The Pursuit of the Pankera: A Parallel Novel About Parallel Universes

by Robert A. Heinlein

  “Mere R&D, Jake. Calculate pressures and temperatures; beef up the vehicle accordingly—spherical, save for exterior anchors—then apply a jigger factor of four. With automatic controls quintuply redundant. Catch it when it comes out and steady it down in Earth’s orbit, sixty degrees trailing—and start selling subdivisions the size of old Spanish land grants. Jake, we should gather enough mass to create new Earths at all Trojan points, a hexagon around the Sun. Five brand-new Earths would give the race room enough to breed. On this maiden voyage, let’s keep our eyes open.”

  Aunt Hilda looked at Zebadiah with horror. “Zebbie! Creating planets indeed!”

  “Step-mother-in-law, these things Jake and I have been discussing are practical—once we thought about the fact that the space-time twister uses no power. Move anything anywhere—all spaces, all times. I add the plural because at first I could not see what Jake had in mind when he spoke of forced aging of a planet. Rotate Venus into the tau-axis, fetch it back along teh-axis, reinsert it centuries—or millennia—older at this point in t-axis. Perhaps translate it a year or so into the future—our future—so as to be ready for it when it returns, all sweet and green and beautiful and ready to grow children and puppies and butterflies. Terraformed but virginal.”

  A bit later, Zebadiah, sprawled out, looked up over the fireplace. “Pop, you were in the Navy?”

  “No—Army. If you count ‘chair-borne infantry.’ They handed me a commission for having a doctorate in mathematics, told me they needed me for ballistics. Then I spent my whole tour as a personnel officer, signing papers.”

  “Standard Operating Procedure. That’s a navy sword and belt up there. Thought it might be yours.”

  “It’s Deety’s—belonged to Jane’s Grandfather Rodgers. I have a dress saber. Belonged to my dad, who gave it to me when the army took me. Dress blues, too. I took them with me, never had occasion to wear either.” Pop got up and went into his—their—bedroom, calling back, “I’ll show you the saber.”

  My husband said to me, “Deety, would you mind my handling your sword?”

  “My captain, that sword is yours.”

  “Heavens, dear, I can’t accept an heirloom.”

  “If my Warlord will not permit his princess to gift him with a sword, he can leave it where it is! I’ve been wanting to give you a wedding present—and did not realize that I had the perfect gift for Captain John Carter.”

  “My apologies, Dejah Thoris. I accept and will keep it bright. I will defend my princess with it against all enemies.”

  “Helium is proud to accept. If you make a cradle of your hands, I can stand in them and reach it down.”

  Zebadiah grasped me, a hand above each knee, and I was suddenly three meters tall. Sword and belt were on hooks; I lifted them down, and myself was placed down. My husband stood straight while I buckled it around him—then he dropped to one knee and kissed my hand.

  My husband is mad north-northwest but his madness suits me. I got tears in my eyes, which Deety doesn’t do much but Dejah Thoris seems prone to, since John Carter made her his.

  Pop and Aunt Hilda watched—then imitated, including (I saw!) tears in Hilda’s eyes after she buckled on Pop’s saber, when he knelt and kissed her hand.

  Zebadiah drew sword, tried its balance, sighted along its blade. “Handmade and balanced close to the hilt. Deety, your great-grandfather paid a pretty penny for this. It’s an honest weapon.”

  “I don’t think he knew what it cost. It was presented to him.”

  “For good reason, I feel certain.” Zebadiah stood back, went into hanging guard, made fast moulinets vertically, left and right, then horizontally clockwise and counterclockwise—suddenly dropped into swordsman’s guard—lunged and recovered, fast as a striking cat.

  I said softly to Pop, “Did you notice?”

  Pop answered quietly. “Know saber. Sword, too.”

  Hilda said loudly, “Zebbie! You never told me you went to Heidelberg.”

  “You never asked, Sharpie. Around the Red Ox they called me ‘The Scourge of the Neckar.’ ”

  “What happened to your scars?”

