Robert A. Heinlein: In Dialogue With His Century

by Robert A. Heinlein

  • to the core group of atomic scientists who were fretting over the political and diplomatic implications of atomics in the postwar world.

  Heinlein could organize and bring these elements together, but he could not afford to get directly involved in any of these subprojects: when he got back to Los Angeles, there would be important political and propaganda work to do—the political end of this technical project, persuading the taxpayers to pay for it!—and for that, shaking his atomics stories loose from Street & Smith got moved several notches up on his list of priorities. He could no longer afford to be stymied by the kind of arbitrariness and indecisiveness Street & Smith had shown in the summer concerning the release of his story rights.

  Heinlein’s last day at NAES was on Friday, August 17; on Monday the twentieth he was in New York, at the Street & Smith offices, prepared to pound desks and make a general nuisance of himself until he got general releases on those stories.

  He had asked for those two releases in a telephone call to John Campbell shortly after the Hiroshima bomb had dropped.8 Street & Smith had simply ignored him for two weeks, apparently unwilling to let go of the rights it had acquired, in Heinlein’s opinion, by fraud9—and even with his personal guarantee that he would not sell to cut-rate competitors. (The last reprint deal he had set up, for “Life-Line,” just before the bomb was dropped, paid him as much for the story as Street & Smith had paid for the initial sale—hardly “cut-rate.”)

  Heinlein had to be very, very firm with Campbell: either he got those releases—now—or he would go over Campbell’s head, to Ralston, the managing Vice President of Street & Smith, and take up the whole sordid business, point by point. He got the releases—the only ones Street & Smith would give him then.

  This kind of personal confrontation was emotionally difficult for him, and only the fact that it was utterly necessary could have forced it on him now. Campbell, he knew, was caught in a bind, trying to accommodate him, both as a friend and as one of his most popular authors. Campbell wanted him writing for Astounding. But Campbell was also too ready an apologist for Street &

  Smith, too loyal an employee, making absurd “defenses” of the policies.10

  Heinlein had been putting off his difficulty with the John Campbell/Street & Smith relationship since 194111: he simply could no longer do business with Campbell and still maintain their friendship.12 Finding a good agent moved up on his list of priorities.

  The next day Heinlein was back in Philadelphia to finish packing up for the move. John and Doña Campbell would take the few household furnishings that were worth shipping, so he and Leslyn could fit almost everything they needed to take into Skylark IV. But he had one more good-bye to make before he took off.

  Ginny Gerstenfeld had been out of town for the last couple of—crowded—weeks. Her fiancé, George Harris, who was also her ice-skating partner, had come back from the South Pacific in the summer, and they had competed in the ice-skating championships in Lake Placid, New York. They placed second in ice-dancing, concentrating so intensely on the competition that they missed the news of the dropping of the bomb. When the Japanese surrender came, on August 14, George and she were the only Navy personnel in Lake Placid, so Gerstenfeld put on her uniform and went out marching with the Army.

  She was back in Philadelphia late in August and met Heinlein, to say good-bye. They talked a little about the bomb, about what atomics might mean in the future. “He left me on a street corner in Philadelphia with a kiss. Our first.”13

  Robert and Leslyn left Philadelphia in Skylark IV on August 23, 1945, stopping near Lewistown, Pennsylvania, where Robert wanted to rope in Charles Edwards, the chief accountant of the Baldwin Locomotive group of companies. Baldwin’s Standard Steel Division had extensive in-house experience in building the new jet and rocket engines, and the company had a history of advanced research in aeronautical materials.

  Edwards was receptive; to give him help convincing the Baldwin board of directors, Heinlein’s old boss at NAES, John Kean, would be approaching Frank Tatnall, the Baldwin-Southwark Research Director, about the project. Baldwin could put effective outside pressure on the Navy for a rocket program.

