Ponderings

by Fenris

The Lost Stories of Robert Heinlein, Part 2

Last time, I discussed the hardest of the three to find, this time, I'll talk about the easiest.

Beyond Doubt is unusual for Heinlein and for the "stinkeroos": it's unusual for Heinlein as it's the only story he ever wrote with someone else (although accounts vary on how that happened), it’s unusual for the stinkeroos as it’s the only one that was ever reprinted.

Beyond Doubt first appeared in Astonishing Stories, Apr 1941 and was reprinted just once in a paperback anthology edited by Frederik Pohl titled Beyond the End of Time. This makes it the easiest of the three stinkeroos to find by far, as Beyond the End of Time shows up regularly on eBay and on-line used bookstores.

It’s interesting to note that no-one really knows who Heinlein’s co-author on this story is. Her name is Elma Wentz, but no-one’s sure of her connection with Heinlein or how she came to co-write this story with him. The best analysis can be found in Robert A. Heinlein A Reader’s Companion by James Gifford (a book no Heinlein fan should be without: an excellent and extremely readable reference work!). In it, Gifford notes that Heinlein was the publisher of Upton Sinclair’s (!!!) newspaper EPIC News and worked with a man named Roby Wentz and Roby’s wife was Elma. So it seems the mystery of how the two are connected has been solved.

The story itself opens with a very Heinlein-esque faux newspaper article about how a archeologist has solved the mystery of what, exactly, the Easter Island statues were for. In pseudo-intellectualese, the archeologist pompously explains that it’s clear the statues had a deep religious meaning for the primitive Easter Islanders…

The story then flashes back to ancient Atlantis on the continent of Mu. Talus is running for Governor on a populist ticket: he’s the underdog candidate, and to make matters much, much worse, he’s honest. So while the current (crooked) Governor can sling mud and play dirty tricks, Talus will have none of it. Which, in large part, is why he’s trailing in the polls, badly.

Talus’s men suggest that they somehow make fun of the current governor (“Ol’ Bat-Ears”) maybe by putting some caricatures of him up. It’s decided against since the Governor’s goon’s will simply tear them down. What they need, Talus’s men think, is big stone statues mocking “Ol’ Bat Ears” that are too big to break up: they can put ‘em at all the polling places. If they can pull this off, they’ll win. But it’ll cost a fortune and their war-chest is already low. They lament that if one of them was a priest, they could simply materialize the statues with their priestly powers. But, another points out, priests are forbidden to interfere in politics so that wouldn’t do any good, anyway.

One of them remembers a defrocked priest. They go to the bar where he hangs out and offer him the job. The priest (Kondor) agrees to do the job but cautions them: there’s two ways to do it: the hard way where he grabs raw material from the ether and shapes it into the statues, or the easy way where he simply grabs waste-stone and reshapes it. They all agree that the easy way is better. They’ll get a regular priest to teleport the statues to the polling places. That’s not forbidden and one of the men knows a priest who’s a good egg who’ll do it for a discount.

Unfortunately, after all the statues are created, it turns out the man who claimed to know the priest was a fink and not only didn’t show, but sold ‘em out. They rush back and get the defrocked priest, who’s now very drunk. He nonetheless insists that he can do the teleportation. Unfortunately, the priest is far too drunk to do the jobs, and leaves the statues just scattered around. As Talus loses the election to the current, corrupt governor, one of Talus’s men comments “What this country needs is a good earthquake”

Heinlein, an old political campaigner from way back always does well when talking about elections and dirty politics, but the forced nature of this story, along with the occasional burst of florid writing (presumably from Wentz: I’m fairly certain Heinlein didn’t write phrases like “But despite the smiling radiance of the sun, and sea, and sky, there was an undercurrent of atmospheric tenseness…”) make it obvious why this story is a stinkeroo. If Heinlein had lost the “Easter Island Statue” thing and simply told the story of an election in Ancient Atlantis, he’d have been far better off.