Off the Main Sequence does overlap somewhat with the third major Heinlein collection, The Fantasies of Robert A. Heinlein, with stories such as “—And He Built a Crooked House —" and “—All You Zombies —". These stories are included here because I considered them science fiction rather than fantasy, or at least thought their categorization was debatable. But this book does not contain any stores that seemed to me unequivocally fantasy — such as “Magic, Inc." and “The Unpleasant Profession of Jonathan Hoag." Adding them would have pushed this book to an even greater, and possibly unfeasible, size. Heinlein additionally wrote a few mainstream stories — available in the miscellaneous collections Requiem and Expanded Universe — that are not included here.
What this book does have is twenty-seven SF stories, including some of the best works by perhaps the best, and certainly the most influential, American SF writer ever. The stories are arranged in order of first publication, except for two short pieces — “Free Men" and “On the Slopes of Vesuvius" — written in 1947 but not published until decades later. Those two stories are placed together at the beginning of Heinlein’s post-war stories.
My thanks go out to Heinlein scholar Bill Patterson for his help finding and determining the correct texts of these stories, and for his arguments on the SF/Fantasy split. This book also literally would not exist without Eleanor Wood, the agent for Heinlein’s estate, and I thank her for her support for the SFBC and our Heinlein projects over the years. SFBC’s Editor-in-Chief Ellen Asher was also invaluable, as a colleague, a mentor, and a friend. The actual production and layout of this book was shepherded by Kathy Kiernan and Lisa Thornbloom, without whom these words would look like a badly word-processed memo. And the wonderful cover was art-directed by SFBC’s talented Nicholas Sica and painted by Bruce Jensen, who has now done a half-dozen great Heinlein covers for the club. But my greatest thanks must go to the Dean of Science Fiction, the late Robert A. Heinlein — if he hadn’t written these Stories in the first place, none of us would be here.
OFF THE MAIN SEQUENCE
Successful Operation
Futuria Fantasia #4, Summer 1940 as “Heil!" by Lyle Monroe
“How dare you make such a suggestion!"
The State Physician doggedly stuck by his position. “I would not make it, sire, if your life were not at stake. There is no other surgeon in the Fatherland who can transplant a pituitary gland, but Doctor Lans."
“You will operate!"
The medico shook his head. “You would die, Leader. My skill is not adequate."
The Leader stormed about the apartment. He seemed about to give way to one of the girlish bursts of anger that even the inner state clique feared so much. Surprisingly he capitulated.
“Bring him here!" he ordered.
Doctor Lans faced the Leader with inherent dignity, a dignity and presence that three years of “protective custody" had been unable to shake. The pallor and gauntness of the concentration camp lay upon him, but his race was used to oppression. “I see," he said. “Yes, I see … I can perform that operation. What are your terms?"
“Terms?" The Leader was aghast. “Terms, you filthy swine? You are being given a chance to redeem in part the sins of your race!"
The surgeon raised his brows. “Do you not think that I know that you would not have sent for me had there been any other course available to you? Obviously, my services have become valuable.
“You’ll do as you are told! You and your kind are lucky to be alive."
“Nevertheless I shall not operate without my fee."
“I said you are lucky to be alive —" The tone was an open threat.
Lans spread his hands, did not answer.
“Well — I am informed that you have a family…"
The surgeon moistened his lips. His Emma — they would hurt his Emma … and his little Rose. But he must be brave, as Emma would have him be. He was playing for high stakes — for all of them. “They cannot be worse off dead," he answered firmly, “than they are now.
It was many hours before the Leader was convinced that Lans could not be budged. He should have known — the surgeon had learned fortitude at his mother’s breast.
“What is your fee?"
“A passport for myself and my family."
“Good riddance!"
“My personal fortune restored to me —"
“Very well."
“— to be paid in gold before I operate!"
The Leader started to object automatically, then checked himself. Let the presumptuous fool think so! It could be corrected after the operation.
“And the operation to take place in a hospital on foreign soil."
“Preposterous!"
“I must insist."
“You do not trust me?"
Lans stared straight back into his eyes without replying. The Leader struck him, hard, across the mouth. The surgeon made no effort to avoid the blow, but took it, with no change of expression….
“You are willing to go through with it, Samuel?" The younger man looked at Doctor Lans without fear as he answered,
“Certainly, Doctor."
“I can not guarantee that you will recover. The Leader’s pituitary gland is diseased; your younger body may or may not be able to stand up under it — that is the chance you take."
“I know it — but I am out of the concentration camp!"
“Yes. Yes, that is true. And if you do recover, you are free. And I will attend you myself, until you are well enough to travel."
Samuel smiled. “It will be a positive joy to be sick in a country where there are no concentration camps!"
“Very well, then. Let us commence."
They returned to the silent, nervous group at the other end of the room. Grimly, the money was counted out, every penny that the famous surgeon had laid claim to before the Leader had decided that men of his religion had no need for money. Lans placed half of the gold in a money belt and strapped it around his waist. His wife concealed the other half somewhere about her ample person.
