To Sail Beyond the Sunset

by Robert A. Heinlein

  That’s the real trick: to keep breathing. Isn’t it, Pixel? Pixel? Pixel! Oh, damn!

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  Changes—In 1972 Princess Polly died in her sleep—heart failure, I think, but I did not have an autopsy. She was a little old lady who had lived a long life and, I think, a happy one, on the whole. I said a prayer to Bubastis, asking Her to watch for the arrival in the eternal Catnip Fields of a little black and white cat who had never scratched or bitten without just cause and who had had the misfortune to have had only one kitten—by Caesarean section and the kitten never opened its eyes—and then she had lost her kitten factory by spaying because her surgeon said that she could never have a normal litter and could not safely risk another pregnancy.

  I did not get another kitten. In 1972 I was ninety years old (although I admitted only to fifty-nine…and tried my darnedest—exercise and diet and posture and cosmetics and clothes—to look forty). Being ninety in fact, it was possible, even likely, that another kitten would outlive me. I chose not to risk that.

  I moved to Albuquerque because it had no ghosts for me. Kansas City was choked with ghosts of my past, of every sort, both sad and happy. I preferred not to drive by a site, such as our old home on Benton Boulevard, or where our old farmhouse out south had once been, when driving past would cover the happy used-to-be with dreary or unrecognizable what-is.

  I preferred to remember Central High School the way it had been when my children attended it. In those days the scholastic records of Central’s graduates at West Point and Annapolis and MIT and other “tough” schools caused Central to be rated as the finest secondary school in the west, equal in academics to the best preparatory schools, such as Groton or Lawrenceville—instead of what it had become: mostly babysitting for overgrown infants, a place where police prowl cars gathered every afternoon to stop fights, to confiscate knives, and to shake down the “students” for drugs—a “high school” where half the students should never have been allowed to graduate from grammar school because they could not read or write well enough to get along in the world outside.

  Albuquerque held no ghosts for me; I had never lived there, I had no children living there, no grandchildren. (Great-grandchildren? Well, maybe.) Albuquerque had had the good fortune (from my point of view) to be bypassed by moving roadway “Route Sixty-six.” The old paved road numbered route 66 and once called “The Main Street of America” had run straight through Albuquerque, but roadcity “Route Sixty-six” was miles to the south; one could not hear it or see it.

  Albuquerque was favored also by having been bypassed by many of the ills of the Crazy Years. Despite its size—180,000 and growing smaller because of the roadcity south of it; such shrinkage was usual—it continued to have the sweet small-town feeling so common in the early twentieth century, so scarce in the second half. It was the home of the main campus of the University of New Mexico…a school blessed with a chancellor who had not given in to the nonsense of the sixties.

  Students there had rioted (some of them) just once; Dr. Macintosh kicked them out and they stayed kicked out. Parents screamed and complained at the state capital in Santa Fe; Dr. Macintosh told the trustees and the legislature that there would be order and civilized behavior on the campus as long as he was in charge. If they did not have the guts to back him up, he would leave at once and they could hire some masochistic wimp who enjoyed presiding over a madhouse. They backed him up.

  In 1970 at campuses all over America half of all freshmen (or more) were required to take a course called “English A” (or something similar) but known everywhere as “Bonehead English.” When Dr. Macintosh became chancellor, he abolished Bonehead English and refused to admit students who would have been required to take it. He announced, “It costs the taxpayers a minimum of seventeen thousand dollars a year to keep a student on this campus. Reading, writing, spelling, and grammar are grammar school subjects. If an applicant for admission to this university does not know these grammar school subjects well enough to get along here, let him go back to the grammar school that had dumped him untaught. He does not belong here. I refuse to waste tax money on him.”

  Again parents screamed—but the parents of these subliterate applicants were a minority, while the majority of voters and legislators were discovering that they liked what they heard from Chancellor Macintosh.

  After Dr. Macintosh revised the university catalog, it carried a warning that students were at all times subject to surprise tests for drugs—urine, blood, whatever. If they were caught—expulsion, no second chance.

  A student who flunked a drug test found his quarters searched at once, all legal and proper, as there were seven judges in town willing night and day to issue search warrants on “probable cause.” No attention was paid to tender feelings; all who were caught in possession were prosecuted.

  Especially for the benefit of drug dealers the legislature reinstituted a fine old custom: public hangings. Gallows were erected in plazas. To be sure, drug dealers sentenced to death always appealed to the state supreme court and then to Washington, but with five members including the chief justice of the Supreme Court of the United States having been appointed by President Patton, it worked out that drug dealers in New Mexico had little reason to complain of the “Law’s Delays.” One bright young entrepreneur lived exactly four weeks from arrest to Jack Ketch. The average time, once the system got rolling, was less than two months.

  As usual, the ACLU had a fit over all these matters. Several ACLU lawyers spent considerable time in jail for contempt of court, not in the new jail, but in the drunk tank of the old jail, with the drunks, the hopheads, the wetbacks, and the quasi-male prostitutes.

  These were some of the reasons I moved to Albuquerque. The whole country was losing its buttons, a mass psychosis I have never fully understood. Albuquerque was not immune but it was fighting back, and it had enough sensible men and women in key posts that it was a good place to live the ten years I was there.

