The Door Into Summer

by Robert A. Heinlein

  F. V. Heinicke!

  “Heinicke” was Ricky’s grandmother’s name...I knew it, I was certain of it! I didn’t know why I knew it. But I felt that it had been buried in my head and had not popped up until I read it again. I had probably seen it or heard it at some time from Ricky or Miles, or it was even possible that I had met the old gal at Sandia. No matter, the name, seen in the Times, had fitted a forgotten piece of information in my brain and then I knew.

  Only I still had to prove it. I had to make sure that “F. V. Heinicke” stood for “Frederica Virginia Heinicke.”

  I was shaking with excitement, anticipation, and fear. In spite of well-established new habits I tried to zip my clothes instead of sticking the seams together and made a botch of getting dressed. But a few minutes later I was down in the hall where the phone booth was—I didn’t have an instrument in my room or I would have used it; I was simply a supplementary listing for the house phone. Then I had to run back up again when I found that I had forgotten my phone-credit ID card—I was really disorganized.

  Then, when I had it, I was trembling so that I could hardly fit it into the slot. But I did and signaled “Service.”

  “Circuit desired?”

  “Uh, I want the Riverside Sanctuary. That’s in Riverside Borough.”

  “Searching...holding...circuit free. We are signaling.”

  The screen lighted up at last and a man looked grumpily at me. “You must have the wrong phasing. This is the sanctuary. We’re closed for the night.”

  I said, “Hang on, please. If this is the Riverside Sanctuary, you’re just who I want.”

  “Well, what do you want? At this hour?”

  “You have a client there, F. V. Heinicke, a new withdrawal. I want to know—”

  He shook his head. “We don’t give out information about clients over the phone. And certainly not in the middle of the night. You’d better call after ten o’clock. Better yet, come here.”

  “I will, I will. But I want to know just one thing. What do the initials ‘F. V.’ stand for?”

  “I told you that—”

  “Will you listen, please? I’m not just butting in; I’m a Sleeper myself. Sawtelle. Withdrawn just lately. So I know all about the ‘confidential relationship’ and what’s proper. Now you’ve already published this client’s name in the paper. You and I both know that the sanctuaries always give the papers the full names of clients withdrawn and committed...but the papers trim the given names to initials to save space. Isn’t that true?”

  He thought about it. “Could be.”

  “Then what possible harm is there in telling me what the initials ‘F. V.’ stand for?”

  He hesitated still longer. “None, I guess, if that’s all you want. It’s all you’re going to get. Hold on.”

  He passed out of the screen, was gone for what seemed like an hour, came back holding a card. “The light’s poor,” he said, peering at it. “ ‘Frances’ —no, ‘Frederica.’ ‘Frederica Virginia.’ ”

  My ears roared and I almost fainted. “Thank God!”

  “You all right?”

  “Yes. Thank you. Thank you from the bottom of my heart. Yes, I’m all right.”

  “Hmm. I guess there’s no harm in telling you one more thing. It might save you a trip. She’s already checked out.”

  IX

  I COULD HAVE saved time by hiring a cab to jump me to Riverside, but I was handicapped by lack of cash. I was living in West Hollywood; the nearest twenty-four-hour bank was downtown at the Grand Circle of the Ways. So first I rode the Ways downtown and went to the bank for cash. One real improvement I had not appreciated up to then was the universal checkbook system; with a single cybernet as clearinghouse for the whole city and radioactive coding on my checkbook, I got cash laid in my palm as quickly there as I could have gotten it at my home bank across from Hired Girl, Inc.

  Then I caught the express Way for Riverside. When I reached the sanctuary it was just daylight.

  There was nobody there but the night technician I had talked to and his wife, the night nurse. I’m afraid I didn’t make a good impression. I had a day’s beard, I was wild-eyed, I probably had a beer breath, and I had not worked out a consistent framework of lies.

  Nevertheless, Mrs. Larrigan, the night nurse, was sympathetic and helpful. She got a photograph out of file and said, “Is this your cousin, Mr. Davis?”