It was an hour and twenty minutes later that Lans put down the last instrument, nodded to the surgeons assisting him, and commenced to strip off operating gloves. He took one last look at his two patients before he left the room. They were anonymous under the sterile gowns and dressings. Had he not known, he could not have told dictator from oppressed. Come to think about it, with the exchange of those two tiny glands there was something of the dictator in his victim, and something of the victim in the dictator.
Doctor Lans returned to the hospital later in the day, after seeing his wife and daughter settled in a first class hotel. It was an extravagance, in view of his uncertain prospects as a refugee, but they had enjoyed no luxuries for years back there — he did not think of it as his home country — and it was justified this once.
He enquired at the office of the hospital for his second patient. The clerk looked puzzled. “But he is not here."
“Not here?"
“Why, no. He was moved at the same time as His Excellency — back to your country."
Lans did not argue. The trick was obvious; it was too late to do anything for poor Samuel. He thanked his God that he had had the foresight to place himself and his family beyond the reach of such brutal injustice before operating. He thanked the clerk and left.
The Leader recovered consciousness at last. His brain was confused — then he recalled the events before he had gone to sleep. The operation! — it must be over! And he was alive! He had never admitted to anyone how terribly frightened he had been at the prospect. But he had lived — he had lived!
He groped around for the bell cord, and, failing to find it, gradually forced his eyes to focus on the room. What outrageous nonsense was this? This was no sort of a room for the Leader to convalesce in. He took in the dirty white-washed ceiling, and the bare wooden floor with distaste. And the bed! It was no more than a cot!
He shouted. Someone came in, a man wearing the uniform of a trooper in his favorite corps.
He started to give him the tongue-lashing of his life, before having him arrested. But he was cut short.
“Cut out that racket, you unholy pig!"
At first he was too astounded to answer, then he shrieked, “Stand at attention when you address your Leader! Salute!"
The man looked dumbfounded, then guffawed. “Like this, maybe?" He stepped to the side of the cot, struck a pose with his right arm raised in salute. He carried a rubber truncheon in it. “Hail to the Leader!" he shouted, and brought his arm down smartly. The truncheon crashed into the Leader’s cheekbone. Another trooper came in to see what the noise was while the first was still laughing at his witticism. “What’s up, Jon? Say, you’d better not handle that monkey too rough — he’s still carried on the hospital list." He glanced casually at the Leader’s bloody face. “Him? Didn’t you know?" He pulled him to one side and whispered.
The second’s eyes widened; he grinned. “So? They don’t want him to get well, eh? Well, I could use some exercise this morning —"
“Let’s get Fats," the other suggested. “He always has such amusing ideas."
“Good idea." He stepped to the door, and bellowed, “Hey, Fats!"
They didn’t really start in on him until Fats was there to help.
And He Built A Crooked House
Astounding Science Fiction, February 1941
Americans are considered crazy anywhere in the world.
They will usually concede a basis for the accusation but point to California as the focus of the infection. Californians stoutly maintain that their bad reputation is derived solely from the acts of the inhabitants of Los Angeles County. Angelenos will, when pressed, admit the charge but explain hastily, “It’s Hollywood. It’s not our fault — we didn’t ask for it; Hollywood just grew."
The people in Hollywood don’t care; they glory in it. If you are interested, they will drive you up Laurel Canyon “— where we keep the violent cases." The Canyonites — the brown-legged women, the trunks-clad men constantly busy building and rebuilding their slaphappy unfinished houses — regard with faint contempt the dull creatures who live down in the flats, and treasure in their hearts the secret knowledge that they, and only they, know how to live.
Lookout Mountain Avenue is the name of a side canyon which twists up from Laurel Canyon. The other Canyonites don’t like to have it mentioned; after all, one must draw the line somewhere!
High up on Lookout Mountain at number 8775, across the street from the Hermit — the original Hermit of Hollywood — lived Quintus Teal, graduate architect.
Even the architecture of southern California is different. Hot dogs are sold from a structure built like and designated “The Pup." Ice cream cones come from a giant stucco ice cream cone, and neon proclaims “Get the Chili Bowl Habit!" from the roofs of buildings which are indisputably chili bowls. Gasoline, oil, and free road maps are dispensed beneath the wings of tri-motored transport planes, while the certified rest rooms, inspected hourly for your comfort, are located in the cabin of the plane itself. These things may surprise, or amuse, the tourist, but the local residents, who walk bareheaded in the famous California noonday sun, take them as a matter of course.
Quintus Teal regarded the efforts of his colleagues in architecture as faint-hearted, fumbling, and timid.
“What is a house?" Teal demanded of his friend, Homer Bailey.
“Well —" Bailey admitted cautiously, “speaking in broad terms, I’ve always regarded a house as a gadget to keep off the rain."
“Nuts! You’re as bad as the rest of them."
“I didn’t say the definition was complete —"
“Complete! It isn’t even in the right direction. From that point of view we might just as well be squatting in caves. But I don’t blame you," Teal went on magnanimously, “you’re no worse than the lugs you find practicing architecture. Even the Moderns — all they’ve done is to abandon the Wedding Cake School in favor of the Service Station School, chucked away the gingerbread and slapped on some chromium, but at heart they are as conservative and traditional as a county courthouse. Neutra! Schindler! What have those bums got? What’s Frank Lloyd Wright got that I haven’t got?"
