Robert A Heinlein - The Past Through Tomorrow (Collected Sto

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For GINNY

Published by arrangement with G. P. Putnam’s Sons

to reproduce this book or portions thereof in

any form whatsoever. For information address

G. P. Putnam’s Sons

200 Madison Avenue

New York, New York 10016

Library of Congress Catalog Card Number: 67-15112

SBN 425-03785-I

BERKLEY MEDALLiON BOOKS are published by

Berkley Publishing Corporation

200 Madison A venue

New York, N.Y. 10016

BERKLEY MEDALLION BOOKS ® TM 757,375

Printed in the United States of America

Berkley Medallion Edition, January, 1975

ELEVENTH PRINTING

& Smith Publications, Inc. The Roads Must Roll, Copyright, 1940, by Street &

Smith Publications, Inc. Blowups Happen, Copyright, 1940, by Street & Smith

Publications, Inc. The Man Who Sold the Moon, Copyright, 1949, by Robert

A. Heinlein, Delilah and the Space-Rigger, Copyright, 1949, by McCall

Corporation, Inc. Space Jockey, Copyright, 1947, by The Curtis Publishing

Co. Requiem, Copyright, 1939, by Street & Smith Publications, Inc. The Long

Watch, Copyright, 1948, by The American Legion. Gentlemen, Be Seated,

1962, by Carson Roberts, Inc. Ordeal in Space, Copyright, 1947, by Hearst

Publications, Inc. The Green Hills of Earth, Copyright, 1947, by The Curtis

Publishing Co. Logic of Empire, Copyright, 1941, by Street & Smith

Publications, Inc. The Menace from Earth, Copyright, 1957, by Fantasy

House, Inc. „If This Goes On-„, Copyright, 1940, by Street & Smith

Publications, Inc. Coventry, Copyright, 1940, by Street & Smith Publications,

Inc. Misfit, Copyright, 1939, by Street & Smith Publications, Inc. Methuselah’s

Children-Earlier, shorter version Copyright, 1941, by Street & Smith

Publications, Inc. Copyright, 1958, by Robert A. Heinlein.

CONTENTS

Introduction by Damon Knight

Life-Line

The Roads Must Roll

Blowups Happen.

The Man Who Sold the Moon

Delilah and the Space-Rigger

Space Jockey

Requiem

The Long Watch

Gentlemen, Be Seated

The Black Pits of Luna

It’s Great to Be Back!

We Also Walk Dogs

Searchlight

Ordeal in Space

The Green Hills of Earth

Logic of Empire

The Menace from Earth

If This Goes On

Coventry

Misfit

Methuselah’s Children

Introduction by Damon Knight

The year is 1967, and in Carmel, California, a retired admiral named Robert

A. Heinlein is tending his garden. Commissioned in 1929, he served through

World War II with distinction, taught aeronautical engineering for a few years,

then became a partner in a modestly successful electronics firm. Aside from

his neighbors, his business associates and Navy friends, no one has ever

heard of him.

This is a likely story, but not true. What really happened is much less

probable: six years after graduation from the Naval Academy, while serving

on a destroyer, Heinlein contracted tuberculosis. He spent a couple of years

in bed, then was retired at the age of 27.

Like the consumptive Robert Louis Stevenson, like Mark Twain, whose

career as a river-boat pilot was swept away by the war, Heinlein turned to

writing almost at random, because he could not lead the more active life he

would have preferred. Cut adrift from the Navy and from the life-line that

would have led him to that rose garden in Carmel, he took graduate courses

in physics and mathematics, intending to pursue his old dream of becoming

an astronomer, but was again forced to drop out because of poor health. He

tried his hand at silver mining, politics, real estate, without conspicuous

success.

Then, in 1939, he happened across the announcement of an amateur short-

story contest in a magazine called Thrilling Wonder Stories. The prize was

$50, not a fortune, but not to be sneezed at. Heinlein wrote a story, called it

‚Life-Line’, and submitted it, not to the contest editor, but to John W.

Campbell, editor of Astounding Science-Fiction. Campbell bought it, and the

next one, and the next. Heinlein’s reaction was, ‚How long has this been

going on? And why didn’t anybody ever tell me?’ Except for the war years,

which he spent at the Naval Air Experimental Station in Philadelphia in ‚the

necessary tedium of aviation engineering’, he never did anything else for a

living again. In the February, 1941, issue of Astounding, in which two

Heinlein stories appeared (one under the pseudonym Anson MacDonald),

the editor wrote:

Robert A. Heinlein’s back again next month with the cover story, „Logic of

Empire“. This story is, as usual with Heinlein’s material, a soundly worked

out, fast-moving yarn, more than able to stand on its own feet. But in

connection with it, I’d like to mention something that may or may not have

been noticed by the regular readers of Astounding: all Heinlein’s science-

fiction is laid against a common background of a proposed future history of

the world and of the United States. Heinlein’s worked the thing out in detail

that grows with each story; he has an outlined and graphed history of the

future with characters, dates of major discoveries, et cetera, plotted in. i’m

trying to get him to let me have a photostat of that history chart; if I lay hands

on it, I’m going to publish it.’

