Update: Alas, Aristotle had already written a meditation about this!

Aristotle has elaborated a cool hack here on use.perl.org, I hope not to infring any copyright duplicating it here:

eval "package Some::Module; $_" for grep m/ = /, split /\n/, <<'=cut';

=head1 VERSION

=for fooling makemaker
=cut-feigned

This document describes Some::Module,
$VERSION = 0.1

=cut
[download]

that yields:

$ perldoc ./Some/Module.pm | grep VERSION
       This document describes Some::Module, $VERSION = 0.1
$ perl -MSome::Module \
       -le'print Some::Module->VERSION'
0.1
$ perl -MExtUtils::MakeMaker \
       -le'print MM->parse_version(shift)' Some/Module.pm
0.1
[download]

Wow, the road to the Dark Side of the Perl is surely attractive!