Robert A. Heinlein, In Dialogue with His Century, Volume 2

by William H. Patterson, Jr.

  Nor was that the end of it. When the Heinleins got home—a trip Robert weathered moderately well, as he only went to bed and slept thirteen hours straight but did not, as he often did, pick up some debilitating respiratory ailment—they found a copy of the Race & Sanger book loaned to them by mail by William M. Davis, M.D., Director of Hematology Service at the Western Medical Center of Massachussets.

  It was their only copy, and Davis asked for it back in a week. Heinlein started swotting it immediately and found, as Asimov had told him, it was the basic foundation he needed—and the Wallerstein briefing had given him enough background to understand it properly. He asked Ginny to photocopy charts from the book for him on their 3M copier mornings when he slept in after working late into the night.

  During the mornings, Heinlein availed himself of Dr. Wallerstein’s offer and phoned him from California with questions as they arose, and always received the same patient, illuminating responses. Dr. Wallerstein’s opinions were always carefully reasoned, even when they disagreed with the consensus, and Heinlein admired him for being a true scientist in a field so unexpectedly dominated by personal issues.27

  By the time Dr. Davis’s copy was due back in Massachussetts, the Levin/Tanner research combine had turned up another copy, same deal, checked out personally from the library at the Washington University medical school—and then a third.

  Levin found a small lot of the fifth edition that were being pulled from distribution and snagged a permanent copy for Heinlein. They had been scheduled for pulping since the new edition would be out within the year. Better yet, Tanner had cabled Race and Sanger in England about Heinlein’s problem, and they offered to send him page proofs early in June—just in time to make his July 1 copy deadline. There were, the doctors assured him, a number of important changes in this edition. It was an extraordinary courtesy but very consistent with the passionate advocacy Heinlein was finding throughout the entire community.

  The unbound page proofs of the Race & Sanger sixth edition arrived on June 5, while houseguests from Finland were visiting. Heinlein raced through the book and immediately found the revisions, as the Drs. Race had told him, substantial and material. Without this book, his article would have been out of date the minute it was published. He finished the first pass of the article, incorporating the new information, and it came out to 9500 words—five times the length Pope had contracted for. Heinlein worked on this manuscript for days, condensing where possible and cutting where absolutely necessary. He got it down to just under three thousand words and stuck there. It was not possible to condense any further without relying too much on the technical language of a very esoteric science—and cutting anything further eliminated some facts that were essential to understand the subject. Nevertheless, he had made a contractual commitment, and he would make it. He cut the piece to the contractual limit of 1,990 words, and the result was so unsatisfactory that he struck out his own name and penned in a pseudonym, “Francis X. Riverside.”28

  A few days later, he called his project editor, Christine Timmons, and “tried to talk her into a longer version.”29 After additional meetings, he produced a clean manuscript of the 2,880-word version and sent it along, as well—with his own name on it. Pope and Timmons agreed this was much the better version and this was the one they would use. This time, the $1,000 fee went to the National Rare Blood Club.

  Heinlein sent out copies of the 2,880-word version to his panel of experts, asking for the most nitpicking, close criticism. He explained to his editors: “I want it to be checked technically savagely, without mercy. I expect to be able to defend successfully every statement I have made … [sic] but I do not want any errors to find their way into print; the subject is too important.…”30

  With the hard work done, they were able to leave for Seattle on July 14.

  This production of the Ring cycle was much more satisfying to Ginny than the Bayreuth production had been in 1954 (though Bayreuth, she thought, had the better voices). This one was sumptuously mounted following as closely as possible Richard Wagner’s original staging instructions. Robert found himself listening and watching the production as music and text in a foreign language, but as he became more interested, more immersed in the drama—

  Odd thing happened to me—My German is feeble … save that I learned Bavarian German at about five in the kitchen of a next-door neighbor—and forgot it. But it is buried somewhere deep down. I was listening and looking, entranced, when I suddenly realized that they were singing in English—whereupon they were singing in German. Then I again became bathed in the drama … and again they were singing in “English.” I went through this several times. By the last day I was understanding all the lyrics … save for a couple of singers who did not articulate clearly.31

  While in Seattle they renewed acquaintances, having dinner at the Nourses’ home with F. M. and Elinor Busby and Frank and Beverly Herbert and the young writer Vonda McIntyre.

  The cruise ship then took them to the Panhandle portion of Alaska, which they had never visited before. Once you got out of Anchorage and Fairbanks, there was more of the “Old West” there than they had found even in Arizona—wooden sidewalks, muddy streets, trading posts for trappers down out of the Yukon Territory—but it was Glacier Bay that arrested them and held them entranced on deck for most of the day, in the freezing weather:

  I’ve seen, oh, 20 or 30 or more, glaciers in the past—but never from this angle, never so close up, and never so active. Instead of a few inches a day Margerie Glacier moves 30 feet per day—so it “calves” (gives off an iceberg) several times each hour. While I knew that glaciers give off icebergs, I had not realized how spectacular it is to see a cliff of blue ice break off and become a berg. And how noisy it is. A “white noise” rumble remarkably like that of a very large rocket.32

  And back to the grind, and back, of course, to the usual stack of accumulated mail. They had offered Phil and Tessa Dick a loan in the summer, at the time Robert sent the electric typewriter, when they suspected the medical bills would swamp the Dicks financially, but Tessa had declined the offer. While they were in Seattle, she wrote reversing herself, apologizing that she simply couldn’t juggle the bills anymore and asking for a loan to pay at least part of their taxes. Robert and Ginny sent off a chatty and supportive letter, together with a check for the full amount of the taxes.