  Next stop: La Porte, Indiana, to see Doc Smith. Doc was enthusiastic about any sort of rocket research, and, so far as Heinlein was concerned, a perfect candidate for project manager: “Although he is fifty-five years old, he is a better man than I am, more energetic and with a faster mind … experienced and successful in the direction of research teams.”14

  By the time the Heinleins got to Indiana, however, Smith’s useful industrial contact was no more: he had gotten into an argument over Kingsbury Ordnance’s poor quality control and quit. Now he was working for Allis-Chalmers, as Assistant Chief Metallurgist—and Allis-Chalmers had no interest in rockets or in research of any kind. Farm machinery was their bailiwick.15

  But it was still a fruitful visit: Smith gave him a completely different strategic approach to atomics he hadn’t heard before. Heinlein set out his understanding of the current situation in a letter that month to John Arwine:

  As I see it, we finally finished off the war by plunging the globe and ourselves in particular into the greatest crisis, the most acute danger, in all history. I am not deploring it. I know that the discovery of atomic power was inevitable and I know that you can’t turn the clock back, nor turn sausage back into hog. It is here. We’ve got to face it and deal with it. I am overwhelmingly thankful that we got it first and that it was brought out into the open by the war. Now we have a fighting chance to save civilization as we know it and the very globe we stand on. If the Axis had gotten it first, we would have had no chance. It might have been a thousand years before freedom and human dignity would ever again have been known.

  But I am bitterly afraid of the way we may handle it. There are two crazy approaches to the matter which are beginning to be heard. The first says, “We got it. We’ll hang onto it. From now on they got to do what we tell them to” … The second crazy viewpoint regards the atomic bomb as just another weapon, powerful but bound to be subjected in time to an effective counter weapon, and that as a matter of fact things haven’t changed and let’s get back to normalcy and forget all about war.

  There is a third reaction, one of deploring the whole thing, of passing resolutions expressing regret that we ever used so barbarous a weapon, apologizing to the poor mistreated Japs, and calling on Congress to do away with the whole thing, tear up the records, make it a lost art, forever proscribed as forbidden knowledge.

  You might call these three types of dunderheads the bloody minded, the common or garden unimaginative stupid, and the custard head. God deliver us from all of them.16

  All right-minded people—of course Heinlein’s position—wanted to place atomic weaponry under international control.

  Smith distrusted the idea of international control and suggested instead that the United States should maintain a big military presence and “go it alone,” perhaps enforcing a pax americana.

  Heinlein did not agree, but Smith made cogent practical arguments, which Heinlein nevertheless thought might not be politically achievable: the arguments sounded too much like the prewar debates about arming Guam and were likely to be scotched by squeamishness about high taxes and the rush to “normalcy” and washing machines.17

  From La Porte, Robert and Leslyn went to Kansas City for a family visit with Louise and the three little Bacchi, and then on to Santa Fe, New Mexico, to see Robert Cornog.

  They had not heard from Cornog since April 1943. Heinlein’s work on getting the rights back from Street & Smith for “Blowups Happen” and “Solution Unsatisfactory” must have brought him back to mind: Cornog had given him the physics background for those stories. It was suspicious—the kind of suspicions Heinlein would not have voiced to anyone—that so many of the atomics men he had known by name or by reputation before the war quietly dropped out of sight. Cornog had popped up again at just that time: he had been working for the Manhattan Proj
ect,18 designing instrumentation for the bomb. He and Heinlein had arranged a quiet visit now that the lid of absolute secrecy was off. Cornog’s plans for the postwar world fit well with Heinlein’s: he was looking around for work in rockets and was quietly discussing such a project with an engineering firm in Pasadena.