  It was Ricky. There was no doubt about it, it was Ricky! Oh, not the Ricky I had known, for this was not a little girl but a mature young woman, twentyish or older, with a grown-up hairdo and a grown-up and very beautiful face. She was smiling.

  But her eyes were unchanged and the ageless pixie quality of her face that had made her so delightful a child was still there. It was the same face, matured, filled out, grown beautiful, but unmistakable.

  The stereo blurred, my eyes had filled with tears. “Yes,” I managed to choke. “Yes. That’s Ricky.”

  Mr. Larrigan said, “Nancy, you shouldn’t have showed him that.”

  “Pooh, Hank, what harm is there in showing a photograph?”

  “You know the rules.” He turned to me. “Mister, as I told you on the phone, we don’t give out information about clients. You come back here at ten o’clock when the administration office opens.”

  “Or you could come back at eight,” his wife added. “Dr. Bernstein will be here then.”

  “Now, Nancy, you just keep quiet. If he wants information, the man to see is the director. Bernstein hasn’t any more business answering questions than we have. Besides, she wasn’t even Bernstein’s patient.”

  “Hank, you’re being fussy. You men like rules just for the sake of rules. If he’s in a hurry to see her, he could be in Brawley by ten o’clock.” She turned to me. “You come back at eight. That’s best. My husband and I can’t really tell you anything anyhow.”

  “What’s this about Brawley? Did she go to Brawley?”

  If her husband had not been there I think she would have told me more. She hesitated and he looked stern. She answered, “You see Dr. Bernstein. If you haven’t had breakfast, there’s a real nice place just down the street.”

  So I went to the “real nice place” (it was) and ate and used their wash-room and bought a tube of Beardgo from a dispenser in the washroom and a shirt from another dispenser and threw away the one I had been wearing. By the time I returned I was fairly respectable.

  But Larrigan must have bent Dr. Bernstein’s ear about me. He was a young man, resident in training, and he took a very stiff line. “Mr. Davis, you claim to be a Sleeper yourself. You must certainly know that there are criminals who make a regular business of preying on the gullibility and lack of orientation of a newly awakened Sleeper. Most Sleepers have considerable assets, all of them are unworldly in the world in which they find themselves, they are usually lonely and a bit scared—a perfect setup for confidence men.”

  “But all I want to know is where she went! I’m her cousin. But I took the Sleep before she did, so I didn’t know she was going to.”

  “They usually claim to be relatives.” He looked at me closely. “Haven’t I seen you before?”

  “I strongly doubt it. Unless you just happened to pass me on the Ways, downtown.” People are always thinking they’ve seen me before; I’ve got one of the Twelve Standard Faces, as lacking in uniqueness as one peanut in a sackful. “Doctor, how about phoning Dr. Albrecht at Sawtelle Sanctuary and checking on me?”

  He looked judicial. “You come back and see the director. He can call the Sawtelle Sanctuary...or the police, whichever he sees fit.”

  So I left. Then I may have made a mistake. Instead of coming back to see the director and very possibly getting the exact information I needed (with the aid of Albrecht’s vouching for me), I hired a jumpcab and went straight to Brawley.

  It took three days to pick up her trail in Brawley. Oh, she had lived there and so had her grandmother; I found that out quickly. But the grandmother had died twenty years earlier a
nd Ricky had taken the Sleep. Brawley is a mere hundred thousand compared with the seven million of Great Los Angeles; the twenty-year-old records were not hard to find. It was the trail less than a week old that I had trouble with.

  Part of the trouble was that she was with someone; I had been looking for a young woman traveling alone. When I found out she had a man with her I thought anxiously about the crooks preying on Sleepers that Bernstein had lectured me about and got busier than ever.

  I followed a false lead to Calexico, went back to Brawley, started over, picked it up again, and traced them as far as Yuma.

