Читать книгу The Counterfeit Heinlein - Laurence M. Janifer - Страница 10

CHAPTER SEVEN

It seems there was a man named Norman W. Nechs. In fact there probably was—it seemed simpler even at that point to assume a real Norman W. Nechs, and a story for the forgery grafted onto him, than to assume that the forgers had invented and built the entire structure. And the assumption turned out to be good; there had been such a fellow.

Norman was alive during the ancient days, before the Clean Slate War. He lived in a state then called Uta, and what he did to make his living we do not really know. He may have been a State Patrolman, and according to the experts there are signs that he was, though there are stronger signs that he was a dentist, as we’ll see—and if we only knew what a State Patrolman was or did, in the State of Uta, we would be much further along in making Norman’s acquaintance. We do know what a dentist was, and did, and it sounds perfectly awful.

As it is, what we know for certain about him is that he liked science-fiction.

Remember, this was back in the days when there really was such a thing—when the giants like Benford and Sturgeon and all the Smiths were alive and actually writing all those wonderful stories we don’t have any more, and a very few we do. Norman undoubtedly liked, and disliked, and felt strongly about, a thousand other things, like everybody else at any time, but what we remember now is that he liked science-fiction—and was something of a Survivalist.

Survivalists were not some primitive incarnation of Survivors. I don’t have much in common with Norman, not that way. We share an affection for Heinlein (apparently he really did like Heinlein, but then most sensible people do), but not much more.

A Survivor is a person who goes out to survive on a new planet, mostly, in order to prove that it can be done by a wave of willing, if less capable, colonists. Bringing the fight to the enemy, so to speak. A Survivalist was a person who’d had the fight brought to him, and who was trying, every passive way he knew how, to live through it.

“Passive” is the key. Your Survivalist didn’t go out to do battle with the things that were threatening his survival. That’s what I do. What a Survivalist did was take one deep breath, tell himself those things could not possibly be fought, and try to figure out a way of living through them.

All the ways Survivalists did think up involved digging immense holes in the ground, surrounding them with armor of every available sort, making sure nothing could get in to the eventual armored space (air was allowed in only when cleaned, taken apart and put back together), and stocking that space with everything you were going to need to continue living—food, water, video games, spare pajamas. Everything. For periods of up to ten or twelve years.

That is Earth years. Comity Standard years. A Survivalist was a person who was determined to live in an armored hole in the ground for three times as long as it takes the light of Proxima Centauri to reach him on Earth Twelve years.

Most of these people, naturally, were crazy. A few did survive, came out of their holes ten or twelve years after the Clean Slate War, and were more or less immediately wiped out by natural processes; in ten years most germs and viruses mutate. Few of them had much stamina left in any case; some had rigged exercise spaces in their holes, but none had continued grimly exercising for ten years, and it is hard to imagine any human being who would. And all were ten to twelve years older, something few had apparently figured out would happen in ten to twelve years. Many had jungled up, so to speak, at, say, 40. These people came tottering out at a prematurely aged 50-or-above. The rest of humanity—such of it as was left, and of course there were people left, protected from immediate blast and radiation and firestorm by any six of a thousand possible accidents—living out of a fallout pattern, surviving the two to three years of truly Biblical weather—this rest of humanity sometimes killed them, and sometimes tried to help them. A few Survivalists lived as long as seven years after coming out of their holes. One, male, is recorded to have had a child by some woman less particular than most; survivors didn’t much want to mate with Survivalists, feeling that insanity was not a welcome part of the gene pool.

Were there other ways of surviving? Survivors proved there were. And a little simple thought would have given some answers. Take all the money that was sunk into one hole-in-the-ground after another, barrel it up, and fund a research program with it. Take your pick of research objectives, active or passive: a) Go after the causes of such insane behavior as the Clean Slate War was clearly going to be, or b) build real and functioning force fields.

But the ancients, though full to the bung with the learning we now call Classical, were not really very accomplished at simple thought. Instead, they had luck—which accounted for survivors of the Clean Slate War—and Survivalists—which didn’t, much.

Our Norman was a Survivalist. He had died in his armored hole. We now think he had had a heart attack, after having lived down there for about two years. I think I might have had one, or an attack of something, possibly suicide, after less time than that. Nor was this the end of his troubles.

His air-machinery was temperature and humidity-controlled, of course. The humidity control went out about three months after Norman died. The air became very, very dry.

When the pie was opened—nearly three hundred years later, because Uta, whatever it was back then, is a fairly isolated place now, and though there are always archaeological search teams, there are not all that many, nor are they all that well-funded—when the pie was opened, there was Norman, dry as a mummy and almost as well preserved. And there were his artifacts, also fairly well preserved, considering, by the unlivable climate inside Norman’s armored hole—though he’d tried, with some success, to do some extra preserving of some artifacts. Not sensibly—that would have been too much to ask of Norman W. Nechs, or probably of any Survivalist—but with great, even showy, dedication.

One of those artifacts, according to the discoverers, was a manuscript, nicely sealed in a mostly-nitrogen atmosphere, in a large, vacuum-sealed barrel of sorts, by Robert Anson Heinlein. It was entitled The Stone Pillow.