  “Never got any, dear. I hung around an extra year, hoping for one. But no one got through my guard—ever. Hate to think about how many German faces I carved into checkerboards.”

  “Zebadiah, was that where you took your doctorate?”

  My husband grinned and sat down, still wearing sword. “No, another school.”

  “MIT?” inquired Pop.

  “Hardly. Pop, this should stay in the family. I undertook to prove that a man can get a doctorate from a major university without knowing anything and without adding anything whatever to human knowledge.”

  “I think you have a degree in aerospace engineering,” Pop said flatly.

  “I’ll concede that I have the requisite hours. I hold two degrees—a baccalaureate in humane arts … meaning I squeaked through … and a doctorate from an old and prestigious school—a Ph.D. in education.”

  “Zebadiah! You wouldn’t!” (I was horrified.)

  “But I did, Deety. To prove that degrees, per se, are worthless. Often they are honorifics of true scientists or learned scholars or inspired teachers. Much more frequently they are false faces for overeducated jackasses.”

  Pop said, “You’ll get no argument from me, Zeb. A doctorate is a union card to get a tenured job. It does not mean that the holder thereof is wise or learned.”

  “Yes, sir. I was taught it at my grandfather’s knee—my Grandfather Zachariah, the man responsible for the initial ‘Z’ in the names of his male descendants. Deety, his influence on me was so strong that I must explain him—no, that’s impossible; I must tell about him in order to explain me … and how I happened to take a worthless degree.”

  Hilda said, “Deety, he’s pulling a long bow again.”

  “Quiet, woman. ‘Get thee to a nunnery, go!’ ”

  “I don’t take orders from my step-son-in-law. Make that a monastery and I’ll consider it.”

  I kept my blinkin’ mouf shut. My husband’s fibs entertained me. (If they were fibs.)

  “Grandpa Zach was as cantankerous an old coot as you’ll ever meet. Hated government, hated lawyers, hated civil servants, hated preachers, hated automobiles, public schools, and telephones, was contemptuous of most editors, most writers, most professors, most of almost anything. But he overtipped waitresses and porters and would go out of his way to avoid stepping on an insect.

  “Grandpa had three doctorates: biochemistry, medicine, and law—and he regarded anyone who couldn’t read Latin, Greek, Hebrew, French, and German as illiterate.”

  “Zebbie, can you read all those?”

  “Fortunately for me, my grandfather had a stroke while filling out a tax form before he could ask me that question. I don’t know Hebrew. I can read Latin, puzzle out Greek, speak and read French, read technical German, understand it in some accents, swear in Russian—very useful!—and speak an ungrammatical smattering of Spanish picked up in cantinas and from horizontal dictionaries.

  “Grandpa would have classed me as subliterate as I don’t do any of these well—and I sometimes split infinitives, which would have infuriated him. He practiced forensic medicine, medical jurisprudence, was an expert witness in toxicology, pathology, and traumatology, bullied judges, terrorized lawyers, medical students, and law students. He once threw a tax assessor out of his office and required him to return with a search warrant setting forth in detail its constitutional limitations. He regarded the income tax and the Seventeenth Amendment and the direct primary as signs of the decay of the Republic.”

  “How did he feel about the Nineteenth?”

  “Hilda, Grandpa Zach supported female suffrage. I remember hearing him say that if women were so dad-burned foolish as to want to assume the burden, they should be allowed to—they couldn’t do the country more harm than men had. ‘Votes for Women’ didn’t annoy him but nine thousand other things did. He lived at a slow simmer, always ready
to break into a rolling boil.

  “He had one hobby: collecting steel engravings.”

  “Steel engravings?” I repeated.

  “Of dead presidents, my princess. Especially of McKinley, Cleveland, and Madison—but he didn’t scorn those of Washington. He had that instinct for timing so necessary to a collector. In 1929 on Black Thursday he held not one share of common stock; instead he had sold short. When the 1933 Bank Holiday came along every olddollar he owned, except current cash, was in Zurich in Swiss money. Eventually US citizens were forbidden by ‘emergency’ decree to own gold even abroad.

