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.
CHAPTER EIGHT
Word got out very, very quickly. There are a lot of Heinlein fans, whatever fashionable critics say, and a high percentage of them know about The Stone Pillow. It is one of the unwritten stories of Heinlein’s Future History. If you know about this, you can skip the next few paragraphs, and pick things up at the space, or the beep, or the sunburst, however you’re getting this report. For the others:
Unwritten, anyhow, until Norman’s carefully preserved manuscript turned up in his armored hole. There were three stories listed in old charts of the Future History that had never been written—The Sound of His Wings, The Stone Pillow and Word Edgewise—but apparently Heinlein had actually written at least the middle one. Why it had never been published nobody knew, and the suggestion that it was too lousy for publication was never made. It was, after all, Heinlein, and “too lousy” did not occur. Even “lousy” occurred only once or twice in the entire Collected Works, as far as we know today, and there is not much agreement about where, or even whether, to paste that label.
The Future History—well, there were a lot of these, though Heinlein’s may have been the first, not only before the Clean Slate War but before World War II, which takes us all the way into antiquity. None were accurate, but accuracy was never the point—the point was to create a framework to put stories in, so that the stories meant a little more all together than they could one at a time. World-building, which is what a lot of science-fiction seems to have been, takes place in three dimensions of space and one of time, and Future Histories use up the time dimension most thoroughly.
In Heinlein’s, there was a period in which the United States, his model for society, fell into a dark age, under the rule of a religious crank called the Prophet, Nehemiah Scudder. The Stone Pillow was supposed to tell the story of some of the rebels and martyrs fighting Scudder and his successors, and that was all anybody knew about it until Norman’s little keepsake turned up.
It turned out to be the story of Duncan BenDurrell, a convert to the fighting faith of Diaspora Judaism and second-in-command of a religio-political rebel army fighting the current Prophet, third of that title, in a wild and uncitified area of what was, in Heinlein’s own time, Oregon.
* * * *
It was at that point, as I was spinning all this out for little Robbin Tress, that the Master interrupted me.
“You have never actually seen the manuscript you speak of, have you, Gerald?” he said in that rasp of his.
I shook my head.
“Let me, then, recite a brief passage,” he said. “It was really a remarkable forgery, in its way—this will show you why, very briefly. Quite typical of early-middle Heinlein, and quite persuasive.”
Robbin was sitting wide-eyed, one bite of cake held forgotten between two fingers. I felt that way myself—forgery or not, I felt as if I were going to get a quick glimpse of a Heinlein story I had never read before. I had to remind myself to start breathing again, at least long enough to say: “Sure. Go ahead.”
Even Master Higsbee’s rasp of a voice couldn’t spoil the effects. I’ll give it to you straight, though—the way it would have looked in print, starting (I checked, much later) with page 94 of the manuscript.
* * * *
94
believe a word of it. But he frowned angrily, and he thought he looked fairly convincing doing it. He owed that much to the Dias, and he delivered it.
“That may be so,” Joshua said. “But whatever you think of him, you must admit Duncan has been acting suspiciously.”
“I’ll admit no such thing,” Frad said. “Duncan BenDurrell may not be an