  And in the same mail was an invitation to be the first civilian passengers on the proposed space shuttle—which Ginny accepted for them with enthusiasm.33

  The writing work continued on the rare blood article, as the critical comments began coming in from his experts. Most of the comments were lavishly complimentary about the article as a unit—it was “a literary coup,”34 “a masterpiece of compression and information-loading,”35 and “first rate for a young person’s encyclopedia.”36 Isaac Asimov comically complained that, having driven all the science-fiction writers into the second rank, Heinlein was now driving the poor science popularizers (like him) into second place as well.37 But the finicky accumulation of corrections required revision after revision—including an opportunity to take a swing at the racist stereotype of sickle-cell anemia being a Negro disease (the mutation occurs in all races; it’s simply conserved only in places where malaria is endemic). Even as late as October, he was phoning in changes of wording, additions of a sentence or two to take new science into account, and a sudden change in federal law that required new handling procedures for reconstituted plasma.

  He turned down a query from Rolling Stone magazine wanting to do a whole Robert Heinlein issue and let Blassingame handle the Avalon Hill people, who were doing a board game based on Starship Troopers. He began concentrating on blood services more than blood science.

  Rivalry and factionalism was much more pronounced in blood services than in the pure-science end of the blood supply problem—but these people were passionate about something that actually mattered in the real world. That was something worth more than writing entertainments�
��worth dedicating your life and your treasure to. When he applied for membership to the American Association of Blood Banks (AABB) in December 1975, his strategy was already well advanced, building on the rare blood article as a start. The application asked him to state the nature of his interest:

  Recruitment … When I started research for this MS [the rare blood article] I knew nothing about blood programs other than through my work in recruiting for NRBC. I now wish to recruit donors of all blood types for all legitimate blood programs: AABB, CCBC, American Red Cross, Canadian Red Cross, British Red Cross, etc., and I have the means to do it; this typewriter.38

  He used all his politician’s tact and fancy footwork to keep the dialogue going with the many scientists and scientist-administrators he had established relationships with—the same methods he and Ginny had used in Soviet Russia, turning their natural sociability to account:

  The magic words “Encyclopedia Britannica” got the Big Man on the line; now I must keep him there. I couch my question in technical terms of hematology plus blood bankers’ argot.… then once I’ve established that I understand the language, I find opportunity to admit (with false modesty) that, No, I’m not a blood banker or an M.D. or anything of the sort, but a former aviation-structures engineer—however I have studied most carefully Race & Sanger’s 1975 edition.… these blood people are all enthusiasts (fanatics, most of them) and they welcome a chance to pontificate at length to a layman who understands and appreciates their problems—they meet so few who do.

  If he shows any signs of slowing down, I use a banderilla: “Dr. Whoosis—” (some equally prominent hematologist as far from Santa Cruz as possible & who I know holds an opinion on a controversial issue diametrically opposed to that held by the man to whom I am speaking—and I usually do know, as I’ve been reading many pounds of the current literature and noting which side each one takes)—“Dr. Whoosis told me day before yesterday that, etc.”

  He represses or sometimes fails to repress a snort of indignation. “Dr. Whoosis is a very learned man, a fine man, a close friend of mine—but between you and me he has a very narrow outlook on this matter. He fails to take into consideration the practical side of, etc.”—whereupon I sit down, light a cigarette and listen and take notes.39

  The proofs of the article were finally ready in December, two days before Heinlein went into the local Dominican Hospital for his third—and final—hernia repair surgery. This time he stayed awake for the whole thing, with a saddle block anesthesia, though the doctors irritatingly put a screen up so he could not watch what they were doing. Heinlein was released from the hospital on December 23, heavily sedated with Demerol so he would not be hurt by the winding mountain roads on the way home.

  They were not “doing Christmas” that year, since Heinlein was restricted to bed rest until December 30, when he was able to totter around the atrium and the pain of getting into and out of bed was decreasing. He was particularly anxious to get back to work. His extra time in the hospital had given him a chance to indulge one of his sickbed habits: He read up on the history of the nun-nurses’ religious order. That was an exceptionally productive read:

  I suddenly figured out something I had long wondered about: why nuns live so long but never grow old. It enabled me to put into words a truth that had been inchoate in me for many years. Hear me: One certain path to happiness lies in having the opportunity to work to the utter limit of your strength on some difficult task that you believe to be worth doing.

  That was exactly the insight he needed for what he was about to undertake: “And a … corollary: Any time you can give someone the chance to work hard on something that he himself—no other judge!—evaluates as being worth doing, you are doing him a favor beyond price.”40

  Characters and personality types fall into and out of fashion, but they do not fall out of existence. Heinlein knew this character type; he was one, himself—and he had been writing for them, for more than thirty-five years.

  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 y
ou 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.