The Counterfeit Heinlein

by Laurence M. Janifer

  The answer to that question turned out to be, unfortunately: Anybody at all. There were no guards, and no locks; the roof was reachable by a staircase from the top floor, and a convenient trap door. When you thought about it, why the Hell would there have been locks, or guards either? The building sat by itself in the middle of a greenflower grassland; there was nothing valuable sitting on the roof; and even a suicide would find a higher building more attractive as a jumping-off spot: First Files was a lousy six stories high, even though the stories were sizable—like most libraries, the place had high ceilings.

  And careful examination of the roof turned up nothing in particular. There was one thing—a thread of cloth that had got itself snagged by a rough spot on a 3V piping up there. But it didn’t lead anywhere in particular. It might have been up there for days, and people did use the roof now and then just as they used the surrounding grassland.

  There was a full report on the thread. Cotton, hothouse-grown on Ravenal—which meant it was expensive, and comparatively uncommon though not really rare—dyed dark blue, and treated against shrinkage, fading and, I suppose, warts. Jackets, pants, jumpers, skirts, blouses or dresses of that material in that color were worn by perhaps fifty thousand people in City Two.

  Who had been wearing clothing made of that material, that day, in that building? The file got a little vague just there; lots of people simply didn’t remember. Ravenal is not a clothes-horse sort of place, and cross-checking to find out if people remembered what other people had been wearing was even less helpful. The thread hadn’t been turned up till three days after the shooting—it took two to find out that the roof ought to be looked at—and nobody really expected results better than that.

  There was a list of ten people who had definitely been wearing something made of that material, and six more probables. None of them was a name I recognized, but I filed them all, of course, and made a note to ask the Master and little Robbin what, if anything, they knew about these sixteen; it was perfectly possible that they knew more than the police did, even after police investigation. Or at the very least knew different things.

  And the police investigation had been very thorough—and, after a while, very frantic. One of those sixteen, after all, was a shining candidate for the post of Berigot Maimer—the election being clouded some by the fact that there might have been others wearing the material, and by the fact that six of the sixteen were only probable, not certain, for it. Not to mention the fact that nobody was anything like positive that the thread had been left on the roof on that particular day.

  Nothing of any interest turned up.

  Two and a half weeks went by.

  Then, at eleven o’clock of an especially dark night (as dark as the night of the theft, five years further along)—twenty-three if you’re following this Scientifically—somebody shot B’dyr G’ridget. B’dyr was just returning home from a visit with friends—human friends, as it happens—and was about a hundred and fifty feet from his nest-or-whatever, on the outskirts of a Berigot area (not the area G’ril lived in), and about forty feet in the air. He was hit in the left wing, managed to brake his fall a bit, and landed without serious incident.

  I could detail it for you, but what’s the use? Gross and a stack of printout detailed it for me, and it was all one large zero. Happily, B’dyr wasn’t hurt, except for the damaged wing, which was repairable. He had a few bumps and bruises, and was out of the office for a couple of days—he worked as a text analyst in Early Comity, and did some work in the late-Twentieth offices down the hall—but he got away, comparatively speaking, without a scratch.

  He was, at 28 Standard, the youngest of the three victims. Did that mean anything?

  Did anything mean anything?

  According to Gross and the printouts, the answer was: God knows. Certainly God knows; that’s His business. But nobody else does.

  And as of even date and time, nobody else did.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR

  GROSS AND I had spent an exhausting afternoon, and so had the mechs who had printed out all the reports. Thanking the mechs was impossible, and thanking Gross didn’t seem sufficient, but it was all I had to hand out. He took the thanks with tired grace, and I left the office, and the building, sped home and got on the phone.

  Master Higsbee had heard of one of the sixteen names, and heard quite a lot. He was vaguely familiar with nine others, but it was that one that got his attention—and, therefore, positively clutched at mine.

  “Geraint Beauthis,” he said reflectively. “An odd person, Gerald. He was once arrested for failure to comply—I cannot recall the object of compliance, but it must have been fairly serious at the time; the usual procedure in noncompliance is a simple warning and an oversight long enough to ensure compliance. I remember it as being perhaps six years in the past.”

  “That makes him odd?” I said. “There are several hundred things I don’t comply with, or wouldn’t. Several thousand.”

  “Few of an importance sufficient to cause arrest,” the Master said. “And you do not normally reside on Ravenal, Gerald. Compliance is very general here; few wish to invest time or energy in unusual social stances, if they require battle with the law.”

  “If you say so,” I said. “Can you scare up details on this Beauthis? And on the other nine?”

  “I shall do so,” the Master said. “And inquire of Robbin Tress as well, when I can speak with her—tomorrow morning will be the earliest possible time. Is there anything else?”

  “Well—” I said, trying to think if there was.

  “Finished,” the Master said after half a second.

  Click.

  Well, there probably hadn’t been.

  * * * *

  AN ODD QUESTION had found its way into my head, and after I’d put the phone down I started to look at it.

  Someone had gone to a great deal of trouble to turn out an awfully convincing forgery. Why?