  At Yuma I gave up the chase, for Ricky had gotten married. What I saw on the register at the county clerk’s office there shocked me so much that I dropped everything and jumped a ship for Denver, stopping only to mail a card to Chuck telling him to clear out my desk and pack the stuff in my room.

  I STOPPED IN DENVER just long enough to visit a dental-supply house. I had not been in Denver since it had become the capital—after the Six Weeks War, Miles and I had gone straight to California—and the place stunned me. Why, I couldn’t even find Colfax Avenue. I had understood that everything essential to the government was buried back under the Rockies. If that is so, then there must be an awful lot of nonessentials still aboveground; the place seemed even more crowded than Great Los Angeles.

  At the dental-supply house I bought ten kilograms of gold, isotope 197, in the form of fourteen-gauge wire. I paid $86.10 a kilogram for it, which was decidedly too much, since gold of engineering quality was selling for around $70 a kilogram, and the transaction mortally wounded my only thousand-dollar bill. But engineering gold comes either in alloys never found in nature, or with isotopes 196 and 198 present, or both, depending on the application. For my purposes I wanted fine gold, undetectable from gold refined from natural ore, and I did not want gold that might burn my pants off if I got cozy with it—the overdose at Sandia had given me a healthy respect for radiation poisoning.

  I wound the gold wire around my waist and went to Boulder. Ten kilograms is about the weight of a well-filled weekend bag and that much gold bulks almost exactly the same as a quart of milk. But the wire form of it made it bulk more than it would have solid; I can’t recommend it as a girdle. But gold slugs would have been still harder to carry, and this way it was always with me.

  Dr. Twitchell was still living there, though no longer working; he was professor emeritus and spent most of his waking hours in the bar of the faculty club. It took me four days to catch him in another bar, since the faculty club was closed to outlanders like me. But when I did, it turned out to be easy to buy him a drink.

  He was a tragic figure in the classic Greek meaning, a great man—a very great man—gone to ruin. He should have been up there with Einstein and Bohr and Newton; as it was, only a few specialists in field theory were really aware of the stature of his work. Now when I met him his brilliant mind was soured with disappointment, dimmed with age, and soggy with alcohol. It was like visiting the ruins of what had been a magnificent temple after the roof has fallen in, half the columns knocked down, and vines have grown over it all.

  Nevertheless, he was brainier on the skids than I ever was at my best. I’m smart enough myself to appreciate real genius when I meet it.

  The first time I saw him he looked up, looked straight at me and said, “You again.”

  “Sir?”

  “You used to be one of my students, didn’t you?”

  “Why, no, sir, I never had that honor.” Ordinarily when people think they have seen me before, I brush it off; this time I decided to exploit it if I could. “Perhaps you are thinking of my cousin, Doctor—class of ’86. He studied under you at one time.”

  “Possibly. What did he major in?”

  “He had to drop out without a degree, sir. But he was a great admirer of yours. He never missed a chance to tell people he had studied under you.”

  You can’t make an enemy by telling a mother her child is beautiful. Dr. Twitchell let me sit down and presently let me buy him a drink. The greatest weakness of the glorious old wreck was his professional vanity. I had salvaged part of the four days before I could scrape up an acquaintance with him by memorizing everything there was about him in the university library, so I knew what papers he had written, where he had presented them, what earned and honorary degrees he held, and what books he had written. I had tried one of the latter, but I was already out of my depth on page nine, although I did pick up a little patter from it.

  I let him know that I was a camp follower of science myself; right at present I was researching for a book: Unsung Geniuses.

  “What’s it going to be about?”

  I admitted diffidently that I thought it would be appropriate to start the book with a popular account of his life and works...provided he would be willing to relax a bit from his well-known habit of shunning publicity. I would have to get a lot of my material from him, of course.

  He thought it was claptrap and could not think of such a thing. But I pointed out that he had a duty to posterity and he agreed to think it over. By the next day he simply assumed that I was going to write his biography—not just a chapter, a whole book. From then on he talked and talked and talked and I took notes...real notes; I did not dare try to fool him by faking, as he sometimes asked me to read back.