  At the very time that America’s schools and families were going to pieces the country was enjoying a renaissance in engineering and science, and not alone in such big items as space travel and roadcities. While students frivoled away their time, the research facilities of universities and of industry were turning out more good work than ever—in particle physics, in plasma physics, in aerospace, in genetics, in exotic materials, in medical research, in every field.

  The exploitation of space flourished unbelievably. Mr. Harriman’s decision to keep it out of government hands, let private enterprise go at it for profit, was vindicated. While Pikes Peak Spaceport was still new, Spaceways, Ltd., was building bigger, longer, and more efficient catapults at Quito and on the island of Hawaii. Manned expeditions were sent to Mars and to Venus and the first asteroid miners were headed out.

  Meanwhile the United States went to pieces.

  This decay went on not just on time line two but on all investigated time lines. During my fifty years in Boondock I read several scholarly studies of the comparative histories of the explored time lines concerning what was called “The Twentieth Century Devolution.”

  I’m not sure of my opinions. I saw it on only one time line, and that only to the middle of 1982 and in my own country. I have opinions but you need not take them seriously as some leading scholars have other opinions.

  Here are some of the things I saw as wrong:

  The United States had over six hundred thousand practicing lawyers. That must be at least five hundred thousand more than were actually needed. I am not counting lawyers such as myself; I never practiced. I studied law simply to protect myself from lawyers, and there were many like me.

  Family decay: I think it came mainly from both parents working outside the home. It was said again and again that, from midcentury on, both parents had to have jobs just to pay the bills. If this was true, why was it not necessary in the first half of the century? How did labor-saving machinery and enormously increased productivity impoverish the family?

  Some sa
id the cause was high taxes. This sounds more reasonable; I recall my shock the year the government collected a trillion dollars. (Fortunately most of it was wasted.)

  But there seems to have been an actual decline in rational thinking. The United States had become a place where entertainers and professional athletes were mistaken for people of importance. They were idolized and treated as leaders; their opinions were sought on everything and they took themselves just as seriously—after all, if an athlete is paid a million or more a year, he knows he is important…so his opinions of foreign affairs and domestic policies must be important, too, even though he proves himself to be both ignorant and subliterate every time he opens his mouth. (Most of his fans were just as ignorant and unlettered; the disease was spreading.)

  Consider these:

  1) “Bread and Circuses”;

  2) The abolition of the pauper’s oath in Franklin Roosevelt’s first term;

  3) “Peer group” promotion in public school.

  These three conditions heterodyne each other. The abolition of the pauper’s oath as a condition for public charity insured that habitual failures, incompetents of every sort, people who can’t support themselves and people who won’t, each of these would have the same voice in ruling the country, in assessing taxes and spending them, as (for example) Thomas Edison or Thomas Jefferson, Andrew Carnegie or Andrew Jackson. Peer group promotion insured that the franchise would be exercised by ignorant incompetents. And “Bread and Circuses” is what invariably happens to a democracy that goes that route: unlimited spending on “social” programs ends in national bankruptcy, which historically is always followed by dictatorship.

  It seemed to me that these three things were the key mistakes that destroyed the best culture up to that time in all known histories. Oh, there were other things—strikes by public servants, for example. My father was still alive when this became a problem. Father said grimly,

  “There is a ready solution for anyone on the public payroll who feels that he is not paid enough: He can resign and work for a living. This applies with equal force to Congressmen, Welfare ‘clients,’ school teachers, generals, garbage collectors, and judges.”

  And of course the entire twentieth century from 1917 on was clouded over by the malevolent silliness of Marxism.

  But the Marxists would not and could not have had much influence if the American people had not started losing the hard common sense that had won them a continent. By the sixties everyone talked about his “rights” and no one spoke of his duties—and patriotism was a subject for jokes.

  I do not believe that either Marx or that cracker revivalist who became the “First Prophet” could have damaged the country if the people had not become soft in the head.

  “But every man is entitled to his own opinion!”

  Perhaps. Certainly every man had his own opinion on everything, no matter how silly.

  On two subjects the overwhelming majority of people regarded their own opinions as Absolute Truth, and sincerely believed that anyone who disagreed with them was immoral, outrageous, sinful, sacrilegious, offensive, intolerable, stupid, illogical, treasonable, actionable, against the public interest, ridiculous, and obscene.

  The two subjects were (of course) sex and religion.

  On sex and religion each American citizen knew the One Right Answer, by direct Revelation from God.

  In view of the wide diversity of opinion, most of them must necessarily have been mistaken. But on these two subjects they were not accessible to reason.

  “But you must respect another man’s religious beliefs!” For Heaven’s sake, why? Stupid is stupid—faith doesn’t make it smart.

  I recall one candidate’s promise that I heard during the presidential campaign of 1976, a campaign promise that seems to me to illustrate how far American rationality had skidded,

  “We shall drive ever forward along this line until all our citizens have above-average incomes!”

  Nobody laughed.