  “Grandpa Zach ducked into Canada, applied for Swiss citizenship, got it, and thereafter split his time between Europe and America, immune to inflation and the confiscatory laws that eventually caused us to knock three zeros off the old-dollar in creating the newdollar.

  “So he died rich, in Locarno—beautiful place; I stayed with him two summers as a boy. His will was probated in Switzerland and the US Revenue Service could not touch it.

  “Most of it was a trust with its nature known to his offspring before his death or I would not have been named Zebadiah.

  “Female descendants got pro-rata shares of income with no strings attached but males had to have first names starting with ‘Z’—and even that got them not one Swiss franc; there was a ‘Root, hog, or die!’ clause. Zachariah believed in taking care of daughters, but sons and grandsons had to go out and scratch, with no help from their fathers, until they had earned and saved on their own—or accumulated without going to jail—assets equal to one pro-rata share of the capital sum of the trust before they shared in the trust’s income.”

  “Sexism,” said Aunt Hilda. “Raw, unadulterated sexism. Any FemLib gal would sneer at his dirty old money, on those terms.”

  “Would you have refused it, Sharpie?”

  “Me? Zebbie dear, are you feverish? I would have both greedy hands out. I’m strong for women’s rights but no fanatic. Sharpie wants to be pampered and that’s what men are best at—their natural function.”

  “Pop, do you need help in coping with her?”

  “No, son. I like pampering Hilda. I don’t see you abusing my daughter.”

  “I don’t dare; you told me she’s vicious at karate.”

  (I am good at karate; Pop made sure that I learned all the dirty fighting possible.)

  “On my graduation from high school my father had a talk with me. ‘Zeb,’ he told me. ‘The time has come. I’ll put you through any school you choose. Or you can take what you have saved, strike out on your own, and try to qualify for a share in your grandfather’s will. Suit yourself, I shan’t influence you.’

  “Folks, I had to think. My father’s younger brother was past forty and still hadn’t qualified. The size of the trust made a pro-rata of its assets amount to a requirement that a male descendant had to get rich on his own—well-to-do at least—whereupon he was suddenly twice as rich. But with over half of this country’s population living on the taxes of the lesser number it is not as easy to get rich as it was in Grandpa’s day.

  “Turn down a paid-for education at Princeton, or MIT? Or go out and try to get rich with nothing but a high school education?—I hadn’t learned much in high school; I had majored in girls.

  “So I had to think hard and long. Almost ten seconds. I left home next day with one suitcase and a pitiful sum of money.

  “Wound up on campus that had two things to recommend it: an Aerospace ROTC that would pick up part of my expenses, and a Phys. Ed. department willing to award me a jockstrap scholarship in exchange for daily bruises and contusions, plus all-out effort whenever we played. I took the deal.”

  “What did you play?” asked my father.

  “Football, basketball, and track—they would have demanded more had they been able to figure a way to do it.”

  “I had thought you were going to mention fencing.”

  “No, that’s another story. These did not quite close the gap. So I also waited tables for meals—food so bad the cockroaches ate out. But that closed the gap, and I added to it by tutoring in mathematics. That gave me my start toward piling up money to qualify.”

  I asked, “Did tutoring math pay enough to matter? I tutored math before Mama died; the hourly rate was low.”

  “Not that sort of tutoring, Princess. I taught prosperous young optimists not to draw to inside straights, and that stud poker is not a game of chance, but that craps is, controlled by mathematical laws that cannot be flouted with impunity. To quote Grandfather Zachariah, ‘A man who bets on greed and dishonesty won’t be wrong too often.’ There is an amazingly high percentage of greedy people and it is even easier to win from a dishonest gambler than it is from an honest one … and neither is likely to know the odds at craps, especially side bets, or all of the odds in poker, in particular how odds change according to the number of players, where one is seated in relation to the dealer, and how to calculate changes as cards are exposed in stud.

  “That was also how I quit drinking, my darling, except for special celebrations. In every ‘friendly’ game some players contribute, some take a profit; a player determined to take a profit must be neither drunk nor tired. Pop, the shadows are growing long—I don’t think anybody wants to know how I got a worthless doctorate.”