He published the chart three months later-the same chart, with some

modifications and additions, that appears in this book. Heinlein had the cover

of that issue too, with a story called ‚Universe’.

‚Future History’ is Campbell’s phrase, not Heinlein’s, and the author has

sometimes been mildly embarrassed by it. This connected series of stories

does not pretend to be prophetic. It is a history, not of the future, but of a

future-an alternate probability world (perhaps the same one in which the

retired Rear Admiral is tending his roses) which is logically self consistent,

dramatic, and recognizably an offshoot of our own past. The stories really do

not form a linear series at all-they are more like a pyramid, in which earlier

stories provide a solid base for later ones to rest on.

Partly because of this pyramiding of background and partly because of the

author’s broad knowledge-about which more in a moment-Heinlein’s readers

find themselves in a world which is clearly our own, only projected a few

years or decades into the future. There have been changes, naturally, but

they are things you feel you could adjust to without much trouble. People are

still people: they read Time magazines, are worried about money, smoke

Luckies, argue with theft wives.

It is easy to say what the ideal science fiction writer would be like. He would

be a talented and imaginative writer, trained in the physical and social

sciences and in engineering, with a broad and varied experience of people -

not only scientists and engineers, but secretaries, lawyers, labor leaders,

admen, newspapermen, politicians, businessmen. The trouble is that no one

in his senses would spend the time to acquire all this training and

background merely in order to write science fiction. But Heinlein had it all.

Far more of Heinlein’s work comes out of his own experience than most

people realize. When he doesn’t know something himself, he is too

conscientious a workman to guess at it: he goes and finds out. His stories are

full of precisely right details, the product of painstaking research. But many of

the things he writes about, including some that strain the reader’s credulity,

are from his own life. A few examples, out of many:

The elaborate discussion of the problems of linkages in designing household

robots, in The Door Into Summer. Heinlein was an engineer, specializing in

linkages.

The hand-to-hand combat skills of the heroes of such stories as Gulf and

Glory Road. Heinlein himself is an expert marksman, swordsman and rough-

and-tumble fighter.

The redheaded and improbably multi-skilled heroine of The Puppet Masters

and other Heinlein stories. Heinlein’s redheaded wife Ginny is a chemist,

biochemist, aviation test engineer, experimental horticulturist; she earned

varsity letters at N.Y.U. in swimming, diving, basketball and field hockey, and

became a competitive figure skater after graduation; she speaks seven

languages so far, and is starting on an eighth.

The longevity of the ‚Families’ in Methuselah’s Children. Five of Heinlein’s six

brothers and sisters are still living. So is his mother: she is 87, ‚frail, but very

much alive and mentally active.’ All the returns are not in yet.

Even the improbably talented families that appear in The Rolling Stones and

elsewhere are not wild inventions: Heinlein himself played chess before he

could read. Of his three brothers, one is a professor of electrical engineering,

one a professor of political science, and the third is a retired major general

who ‚made it the hard way - i.e., from private right up through every rank

without any college education at all.’

Like Mark Twain, Heinlein is from Missouri. It shows in his skepticism, his rich

appreciation of human absurdity, and in an occasional turn of phrase - a taste

for gaudily embellished understatement. He has the Missourian admiration

for competence of any kind, for those who can get things done - even (or

perhaps especially) if they bend a few rules in the process. (Heinlein: ‚I stood

quite high at the Naval Academy and would have stood much higher save for

a tendency to collect „Black N’s“ - major offenses against military discipline.’)

Unlike most modern novelists, he has no patience with the unskilled and

incompetent. Those who contribute most to the world, Heinlein thinks, are

also those who have the most fun. Those who contribute nothing are objects

of pity; and pity for the self-pitying is not high on Heinlein’s list of virtues. This

tough-mindedness is an altogether different thing from the cynicism of other

writers. Heinlein is a moralist to the core; he devoutly believes in courage,

honor, self-discipline, self-sacrifice for love or duty. Above all, he is a

libertarian. ‚When any government, or any church for that matter, undertakes

to say to its subjects, „This you may not read, this you must not see, this you

are forbidden to know,“ the end result is tyranny and oppression, no matter

how holy the motives. Mighty little force is needed to control a man whose

mind has been hoodwinked; contrariwise, no amount of force can control a

free man, a man whose mind is free. No, not the rack, not fission bombs, not

anything - you can’t conquer a free man; the most you can do is kill him.’