  The rocket men in those days were sheerly brilliant, innovative. Progress could be expected to be meteoric. Cornog had known Jack Parsons for years, of course, but during the war, he had had a chance to work with Dr. Tsien Hsue-shen, the Chinese rocket scientist who had founded the Guggenheim Aeronautical Laboratory at Cal Tech (GALCIT) before the war, with Parsons, Frank Malina, and Theodore von Kármán. In 1944 GALCIT became the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, and Dr. Tsien would go on to work with the V-2 project in this country after the war. Dr. Tsien was one of the few people Heinlein had ever met whom he recognized immediately as smarter than he.19 Cornog introduced Robert and Leslyn as political operators to the group of Manhattan Project scientists who were worrying over the postwar implications of atomics. The scientists had already faced up to the hard facts of dealing with the genie they had let out of the bottle. “Well, they fell on our necks. They practically kissed us—at finding a layman of their own view point. We … found ourselves drafted into the position of unofficial political advisor for the nonce.”20

  Two years earlier, H. G. Wells had published a pamphlet, Phoenix, talking about the cutting edge of the massive coming revolution, as a fruition of his Open Conspiracy, articulated as early as 1926 in The World of William Clissold. These young men were the ones he was talking about, with their “clear, cold, hard realization of the essential rightness, and therefore the essential community, of their ideas.”21 Here was the fruit of Wells’s foresight, coming together before Heinlein’s eyes—humbling and inspiring at the same time: “The men who built the atom bomb asking us quite seriously what they should do next to achieve their social aims,” he wrote wonderingly. And then, “I was floored.” It was something worth giving your life to—and just the inspiration the Heinleins needed at this moment.

  Leslyn and I felt our hearts lifted up to discover how real, sincere, and conscientious was the feeling of responsibility these boys have for the power they have let loose in the world. There will never be an atomic war if they can help it.22

  The scientists’ particular problem at the moment was that they were gagged by the security restrictions—and they knew that anything they sent up “through channels” would get to Leslie Groves’s desk and be killed there. Heinlein’s recent experience with Navy bureaucracy suggested a way around the blockage: address any statements through channels directly to the Commander-in-Chief.

  None of them had thought of that approach. They had been organizing themselves for some time already and had worked out a consensus among the thousand or so scientists:

  We found, when we arrived, that they had formed an association, comprising an overwhelming majority of the professional men there, for the specific purpose of convincing congress and the country that such should be done. They propose that the so-called secret be made public, but that all atomics work throughout the globe be under the surveillance of international police, acting for a planetary super-government which would be armed with the atomic bomb. They say that atomics work is of such a nature that it cannot be concealed and therefore could be policed. They believe that the alternative is an armaments race between nations, each developing its own atomic weapons, each in fear of the other. If war came (as it would!) under such circumstances, we would be subjected to surprise attack which would destroy us in a matter of minutes.

  So far as I can see, I am forced to agree with them .23

  If the United States tried to hold on to bomb technology, it would be hated and feared as no other nation in history. “We will automatically be marked for destruction in a hundred secret conclaves,” Heinlein wrote.24

  The greatest danger, he thought, came from the smaller nations now that the basic research had been done and it was potentially a cheap weapon.

  Shucks … we could be wiped out by Switzerland, or Sweden—or Argentina … . I would judge that, using the Smyth report as a laboratory manual, ten million dollars and three years should enable any competent research team to build a workable bomb. Bolivia could afford it. Portugal could afford it.25

  The one state he did not at this time suspect was Soviet Russia. Uncle Joe had too much at stake to risk: “Forget Russia—she has the same overpowering reasons for wanting to keep the peace that we have. She is a ‘have’ nation. She can’t afford this new sort of war. She has too much to lose.”26 Dealing with Russia was a tactical necessity in making this whole scheme—as impractical as it sounded—work at all: once an arms race started, it could not be stopped; the one chance at survival was to stop the arms race before it got started:

  We have got to get along with Russia … . The help of Russia is indispensable to the setting up of a world police force. Right now, while we have the bomb, we might be able to talk business with her. Later on, when Russia has the bomb too, there is much less chance of getting them to give up their secretive, nationalistic ways and to surrender their own military might to a superstate.27

  But he was not sanguine about the realistic possibilities:

