Robert A. Heinlein: In Dialogue With His Century

by Robert A. Heinlein

  “We had a very nervous-making day last week,” Heinlein wrote Campbell,

  but one of the most remarkable and significant of my life. First, it was Leslyn’s day to work with her blind marines in the shop—work she loves and has worked up herself, but hard on her emotionally—then, as we came out of the lunchroom that noon, we found ourselves listening to a speaker outside—it was … just a guy in uniform talking about action he had seen. But I could not walk on past. The man brought it to you and laid it in your lap, with the blood still flowing … .

  I couldn’t leave until he had stopped talking. I skipped my one and only chance to buy my weeks’ cigarette ration in order to hear him, but I could not leave. It was while he was talking that I decided that I could not with clear conscience take a day off until I had my work in better shape.

  Well—that night we went across the street to dinner. Miles’ and Rod’s was crowded. There was a marine with one leg sitting on the couch. He said, no, he wasn’t waiting for a table; he had had to move because the hard chair hurt him—his leg wasn’t healed. Presently a party started coming out, another one-legged marine with a corpsman, then a bluejacket with a crutch under the stump of his arm, then a man with no legs, carried. The marine said with respect to the bluejacket, “There’s the bravest guy in the ward. One arm, one leg, one eye, and one ear—and he jokes about it.”

  We went in as the marine left, feeling pretty shaky, but thinking that the party was gone. But there was still one marine in there, apparently all right. As the last one on crutches left, this one said, “There’s the way I’m going to walk.” Just then a corpsman returned, said brightly, “bet you thought I’d forgotten you,” and turned around, presenting his back to the kid. The kid put his arms around the corpsman’s neck and the corpsman carried him out, like a sack of flour. There was just enough of him left to sit down.

  I got up and went out and locked myself in the head and bawled my eyes out for about fifteen minutes. Then we took a walk around the block and came back. I was all right by then but I couldn’t get Leslyn to eat.

  I wish more people could have seen them.44

  This last year and a half, Heinlein had finally been able to see practical—and satisfying—results to some of the excruciatingly frustrating work he and Leslyn had been doing. On his side, he had been able to find an interim solution to the radome problem, and when Cal Laning was able to facilitate an order for 150 of them, he even moved it from research to production.

  The Plexiglas canopy problem was not solved—he had been conducting mostly fruitless discussions with all the local producers of optical plastics and had come to the conclusion that the problem probably couldn’t be solved until there was a breakthrough in technology. He did not know until years later that the breakthrough already existed: one of the companies he had contacted, Rohn & Haas, “had a Plexiglas product in their German plant that would have met our specs and the Philadelphia plant knew about it.”45 By that time, he might have been able simply to shrug it off: that kind of selfsabotage was routine by the end of the war, and he had become—somewhat—inured. He wrote up his research in the single engineering report (of about two hundred) that survived from his wartime work in Philadelphia; Report on Cockpit Canopies—Free-blown Type—Thermal Stability—Evaluation of, by Aeronautical Materials Laboratory Naval Air Experimental Station, Naval Air Material Center Philadelphia.46 His successors could build on his research.

  The kamikaze problem might not have any solution at all. Various suggestions were made from time to time, and tried out in combat,47 but nothing they could come up with made any appreciable difference.

  On Leslyn’s side, the feedback was more immediate. The war matériel produced by the shops she supervised was often in use in the Pacific Theater of Operations (PTO) within weeks—so the reduced absenteeism when she was on the shops’ floors translated directly into additional production of war matériel. This must have braced her up emotionally: the psychotic episodes went away, and for a time they had their old, affectionate relationship back.48

  Heinlein had finally begun to feel that what they were doing was a useful—even important—contribution to the war effort, and he was not inclined to give over any of his carefully husbanded energies to mere entertainment. The Westminster proposal that he should write a boys’ book would stay on the back burner for the duration.

  In the meantime, new markets for his writing continued to open up. Sometime late in 1944, Heinlein’s friends and fellow writers Roby Wentz and Cleve Cartmill had become involved in a new pulp magazine chain being fronted by Leslie Charteris, writer of the popular “Saint” mysteries. Bond-Charteris Enterprises were headquartered in Beverly Hills and planned to start some new Western and mystery magazines on the West Coast. They had approached Heinlein to write for a new mystery magazine. Henry Kuttner was already negotiating with Charteris and his group to ghostwrite Charteris stories.49 Mystery writing was not something that interested Heinlein much, but he passed word along to his friends.50

  Hardcover publishers were only slowly beginning to integrate science fiction into their lines, but editors of a new medium—small-format “pocket books” (possibly encouraged by the wartime paper shortages)—were eager for science fiction, particularly reprints of the best prewar stories. Several paperback anthologies were in process by 1945, and all of them wanted some of Heinlein’s stories. Reprints he could manage; it just required correspondence, not the time and energy of original writing. And the secondary-sales checks, though smaller than the original sale, were a welcomed addition to the severely wounded Heinlein exchequer, still supporting two households.

