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

by William H. Patterson, Jr.

  For reasons not recorded, Heinlein left off work on the novel and turned his attention to other matters. When Frank Robinson had conducted that long Playboy interview in 1969—the one that was later (1972) badly chopped up for Oui magazine—Robinson had mentioned an academic Heinlein would probably like: Leon Stover. Now Dr. Stover contacted Heinlein for an interview: He was in the middle of a book on H. G. Wells for Frederick Ungar, and the publishing house had asked for a book on Heinlein. An anthropologist by training and China advisor to the State Department, Stover had published widely in fields as diverse as Chinese cultural anthropology, the development and meaning of Stonehenge, and a book in French on the cultural anthropology of science fiction. He was now at the Illinois Institute of Technology teaching courses in science fiction in which Heinlein figured prominently. He wanted to do a book more on Heinlein’s role in intellectual history than biography or even literary criticism per se and would come to Northern California in June, if that were convenient—and he had a class argument to lay at Heinlein’s feet to make it interesting. Heinlein decided to do the interview.

  In April he attended the L5 Society’s Space Development Conference in San Francisco. The Society had grown faster and larger than anyone could have foreseen after the successful lobbying effort to get the Moon Treaty taken off the table in Congress. The San Francisco group wanted the Society to start moving, preferably toward a space station.

  Heinlein and Pournelle were not sure this was politically achievable with the capital and goodwill they had available to work with—which might be better spent pushing SDI. They had naturally assumed that the L5 Society would support the space aspects, at least, of the Citizens Advisory Council work on Mutual Assured Survival, but there was a sizeable faction on the L5 Society Board of directors who were deeply suspicious of anything military in space.

  After forty-five years of struggle with “custard-headed pacifists,”18 Heinlein was predisposed to see anyone who blocked the Society’s active involvement in SDI as pacifists, but the situation on the L5 board was more complex than that: Much of the resistance was coming from a tertium quid who felt that L5 had a more useful mission doing practical political groundwork.19 This is a very different thing from stubborn pacifism, but it was not something Heinlein was disposed to see at that moment.

  At one point, Heinlein said to Pournelle, “Jerry, you’re being nibbled to death by ducks. Let’s let them get back to their games. We have better things to do.” They resigned, though were persuaded to return so a compromise could be enacted.

  Heinlein went home and wrote a congratulatory letter to Andre Norton (1912–2005) on the occasion of her fiftieth anniversary as a published writer. She was named SFWA Grand Master in 1983:

  It comes as no surprise to anyone and no one of us deserves it more richly than you do. Do you happen to recall a time when I telephoned you on a matter of SFWA business? Sunday evening 27 August 1978, it was. In the course of that conversation I suggested that you could expect this recognition in the near future.

  It was the easiest prediction I ever made.20

  A few days later, June 9, 1984, Leon Stover visited in the afternoon with his Japanese wife, Takeko.

  Heinlein must have found Stover quite an interesting fellow, with life experience and conclusions completely different from his own, but often complementary in stimulating ways. Stover himself was a kind of Johnsonian tory—a type not often seen anymore, an entertaining eccentric.

  Heinlein rarely discussed his own stories at all except in shoptalk with another writer—but he made an exception here. In response to a question about “Coventry” and the “Calvinist” reading that had been advanced by George Edgar Slusser, he hardly needed to think about the problem. Stover and Slusser were both mistaken: They had taken different gambits written into the story that misdirected their thinking.

  And then Stover did something that must have impressed Heinlein: He accepted what Heinlein told him at face value and integrated the new information into his mental picture. Stover was demonstrating a very rare intellectual quality: The potential for moving behind and beyond the superficial slogans Heinlein presented to the world—all, he judged, that most people could assimilate.

  It was probably at that moment that Heinlein began to think of a possibility he had more or less abandoned a decade ago. This was a man who might be able to write a biography of him. He was not “opposed to memoirs per se. A person with a box seat at great events should record what he remembers.”21 Heinlein put it into the back of his mind to let it mature and picked up The World Snake again, with the prospect of several weeks clear—more than two months if he needed it.

