Hubbard was unable to write. He had exaggerated his injuries—if he could no longer be the most impressive person in the room, he would settle for being the most damaged—but his ulcer was real enough, and his medication had left him impotent and depressed. It combined to reveal a strain of weakness that he had previously been able to conceal, as de Camp wrote to Asimov: “He always was that way. . . . What the war did was to wear him down to where he no longer bothers with the act.” Heinlein saw Hubbard, unquestioningly, as a wounded veteran, and he was forgiving of him, even when he snuck
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