  But he never mentioned time travel.

  Finally I said, “Doctor, isn’t it true that if it had not been for a certain colonel who was once stationed here you would have had the Nobel Prize hands down?”

  He cursed steadily for three minutes with magnificent style. “Who told you about him?”

  “Uh, Doctor, when I was doing research writing for the Department of Defense—I’ve mentioned that, haven’t I?”

  “No.”

  “Well, when I was, I heard the whole story from a young Ph.D. working in another section. He had read the report and he said it was perfectly clear that you would be the most famous name in physics today...if you had been permitted to publish your work.”

  “Hrrmph! That much is true.”

  “But I gathered that it was classified...by order of this Colonel, uh, Plushbottom.”

  “Thrushbotham. Thrushbotham, sir. A fat, fatuous, flatulent, foot-kissing fool incompetent to find his hat with it nailed to his head. Which it should have been.”

  “It seems a great pity.”

  “What is a pity, sir? That Thrushbotham was a fool? That was nature’s doing, not mine.”

  “It seems a pity that the world should be deprived of the story. I understand that you are not allowed to speak of it.”

  “Who told you that? I say what I please!”

  “That was what I understood, sir...from my friend in the Department of Defense.”

  “Hrrrmph!”

  That was all I got out of him that night. It took him a week to decide to show me his laboratory.

  Most of the building was now used by other researchers, but his time laboratory he had never surrendered, even though he did not use it now; he fell back on its classified status and refused to let anyone else touch it, nor had he permitted the apparatus to be torn down. When he let me in, the place smelled like a vault that has not been opened in years.

  He had had just enough drinks not to give a damn, not so many but what he was still steady. His capacity was pretty high. He lectured me on the mathematics of time theory and temporal displacement (he didn’t call it “time travel”), but he cautioned me not to take notes. It would not have helped if I had, as he would start a paragraph with, “It is therefore obvious—” and go on from there to matters which may have been obvious to him and God but to no one else.

  When he slowed down I said, “I gathered from my friend that the one thing you had not been able to do was to calibrate it? That you could not tell the exact magnitude of the temporal displacement?”

  “What? Poppycock! Young man, if you can’t measure it, it’s not science.” He bubbled for a bit, like a teakettle, then w
ent on, “Here. I’ll show you.” He turned away and started making adjustments. All that showed of his equipment was what he called the “temporal locus stage” —just a low platform with a cage around it—and a control board which might have served for a steam plant or a low-pressure chamber. I’m fairly sure I could have studied out how to handle the controls had I been left alone to examine them, but I had been told sharply to stay away from them. I could see an eight-point Brown recorder, some extremely heavy-duty solenoid-actuated switches, and a dozen other equally familiar components, but it didn’t mean a thing without the circuit diagrams.

  He turned back to me and demanded, “Have you any change in your pocket?”

  I reached in and hauled out a handful. He glanced at it and selected two five-dollar pieces, mint new, the pretty green plastic hexagonals issued just that year. I could have wished that he had picked half fives, as I was running low.

  “Do you have a knife?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “Scratch your initials on each of them.”

  I did so. He then had me place them side by side on the stage. “Note the exact time. I have set the displacement for exactly one week, plus or minus six seconds.”

  I looked at my watch. Dr. Twitchell said, “Five... four... three... two... one... now!”

  I looked up from my watch. The coins were gone. I didn’t have to pretend that my eyes bugged out. Chuck had told me about a similar demonstration—but seeing it was another matter.

  Dr. Twitchell said briskly, “We will return here one week from tonight and wait for one of them to reappear. As for the other one—you saw both of them on the stage? You placed them there yourself?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “Where was I?”

  “At the control board, sir.” He had been a good fifteen feet from the nearest part of the cage around the stage and had not approached it since.

  “Very well. Come here.” I did so and he reached into a pocket. “Here’s one of your bits. You’ll get the other back a week from now.” He handed me a green five-dollar coin; it had my initials on it.