  “I do!” I put in.

  “Me, too!” echoed Aunt Hilda.

  “Son, you’re outvoted.”

  “Okay. Two years active duty after I graduated. Sky jockeys are even more optimistic than students and have more money—meanwhile I learned more math and engineering. Was sent inactive just in time to be called up again for the Spasm War. Didn’t get hurt; I was safer than civilians. But that kept me on another year even though fighting was mostly over before I reported in. That made me a veteran, with benefits. I went to Manhattan and signed up for school again. Doctoral candidate. School of Education. Not serious at first, simply intending to use my veteran’s benefits while enjoying the benefits of being a student—and devote most of my time to piling up cash to qualify for the trust.

  “I knew that the stupidest students, the silliest professors, and the worst bull courses are concentrated in schools of education.

  “By signing for large-class evening lectures and the unpopular eight a.m. classes I figured I could spend most of my time finding out how the stock market ticked. I did, by working there, before I risked a dime.

  “Eventually I had to pick a research problem or give up the advantages of being a student. I was sick of a school in which the pie was all meringue and no filling, but I stuck, as I knew how to cope within which the answers are matters of opinion and the opinion that counts is that of the professor. And how to cope with those large-class evening lectures: buy the lecture notes. Read everything that professor ever published. Don’t cut too often and when you do show up, get there early, sit front row center, be certain the prof catches your eye every time he looks your way—by never taking your eyes off him. Ask one question you know he can answer because you’ve picked it out of his published papers—and state your name in asking a question. Luckily ‘Zebadiah Carter’ is a name easy to remember. Family, I got straight-A’s in both required courses and seminars … because I did not study ‘education,’ I studied professors of education.

  “But I still had to make that ‘original contribution to human knowledge’ without which a candidate may not be awarded a doctor’s degree in most so-called disciplines … and the few that don’t require it are a tough row to hoe.

  “I studied my faculty committee before letting myself be tied down to a research problem … not only reading everything each had published but also buying their publications or paying the library to make copies of out-of-print papers.”

  My husband took me by my shoulders. “Dejah Thoris, here follows the title of my dissertation. You can have your divorce on your own terms.”

  “Zebadiah, don’t talk that way!”

  “Then brace yourself. An Ad-Hoc Inquiry Concerning th
e Optimization of the Infrastructure of Primary Educational Institutions at the Interface Between Administration and Instruction, with Special Attention to Group Dynamics Desiderata.”

  “Zebbie! What does that mean?”

  “It means nothing, Hilda.”

  “Zeb, quit kidding our ladies. Such a title would never be accepted.”

  “Jake, it seems certain that you have never taken a course in a school of education.”

  “Well … no. Teaching credentials are not required at university level but—”

  “But me no ‘buts,’ Pop. I have a copy of my dissertation; you can check its authenticity. While that paper totally lacks meaning, it is a literary gem in the sense in which a successful forging of an ‘old master’ is itself a work of art. It is loaded with buzz words. The average length of sentences is eighty-one words. The average word length, discounting ‘of,’ ‘a,’ ‘the,’ and other syntactical particles, is eleven-plus letters in slightly under four syllables. The bibliography is longer than the dissertation and cites three papers of each member of my committee and four of the chairman, and those citations are quoted in part—while avoiding any mention of matters on which I knew that members of the committee held divergent (but equally stupid) opinions.

  “But the best touch was to get permission to do field work in Europe and have it count toward time on campus; half the citations were in foreign languages, ranging from Finnish to Croatian—and the translated bits invariably agreed with the prejudices of my committee. It took careful quoting out of context to achieve this, but it had the advantage that the papers were unlikely to be on campus and my committee were not likely to go to the trouble of looking them up even if they were. Most of them weren’t at home in other languages, even easy ones like French, German, and Spanish.

  “But I did not waste time on phony field work; I simply wanted a trip to Europe at student air fares and the use of student hostels—dirt-cheap way to travel. And a visit to the trustees of Grandpa’s fund.