“We can’t yet determine just how the forgery was managed,” he said. “It’s so nearly a perfect counterfeit that it fooled our experts for over four years—and our experts, Knave, know their business. Or businesses, of course.”
We were, after all, on Ravenal, home of the Ravenal Scholarte (where Ping Boom was co-chief librarian, Manuscript Division). I agreed that Ravenal’s experts knew their businesses; they always do.
“So you want me to track down the manuscript,” I said.
“Exactly,” Ping Boom said. “It’s been stolen—very neatly, too. There’s been some talent at work here.”
We discussed some other matters—payment, for instance. I won’t bother you with the whining and screaming on both sides, so common in such discussions, but we finally managed to arrive at a mutually unsatisfactory figure, and I agreed to come down and take a look at the scene of the crime, as the first step in finding the missing non-Heinlein.
“There’s nothing to see, Knave,” Ping Boom told me.
“That’s exactly what I want to look at,” I said, and we settled on a time.
CHAPTER TWO
The library of Ravenal Scholarte (more Nobels per square cerebrum than anywhere else in the universe), or the part of it I went to visit, was a large and very odd building, about six or seven standard stories high, the usual perches on two big windows per floor, and the general feel of a museum. Many of Ravenal’s public buildings are fairly showy—the place tends to substitute tradition for imagination—and in the library they had a fair imitation of the ancient Grand Central Station, sitting, unfortunately, exactly in the middle of a sizable square of space planted with greenflower, and (as in the old joke) much larger. Grand Central Library, as I christened it (the Scholarte called it First Files Building) seemed to own something on the order of a hundred entrances, each leading into a maze of echoing corridors lined with doors. The doors looked like velvet-bordered wood—a nice, expensive touch; it’s not on the regular settings—but weren’t really there, of course; they were the usual hologram shows covering lock-and-unlock fields. Technologically, Ravenal is a bit more up-to-date than the date; half the improvements in the known systems seem to start there. I waited for Ping to unlock the Special Exhibits door, halfway down the hall on the left, and followed him inside.
Everything was laid out under actual glass. “We try to fit the period,” Ping whispered to me, and I wondered just how he’d present, say, any bits of the Dead Sea Scrolls. I nodded, and we tiptoed around for a few minutes, getting accustomed to the glass and to the lighting.
Glass isn’t glassex—it’s transparent and it comes in sheets, but it has a shine to it that just isn’t there for glassex. The wildly old-fashioned fluorescents that lit the room did not mate nicely with the glass; glare was everywhere, and your head had to be at one of a few particular angles for you to see inside the manuscript cases.
But they were worth the effort. There was a notebook—one of the Future History notebooks, and open to a page on the ancestry of “Andrew ‘Slipstick’ Libby.” In Heinlein’s own handwriting—a decisive, clear written hand, not at all the sort of scribble one associates with mid-Twentieth holographs.
There was a printed copy of The Man Who Sold the Moon, the original Shasta edition—some collector back before the Clean Slate War had had the remarkable good sense to bag it and either put it in vacuum or get caught in his own shelter airlock with it when the war began. The case was sealed (“Argon atmosphere,” Ping whispered), but I thought, romantically and inaccurately, that I could smell the original, actual paper and boards and glue.
There was a manuscript copy of a very early Heinlein—“And He Built A Crooked House”—also in a sealed case, of course—and there was a disk that contained, according to the case label, a few of his headnotes for his final collection—that one has been lost, damn it—and a job lot of personal letters.
And there was more. I won’t tantalize you with it—except to mention a color photograph (long faded, and almost as long restored) of Robert and his wife Virginia, taken, according to the label, somewhere in California at some time between 1960 and 1972.
Of course, California is more mythical today than Heinlein—at least some of Heinlein has survived. The little 2D photo got to me, somehow, and I was dabbing at my eyes, just a bit, when I turned away from it. Ping nodded.
“It does seem to affect people that way,” he said, and I told him it was the dust in the room. He nodded again and we let it go.
At last I tore myself away from the damn precious relics, and asked: “Where was the forgery?”
“The manuscript that was stolen?” Ping said. “Over by the window,” and he walked me over past a row of cases to a big window—glass like all the rest in the 20th-C wing, shining into my eyes very disturbingly—that looked out on a grove of trees. Maple, I thought, and those things from Rigel IV—walking-trees, the ones that used to stampede. I was sure of the walking-trees, since I’d been the one who had put an end to the stampedes.
Long, long ago ... it was a shock to realize how long ago, and the odd thought gave me a very distant feeling of kinship with Robert Anson Heinlein, of much longer ago.
A few steps before we reached the window, Ping stopped at an empty space just big enough to fit a case. “We haven’t yet replaced it with anything,” he said. “A late-Twentieth word-processor keyboard, perhaps, with its own attachments, just to give the feel...”
I agreed that would be nice, and asked after the case the manuscript had been in. Ping looked at me in surprise.
“Oh, that,” he said. “The Pigs have it.”
It took me a few seconds. “The police?”
He nodded, looking a little shamefaced. “One does get carried away,” he said. “I become so late-Twentieth in here...”
“I’ll have to see that case,” I said. “Carefully and extensively. I’ll have to have some other people see it.”
“I’m sure the—the police will be reasonable,” he said. It was more than I was; in my experience the sort of people who choose policing as a career are also the sort of people who are only as reasonable as they absolutely have to be.
“You’ll have to tell them I’m officially in your employ,” I said. “Otherwise, I’m just some Joe from Kokomo.”
Ping stared. “Some what from where?” he said.
“Slang,” I said. “Somewhere in the Twentieth, probably pre-Heinlein.”
“Ah,” he said, and nodded again. It was one of his strong points. “To be sure. I’ll speak to the police. Anything else, Knave?”
“I want this room sealed off,” I said. “It’s probably too late—when was the theft?”
“Two days ago,” he said, and I stifled a curse. Well, the police would have a lot of details, and perhaps they really could be persuaded to share.
On the other hand, I was going to have to take their word for all those details, many of them now long gone. I have, as it happens, a strong dislike for taking anyone’s word, at any time or place, but my own—but there was no help for it on this job. I was arriving late, the first-act curtain had gone down, and as Act II started I was going to have to do the best I could with my printed program and whatever help I could tease out from the other spectators.
“One more thing,” I said, concluding that I’d also get a better picture of the actual mechanics of the theft from the police, and tucking away sixty or seventy questions for them, later on. “Who handles Berigot assignments for this floor?”
“B’russ’r B’dige,” he said, and I filed the name away. He was certainly around the building—it was nearly two in the afternoon (fourteen, if you have the Scientific Mind), the building was open, he’d be