  Job was not due for release until mid-August, just days before they were to leave for Montreal and parts north, but the Kirkus Reviews got in an early and favorable review while Heinlein was working in the two-hour stretches that now constituted his personal “‘can’-to-‘can’t’.” He finished The World Snake two weeks and two days after his seventy-seventh birthday in July, and found you could get the computer to count the words for you—130,805 of them. He gave it a quick read-through for typos and grammatical errors—and then he put it away. He might be able to get it edited and finalized in the three weeks before they had to leave, but there was no hurry about it: Putnam’s would not rush a new book into print until sales on Job had peaked. January or February would be the right time to hand over the Snake.

  In the meantime, he got the newest high-resolution maps of the area north of the Canadian mainland. All the land there, north of Hudson’s Bay, looked like nothing so much as a wet sponge. He sent off a series of letters to friends optimistically informing them to expect him in Japan at the end of September—and to Isaac Asimov to expect them in New York late in October.

  Job was released by Del Rey in mid-August, debuting on the New York Times bestseller list at number fifteen (rising later to number nine). They flew out on August 19 to Montreal. The next day they flew on to St. John’s in Newfoundland,22 where they were able to board Lindblad Explorer just in time to cast off that same day.

  The two-day passage to Greenland was taken up with orientation—surprisingly more intense than the orientation for the Antarctic. They were read frightening passages from G. W. Melville’s account of the attempt by the Jeanette in 1880 to make the Northwest Passage, which stressed the deadly danger of the pack ice: Captain Lindblad wanted them more than wary this time—he wanted them scared.

  At Jakobshavn in Greenland, the ship took on as much fresh water as it could hold, and even the ship’s small swimming pool was filled with drinking water.

  From Jakobshavn they made north along the southern (inner) coast of Greenland and into the Davis Strait, crossing the Arctic Circle. The Davis Strait led to Baffin Bay through a field of smallish icebergs, and to Baffin Island and another fjord—spectacle again, with cascades of glacial melt spurting from the tops of the high cliffs on each side. They continued into Lancaster Sound separating Baffin Island on the south from Ellesmere Island and the tight cluster of the Queen Elizabeth Islands on the north, pointed almost to the northern tip of the Boothia Peninsula, the northernmost connected part of North America.

  They landed at Beechey Island, where members of the Franklin expedition had died in 1845 and 1846, interred in the solid ice.23 This event made the international news, but by that time Explorer was on to Resolute on Cornwallis Island, which is almost the northernmost settlement on Earth.24

  The Arctic is alive in a way the Antarctic is not. The Eskimos—called “Inuit” in Canada (actually there are dozens of cultures and peoples lumped together under either of those names)—lived there, though traditional lifestyles were being wiped out by the laws that made nomadic existence impossible: You can’t send your children to a little red schoolhouse from a dogsled following reindeer herds. The wildlife of the Arctic is abundant, not limited to seals and seabirds. The ship’s films and lectures this time expanded from geology and ice physics to the entire natural history of the ar
ea and extensive treatment of flora and fauna.

  The fauna that drew the most attention were the polar bears. There was something almost magical about these beasts—and for just that reason the crew and scientific staff drilled the passengers relentlessly about the danger they represented. Bears are touchy under the best of circumstances, and polar bears found the ship’s engines irritating and so were likely to become annoyed if they could not wander off to find someplace quieter. Any time they were ashore, the expedition leader would carry a rifle “loaded for bear,” and if one were sighted on land, they would make back to the boats. As Heinlein often said, the best way to avoid trouble is not to be there when it happens.

  They were able to get off the ship at Gjoa Haven25 on King William Island—a tiny settlement named for Amundson’s vessel from his 1903 expedition. Amundson had wintered there, taking shelter from the ice pack. The ground was tundra, soggy where the top melted over permafrost, hilly and hummocky and difficult for Heinlein to get around on. He was in good enough health, but he does not look strong in the pictures that were taken.

