years, and send them on to the University Library for archival. On July 6, 1987, Rita Bottoms came with her assistant Paul Stubbs.

Bottoms had become a good friend over the years, virtually one of the family. Robert confided cheerfully that he thought Leon Stover would be suitable to write his biography, if anybody wanted a biography. On that occasion, they discovered that they both liked the song “Cool Water,” and burst into song together, Robert croaking a little because of the emphysema but in good spirits.

Ginny was comfortable enough with Bottoms, too, to let down her guard from time to time. Coming into the kitchen, Bottoms was startled when Ginny suddenly sagged back against the closed door, obviously exhausted. “I just can’t do this anymore,” she said.47

The next day was Robert’s eightieth birthday, and the publication date of To Sail Beyond the Sunset. The book had been on bestseller lists since June. Putnam’s sent Robert balloons and chocolates to mark the occasion, and they received a congratulatory letter from President and Nancy Reagan. They had a rare social gathering, with in-person visits from science-fiction writer and veterinarian Jesse F. Bone and his wife, and Charles Brown, a fan friend who visited frequently (and was also publisher of Locus magazine). Yoji Kondo arranged for him to receive an honorary Judo Black Belt. Brown took pictures to memorialize the occasion.

Bottoms had let Heinlein know that they had gotten a number of requests from the general public over the years—for the Opus List in particular. Robert and Ginny decided it was time to tighten up the restrictions on what might be publicly accessible during their lifetimes. The Opus List would be made off-limits.

Bottoms had long ago drafted language for a seal on the correspondence, and on July 13, 1987, Heinlein made that seal a formal restriction on the gift of his papers—for twenty-five years, instead of the fifty years they had originally discussed. At the same time, he reversed a decision he had made ten years earlier: Originally he had marked what was left of the abortive 1977 Panki-Barsoom Number of the Beast for destruction after he was gone; instead, he put the manuscript box with the typewritten instructions among the material to be taken to the UCSC Library’s Special Collections, with a fifty-year restriction.

The university was starting to send pleasant but very persistent functionaries angling for a big bequest. Perhaps it was becoming too obvious that he was getting old and had little time left. Over the years Heinlein had come to think that the money might be better spent in a donation to a smaller library—his birthplace of Butler, Missouri, for instance, had only a small county library. He had been talking with Ginny for some time now about donating enough money to them to build a really nice facility, and he told Bottoms that was what he was determined to do—the major bequest to the Butler library (though a smaller donation—say, on the order of $10,000—was still a possibility for the well-funded university).

It was probably all this thinking about his “legacy” that reminded him of Leon Stover, and Heinlein called on July 17, 1987, just to talk for an hour, ranging over this and that. One thing he made sure to get into the conversation: “You’ve got it all wrong,” he told Stover genially, about Stover’s Calvinist interpretation.48 There was still too much of it in the draft manuscript, but Heinlein did not attempt to argue Stover out of it. Possibly he was satisfied that Stover did get some of the important points others missed seeing—about him no less than about the stories—and most of Stover’s colleagues didn’t even seem to be aware of the background material Heinlein was moving around, or even of the history of science fiction to which he was often reacting.

Stover wanted to position him with American writers such as Mark Twain, rather than as a genre writer,49 which was not altogether unreasonable. When Gerald Jonas reviewed To Sail Beyond the Sunset for the New York Times Book Review later that year, he observed that Heinlein had been migrating out of the genre for some time, that “he now writes books that bear only the most superficial relation to either science fiction or the conventional novel.”50

The house in Carmel went into escrow late in July, so they had about ninety days to clear out twenty years of collected junk. Charles Brown came to help, and Heinlein gave him some cover paintings for his earlier work and a pile of some of the less valuable books—second impressions and book club editions, mostly—sitting for hours on the living room banquette and signing book after book, to increase their eventual sales value (the more valuable first editions were to go to the Archive). He also sent his personal copy of one of his favorite books to Leon Stover: Jerome K. Jerome’s Three Men in a Boat, inscribed to Stover.51

Packing up his working desk brought up a matter that had been lying fallow for decades: He got out the file of manuscript and notes and correspondence about that first novel he had written in 1938 (For Us, the Living). Over the years, he had mined it for story ideas—the whole trajectory of the Future History had come from that book. It couldn’t be anything more than a curiosity at this point.

Ginny agreed. “It wouldn’t have done his reputation any good to publish it—and I had begun to be aware that he had a reputation at that point, so I recommended that he chuck it.”52 They burned the entire file, together, all the copies he had had made over the years, in the Swedish fireplace in the living room of the Bonny Doon house.53

Toward the end of September, the house was bare walls and a pile of boxes. Ginny asked him if he had any regrets—about marrying her, about having had no children. He took a little time to think about the question: No regrets, he told her. He had had a good life, and enjoyed almost every minute of it—and she had been a big part of making it so, particularly these last decades, which he wouldn’t have had at all without her.54

And then the movers did come and cleared out the house to the bare walls. Ginny had taken Pixel to a kennel, to spare him the upset of the move.

But Pixel accepted the new environment with only a few reservations. A few days after the move, they went back to the Bonny Doon house to clear out any leftover bits and get it in shape to turn over to the real estate agent. They stayed there for an hour or so. “It was sad, having to leave our home … [sic]. We both cried.”55

Within a very short time they were more or less up and running in the Carmel house, with phone installed and Robert camping out in Ginny’s way, at a breakfast bar between the office and the kitchen. He had decided it was time to use some of the contacts he had been accumulating and nurturing for the last several years and get back into politics: He started out with the SFWA Directory and the membership of the Citizens Advisory Council and worked hard to organize a candidacy for Jeane Kirkpatrick for the 1988 presidential campaign—when Ronald Reagan’s second term would expire. He was pushing the campaign into funded existence by sheer force of will—but ultimately Ms. Kirkpatrick asked him to leave off and let her out of the commitment: Her husband had been diagnosed with a terminal illness and she wanted to retire to take care of him in his last days.

That Christmas they had a small tree, because Ginny didn’t want to risk a ladder. Apparently Robert had packed some things she didn’t know anything about. When she opened her main present from Robert this year, she found a largish, empty—almost empty—gold-colored and gilded bottle of men’s cologne, King’s Men, with the gilding wearing off. It was inscribed “Merry Christmas to Ticky, the queen of my heart.” On the other side was one of his “Ticky pictures,” with his perennial motto, “Semper toujours”—“always, ever.”

This was the very bottle she had given him forty years and a few months earlier, when Robert had moved out of the house in Laurel Canyon and was living in motels in the San Fernando Valley. They had been driving on some errand and stopped at a drug store. She had bought this cologne for him then, and gave it to him when he got back into the car—just something to perk him up. He had scolded her then, for spending her hard-earned cash on something frivolous like that.56 But he used it—used it up and saved the bottle, to give her forty years later.57 It was a folly of sentiment—and so very like him.

It was a second answer, an and I really mean it to the question she had asked him a few months back at Bonny Doon—a question that really never needed to be asked, and for which no words could ever be sufficient, whether he regretted marrying her. “Cherish Ticky” was more than a family game between a married couple; it was their way of life.