Robert A. Heinlein: In Dialogue With His Century

by Robert A. Heinlein

  And his other efforts were bearing fruit, too: L. Sprague de Camp was over his case of whooping cough; he came back from a three-week vacation in Florida and passed his physical on May 3. Scoles put in a request for his services. There would be a two-month wait until the next session of the Naval Training School started at Dartmouth College. In the meantime, Scoles asked de Camp to take a civilian job as Assistant Mechanical Engineer. He would work at the same grade as Heinlein until he graduated the Training School and was commissioned a full lieutenant—a grade higher than Heinlein had been retired at eight years earlier. De Camp was an officer in the Navy, and Heinlein was a mere civilian engineer. Never mind: it was war work.

  I have today [May 11, 1942] accepted a civil service appointment as a mechanical engineer at the Naval Aircraft Factory, Navy Yard, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. Have notified 11th Naval Dist. to stop retired pay.47

  23

  “DO WITH THY HEART WHAT THY HANDS FIND TO DO …”

  The physical plant of the Aeronautical Materials Lab (AML) was not prepossessing: several hangarlike buildings separated by unpaved stretches that became innavigable mudflats during the rainy season. The distances between the buildings were so great that they kept racks of bicycles outside the buildings, and everyone used them for basic transportation around the Yard. Heinlein commented wryly:

  A naval officer of rank, years, and poundage on a bicycle is a touching sight. And … visualize me in business suit, necktie, and hat pedaling with dignity up to the Commandant’s office. Also riding without using the handle bars. Oh, I’m a gallus snapper all right!1

  People did not drive, even between widely separated buildings: by 1942, gasoline rationing was already in effect. Five gallons per week was the ordinary ration, and Heinlein would not indulge in the various rationalizations that could have allowed him a bigger allowance. Nor would he countenance others doing so: gasoline was rationed because it was needed for the war effort, and nothing, he felt, must get in the way of that. This was one subject about which he had no sense of humor at all.

  One of his coworkers, Joel Charles, cut off the paper tags from tea bags one day as a gag and offered to sell “T” stamps—gasoline ration—to Heinlein in a public hallway, a black market transaction. Years later, Charles recalled the incident to Heinlein: “You unwrapped them, took one look, then handed them back very disdainfully with the remark, ‘you’re lucky they weren’t real.’ My ‘joke’ had all the impact of a collapsed dirigible.”2

  Sugar and whiskey were also rationed, but Cuba Libres were Heinlein’s favorite drink (made with rum and Coca-Cola),3 so he was not seriously compromised in that (so long as the Coca-Cola Company could finagle enough cane syrup to get by).

  Nor was public transportation an option. There was subway service in Philadelphia, but it did not go all the way to the Navy Yard. You had to take a shuttle bus from the subway. “Robert told me,” Virginia Heinlein recalled, “that [the Philadelphia City Fathers] had stolen the money for the subway continuation down to the Navy Yard.”4 Philadelphia’s municipal politics had never seriously been challenged by reformers, operating instead by good, old-fashioned graft.5 In the meantime, commuters carpooled to the Navy Yard from the suburbs.

  Within the buildings, there was an awe-inspiring bustle of activity. The ground floor was a huge, open shop, with gantry cranes rumbling overhead, conducting engine tests (very loud) and structural stress tests.6 A wing test was especially exciting and always drew a crowd of sidewalk superintendents as they crushed the wing or broke it literally in two.7

  The floor above was a large room with dozens of desks, each one inhabited by a person who was supposedly an expert in his or her subject. Heinlein was going to have one of those desks—if he could get the intradepartmental squabbling over him under control. Once his availability was announced, there was a tug-of-war over his assignment—flattering but also annoying because he couldn’t get down to work until the various department and section and subsection heads got their priorities straight.8

