Robert A. Heinlein, In Dialogue with His Century, Volume 2

by William H. Patterson, Jr.

  He insisted on participating even in the Masquerade Ball, Ginny in cat costume as Vesta the Vegian from Doc Smith’s The Vortex Blaster, while he—“I am depending largely on green grease paint and crepe hair to create a Charles Addams horror: Minister Plenipotentiary and Ambassador Extraordinary from Arcturus III.”66

  They got through the speech at the University of Washington the day after the convention ended and flew back to Colorado Springs, where Ginny caught Robert’s flu and took to her bed.67

  That speech he had given at the convention would not let him go: All the way back home, he thought about the potential hypocrisy involved in telling these young people they should invest their futures in fallout shelters.68 One supercilious and ignorant “colleague” had already as much as accused him of hypocrisy in print, talking about (nonexistent) radiation proofing on his house in Colorado Springs.69 That stung more than he cared to admit in public. He had considered building a bomb shelter, but the house was built on a granite outcrop, and there was no place to put a shelter.

  Do you recall Carl Sandburg’s anecdote in The People, Yes about the man who spread the rumor that they had struck oil in Hell … and spreads it so well that he sells the idea to himself—and leaves for Hell? Something like that happened to me:

  I.e., in Seattle, in my talk, I told the audience that everyone, pacifist or fighter, should provide himself with a fallout shelter—and also noted that most Americans would not do so … with myself as a typical bad example of an American who, despite all warnings, had done nothing at all to protect himself and his family from possible atomic attack.

  … I had a long string of excuses—no children and no overpowering desire to last through a fourth war in one lifetime, neighbors with children who had done nothing (and who would be certain to show up with their kids if I built a shelter—leaving me to sit outside and fry), the extreme expense of the thing, since my house has no basement and no attic and sits on a shelf of granite … no cheap and easy way to do it.…

  Excuses—I had the money and I also had the strong conviction that the USSR is less likely to attack the stronger we are … in particular, if most Americans did their best to render themselves as nearly immune from attack as possible (without waiting for the government to do it for them), then the Kremlin would not attack, because those babies bet only on sure things.

  The fact that I still believed that the majority of Americans would sit, fat, dumb, and happy, and take no steps to survive, in no way relieved me of my obligation to make my small piece of America as strong as possible. So wearily I undertook to design and build a fallout shelter.70

  He got some chores out of the way first—thank-you letters, including a thank-you ad in the progress report for the next WorldCon, in Chicago; he offered to put Algis Budrys in touch with some high-level people in Washington, D.C., who might be interested in some of A.J.’s ideas about the Lithuanian resistance movement. And then General Kuter,71 from NORAD, invited him along to attend the Air Force Association meeting in Philadelphia on September 20 to 24.

  Heinlein flew from Peterson Field in the General’s private plane. This was his third such meeting: He had attended the first in Denver during the Patrick Henry campaign—depressing for its dispiriting sense of defeatism. This one was invigorating, energizing him with the implication that there were things that could be done to check the long, slow slide into surrender. He came back to Colorado Springs on Sunday evening, following the banquet.

  16

  SMOKING RUBBLE

  Since it was going to be difficult anyway, Heinlein decided to take on all the difficulties at the same time and make not just a fallout shelter, but a blast shelter that could survive anything but a direct hit. Ginny insisted on a back-door exit, which made good sense from a survival perspective but complicated the design and engineering.

  He started building a shelter by the first of October 1961, blasting a pit twelve feet wide, twelve feet deep, and twenty-four feet long—big enough to accommodate a seven-by-seven-by-fourteen shelter. The crew dug out the rubble and installed a reinforced steel frame to keep the surrounding rock from collapsing.

  The roof was twenty-eight inches of reinforced concrete, “vibrated into place and cast over a heavy steel shell (to avoid the shrapnel effect of cracked concrete).”1 When they got it installed, it was reached through a counterweighted door set flat into the house’s east balcony, backed up by two submarine-type vault doors, to take the overpressure necessary to keep radioactive dust from seeping in. And for Ginny’s bolt-hole, a concealed “escape tunnel” made of culvert steel, well stocked with tools and a concealed exit in the arroyo. The tunnel could also be used for food storage. Altogether, the shelter would keep two people alive for three months.