  Russia has reason to be suspicious of us. Twice since World War I the United States has invaded her for the open purpose of overthrowing the present government. For years we refused her diplomatic recognition and we still continue to subject her, throughout our newspapers, to an unbroken stream of abuse, lies, and suspicion. (That Russia has treated us badly in many ways is beside the point—I’m talking about why she mistrusts us. Why it will be so difficult to get her to go along no matter how generous and altruistic a scheme we may propose.) When you combine the suspicion Russia has of us with the suspicion that we have of Russia you get a combination which looks hopeless—unless both sides are utterly convinced that survival depends on it.28

  The dynamics of the Cold War, that had dawned on Robert so chillingly in 1940, with the writing of “Solution Unsatisfactory,” were a cold and present reality. Robert and Leslyn decided that their first priority was to help these dedicated young scientists ride the tiger. Robert immediately began to factor them into his plans.

  They were not able to visit the Trinity site itself, more than fifty miles southeast of Albuquerque—the entire area was still cordoned off—but Cornog gave them a small chunk of the bubbly, translucent green glass they were calling “Trinitite”—the sand fused into glass beneath the first atom bomb blast. Leslyn, Robert sensed, was afraid of it, and he handled it gingerly himself, since it was mildly radioactive. He kept it shielded in metal, in a brick fire-safe in their basement .29 The Trinity site was opened up by General Groves a few days after they left, on September 9, 1945. Already the ranchers forty to sixty miles from the Trinity site were reporting that their cattle had lost patches of hair on the sides exposed to the bomb blast or to the radioactive dust from it—the first victims of fallout. What they might find next April, when this generation started dropping calves, was a chilling thought.

  They stopped at Meteor Crater in Arizona—“an eerie, frightening place. I still want to go to the Moon, but, if it’s like this sample, I want a good bar handy.”30 The desolation might have served as local color for an article that was coming together in his mind—“Men in the Moon,” about placing atomic weapons research on the far side of the Moon.

  Then on to the coast by way of Boulder Dam, through Los Angeles, and down to Laguna Beach arriving September 9, for a visit with Leslyn’s sister and nephews.31 Keith had remarried, but her new husband, John Adams, had been sent to the Philippines, too, to her horror. Now she was recuperating from an operation she had had in August—for uterine cancer. After a two-day visit, the Heinleins returned to Los Angeles on September 11, 1945—not quite home at last.

  They found Hollywood somewhat changed—and not for the better:

  Item: Instead of the clear, golden, ove
rpowering sunshine Los Angeles county now has Smog, occasioned apparently by the synthetic rubber plants and sich. Not a thick Pittsburgh smog, not even the Philadelphia variety. Nevertheless there is a high haze of which the natives (and I) complain bitterly. The City Council threatens to take Steps, involving precipitrons and such. I hope they do. I want a sun that will knock you down dead if you fool with it, the kind of sun we saw coming across the desert. This sunshine takes half an hour to give a sunburn instead of the former fifteen minutes. I wish I had a vacuum thermocouple at hand.

  Besides that prices are considerably inflated, particularly real estate and restaurant prices. Food in the markets is considerably cheaper and better in quality and variety than in Philadelphia, but a meal in a restaurant costs about what it does in Philly. Housing is almost unobtainable. However I think both of those items will improve rapidly as the Boomers head home, looking for jobs, and as the Army concentrations hereabouts thin out. The Japs and the Nisei [interned by President Roosevelt during the war] are coming back which will help.32

  Hollywood, he concluded, isn’t what it used to be, and possibly never was.33

  They also found that their tenant at the Laurel Canyon house had not moved out yet, and apparently had made no preparations to do so. After the Kuttners moved out in 1942, a local realtor had found a tenant for them, Johnny Paxton, a screenwriter for RKO Pictures. The termination-oftenancy notice their real-estate agent had served on him turned out defective in its language, so they started the process all over again. The new notice gave the tenant a month’s notice and another month to vacate. They could not expect to take back possession until sometime in October.34 The house looked more run-down than simple lack of maintenance could account for. “Our poor house has been mistreated and it will take me three months to get it into proper shape again.”35