  Heinlein’s immediate assignment was to supervise the new cold-andpressure chamber for the AML’s high-altitude projects, which included the creation of a “high-altitude pressure suit”—the prototype of a space suit. The new altitude chamber was a white-painted steel cylinder about the size of a large steam locomotive boiler. He also supervised installation and operational tests for the Cold Room—a large, cubical, Freon-cooled chamber. Everyone then had to undergo medically supervised tests for resistance to anoxia (oxygen deprivation). L. Sprague de Camp described the experience:

  We sat on a bench in this insulated steel cylinder with oxygen masks in our hands. As the pressure fell, corresponding to altitudes of ten thousand feet, twenty thousand feet, and so on, I noticed that the white paint on the walls of the chamber seemed to turn yellow, while the hiss of air in the pipes seemed to sound like church bells. Before anyone passed out, the medical officer had us don our masks, whereupon the wall turned white again and the church bells ceased.9

  But Heinlein was not even allowed to take the test: the flight surgeon eliminated him just on the basis of his medical records. Sprague de Camp took over the high-altitude projects when he returned from Officer Training School.

  Heinlein was reassigned where he could give some more attention to his secondary duties: hiring engineers. He continued his recruiting efforts among the science-fiction writers. John Campbell wrote him in mid-May that L. Ron Hub bard was in New York, wounded, and he might be available, since he was a civil engineer.10 But Hubbard quickly obtained an assignment captaining a subchaser, and that took him to the West Coast and to San Francisco—though the Kuttners reported a Hubbard sighting on the streets of Los Angeles one day in July:

  He mentioned meeting you [Heinleins] and in flattering terms I shan’t repeat for fear of turning your heads. Isn’t he wonderful and astonishing? We have the strange faculty of meeting him in the middle of the sidewalk when neither of us knows the other is in town. It’s happened twice now.11

  The AML was expanding so rapidly that Heinlein had to recruit engineers everywhere he could—a very scarce commodity when all the young men were in the services. But he knew there would be an untapped source: he spent the last months of the academic year scouting technical schools all over the East, looking for female engineers. Female engineers would be draftexempt. He amused himself between interviews checking—and refuting (to his satisfaction)—Doc Smith’s idea that a woman could have either brains or beauty, but when he saw at first hand the unfair treatment women were accorded by universities, he became incensed. 12 At the University of Delaware, he found that female engineering candidates were not even permitted into the School of Engineering.

  I almost went through the roof … then took nasty pleasure in chewing out the President of the University in the presence of a large group of people, by telling him that his University’s medieval policies had deprived the country of trained engineers at a time when the very life of his country depended on such people.13

  Between trips, the work piled on. Scoles kept him on administrative and personnel work because everyone could see that “his technical competence, managerial ability, and ability to relate to others placed him in a class by himself.”14 By July, when the high-altitude chamber gushed clouds of chill fog into the humid Philadelphia air, Heinlein was buried in paperwork, suffering from a constant backache and kidney problems, sleep deprivation, and incipient exhaustion—and frankly depressed about the whole situation:

  I hate Philadelphia, I hate this blasted, hot, humid, mosquito infested climate, and—Lord help me—I hate my job. There is plenty of important work being done here but I am not doing it. Instead I do the unimportant work in order that others with truly important things to do may not be bothered with it. Necessary and useful, but I dislike it. I happen to be cursed with the sort of ability that makes the perfect private secretary, the ability to attend to multitudinous details for other people, picayune but necessary details, none of which interest
me and none of which use up any important part of my brain. I see that reports get out, I see that letters are written on time, I soothe the feelings of senile, half-witted, permanentappointment civil service clerks when the boss wants to do something not included in their sacred bureaucratic procedures. I write memos requesting copies from General Files of directives written months or even years before in order to prove to timorous functionaries that we really are permitted to do something we intend to do anyhow. I count gas masks, or order them to be counted, and report that someone has stolen one pair of rubber boots from one of the air raid lockers. (That presents a really nice problem in the inanities of administration, Air raid equipment can not be locked up, else its purpose is defeated, yet it is government property and must be accounted for.)

