The fan nuisance we were subjected to was nothing like as nasty as the horrible things that were done to you two but it was bad enough that we could get nothing else done during the weeks it went on and utterly spoiled what should have been a pleasant, happy winter. But it resulted in a decision which has made our life much pleasanter already and which I expect to have increasingly good effects throughout all the years ahead. We have cut off all contact with organized fandom.… I regret that we will miss meeting some worthwhile people in the future as a result of this decision. But the percentage of poisonous jerks in the ranks of fans makes the price too high; we’ll find our friends elsewhere.11
Fortunately, not all their fan contacts were so unpleasant. In December 1964, Jerry Pournelle, whom they had met in Seattle in 1961, and kept up a very stimulating correspondence with, attended one of Herman Kahn’s seminars at the Broadmoor less than a mile away.12 The Heinleins invited Pournelle home for drinks and a chance for extended conversation.
Ginny left them jawin’ and yarnin’ and went to bed early. Eventually the evening wound down. Before it should reach a state of total incoherence, Robert called a taxi to drive Pournelle back to his hotel. It was very late, and the Colorado winter had turned bitterly cold overnight. It was below freezing in the uninsulated garage, and the ground was slick with ice. When the taxi got there, Heinlein saw Pournelle out and shook hands and watched as the taxi got about thirty-five feet up the incline to Mesa Avenue and slid back, wheels spinning. It tried three more times, then called another taxi, which had exactly the same problems.
By this time it was after three A.M. Pournelle later recalled the incident:
He took me inside and he said, “I am going to show you a secret which you will reveal not until after I am dead.”
Sir, I kept my word: I didn’t tell anybody until now.
He unfolded some couches that were in the living room, and they turned into a bed. Below them he had stashed away stockings, underwear, t-shirts of various sizes, new pajamas, a new robe—all set up for visitors, except he didn’t want anybody to know that he could have visitors.
And he said, “There’s nothing for it but to reveal this secret, and you must never tell anyone.” And I said, “Yes, sir.”13
In the morning, Pournelle had to get back to the seminar so they were both up early. Heinlein apologized that he couldn’t offer anything more than toast and coffee for breakfast (Ginny always made morning coffee for Robert—they liked the robust Navy blend sold in 3 lb. cans at PX’s), but he had checked the larder last night and the cupboard was bare. Pournelle suggested they could buy some now—Robert’s car had snow chains and could get up the hill. But when they got in the car, the engine turned over but it would not move. A little investigation revealed that the tires were frozen to the concrete. “… we went back in,” Pournelle remembered,
and sat there glumly drinking coffee, at which point we smelled bacon and eggs cooking. Ginny brings out a platter of bacon and eggs, and Robert says, “There isn’t any bacon: I looked.” And she said, “Yes, I know: I went down and bought some.”
And he said, “You couldn’t have gone down and bought some; the car won’t work. We tried it.”
And she said, “Oh, there’s nothing to that. You just—the steel lugs were frozen to the driveway. You go out with a pot of hot water and pour it on them; you melt them loose.”14
She had simply boiled extra water when making Robert’s coffee: two quarts, no waiting.15
Heinlein laughed: It was just as he always said—smarter than he and more practical.16
Pournelle got back to his seminar, and Heinlein began making notes on his new book. In the course of that evening, Pournelle had casually used an expression they had never heard before: TANSTAAFL. It was an acronym, Pournelle explained, that he got from his father, for the expression, still widely used in the American South (Pournelle had been born in Shreveport, Louisiana, in 1933): There Ain’t No Such Thing As A Free Lunch.
Saloons used to advertise free lunches with drinks—anything from pickled eggs to elaborate buffet spreads. Of course, there was nothing “free” about the food. The cost was folded into the price of the drinks. Free lunches had disappeared from the American scene around the time of World War I. The acronym, collapsing the whole thing into a single word, was exactly what Robert had been looking for: “I was working on a novel into which it fitted perfectly,”17 Heinlein later explained. He was working up a story background around Economics in One Lesson, and that one word, TANSTAAFL, functioned perfectly as a motto for that society. At the time he made a note of it on one of the three-by-five index cards he carried everywhere with him, for just such flashes of inspiration,18 and it entered the mix that had been accumulating for some time. Virginia Heinlein later recalled:
I suppose that all of this society in The Moon is a Harsh Mistress arose out of discussions that Robert and I had. What happened was that we held a number of discussions (and I remember them well) about ideal government.