  His example set off a burst of building among his neighbors, a little behind the national craze and too late to shore up the marginal shelter-supply businesses in the area that were starting to fail. He was able to pick up much of his initial stock and specialized equipment at going-out-of-business sales.

  The shelter was completed by mid-November. But building the shelter was the easy part. The hard part was people. He knew what the “correct” answer was: Nobody in once the doors are shut. But he doubted he could carry it out that way: No matter what he “knew” intellectually, he would take in at least any children. That, he did not allow to be widely known: “Lots of people have seen our shelter … [sic] and far too many of them have said brightly, ‘Gee, I’m glad you’ve built this! Now we’ll know exactly where to go when the alert sounds!?’”2 Chilling. Overwhelmed instantly; all die—and every single one of his neighbors was well-off enough to build shelters of their own. “Simple horse sense is so damned scarce in the human race that it is amazing that we took over this planet.”3

  Poul Anderson had been agonizing over the same dilemma. He had settled in the Bay Area town of Orinda, tucked away on the other side of the Oakland Hills from San Francisco. Heinlein commiserated and encouraged by mail:

  Each shelter built reduces our vulnerability to blackmail, increases our national chances if it comes to the worst. Neither you nor I nor any other individual can build a shelter that will take anything—but we most certainly can vastly improve our chances and, with that, our country’s chances.4

  The moral problems were hard—and could not be shared or divided, e.g., by the kind of public or neighborhood shelters that were available to city dwellers and suburbanites. In the end, it comes down, as it always comes down, to each individual human being doing what he—or she—must to live with himself/herself. “… In my opinion there is no such thing as an unsolvable moral problem … It is only necessary to know what your moral standards are, and why, and then have the guts to carry out the answers.”5 A very old and inescapable position: Epictetus had outlined it in the second century C.E.: “First say to yourself what you would be; and then do what you have to do.” The whole project was an exercise in Epictetus: “Make the best use of what is in your power, and take the rest as it happens” is another well-known quotation from the Enchiridion.

  Howard Cady at Putnam’s was pleased with the fall sales of Stranger; they might even have to go into a second printing before the end of the year. Heinlein began casting around for another writing project. Putnam’s had always wanted a juvenile from him, and he did have a stub juvenile in his files.

  In 1958 he had started a freakish juvenile—freakish because it had a teenage girl protagonist, and girl-oriented science fiction was impossibly outré. He had a third of Podkayne Fries: Her Life and Times already written—a story about a teenaged Mars-colonist girl on an interplanetary cruise to Earth and Venus. By the time he was ready to work on it again, it had evolved: It wouldn’t be the kind of girls’ Wanderjahr he had originally planned. Instead, when he finished the writing on January 14, 1962, he had crafted an important message about “latchkey kids” and parenting in the age of Sputnik and orbiting missiles.6

  And about that time he got a letter from an advertisin
g agency, Carson/Roberts. They had developed an innovative ad campaign for Hoffman Electronics, thousand-word short-shorts by noted science-fiction authors, preferably illustrating some problem in electronics. A. E. van Vogt and Isaac Asimov had already done stories for them. Now they wanted Heinlein.7

  He referred them to Fred Brown, who was a specialist in that sort of short-short—but Carson/Roberts’s D. H. Steele was persistent: They wanted Heinlein, and they were prepared to pay a premium rate for him—double or triple the rate they originally offered. He finished Podkayne—retitled now Podkayne of Mars—and there really wasn’t any reason he should not get in on the bonanza at an unheard-of sixty-two cents per word. But electronics was not a field he was comfortable with, and the correspondence with Steele continued until a couple of possible gimmicks occurred to Heinlein in March.8

  Both he and Ginny were having troubles with their health in early 1962, Ginny’s more serious than his. He had been suffering from throat spasms for some time, which was annoying but not essentially serious. A “soma compound” taken one tablet before meals gave Robert some relief.

