Heinlein's Children

Heinlein’s Children by Arlan Andrews

“So, they’re finally coming after me, after all these years?” I say to my wife, who is standing over my patio lounge chair, awaiting my reaction to the news she’d just seen on the video. 1 turn my head to hide my tremulous emotional reactions from her view. I’ve always heard the expression, not knowing whether to laugh or cry; only now do I realize what it means. A knot forms in my throat. It’s been worth it, but now that it’s over.... Hell, I admit to myself, I’m still afraid. After all these years.

Joyce, however, can’t hold back the tears. “It was just on the news, honey. They’re looking for you. ‘The Trillion Dollar Thief’ they’re calling you,” she sobs. “Is it—” she can’t bring herself to ask, knowing I’ll tell the truth no matter what. She bites her lower lip, at the same time brushing away a wisp of long gray hair with a graceful movement of her left hand. I’ve always admired her girlish shrug that follows, an unconscious but erotic motion that sets her long, long curls into sinuous movement. Once those locks were dark, dark red; now devoid of color, they mark her years—somewhere in the middle of the seventh decade of an eventful life. My own remaining skull covering, thin and sparse, matches that gray, year for earned year. I’ve kept hoping for the nano-medical revolution to come home, but so far the PacRimmers haven’t dropped their prices enough that we can afford rejuve-jobs, not on my retirement pay.

Joyce regains her composure and says, “Then it is true. What they’re saying. You did deceive the whole world.”

Shrugging, I nod. “You know it is true,” I admit. Unsurprised, resigned, she sighs and returns inside to watch the rest of the claims against me, me the criminal Dreamer.

Outside, police sirens shriek, the warning calls of a suborned State, the wails of disappointed children. Angry children.

Dangerous children.

It began, unlike most stories, in the White House. Yeah, that one, the one that used to be where Pennsylvania Avenue used to be—where downtown Washington, New Columbia, used to be. Where the Bessarab Crater is, right next to the Mall Dome. Oh, excuse me—“The Martyr’s Crater” is the Preferred Consensus, isn’t it. I must have forgotten the most recent PC. Which martyr? I ask myself, thinking of the dozens of Secret Service, those thousands of Army troops who stayed behind while that physical coward of a President tried to run away to Camp David, getting swat-fried in midair for all his efforts. Oh well, just one more secret from the Thought Police in the Land of the Semi-Free, Twenty-First Century version.

Anyway, in those days a couple of speculative fiction writers wound up by pure chance assigned to the President’s Science and Technology Office, technological consultants occupying adjacent desks in the Old Executive Office Building, which, though now a puddle of molten rust, was once a grand and glorious remnant of the Second Empire Style of architecture. (Not the Second Soviet, the Second French—Napoleonic. Look that up on the verch channels. Those New Reds have no more taste than their butcherous ancestors.) I was one of those consultants; the other, to remain unnamed until the neuroprobes do their nano-surgery, is now retired from the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and, 1 would wish, beyond suspicion and reproach. Until they mine my mind…

I smile at the memory of Dub. If only we had known where our idle speculations would wind up. 1 rather wish I had taken him up on that government job offer in one of the spook shops years later, but at the time the verch channel installations were under way and there was money to be made for creative sci-fi types.

“Dub,” I said in all innocence, all those many years ago, “so what’s with NASA these days?” He’d just returned from a briefing on the Mars Observer Mission from the space directorate, and was looking thoughtful. Glum, really. The new administration had recently canceled the Space Exploration Initiative, something Dub and his team had worked on for almost a year; their final report had recommended returning to the Moon and going on to Mars. But neither of those was ever going to happen, not in our lifetime. I would have thought a camera probe to Mars was the next best thing, but he was really P-O’ed at something.

“I don’t understand those guys!” he snorted, slamming down the thin blue vinyl notepad. “I thought science—that’s Science, with a Capital S—was supposed to be open, a free flow of information, all that easy access stuff.” I nodded; something was really bugging him.

“But—?” I asked, prodding him on.