  The usual reason for committing a forgery is money: if somebody believes the thing you’ve put together is really by Chaucer, or Julius Verne, or Heinlein, or some such famous corpse, he may pay through any and all available noses to own it.

  But the manuscript of The Stone Pillow had never been offered for sale, not for a second, and nobody had ever thought it might have been. Once dug up, it was going straight to First Files Building, to be treasured as an artifact, displayed as a wonder, and even guarded fairly well. There was no money in it whatever—if you except the additional fees paid by tourists and scholars interested in coming into the library to see the manuscript.

  Somehow, that teeny pittance—and it was teeny; fees were paid to the usual mechs, to enter the library, and to examine some special areas (including late-Twentieth manuscripts), but they were very small indeed; the fee paid on entrance, for instance, wouldn’t be enough to buy a cup of coffee and a pastry anywhere in City Two—somehow, that didn’t seem like enough motive for the work that had had to be involved.

  But the work had been done, and there was The Stone Pillow. And—well, why was it?

  It struck me that I had two complementary puzzles on my hands:

  1. Why was Ping so damned anxious to recover what was essentially a worthless forgery?

  2. Why had anyone ever constructed what was essentially a worthless forgery—a job without any pay in it I could see?

  Were these two questions related? I worked away at answers to that for a while.

  Suppose (I said to myself) the forgery was really only a cover for some secret message, meant for Ping himself? The whole business of making the forgery and getting it into the library might have been a cover for getting some very complicated secret message to Ping by a channel no one would ever suspect.

  I was very fond of that answer; it was showy as all Hell, and so beautifully complex, when you started to examine it, that it set new records for my head. Unfortunately, it was also nonsense.

  I couldn’t come up with any reason for Ping not to have read the message, acted
on it, or at the very least either memorized it or copied it, some time during the four years the manuscript had been lying around the place. And if he’d done any of those things, then recovering the manuscript itself was a meaningless exercise.

  He’d have had to go through the motions, of course—call in the police, look worried and so on. But Gerald Knave, if you’ll pardon an obvious truth, was not one of the motions he’d have had to go through; Gerald Knave was a special expense, and a very expensive special expense (though not, I reflected, nearly expensive enough; what with the longueurs of bargaining, he seldom is). Calling me in meant that Ping had seriously wanted the manuscript back.

  I tried to come up with a message that couldn’t be copied or memorized in four years. After much thought, my head returned me an answer: There ain’t no such animal.

  But it also returned me another thought. The forgery was of a Heinlein manuscript—the most loved, the most valued, of all science-fiction writers from before the Clean Slate War.

  Was its appearance designed, perhaps, to smoke out secret sf fans? I knew how carefully Mac and the others guarded their hobby, or interest, or mania, or whatever it was. Could the forgery have been meant to force them into public avowals?

  Again, it was a perfectly lovely idea, and again it made no sense. Charles Darwin, my Classical education told me, had once defined a tragedy as: “A beautiful theory, killed by a nasty, ugly little fact.” The nasty, ugly little f. this time around was that the appearance of The Stone Pillow had done nothing whatever to make any sf fans anywhere go public, and there was no reason to believe that it ever could have. Other manuscripts, even other manuscripts by Heinlein, existed in the library. The Stone Pillow had had no more effect on the public actions of sf fans on Ravenal than the other manuscripts had had—and there was no reason why it ever should have. It was a surprise, an unknown Heinlein story—but nobody could think that even that surprise would push sf fans into the open. They could go to First Files Building and check the thing out, just from natural curiosity, without really giving themselves away; and they had.

  I shuffled the data around in my head for a little while, and came up with two statements:

  1. Somebody had gone to the Hell of a lot of trouble, for no purpose I could figure out.

  2. I had been hired to go to the Hell of a lot of trouble, for no purpose I could figure out.

  This was a simple, even a charming picture. That it made no sense was, in a way, a plus: things do not, in the actual world, make that little sense.

  I was, in other words, missing a fact, possibly sixty-seven facts, that would assort this simple picture into a sensible one.

  Maybe, I told myself with a certain amount of idiotic hope, Geraint Beauthis would provide one or more of them, when the Master and Robbin Tress got around to digging up a dossier on him and passing it on to me.

  Anything, after all, was possible.

  So I stacked everything neatly in my head, put it in the care of whoever it is lives in the back of my head where the real work always gets done, and went out for dinner.

  This turned out to be something of a mistake.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE

  I picked the place almost at random. I was busily trying new restaurants throughout my stay in City Two, looking for one that had the capability to become a regular stop while I was on planet; the Rose & Corona hadn’t been bad, away back before I’d even met Ping Boom, but the track record of City Two since then had not been anything to keep as a souvenir. I’d done a good deal better with my own cooking—which is not all that rare a fact. But I still had hopes, and a place called the Art Café seemed to promise well; cookery is, after all, an art.

  Nor was I wholly disappointed; the chef there seemed to understand a few things about a dish I’m fond of, eggplant parmigiana (as I may have said once or twice, I have low tastes; it is not ever a gourmet specialty, which is a loss only to gourmets); he had the sense to serve it with spaghetti bolognese (I have known places to serve it with a baked potato and a salad, but I have not known them more than once each), and somewhere on Ravenal somebody had made a loving career out of providing fresh parmesan to grate onto the spaghetti. With a decent wine, and decent coffee, it would have made an admirable dinner for a single fellow far from his usual haunts.