The problem with government is that, given some areas to make laws about, they move out into other areas, until all freedoms are gone.19
Before starting to write the book, he had a deadline to meet on an article on science fiction for the Book of Knowledge people, “Science Fiction: The World of ‘What If?’” But by the end of January 1965 he turned in the Book of Knowledge article20 and started organizing his outline, Wyoming Schmidt: Notes for a Luna-Terra novel, 24 Feb. 1965. The story was about a background incident in his unproduced Century XXII script—a woman who spied for a colonial revolution on the Moon, combined with the “gravity gauge” idea he had been talking about since at least 1948:21 Anybody sitting at the bottom of a gravity well was vulnerable to missiles or even just rocks thrown from orbit or from a satellite. Heinlein also had an idea how money could be stolen to finance a revolution by a “dishonest” computer—and “it also describes how a libertarian revolution could go wrong in other ways.”22
The Wyoming Schmidt version of the story organized itself around Wyoh’s revolutionary comrades—Wells’s “small and devoted elite.”23 Revolution, Wells had said, should not be the work of “thwarted pedants and unlicked youngsters … restless shop stewards and the sort of defectives who set fire to things.”24 In the process of unthwarting a pedant, Heinlein arrived at a somewhat Leninesque figure as one of his principals—but a charmer rather than a wasp—and a naïve young man for another, and the sentient computer became a practical joker—and Wyoh’s role moved out of the center of the story. If Wells probably had Lenin and the Bolshevik revolution in mind, Heinlein’s thinking naturally gravitated to the American Revolution.
I think this story has got to be from ca. 1774 through ca 1784—starting not with secession but with complaints—which get no where. In fact we might admit the parallel by having the Declaration of Lunar Independence be dated July 4, 2176. Or perhaps July 4, 2192 … [sic] and intentionally fudge the data to match.25
The computer was the missing piece of this particular puzzle, with everyone revolving around it. Heinlein began writing the story on February 27 as That Dinkum Thinkum and put “The End” to his 150,000-word manuscript—603 pages—on April 13. He typed out a fresh title page: The Brass Cannon26: Being the Personal Memoir of Manuel Garcia O’Kelly Davis, Freeman, concerning the Lunar Rebellion: A True History.27
If a person names as his three favorites of my books Stranger, Harsh Mistress, and Starship Troopers … then I believe that he has grokked what I meant. But if he likes one—but not the other two—I am certain that he has misunderstood me, he has picked out points—and misunderstood what he picked. If he picks 2 of 3, then there is hope, 1 of 3—no hope.
All three books are on one subject: Freedom and Self-Responsibility.28
And years later, he was asked—yet again!—about the apparent dichotomy between Stranger and Starship Troopers and replied that there was no dichotomy. A witness recalled his remarks as “They are both descriptions of objects of human love. L
oving his fellow men enough to be willing to die for them in one, and the other—well, the whole book is about it.”29
Heinlein then took a short break from the writing for a seminar Herman Kahn gave at the Air Force Academy on his book of that year, On Escalation.30 Kahn urged Heinlein to come to one of his seminars as a personal guest—but Heinlein could not clear his schedule that rapidly, as the manuscript required cutting (by about 20 percent, from 150,750 words to 125,000 words) that would take longer than the writing.31 Regretfully, he passed—but Kahn renewed his invitation in his bread-and-butter note.
Heinlein worked steadily, cutting the 603-page manuscript to under 500 pages. This time the cutting involved an unusual step: He converted his viewpoint protagonist’s speech into a kind of polyglot Loonie argot.