  Ginny was not so lucky. At a dance in January, she had suddenly doubled over in extreme pain, like nothing she had experienced before. The next day, Robert put her in the hospital (Ginny hated doctors and hospitals and almost always had to be coerced into them), with a shot of morphine for pain. A round of tests started. With a reaction that extreme, they feared cancer—advanced and widespread, metastasized and inoperable. Fortunately, they were soon able to rule out cancer. A shadow on an X-ray suggested an aytpical kidney stone. The doctors suggested trying to dissolve it by a strict diet, as an operation would probably destroy the kidney.

  This started a cycle of yo-yoing in and out of the hospital, and Robert would get his dinner usually with Andy Ahroon and his family—his closest friends in Colorado Springs.9 When Ginny wasn’t in the hospital she was being worked over by “specialists” in this and that. Three days out of four, about dinnertime she would have an attack of acute, system-wide pain, for which injections of Demerol were prescribed. Robert learned how to give her the injections and put her to bed. Evening events became simply out of the question—which played havoc with their social life. After a while, they no longer had one.

  In March, Ginny was back in the hospital again, and Robert had an attack of appendicitis, acute but also atypical, so the doctors decided to wait and see rather than operate. With both Heinleins hospitalized, the doctors began to suspect other causes than the obvious. They began by taking stool samples—and found to their amazement that Robert had no organisms to culture in his stool. “In other words,” he chortled, “I produce ‘pure crap.’ This will come as no surprise to many literary critics.”10 By the end of March, the doctors settled on a diagnosis of amebic dysentery and put them both on an antibacterial regimen. It seemed to help. Ginny continued on Demerol nearly daily—for months and with no end in sight.

  It was probably at this time that Heinlein also took the opportunity to discuss with the doctor something that had been bothering him:

  I was definitely slowing down in every way—and I have always been worried about premature senility because my father became utterly senile when he was a year younger than I am now. He was a wreck, no pleasure to himself and a nuisance to other people and unable to do any sort of work—a zombie and he never did pull out of it even though he stayed alive another quarter of a century.

  This is the only thing I have ever been afraid of—that I would go the way my father did. So when I started slowing down, I went to our doctor and insisted on some monkey glands in pill form.11

  The doctor started him on oral Metandren, a synthetic testosterone pill.

  Whether it was simple recovery of health or the Metandren was giving his energy a boost, by April Robert felt able to write again.

  All of Robert’s “first readers” loved Podkayne of Mars—except for the ending. Every one of them. And when it was submitted to Putnam’s, Peter Israel joined the chorus (Howard Cady had left Putnam’s in the interim, and Peter Israel was now Putnam’s editor in chief). Everybody hated the fact that he killed Poddy off. Heinlein felt this was a misread of the text: Podkayne was not a juvenile, but a cautionary message to adult readers—to parents and potential parents “too busy” to parent their kids.

  Podkayne—as originally written, the title character was supposed to die and her brother was supposed to have the ending all to himself … with the story over when his character change was completed. I weakened—because my wife, my agent, and both my editors, serial and trade book, just couldn’t stand to have me kill off such a nice little girl. The result was that practically nobody understood what I was driving at.12

  Podkayne’s death was the direct result of her mother’s failure to parent—and Clark’s sociopathy, as well.13 The last five words of the book—Clark’s decision to join the human race—were intended to be the most poignant thing he had ever written14 … and it was set up by Poddy’s death.

  Fred Pohl was interested—not for Galaxy, which couldn’t use a teenage girl protagonist either,15 but for Galaxy’s sister magazine, Worlds of If. Heinlein had not expected any serial sale for this manuscript and considered Blassingame’s success in marketing it somewhat miraculous. He still didn’t think the change of ending everybody wanted was necessary—but everybody wanted it, so he agreed not to kill Poddy off so definitely. Blassingame and Ginny and Peter Israel passed his compromise ending, allowing the possibility that Poddy might recover, and he was done with Podkayne of Mars.