The author himself has often denied that the stories in this book are

prophecy. Yet it is apparent that some of Heinlein’s fictional forecasts have

already come true - not literally but symbolically. ‚The Roads Must Roll’

predicts urban sprawl, and anticipates Jimmy Hoffa’s threat of a nationwide

transport strike. The 1969 newspaper headlines in Methuselah’s Children,

illustrating the character of ‚The Crazy Years’ - Heinlein’s term for the present

era - seem less fantastic now than they did in 1941.

‚Blowups Happen’, written and published five years before the Bomb, is

based on a series of shrewd guesses that turned out to be wrong. The

specific dilemma of that story never became real; nevertheless, it mirrors the

real, agonizing dilemma of atomic power with which we have been living

since 1945.

Some of these stories are minor entertainments, but one, at least, is a major

work of art: ‚The Man Who Sold the Moon’.

Written with deceptive ease and simplicity, it functions brilliantly on half a

dozen levels at once. It is a story of man’s conquest of the Moon, a

penetrating essay on robber-baron capitalism, and a warm, utterly convincing

and human portrait of an extraordinary man.

As for the still-unfolding future, there are guideposts and warnings here.

Heinlein continually reminds us that history is a process, not something dead

and embalmed in textbooks. The ultimate problem is man’s control of his own

inventions-not only the minor ones, like the crossbow and the atom bomb,

but the major inventions-language, culture and technology. We are a tough

and resourceful lot, all things considered; our descendants will need to be

tougher and more resourceful still. The odds are all against them. The stars

are high, life is short, and the house always takes a percentage. But Man

himself is so unlikely that if he did not exist, his possibility would not be worth

discussing. Heinlein’s money is on Man; and I have a hunch that the next

century will prove him right.

The Anchorage

Milford, Pennsylvania

Life-Line

THE chairman rapped loudly for order. Gradually the catcalls and boos died

away as several self-appointed sergeants-at-arms persuaded a few hot-

headed individuals to sit down. The speaker on the rostrum by the chairman

seemed unaware of the disturbance. His bland, faintly insolent face was

impassive. The chairman turned to the speaker, and addressed him, in a

voice in which anger and annoyance were barely restrained.

„Doctor Pinero,“ - the „Doctor“ was faintly stressed - „I must apologize to you

for the unseemly outburst during your remarks. I am surprised that my

colleagues should so far forget the dignity proper to men of science as to

interrupt a speaker, no matter,“ he paused and set his mouth, „no matter how

great the provocation.“ Pinero smiled in his face, a smile that was in some

way an open insult. The chairman visibly controlled his temper and

continued, „I am anxious that the program be concluded decently and in

order. I want you to finish your remarks. Nevertheless, I must ask you to

refrain from affronting our intelligence with ideas that any educated man

knows to be fallacious. Please confine yourself to your discovery - if you have

made one.“

Pinero spread his fat white hands, palms down. „How can I possibly put a

new idea into your heads, if I do not first remove your delusions?“

The audience stirred and muttered. Someone shouted from the rear of the

hail, „Throw the charlatan out! We’ve had enough.“ The chairman pounded

his gavel.

„Gentlemen! Please!“ Then to Pinero, „Must I remind you that you are not a

member of this body, and that we did not invite you?“

Pinero’s eyebrows lifted. „So? I seem to remember an invitation on the

letterhead of the Academy?“

The chairman chewed his lower lip before replying. „True. I wrote that

invitation myself. But it was at the request of one of the trustees - a fine

public-spirited gentleman, but not a scientist, not a member of the Academy.“

Pinero smiled his irritating smile. „So? I should have guessed. Old Bidwell,

not so, of Amalgamated Life Insurance? And he wanted his trained seals to

expose me as a fraud, yes? For if I can tell a man the day of his own death,

no one will buy his pretty policies. But how can you expose me, if you will not

listen to me first? Even supposing you had the wit to understand me? Bah!

He has sent jackals to tear down a lion.“ He deliberately turned his back on

them. The muttering of the crowd swelled and took on a vicious tone. The

chairman cried vainly for order. There arose a figure in the front row.

„Mister Chairman!“

The chairman grasped the opening and shouted, „Gentlemen! Doctor Van

RheinSmitt has the floor.“ The commotion died away.

The doctor cleared his throat, smoothed the forelock of his beautiful white

hair, and thrust one hand into a side pocket of his smartly tailored trousers.