“Commissions," his friend answered succinctly.
“Huh? Wha’ d’ju say?" Teal stumbled slightly in his flow of words, did a slight double take, and recovered himself. “Commissions. Correct. And why? Because I don’t think of a house as an upholstered cave; I think of it as a machine for living, a vital process, a live dynamic thing, changing with the mood of the dweller — not a dead, static, oversized coffin. Why should we be held down by the frozen concepts of our ancestors? Any fool with a little smattering of descriptive geometry can design a house in the ordinary way. Is the static geometry of Euclid the only mathematics? Are we to completely disregard the Picard-Vessiot theory? How about modular systems? — to say nothing of the rich suggestions of stereochemistry. Isn’t there a place in architecture for transformation, for homomorphology, for actional structures?"
“Blessed if I know," answered Bailey. “You might just as well be talking about the fourth dimension for all it means to me."
“And why not? Why should we limit ourselves to the — Say!" He interrupted himself and stared into distances. “Homer, I think you’ve really got something. After all, why not? Think of the infinite richness of articulation and relationship in four dimensions. What a house, what a house —" He stood quite still, his pale bulging eyes blinking thoughtfully.
Bailey reached up and shook his arm. “Snap out of it. What the hell are you talking about, four dimensions? Time is the fourth dimension; you can’t drive nails into that."
Teal shrugged him off. “Sure. Sure. Time is a fourth dimension, but I’m thinking about a fourth spatial dimension, like length, breadth and thickness. For economy of materials and convenience of arrangement you couldn’t beat it. To say nothing of the saving of ground space — you could put an eight-room house on the land now occupied by a one-room house. Like a tesseract —"
“What’s a tesseract?"
“Didn’t you go to school? A tesseract is a hypercube, a square figure with four dimensions to it, like a cube has three, and a square has two. Here, I’ll show you." Teal dashed out into the kitchen of his apartment and returned with a box of toothpicks which he spilled on the table between them, brushing glasses and a nearly empty Holland gin bottle carelessly aside. “I’ll need some plasticine. I had some around here last week." He burrowed into a drawer of the littered desk which crowded one corner of his dining room and emerged with a lump of oily sculptor’s clay. “Here’s some."
“What are you going to do?"
“I’ll show you." Teal rapidly pinched off small masses of the clay and rolled them into pea-sized balls. He stuck toothpicks into four of these and hooked them together into a square. “There! That’s a square."
“Obviously."
“Another one like it, four more toothpicks, and we make a cube." The toothpicks were now arranged in the framework of a square box, a cube, with the pellets of clay holding the corners together. “Now we make another cube just like the first one, and the two of them will be two sides of the tesseract."
Bailey started to help him roll the little balls of clay for the second cube, but became diverted by the sensuous feel of the docile clay and started working and shaping it with his fingers.
“Look," he said, holding up his effort, a tiny figurine, “Gypsy Rose Lee."
“Looks more like Gargantua; she ought to sue you. Now pay attention. You open up one corner of the first cube, interlock the second cube at the corner, and then close the corner. Then take eight more toothpicks and join the bottom of the first cube to the bottom of the second, on a slant, and the top of the first to the top of the second, the same way." This he did rapidly, while he talked.
“What’s that supposed to be?" Bailey demanded suspiciously.
“That’s a tesseract, eight cubes forming the sides of a hypercube in four dimensions."
“Use your imagination, man. Consider the top of the first cube in relation to the top of the second; that’s cube number three. Then the two bottom squares, then the front faces of each cube, the back faces, the right hand, the left hand — eight cubes." He pointed them out.
“Yeah, I see 'em. But they still aren’t cubes; they’re whatchamucallems — prisms. They are not square, they slant."
“That’s just the way you look at it, in perspective. If you drew a picture of a cube on a piece of paper, the side squares would be slaunchwise, wouldn’t they? That’s perspective. When you look at a four-dimensional figure in three dimensions, naturally it looks crooked. But those are all cubes just the same."
“Maybe they are to you, brother, but they still look crooked to me."
Teal ignored the objections and went on. “Now consider this as the framework of an eight-room house; there’s one room on the ground floor — that’s for service, utilities, and garage. There are six rooms opening off it on the next floor, living room, dining room, bath, bedrooms, and so forth. And up at the top, completely enclosed and with windows on four sides, is your study. There! How do you like it?"
“Seems to me you have the bathtub hanging out of the living room ceiling. Those rooms are interlaced like an octopus."
“Only in perspective, only in perspective. Here, I’ll do it another way so you can see it." This time Teal made a cube of toothpicks, then made a second of halves of toothpicks, and set it exactly in the center of the first by attaching the corners of the small cube to the large cube by short lengths of toothpick. “Now — the big cube is your ground floor, the little cube inside is your study on the top floor. The six cubes joining them are the living rooms. See?"
Off The Main Sequence Page 3