  Over it all and greatly contributing to my malaise hangs the gloom of a war which isn’t going any too well, which at the moment we seem to be losing. I have no doubt that we will win in the end but after how long and at what cost? I don’t expect the high command to confide in me but I am beginning to wonder when we are to read of something better than strategic retreats, something better than careful explanations of why a second front cannot be opened.

  No, my morale isn’t so hot—but I have and will retain a grim determination to hang on and do this job the best I can. But I don’t have to like it and don’t. I know that it is a privilege to serve and I know that I am damned lucky not to be in a fox hole somewhere, or clinging to a life raft—but I still think Philadelphia stinks and I wish to Christ they would retire everybody over fifty!15

  They needed a vacation. Leslyn had not been able to get the kind of factory work she wanted and so had been taking business courses downtown to sharpen her administrative skills. But they got a three-day weekend break from the overtime at the end of July, and visited with the Campbells.

  Sprague de Camp was at Officer Training School in the summer, but he had asked his wife, Catherine, to find them a place to live in Philadelphia. Burdened with a toddler (Lyman), she appealed to the Heinleins for help in the nearly impossible task of finding a living space for the three of them plus her uncle, Frank Badeau.16 In July and August, the Heinleins put Catherine up in their tiny apartment in Lansdowne.17 Eventually, a local real-estate agent told her of an attic apartment in a big house a block away from the Heinleins’ apartment. It was the Pennock mansion, the “family seat” of a wealthy florist, now deceased. The widow Pennock wanted social references from Catherine, which was somewhat startling. Catherine’s references must have been satisfactory: by the time Sprague returned from OTS in September, she had moved Lyman and Uncle Frank into the garret and started homemaking.18

  The Heinleins and the de Camps spent many of their off-hours together (not that there were many—wartime work schedules called for six days a week), picnicking on the lawn of the mansion or walking the two miles into Philadelphia to visit with Isaac Asimov and his new wife, Gertrude.

  Leslyn completed her business courses—and promptly got a job as Junior Radio Inspector at the Navy Yard. She was not in the same building as Robert, but they could commute to and from, and eat lunch together. The Plastics & Adhesives section, where Heinlein wound up, made a point of taking lunch together as a group at the cafeteria, which they called “Ulcer Gulch.” Leslyn joined them.

  The table was entertaining for the talk, if not for the fare—most often a stew made from tripe and other mystery meats better left uninquired-after, or scrapple, a local specialty that is, to put it delicately, not to everyone’s taste. Isaac Asimov, who joined the Ulcer Gulch crowd a year later, in the summer of 1943 (after his wife left for a visit with family in Canada),19 immortalized Ulcer Gulch.

  Deprived of his sandwiches and his lunchtime reading, Asimov complained continuously, in a deliberately comic way—though not without justification, in fact—about the food. Heinlein would not countenance morale-destroying grumbling.

  When … I spoke eloquently of cardboard potatoes and wilted lettuce and middle-aged roast beef, Heinlein passed a ukase to the effect that from then on anyone who complained about the food would have to put a nickel into the kitty. (When enough had accumulated, I think he was going to buy a war bond.)

  I objected bitterly, for I knew it was aimed at me. I said, “Well, then, suppose I figure out a way of complaining about the food that isn’t complaining? Will you call it off?”

  “Yes,” he said.

  After that, I had a mission in luncheon life that took my mind off the food, at least. I was going to find a way of complaining that couldn’t be objected to. My best solo attempt, I think, was one time when I pretended to be sawing away ineffectually at a dead slab of haddock and asked with an innocent air of curiosity, “Is there such a thing as tough fish?”

  “That will be five cents, Isaac,” said Heinlein.

  “It’s only a point of information, Bob.”

  “That will be five cents, Isaac. The implication is clear.”

  Since Bob was judge, jury, and executioner, that was that.

  But then someone new joined the table who did not know the game that was going on. He took one mouthful of some ham that had been pickled in formaldehyde and said, “Boy, this food is awful.”