He assumed his women’s club manner.

„Mister Chairman, fellow members of the Academy of Science, let us have

tolerance. Even a murderer has the right to say his say before the state

exacts its tribute. Shall we do less? Even though one may be intellectually

certain of the verdict? I grant Doctor Pinero every consideration that should

be given by this august body to any unaffiliated colleague, even though“ - he

bowed slightly in Pinero’s direction - „we may not be familiar with the

university which bestowed his degree. If what he has to say is false, it can

not harm us. If what he has to say is true, we should know it.“ His mellow

cultivated voice rolled on, soothing and calming. „If the eminent doctor’s

manner appears a trifle in urbane for our tastes, we must bear in mind that

the doctor may be from a place, or a stratum, not so meticulous in these little

matters. Now our good friend and benefactor has asked us to hear this

person and carefully assess the merit of his claims. Let us do so with dignity

and decorum.“

He sat down to a rumble of applause, comfortably aware that he had

enhanced his reputation as an intellectual leader. Tomorrow the papers

would again mention the good sense and persuasive personality of

„America’s handsomest University President“. Who knew? Perhaps old

Bidwell would come through with that swimming pool donation.

When the applause had ceased, the chairman turned to where the center of

the disturbance sat, hands folded over his little round belly, face serene.

„Will you continue, Doctor Pinero?“

„Why should I?“

The chairman shrugged his shoulders. „You came for that purpose.“

Pinero arose. „So true. So very true. But was I wise to come? Is there anyone

here who has an open mind who can stare a bare fact in the face without

blushing? I think not. Even that so beautiful gentleman who asked you to

hear me out has already judged me and condemned me. He seeks order, not

truth. Suppose truth defies order, will he accept it? Will you? I think not. Still,

if I do not speak, you will win your point by default. The little man in the street

will think that you little men have exposed me, Pinero, as a hoaxer, a

pretender. That does not suit my plans. I will speak.“

„I will repeat my discovery. In simple language I have invented a technique to

tell how long a man will live. I can give you advance billing of the Angel of

Death. I can tell you when the Black Camel will kneel at your door. In five

minutes time with my apparatus I can tell any of you how many grains of

sand are still left in your hourglass.“ He paused and folded his arms across

his chest. For a moment no one spoke. The audience grew restless. Finally

the chairman intervened.

„You aren’t finished, Doctor Pinero?“

„What more is there to say?“

„You haven’t told us how your discovery works.“

Pinero’s eyebrows shot up. „You suggest that I should turn over the fruits of

my work for children to play with. This is dangerous knowledge, my friend. I

keep it for the man who understands it, myself.“ He tapped his chest.

„How are we to know that you have anything back of your wild claims?“

„So simple. You send a committee to watch me demonstrate. If it works, fine.

You admit it and tell the world so. If it does not work, I am discredited, and

will apologize. Even I, Pinero, will apologize.“

A slender stoop-shouldered man stood up in the back of the hail. The chair

recognized him and he spoke:

„Mr. Chairman, how can the eminent doctor seriously propose such a

course? Does he expect us to wait around for twenty or thirty years for some

one to die and prove his claims?“

Pinero ignored the chair and answered directly:

„Pfui! Such nonsense! Are you so ignorant of statistics that you do not know

that in any large group there is at least one who will die in the immediate

future? I make you a proposition; let me test each one of you in this room and

I will name the man who will die within the fortnight, yes, and the day and

hour of his death.“ He glanced fiercely around the room. „Do you accept?“

Another figure got to his feet, a portly man who spoke in measured syllables.

„I, for one, can not countenance such an experiment. As a medical man, I

have noted with sorrow the plain marks of serious heart trouble in many of

our elder colleagues. If Doctor Pinero knows those symptoms, as he may,

and were he to select as his victim one of their number, the man so selected

would be likely to die on schedule, whether the distinguished speaker’s

mechanical egg-timer works or not.“

Another speaker backed him up at once. „Doctor Shepard is right. Why

should we waste time on voodoo tricks? It is my belief that this person who

calls himself Doctor Pinero wants to use this body to give his statements

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ForGINNYCopyright©1967,byRobertA.HeinleinAllrightsreservedPublishedbyarrangementwithG.P.Putnam’sSonsAllrightsreservedwhichincludestherighttoreproducethisbookorportionsthereofinanyformwhatsoever.ForinformationaddressG.P.Putnam’sSons200MadisonAvenueNewYork,NewYork10016LibraryofCongressCatalogCardNumbe...

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Robert A Heinlein - The Past Through Tomorrow (Collected Sto

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