Requiem
1988
I reread his books and discover lines of dialogue that I
unconsciously plagiarized, then think that he would've said not
to worry about such thefts--"Just file off the serial numbers,
run it across the state line and it's yours."
When Jascha Heifetz, considered by many of his colleagues to
be the finest concert violinist of all time, died late last year,
fellow virtuoso Isaac Stern said, "Heifetz has been in the inner
ear of every violinist of our time."
So, too, with Heinlein and science fiction writers: he is
inside our heads, and we often decide whether or not something
works by the way he did it.
The buzzing in our heads doesn't stop when we leave our
writing desks.
I couldn't help thinking about Heinlein last week, with a
smile of recognition, when Donald Regan's book broke the news
that the First Lady has been guiding presidential affairs with
the help of an astrologer. I thought: So? Heinlein told us this
could happen almost thirty years ago in Stranger in a Strange
Land. One could only hope, for the sake of avoiding World War
III, that Nancy Reagan's astrologer had the common sense of
Heinlein's fictional Becky Vesey.
I halfway think that it couldn't have been something as
silly as emphysema that killed him--it must've been the thought
that his Commander-in-Chief took this sort of nonsense seriously.
Then, there's still a part of me, which has never grown any
older than eight, that is halfway convinced that it's got to be a
put-up job. Heinlein die? Impossible. Nothing could kill that
old rascal. He's just stepped through a portal into the
Rejuvenation Clinic on Tellus Tertius; when he comes back (if he
finds this backwater planet worth visiting again) he'll have a
biological age of eighteen and a cosmetic age of about fifty.
(Old enough to keep him out of stupid bar fights.) Obviously the
remains that the Navy's going to give burial-at-sea were a never-
alive clone, aged for the purpose of pulling off this masquerade.
It's got to be true, doesn't it? After all, Robert A.
Heinlein told the House Select Committee on Aging that he refused
to die until he could die on the moon, and he wouldn't perjure
himself to the United States Congress, would he?
END