  He got a request to reprint “Life-Line” and again asked Street & Smith for a release. Heinlein generally agreed with Street & Smith’s management that the new pseudo-magazine paperbacks were detrimental to the industry and was prepared to use discretion, but what he thought didn’t matter. Street & Smith unilaterally changed the terms of the deal: it would release anything for which the writer had an immediate sale use unless the stories were for reprint paperbacks, which would be handled on a case-by-case basis.

  Heinlein had been warned of the possibility this might happen: Henry Kuttner had written to him in September 1944 saying Street & Smith was refusing to release paperback rights to him.51 Heinlein was angry, but he couldn’t manage the time to pursue a protracted case through the Pulp Section of the Authors Guild; he would just have to live with whatever crumbs of “found money” Street & Smith would let him have, for the duration—which might mean another year or two.

  On the morning of August 6, 1945, everything changed.

  26

  DANGEROUS NEW WORLD

  Early in July 1945 the imperial Japanese government had approached the Soviet government to open diplomatic discussions for a negotiated peace. By this time, however, it was clear that what the Japanese wanted was a “breather,” to rebuild their shattered war machine, and that was not acceptable: there could be no prospect for an actual peace so long as the military was in control of the Japanese government. From Japan, the Allies would accept nothing less than unconditional surrender. They would not give any guarantees, though on July 27, 1945, in the Potsdam Declaration the United States, jointly with Britain and China, assured the Japanese of humane treatment.

  President Truman knew what the Japanese did not: the day before the Potsdam Declaration, the USS Indianapolis had delivered the U-235 core of the “Little Boy” atomic bomb to Tinian Island. The plutonium bomb, code-named “Fat Man,” to be used after Little Boy, had been tested in the New Mexico desert on July 16, 1945, code-named “Trinity.” The results at the Trinity site at 5:30 A.M. were awe-inspiring, terrifyingly far beyond anyone’s expectations (the yield was calculated at twenty thousand tons of TNT—the equivalent of two thousand bomber loads, delivered in a single instant at one point on Earth). The detonation flash of light was seen over the entire state of New Mexico and in parts of Arizona, Texas, and Mexico.

  Some of the Manhat
tan Project scientists had argued for a demonstration of the fearsome, awe-inspiring, terrifying new weapon for Japanese and other international observers, but President Truman ultimately decided to use the bomb as its own demonstration. The Japanese high command was known to deal with unfavorable war news by ignoring it—a policy known as mokusatsu, meaning “kill with silence.” It was hard enough to credit their own reports of the bomb’s impact. If the Allies lost the shock value of the weapon, and the Japanese high command minimized the reports of their observers, then the dreaded invasion of the Japanese Home Islands would have to go forward. President Truman could not convince himself to risk a million new Allied casualties—to say nothing of the casualties the Japanese would take. The invasion of the home islands, code-named Operation Downfall, was scheduled for early November 1945. Devastating air strikes on Japanese military and industrial targets would precede Downfall, each bomber now dropping ten thousand pounds of high explosive, in waves of hundreds of bombers per sortie. Heinlein hoped that would be enough—not merely for its Schrecklichkeit (“dreadfulness”), but to destroy the Japanese cottage industry in war matériel and bring the imperial war machine to a state of collapse. The lesson of the German bombing of London was not lost on him:

  Modern war is like an iceberg, with the part that sticks up representing the combat forces, the concealed part the industry and train behind him … . No. I have a dirty feeling that this is our last chance; we had better make it good.1

  Early in the morning of August 6, 1945, the specially modified bomber Enola Gay approached the industrial city of Hiroshima, flanked by two observation planes carrying cameras and scientific instruments to record the event. They had left Tinian Island at 2 A.M.; now the city’s workday was starting. At 8:16 A.M., in clear weather, Enola Gay dropped its payload, the U-235 bomb code-named Little Boy. A quarter mile in the air, it exploded, with a blinding flash and an inconceivable rumbling. In the blast and backdraft, buildings simply fell out of the sky, and a cloud of dust and smoke rose into the sky.

  The Japanese General Staff sent observers to find out about the mysterious explosion in Hiroshima—thirty thousand deaths, tens of thousands of casualties, hundreds of thousands of survivors digging themselves out of rubble. They learned its cause with the rest of the world, sixteen hours after the explosion—early evening on the East Coast of the United States—when President Truman went on the air and publicly announced it.

  Heinlein had known about a secret War Department project involving uranium and did his best to keep talk about the subject in his presence to an absolute minimum, preferably none at all.2 Now, atomics were a reality—and the future rushed in.

  Even while he struggled to grasp the enormity, his mind flashed ahead to the meaning of the event. “That’s the end,” he said flatly.3 The end of the war, almost certainly—but also, Good-bye to All That, the end of the whole world as it was before August 6, 1945—and also the opening up of an unprecedented opportunity to change things for the better.