  Heinlein wrote the Hoffman Electronics ad short-short story, “Searchlight,” in the last week of May, meeting the Carson/Roberts deadline, even with the unexpected rewrite on Podkayne.16

  Lady Livia Gollancz wrote from London that the British publisher Victor Gollancz Ltd. wanted to put “Universe” and “Commonsense” together into a book for the British market, to be titled Orphans of the Sky17 (one of the possible titles he gave them). This would have been the core of the fifth of Shasta’s original Future History series—and he wouldn’t need to write “Da Capo.” The Doubleday SF Book Club picked it up for the American market, and they arranged publisher-to-publisher for Putnam’s to issue the book for the American trade.

  When his brother Rex taught electrical engineering at West Point (1942–53), he had introduced to Robert one of his students, George Scithers. Scithers was one of the “organized” science-fiction fans (a term that always strikes SF fans as either irritating or else inexpressibly funny because it so misunderstands the deliberately chaotic nature of their little subculture), and even published a fanzine, Amra, devoted to a narrow sub-genre of heroic fantasy designated (by Fritz Leiber) “Sword & Sorcery.” In the early 1960s Sword & Sorcery was becoming popular. It was a highly conventionalized form, and not Heinlein’s usual kind of thing—particularly the adventure-melodrama apparatus of clear-cut hero and black villain—but Scithers had said something in correspondence that kicked off a train of thought: What happened to the hero, he asked rhetorically, once the adventure was done?18 A story began taking shape in Heinlein’s mind about just that question—like Stranger a “Cabellian” story. What he evidently had in mind was the story form Cabell had used over and over again: The first act sets up the desired; the second is the search for the desired. And in the final act, either you do not achieve the desired, or else—and so much better—you do achieve it … and find out it doesn’t make you happy. “… happiness, after all, abides a thought farther down the bogged, rocky, clogged, befogged, heart-breaking road, if anywhere.”19

  For that, of course, was Heinlein’s answer to Scithers’s provocative question: a Hero did not stop looking for his—or her—heart’s desire. You set out on that “bogged, rocky, clogged, befogged, heart-breaking road”—the Glory Road—again. That’s what Cabell had missed, himself: His heroes of romance all settled into domestic bliss and spent the rest of their lives yearning. That just wasn’t in Heinlein’s conception of the hero’s psy
chology.

  The apparatus of wizards and aristocrats didn’t much appeal to Heinlein’s democratic soul. Instead he made Glory Road a kind of “gay deceiver.” Los Angeles SF fan Walt Liebscher had coined this term to describe fantastic stories that had mundane explanations—dreams, most often. The “fantasy” elements of Heinlein’s new story would be high-level technology, applied mathematics mostly, and literary psychology, so that the fantasy would be science fiction in masquerade. Heinlein acquired a multivolume Encyclopedia of Magic and a copy of the Red Grimoire20 for research purposes (grimoires are record books kept by working witches; a few have been published over the centuries)—and started The Power and the Glory on April 12, 1962.

  He finished his book as Glory Road, at 106,000 words, three weeks later (May 4, 1962) and began strategizing with Lurton Blassingame about a big omnibus volume of his Future History stories.21 Heinlein had placed reprint contracts for the three existing books with Gnome Press in 1959, since they had brought out Methuselah’s Children in 1958. Although the Methuselah’s Children issue was in many ways unsatisfactory,22 Heinlein planned then to add a fifth book to the series, The Endless Frontier, for which he would write the capstone of the series, “Da Capo,” to conclude the adventures of Lazarus Long. Although Putnam’s was interested in putting out an omnibus edition of the Future History series as early as 1962,23 the Gollancz/Putnam’s Orphans of the Sky that year replaced The Endless Frontier and essentially put the Putnam’s omnibus on indefinite hold.

  After a brief contact in 1955, Mary Briggs—now Mary Collin—had written him—a Stranger fan letter—in 1961. That brought back cherished memories of 1929 and the vision she had given him of what it was possible for a woman to mean—a vision that had stayed with him ever since.24 He had not seen her since before he married Leslyn, in 1932—but he had thought of her often over the years.