  From Gjoa Haven they ducked underneath Victoria Island, keeping in sight of the Canadian mainland. As they got closer to the Beaufort Sea, they were joined by a Canadian ice-breaker, Camsell, that broke a path for them as the pack ice grew thicker. It was a slow process, but very interesting. If the pack ice was too thick to simply shove aside, Camsell would heave itself up on the ice and break it with its weight. The passengers had a “chipping party” one day, as ice accumulated on the deck of Lindblad Explorer and all hands turned out to chip it away.

  Camsell and her little caravan left Explorer at the Canadian border, taking the Mounties with them and leaving Explorer to “long, lonely days in ice-filled ocean.”26 The pack ice was rafting up on them, but they were only a hundred miles from Point Barrow, and they had Explorer’s special ice-breaking prow.

  They found Barrow modernized remarkably from their last visit in 1960. There were still no local industries, but instead of “temporary” structures, there were permanent buildings and even streets now. And Heinlein was found and entertained by his fans and readers, even there.

  The hard part of the Northwest Passage was now behind them. This was essentially as far as most of the successes had gone, though the trip on to Japan, along the chain of Aleutian Islands and into the Bering Sea, was relatively less difficult. They were ahead of schedule, so they had a few additional unscheduled stopovers, visiting Eskimo settlements at Diomede and other islands in the Bering Strait. More than ten thousand years ago, during the Ice Age,27 these islands were mountains on the Bering Land Bridge that is now on the bottom of the ocean, and the remote ancestors of the North American Indians walked across from Asia. Even today, Eskimos look enough like Japanese to be mistaken for them without the furs.

  They made landfall at Little Diomede, an American island just two and a half miles from Big Diomede, a Russian possession. Little Diomede was so steep that the Heinleins stayed close to the landing, though some of the more adventurous passengers climbed a bit.

  From Diomede it was a longish hop along the chain of Aleutian Islands and across to the Japanese Home Islands. They reached the northernmost, Hokkaido, and were greeted at the dock by newsmen and a television crew to record this historic event: Thirty-three ships before them had gotten through the Arctic ice, but all had originated in North America; the Lindblad Explorer was the first ship in human history to complete the passage from Europe to the Orient, the culmination of four hundred years of ambition.

  They took their time in Japan this trip, visiting in Tokyo with friends made on the trip last year—Tetsu Yano, Hiroshi Hayakawa and family, and Osamu Tezuka. As October came on, the 55th reunion of the Naval Academy class of ’29 was coming up. They flew back over the pole to the States, making the last leg of their trip to Annapolis by commuter train.

  This year their numbers were greatly reduced, though many of Heinlein’s special friends were still among the living. Bob Clarke was still alive, and Cal Laning—people who had bridged with him the era from cloth-winged biplanes, when rockets and spaceflight were “crazy Buck Rogers stuff,” to the era of space travel come and gone while Doc Smith’s “lambent rays” conducted space battles overhead (or near enough).

  They went on to New York for a few days and caught up with the progress of the book while they were away. Job was performing very satisfactorily, Eleanor Wood informed him. Jerry Falwell had given the book an unlooked-for publicity boost when he condemned Job in his September Moral Majority Report newsletter,28 which must have pleased Heinlein since this was the closest modern equivalent that could be managed to being banned in Boston—the ambition he had started out with, all those decades ago. And, of course, it was a heartwarmingly genuine cri de bunion satisfying in itself: He would probably have been puzzled and disappointed if this book hadn’t stepped on some toes that badly needed stepping on from time to time.29

  As was their custom, Robert and Ginny threw a party in their hotel suite on October 23, 1984. Heinlein might need a cane nowadays to keep upright, and he might be on the verge of an unwelcomed shotgun marriage to a Lindé bottle, but there was nothing wrong with his memory: He greeted and introduced every guest by name and without notes—even those not already known to him.