  American newspapers frantically assembled their reports from every source they could find. Although many people had no way to grasp the scale of the event or its importance, some intuited immediately that things had changed. An editorial in the next day’s Kansas City Star said: “We are dealing with an invention that could overwhelm civilization.”

  Two days later, on August 9, 1945, the second bomb, a plutonium bomb code-named Fat Man, was dropped on the port of Nagasaki, with results no less devastating. The same day the Soviet Union invaded Manchuria with one million troops. If Japan did not surrender unconditionally, the juggernaut of “swift and utter destruction” promised by the Potsdam ultimatum was upon them. Japan surrendered unconditionally on August 14, 1945. The war was over.

  The news came at 7 P.M. on the East Coast, and civilians and soldiers crowded into public places to share this glorious moment. Heinlein was already at work on the postwar. That day he had written his letter of resignation from the civilian engineer job at NAES, to be effective August 18, citing “Reason for Resignation: (a) End of war. (b) Health—I’ve been holding together, trying to last to the end. (c) My permanent home is on the west coast; my permanent profession is not engineering.”4 He had accumulated vacation time that would carry him through September if he wished, but he had conceived a huge and exciting project that would involve the Navy and American industries, and push America into the future headfirst.

  That morning, before the surrender came through, he had sent a five-page memorandum to his boss, John Kean, titled “Tentative Proposal for Projects to be carried on at NAMC,”5 outlining a program to invest the Naval Aircraft Factory’s research and development resources in the next stage of aviation—rockets and missiles. Atomic weaponry was the single fact that overwhelmed, true—but the key to atomic weaponry was deployment. Combine the atomic bomb with the V-2, and—

  1. I believe it is evident to any sober-minded technical man that the events of 6 Aug. 45, et seq., should cause us carefully to re-examine all plans, proposals, and projects which obtained before that time … . In the broad sense, we are out of business, just as thoroughly out of business as were wooden ships after the battle of the Monitor and the Merrimac. On the other hand we need not be out of business if we reorient, see what may be done with our exceptional resources in the way of trained personnel and mechanical equipment, and then determine what we should do in the interest of the United States of America in particular and humanity in general.

  A week after hearing the news, he had grasped the essential elements that would shape the postwar world.

  It is a simple fact that (1) we can not afford a war ever again, (2) the atomic bomb cannot be abolished, nor can it be indefinitely kept from other peoples. We must ride the lightning and ride it well. I conceive the atomic bomb as being the force behind the police power for a planetary peace … such a force there must be if we are not to be ourselves destroyed.

  The Naval Air Materials Center, which was the research wing of the Naval Aircraft Factory, should organize “a major project” with all the usual apparatus of its wartime R & D projects, to develop a man-carrying rocket out of V-2 technology. The first step could be an unmanned “messenger rocket” to the Moon, guided by the new radar target-seeking technology, but (eyes on the Navy’s target):

  It must be noted that it is really much easier to build a successful Moon rocket than to build a proper war rocket. Nevertheless either problem can be used to solve the other—the choice between the two is a choice in diplomacy and politics, not in engineering.

  The public, he said, is now ready for such a project, and Robert Goddard had suggested a good test in his 1920 technical paper: the Moon rocket could carry a fifty-pound payload of carbon black. An explosion just before touchdown could disperse it far enough for the mark to be seen on Earth, even by quite low-power amateur telescopes. That was politics. “The unique prestige which would accrue to the United States of America, to the U.S. Navy, and to NAMC in particular cannot be expressed.” And that was diplomacy. At the very end, he dropped a little personal diplomacy, concluding with a final, delicate hint that he, Robert Heinlein, was uniquely qualified to guard and guide such a project.

  The memo went up channels, from John Kean’s office to the head of the Naval Aircraft Factory, where it quietly died; another copy went through Navy Department channels. Cal Laning, on his way to Washington, could monitor its progress from inside the Navy bureaucracy while working up his own proposals for an artificial satellite program. He appealed to Heinlein for help with writing up his proposal, but in the third week of August, when Laning visited them in Philadelphia, Heinlein was frantic with his own full program, mobilizing support outside the Naval bureaucracy for a government-and-industry “five companies and Guggenheim”6 rocketry project that would be a necessary complement to the Navy’s rocket program. He suggested instead that L. Sprague de Camp might be able to help with the writing. He also gave Laning an introduction to Willy Ley, who had just been hired to work
on commercial weather rockets.

  A project of the magnitude Heinlein envisioned needed massive support. By excruciating years of exhausting and mostly unrewarding effort, he had positioned himself at the center of a huge web of contacts, and some of them could be turned to account. He began working his network to stir up support for his own government-and-industry rocket project.7 Before he was ready to leave Philadelphia, he mapped out a route of side trips on the way back to California:

  • to a steel plant that could be moved from war production to manufacturing the specialized alloys needed for rocket research;

  • to a high-explosives engineer with the kind of mental flexibility and project-coordinating experience to do the kind of thing Heinlein had done for Buddy Scoles in 1942;