  Well, you can’t have everything, and some days you can’t even have a terribly high percentage of thing. The wine was wine the way the Blackjack beer had been beer, only even less so; and the coffee had been brewed from the ground bits of a bean that somehow resembled the coffee bean, but not very much.

  And it was not, as things turned out, a dinner for a single fellow at all; it was a dinner for a man accompanied by two sf fans.

  Corri Reges and Chandes Washington, whom I’d met and talked to at some length back at the Misfits affair, had been having a little dinner of their own in a corner just dim enough so that I didn’t notice them when I came in and found my own table. But Corri noticed me, and within bare minutes had trundled her wide little self on over to ask if she and her dark, thin and baritone companion could join me.

  Well, why not? Given a little time and wine, I might even be able to think up a question or two worth asking. And how much of a disturbance could either of them be to my digestion?

  Don’t ask.

  Of course, whether or not I had questions, Corri did. Who had stolen the manuscript, and was I going to catch up to the thief in minutes, or was it going to take hours? I said my conclusions and plans were confidential, because the library wanted them that way (whether or not Ping did, I did; the way to handle back-seat drivers is to remove the back seat). I tried to look as confident as humanly possible while I was saying that, and Chandes Washington nodded gravely at me.

  “The library,” he said. “You do mean First Files Building.”

  “Well, actually,” I said, “I meant the people in it. Just careless of me, calling a public collection of books and manuscripts a library.”

  Corri giggled. I have no idea why wide women, or round women, giggle more than thin ones. It could be that, because they eat more, on average, they’re happier. “We have simple names for things here,” she said. “We do understand that they confuse outsiders—we take no offense at it.”

  “But why would they want everything kept quiet?” Chandes said. He still looked as if he’d got lost somehow many years ago, and hadn’t yet found a way back to anywhere in particular. But his wide-opened eyes were sharp. “I should think—now the story of the theft is pretty well out—they’d want to publicize any success.”

  “Mine not to reason why,” I said casually. “They pay the piper, they call the tune.” I had not lied so often in so few words in some time, but Chandes nodded.

  “I suppose so,” he said. “They’re a bit odd over there in any case, always have been. Comes of associating with Beris, I think.”

  Corri said: “Berigot, Chan.”

  “Berigot,” he said. “Whatever. There’s something—disturbing about them. Bothersome.”

  Corri giggled again. “Me,” she said, “I think they’re cute.”

  The idea of a cute B’russ’r B’dige stopped me for a second, but I nodded and smiled at her. “They do fine work for First Files Building, I understand,” I said. “Great librarians.”

  Chandes snorted, and swallowed some wine to soothe irritated passages—he and Corri were having some sort of marinara angel-hair fish fry, and had been supplied with a bottle of the house white, a common error even with decent wine: fish or beef, tomato sauce calls for a red and a hearty one. “What kind of librarians can they be?” he said. “How can they understand the culture they must deal with?”

  I shrugged. “They seem to do all right with it,” I said. “I haven’t heard many complaints.”

  Another snort, another swallow and a refilled glass. “People are too polite to complain,” he said flatly. “Mustn’t upset the poor Beris’ feelings, you know. Not at all the nice thing to do.”

  “Berigot
,” Corri said. “Chan, honestly—”

  “I’m entitled to my opinion,” Chandes said, turning to her. It was almost a waspish snap, which assorts very oddly with a deep baritone voice. “Even in City Two. Even these days.”

  I knew what he meant by “these days”. There’s a sort of irregular cycle some societies go through. For a while they’re relaxed and comfortable with whatever the rules of the society are—and for this cycle, it doesn’t much matter what rules I’m talking about; anything that will last forty or fifty Standard years will do for a set.

  Then, for another while, they begin to get nervous. They begin insisting on the rules—all the rules. The small social rules become very big social rules, and sometimes legal rules. The personal rules become social rules. Everything gets very tense.

  (Oddly, at this point in the cycle the legal rules relax, quite a lot. It is felt to be unkind to enforce them fully. There may be a point to that feeling; when the social and personal rules are being so tightly enforced, any society has to find some relaxation somewhere. If it becomes less and less possible to use rude names, say, there may be a point to making it more and more possible to steal small objects.)

  City Two—a large fraction of Ravenal generally, in fact—was going through a tense period. It had been possible, once upon a time, to dislike Berigot—or human beings—or bald men, or redheaded women. Now, it almost wasn’t. The social rule of personal equality was being enforced tightly. It would relax again—it always does—but in the meantime people with opinions like Chandes Washington’s were being made to feel uncomfortable.

  Nothing serious or useful was being done to change their opinions. But everybody felt highly moral about their discomfort.

  Corri said, gently and soothingly: “Of course you are, Chan. Everybody is entitled to any opinion, we all know that. But you have to show some courtesy.”

  Two errors in one speech, both of them due to the phase of the societal cycle the place was in, so I didn’t point them out.