Here we have a first-person story, which therefore must be told in something approximating the natural language of the imaginary narrator. This can be done whole hog, as Mark Twain did it in Huckleberry Finn or it can be done simply by suggesting the style and accent. I decided on the latter.
In deciding how he would speak it was necessary for me to define both him and his social matrix.… I concluded (assumed) that these people would speak a pidgin based largely on English but with both its vocabulary and its syntax strongly influenced by both Cantonese and Russian. But this pidgin (in view of the way they must live) would be loaded with technical terms—in English, since English is now the international technical language and bids fair to remain so.
But such a pidgin would be far too hairy for story purposes; I had to simplify it.… I attempted to suggest the Russian and Chinese sources by butchering the syntax, primarily by omitting those English structure words of no semantic content, which have no parallels in Russian or in Cantonese.… In the draft Mannie’s spoken dialog was the only part, which invariably displayed this butchering; his narration was more or less Standard English. But in trying to shorten it I applied this pidgin rule to his narration as well.32
The cut was finished enough to send it to the typist by the middle of May. It was ready to go to Blassingame by June 21.
Playboy bounced The Brass Cannon within a week, saying they didn’t want to take on a long serial. It was also too long for John Campbell—a darned shame, he said, “’Sa good yarn, too.” But the complaints over the length of Frank Herbert’s Dune meant Analog’s readers would not hold still for another five-part serial.33 Blassingame sent the manuscript on to Fred Pohl.
Putnam’s accepted the book for publication, even though the sales of Farnham’s Freehold had dipped below his normal pull.34 His editor, Peter Israel, did not like the title. Heinlein was used to the drill by now. Somehow in the process, it got changed to The Moon Is a Harsh Mistress.35
Herman Kahn’s seminar on “The Next Ten Years: Scenarios and Possibilities” was held at his Hudson Institute in Tarrytown, New York, beginning on July 25. It was immensely stimulating—six and eight lectures a day and scenario discussion groups that might break up at midnight or later, with classes resuming early the next morning. If he hadn’t taken special care, he would not have gotten more than five or six hours a night of sleep.36
This group was fearsomely bright—and, flatteringly, most of them knew of him already:
… if I attend an ordinary cocktail party, perhaps two or three out of a large crowd will know who I am. If I go to a political meeting or a church or such, I may not be spotted at all … But at Hudson Institute over two-thirds of the staff and over half of the students button-holed me. This causes me to have a high opinion of the group—its taste, I.Q., patriotism, sex appeal, charm, etc.—writers are incurably conceited and pathologically unsure of themselves; they respond to stroking the way a cat does.37
Ginny and he capped the seminar by going on to New York for business and for pleasure. Heinlein lunched with William Targ, his new editor at Putnam’s (Peter Israel was taking off a year to write a novel), and met with Terry Carr at Ace to handshake the deal for a new collection Blassingame had rustled up, The Worlds of Robert A. Heinlein.38 He agreed to provide the contents by September 2. He could hardly work up enthusiasm for the paperback original they intended to make it39—but it gave him an opportunity to put some of his orphaned children into print, and that was all to the good. He also ground out an update to the set of predictions he had made in 1950, to see where he stood, after fifteen years, as a professional prophet.
They had not been to New York since 1960, so they packed in a lot of shows: Kismet (“Froth, sure, but such superior froth”40) and a ballet performance of Jacob’s Ladder by the Nederlands Ballet corps. Up to the Tanglewood Music Festival for an outdoor concert under the stars by the Boston Symphony Orchestra, where they tracked a satellite in the sky over the orchestra—and, best of all, a live production at Stratford, Connecticut, of Shakespeare’s Coriolanus.
Here is a play almost never produced and which I read once over forty years ago and had forgotten completely. So, in effect, I was seeing a new play by Shakespeare—it could have been its first performance.