  Whereupon I rose to my feet, lifted one arm dramatically, and said, “Gentlemen, I disagree with every word my friend here has said, but I will defend with my life his right to say it.”

  And the game of fine came to an end.20

  Even after his transfer to engineering, Heinlein continued to work as a kind of unofficial personnel director for the whole installation, according to J. Hartley Bowen, a section chief in “another part of the [Air Materials] Laboratory.” 21 The personnel mix was a potentially explosive combination of new-minted engineers fresh out of college, a grab bag of naval officers from ensign to commander, on temporary rotation, and well-pickled civilian engineers. The mix needed a lot of stabilization. Civilian and Navy officers—particularly those trained in the old, aristocratic traditions of the naval officer class—did not mix well. Heinlein was constantly watching out for those instantaneous tips of emotional balance that could erupt into open conflict.

  Sprague de Camp was very much aware of this problem. When he came back a commissioned lieutenant, he noted the friction he seemed to be at the center of and asked Heinlein for advice. Thoughtfully, Heinlein told him to “clip those beetling brows.”22 He could speak more freely with a colleague from Astounding than he might with one of the other engineers. De Camp had bushy eyebrows, but that’s not what he meant: Heinlein’s advice was to be more pleasant, not to glower so much, and perhaps insist less on the perquisites of his rank. Naval-officer aristocracy came too naturally to de Camp. (The advice seems to have fallen on deaf ears, as he was still observed to be overly punctilious two years later.23)

  As with many ministerial virtues, Heinlein’s hands-on personnel micromanagement had its own set of defects, and the more stable individuals sometimes bore the brunt of the arrangements: Heinlein once browbeat Isaac Asimov into volunteering to work on Yom Kippur, taking advantage of Asimov’s amiable desire to help his Jewish coworkers arrange to have Yom Kippur off instead of Christmas. In a way, it was a compliment to young Isaac—not that he could be manipulated this way, but that Heinlein thought he was emotionally strong enough to bear some of the burden of compromises.

  In September, they finally got some word about Leslyn’s family in the Philippines. Bill Corson, who had contacts in the consular service, sent them a postcard: “Whole Hubbard gang interned (as of Feb.) Santo Tomas University. Nothing since, but will check anon.”24 The “whole Hubbard gang” meant Keith and her two boys. Her husband, Mark Hubbard, had been on another island. He had simply vanished.

  By October, winter was coming on, and Heinlein’s schedule was no more settled than it had been in the summer. He decided it was not practical for him to try to commute by carpool from Lansdowne, so he found a small apartment on South Hicks—a one-block street south and west of Rittenhouse Squ
are, close to the railyard. This was a minor miracle in overcrowded Philadelphia (but his work recruiting out-of-state engineers had undoubtedly given him some expertise in handling housing problems).

  “The Unpleasant Profession of Jonathan Hoag” appeared in Unknown Worlds, under a new pseudonym, John Riverside.

  That fall, Buddy Scoles’s tour of duty was up, and just before Thanksgiving he was transferred somewhere on the West Coast. Nobody knew exactly where anyone went in those days: everyone tried to be conscientious about unnecessary talking. Heinlein himself was so tight-lipped that many of the people he associated with on a daily basis never knew exactly what projects he was working on.25

  His new boss was “a nice guy whom I knew slightly in the Lexington a good many years back.”26 But the change introduced another element of uncertainty into Heinlein’s work—less administrative work and more engineering. He was very rusty as an engineer.

  Leslyn, on the other hand, was happy with her factory job, though she worked every other Sunday and went at it, perhaps, too intensely for the good of her health. “The work is quite hard on her,” he told John Arwine. “But I think she can stand it.”27 The strain on Leslyn was obvious, too, to Forrest Ackerman, with whom they were both corresponding:

  [T]his was so serious to her, that she just knocked herself out twenty-four hours a day in the war industry, I believe, just doing everything she could to shorten the misery of her sister. The Heinleins during WWII had no use for anybody who wasn’t engaged in the war effort, particularly as a soldier or marine or airman.28