  When I moved to Albuquerque I simplified my life in several ways. I simplified my holdings and split them among three conservative managements, in New York, in Toronto, and in Zurich. I wrote a new will, listing a few sentimental bequests, but leaving the major portion, over 95 percent, to the Howard Foundation.

  Why? The decision resulted from some long, long midnight thoughts. I had far more money than one old woman could spend—Lawsy me, I could not even spend the income from it. Leave it to my children? They were no longer children and not one of them needed it—and each had received not only Howard bonuses but also the start-up money that Brian and I had arranged for each of them.

  Leave it to “worthy causes”? That is thin gruel, my friend. Most of such money is sopped up by administration, i.e., eaten by parasites.

  The original capital had come from the Ira Howard Foundation; I decided to send my accumulation back to the Foundation. It seemed fitting.

  I bought a modern condo apartment near the campus, between Central Avenue and Lomas Boulevard, signed up for a course in pedagogy at the university, not with any serious intention of studying (it takes real effort to flunk a course in pedagogy) but to establish me on campus. There are all sorts of good social events on a campus—motion pictures, plays, open lectures, dances, clubs. Doctorates are as common on campus as fleas on a dog, but nevertheless a doctor’s degree is a union card that gives entrée many places.

  I joined the nearest Unitarian church and supported it with liberal donations, in order to enjoy the many social benefits of church membership without being pestered by straitjacket creeds.

  I joined a square dance club, a Viennese Waltz club, a contract bridge club, a chess club, a current events supper club, and a civic affairs luncheon club.

  In six weeks I had more passes than the Rocky Mountains. It let me be fussy about my bedmates and still get in far more friendly fornication than had been the case in the preceding quarter of a century. I had not limited myself to George Strong during those years, but I had kept too busy for serious pursuit of the all-time number-one sport.

  Now I had time. As some old gal said (Dorothy Parker?), “There is nothing as much fun as a man!”

  “Male and female created He them”—that’s a good arrangement, and for ten years I made the most of it.

  I did not spend all of my time chasing men…or in letting them chase me while I ran very slowly, the latter being my MO because it makes a man nervous for a woman to be overt about it—it is contrary to traditional protocol. Males are conservative about sex, especially those who think they are not.

  We Howards were not inclined to keep in touch with all our relatives; it was not feasible. By the year I moved to Albuquerque (1972) I had more descendants than there are days in the year—I should keep track of their birthdays? Heavens, I had trouble keeping track of their names!

  But I did have some favorites, people I loved irrespective of blood relationship if any: My older sister Audrey, my older “sister” Eleanor, my brother Tom, my cousin Nelson and his wife Betty Lou, my father and I missed him always. My mother I did not love but I respected her; she had done her best for all of us.

  My children? While they were at home I tried to treat them all alike and to lavish on each of them love and affection—even when my head ached and my feet hurt.

  Once they were married—Now comes the Moment of Truth. I tried to do unto them as they did unto me. If one of my offspring called me regularly, I tried to call her (him) as often. To some I sent birthday cards, not much else. If a grandchild gave attention to Grandma, Grandma paid attention to that child. But there just isn’t time to be both openhanded and evenhanded with 181 grandchildren, that being the number I had (unless I lost track) by my ninety-ninth birthday.

  My special loves—Blood did not necessarily enter into it. There was little Helen Beck, who was just Carol’s age, and the two little girls went to Greenwood school together in first and second grade. Helen was a lovely child and utterly sweet-natured. Because her mother w
as a working widow, Helen spent quite a bit of time in my kitchen until we moved too far away.

  But she did not forget me and I did not forget her. She went into show business and traveled; we tried to keep each other advised of moves so that we could make rendezvous every year or six. She lived a long time for a non-Howard and was a beauty right up to her death—so much that she could afford to dance naked into her seventies, at which age she still gave every man present an erection. Yet her dancing was never styled to be provocative, nothing like the cootch dancer Little Egypt of an earlier generation.

  Helen changed her name early in her show-biz career; most people knew her as Sally Rand. I loved Sally and Sally loved me, and we could be apart for several years, then manage to make rendezvous, and be right back where we had left off, intimate friends.

  Sally and I shared one oddity: both of us went to school as often as we could manage it. She usually performed at night; in daytime she was a special student at whatever campus was nearest. By the time she died (1979) she had far more collegiate hours than most professors. She was a polymath; everything interested Sally and she studied in depth. Sally did not drink or smoke; her one weakness was big, thick textbooks.

  Nancy stayed closer to me than did my other children, and I was her husband’s sometime mistress for sixty-four years…because Nancy had decided it that way before she married Jonathan. Not often but always when we met and could find opportunity. I can’t believe that Jonathan truly had much interest in this old carcass into its nineties—but he could lie about it delightfully. We really did love each other, and an erection is the most flattering compliment a man can pay to an old woman. Jonathan was a true Galahad, one who reminds me of my husband Galahad. Not too surprising, as Galahad is descended from Jonathan (13.2 percent, counting convergence)—and from me, of course, but all of my husbands are descended from me except Jake and Zeb, who were born on another time line. (Time line four, Ballox O’Malley.) (Oops! And Jubal, time line three.)