Well, it knocked me out of my seat! This boy writes a good stick.…41
They even got over to Connecticut to see Hank and Barbie Stine one night, and Robert spotted a copy of The Sirens of Titan (Kurt Vonnegut, 1959) on a bookshelf and borrowed it to read on the flight back to Colorado. On the plane he found himself seat-hopping to talk with interesting passengers—and forgot the borrowed copy of Sirens of Titan in one of the seat pockets. A sin! (“I might steal a man’s wife, given opportunity; I would not steal his books.”)42 He hastened to replace it as soon as he got back, first priority. Good book, too, though he liked Player Piano (Vonnegut, 1952) better.43
This trip had done wonders for their morale—both of them, but Ginny especially. Heinlein wrote thanking Lurton Blassingame for the hosting, and added:
I don’t know whether you realize it or not, but you are my closest friend. Ginny and I both tend to be rather lonely. About two friends here in town—but the other people we feel really close to are scattered around the country and around the world, from Finland to Singapore. But of those scattered friends you have long been the most important.44
They agreed they had gotten into a rut recently: They began talking about buying some land in Washington state, as the “excess” royalties came in from some of the new foreign sales Blassingame continued to place—always providing their health held up. Ginny started to feel ill again just a few weeks after they got back.
Heinlein was not doing so well, himself: For the last year or so, he had a slight, obscuring mist in his vision, both eyes, and his doctors had finally diagnosed cataracts coming on, for which he would eventually require surgery. Ginny had been researching the problem and found a discussion in one of Adelle Davis’s books on nutrition. She started him on a program of riboflavin—Vitamin B2—50 milligrams a day in two doses of 25 milligrams each. A year later, the doctor didn’t find even a trace of the clouding. By the time he was due to set up the surgery, every vestige of cataract had disappeared.
Doc Smith died suddenly in September 1965, not quite a year after Sarge Smith’s death, and that was upsetting. Of his older, wise mentors, only Hermann Deutsch was left—and he was ill due to complications of old age. “So you take care of yourself, you hear me?” he told his friend Lurton Blassingame: “We can’t spare you too.”45
Ben Babb, the publicist friend Heinlein had made while working on Destination Moon, died two weeks later, after a long illness in a VA hospital in Houston. A little more than two weeks after that, Heinlein had a handwritten letter from Cal Laning: Their mutual friend from the Naval Academy days, John S. Arwine, died in New York of a sudden heart attack.46 His generation of contemporaries were entering their sixties now.
Clifford Simak, a working newspaperman as well as a highly respected SF writer colleague, wrote for a quote, for a story he was writing on assignment from his paper(s), the Minneapolis Star and Tribune—what do SF writers write about, now that we have conquered space? Tha
t was somewhat premature, Heinlein wrote back, as Simak surely knew: The space age could barely be said to have started yet—and in any case speculative fiction was concerned with many other subjects than space.
I suppose I could say that I always write about politics, sex, and religion, three markedly non-scientific subjects … [sic] but three utterly unlimited subjects. But add these three subjects together and it spells “people.” Which simply paraphrases the very old statement that “the proper study of mankind is Man.” Man remains the oldest and closest of mysteries; until we solve the mystery of Man—where he came from, where he is going, and why—there can be no lack of variety in subjects for speculative fiction.47
About October 10, Ginny stopped him in the house with the first volume of their Encyclopedia Britannica in hand and read him a list of symptoms that matched up with her medical problems over the last seven or eight years. She had been reading up on anoxia, or “mountain sickness”—a pure guess on her part, but it made sense: When they were traveling—at sea level most of the time, since they went most places by ship and visited seaports—Ginny perked up and felt fine. But a couple of weeks after they got back home and back to seven thousand feet, she usually got sick again. The encyclopedia also said that, whatever else you might have, anoxia made it worse.
“So I went to the doctor,” Ginny recalled, “and I said could this possibly be my problem? He said, why yes, everybody feels better at sea level.”48 A diagnosis in the usual sense was neither possible nor necessary. She sat down with Robert for a family conference, and within minutes they had reached a decision: If Ginny needed to be at sea level, it was time to abandon the baggage and git. “We were firmly entrenched in that house,” Ginny said, “but it was getting a little small for us.”49
Robert A. Heinlein, In Dialogue with His Century, Volume 2 Page 34