  When they got back to Santa Cruz, they found news from Leon Stover about the book deal with Ungar—it had fallen through: They were only interested in a treatment of Heinlein as a genre figure, and that wasn’t Stover’s vision. Heinlein was more appropriately, in his opinion, classed as an Americanist than as a genre writer.

  Mark Twain was once regarded as a Frontier writer, and Herman Melville as a writer of Sea Stories. How long will it take the critical establishment to see that RAH is destined to shed his contemporary reputation as merely the best of SF writers? Something more there is in this, that places his work with the classics of American literature (not to say World Literature, if we stand the best of the boy’s books up against the work of Robert Louis Stevenson).30

  The project was not dead yet: Twayne might be interested in the book for its United States Authors series.

  Heinlein turned his mind to the SDI struggle that was still going on. The Citizens Advisory Council had scheduled a meeting for December 8, at Larry Niven’s home in Tarzana, again. Arthur C. Clarke had been invited to visit following anti-SDI testimony he had given before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee on September 17, 1984, and he showed up at about 11:00 A.M. A couple of years earlier, Clarke had written an article for Analog criticizing the strategic feasibility of some of the hunter-killer satellite ideas,31 but he had made some arithmetic mistakes in calculating orbits, and his entire argument, which was conducted in very strongly worded terms (at one point in the Senate testimony he termed proposed SDI hardware “technological obscenities”), was off base. He also seemed to be criticizing the idea of a leak-proof defense—which nobody on the Council was advocating, because nobody thought such a thing possible in the first place.

  The essay had been reprinted in Clarke’s collection of anti-SDI essays just released, Spring: 1984.32

  Heinlein’s steadfastly affectionate feelings for Clarke had cooled somewhat when Clarke started giving anti-SDI polemics on his speaking tours. At that time Britain’s foreign policy backed the Russians’ various ploys to get SDI removed from policy considerations, and the Soviets had given Clarke a Potemkin luxury junket. Robert and Ginny were disappointed that Clarke seemed to fall for the Red carpet treatment, but it was really the Congressional testimony—particularly when he was clearly wrong about his facts—that put him over the line:33 “We both felt that Art was far too friendly with the commies in the S[oviet]U[nion] for our taste, and we resented him talking in public about such things.”34

  The rules of the Citizens Advisory Council do not permit any individual to be quoted; nevertheless, several accounts of this incident have been published, some of them quite inaccurate in both fact and in relating the emotional co
ntent of the confrontation that did occur.

  As Clarke entered the meeting, Max Hunter and Lowell Wood kidded him about his erroneous technical assumptions and particularly the mistakes in orbital calculations. “Arthur’s first words coming into the room were—‘But Max, I learned everything I know about celestial mechanics from you,’ to which Hunter replied, ‘I didn’t teach you enough, Arthur.’”35 The group of about forty went over the technical issues together with Clarke. That unsettled Clarke, but he was an honest scientist, and he was grappling with the realization that he had made, not one, but a series of embarrassing and embarrassingly public mistakes. “He asked several questions,” Jerry Pournelle told Clarke’s biographer, “and at the end of it he admitted, ‘I clearly was wrong.’”36

  Heinlein had not participated in the technical portion of the briefing, but Clarke had tried to take a moral high ground against SDI, and Heinlein finally had enough of the arrogance of the Brit who sees no problem in telling other people how to run their country and told Clarke so directly, if politely—always, as Jerry Pournelle noted, politely, even when more heated than usual.37

  Some of the other participants at the meeting suddenly woke up, as shocked as Clarke at the public remonstrance against an old friend. Gregory Benford summarized the incident for Clarke’s official biographer:

  When Clarke stated his reservations about [the very idea of] strategic defense, Heinlein chose not to argue about it as a technical problem but rather to say something like, “Look, this is a matter of the defense of the United States, and you’re not assisting the United States, and therefore you really don’t have call to have an opinion about it.”

  Clarke’s biographer goes on to summarize Benford further, adding, “Heinlein continued in that vein, saying that if he were visiting England or Sri Lanka, he would not tell those people how to run their country.”38