Robert A. Heinlein, In Dialogue with His Century, Volume 2

by William H. Patterson, Jr.

  They had a very good time on the trip. They had ample sightseeing and shopping time and were speaking “tourist Portuguese” in a matter of days.13 Aside from a bizarre incident with Harry Harrison trying to have a scuffle with Robert and crashing an embassy party,14 only one other thing marred the trip: Ginny banged her head getting into a taxi one day and knocked herself out briefly. She seemed to get over it, with only a small cut on the outside of her right eye, but soon she began to experience a ringing in the ears—tinnitus—that would not go away.15

  They flew back to New York, planning to spend time with friends there and do a little business, but Heinlein caught a bad case of flu and was bedridden in the Tuscany hotel. Ginny decided to cancel all their plans and get him home to Santa Cruz as soon as possible.16 She had a thirty-five-year reunion coming up at Packer next April; they could come back then and do what they had failed to take in this year.17

  The big trees of Santa Cruz were soothing after Rio, though the accumulated mail was not. The mail on Stranger was now a significant portion of the total, and it tended to be different from the regular run of fan mail, repetitive in its own way, but sometimes spiked with the unexpected—such as an article in an academic literary magazine, The CEA Critic, by Willis McNelly, Ph.D.,18 at Cal State, Fullerton, “Linguistic Relativity in Middle High Martian.” McNelly talked about the Whorfian19 underpinnings of the hypothetical Martian language of Stranger in a Strange Land that was both playful and serious. The article pleased Heinlein very much—“so much so that there is danger of taking myself seriously … [sic] but not too much danger so long as I remain married to my Best Friend & Severest Critic. ‘Cut to the chase!’ is her motto, and she keeps me reminded.”20

  But McNelly’s article was anything but typical of the Stranger fan mail. And now Heinlein was starting to receive thanks and congratulations on his political writing in The Moon Is a Harsh Mistress. There was a slow resurgence of interest in classic American individualist political philosophy. The radical fringe of this new libertarianism tended to anarchist theory, and he couldn’t quite go along with that:

  I miss being an utter anarchist only by a very narrow margin21—i.e., a misgiving about the possibility of maintaining a complex society capable of mass production without a certain amount of sheer force, both internal and external. (I’m still searching for the libertarian philosopher who can explain convincingly how this can be done—I haven’t quite given up hope.)22

  In a sense, he was too individualist even for these confessed radical individualists, and some of that had leaked over into his portrayal of lunar society in the first part of The Moon Is a Harsh Mistress.

  Ginny offered to take over all the correspondence, to give him time to write. At first he was reluctant23—but the alternative was to do it himself (in which case he might never be able to write any new fiction at all) or quit answering mail from strangers (which stuck in his craw). Ginny took it all over—business correspondence, fan mail, management of their finances (which she had been doing for nearly ten years by that time), and gradually, with decreasing amounts of oversight and participation on his part, the management of the business aspects of the writing, which left Heinlein free to do the writing aspects of the writing.

  By the beginning of June 1969 he was wandering around with a glazed expression and bumping into things. Ginny told Willis McNelly that he was at the “horrid stage” of generating a story.24 But he got no further than nine pages of outline notes dated June 18, 1969, for a novella aimed at Playboy—four years, two months, and five days since he had put “The End” to his last writing project. Possibly he was inhibited by the prospect of another trip that would have to be made in July.

  The next Apollo mission, Apollo 11, was to land a man on the Moon, and Heinlein wanted to be there at Cape Kennedy on July 16, 1969. “I am going to see that shoot,” he told Blassingame. “I’ve waited a lifetime for the first trip to the Moon and I am not going to miss it.”25

  But neither research nor pull could get them a room anywhere within a hundred miles of the launch site: And he would pay anything at all—anything!—for a reservation the night before the launch.26 But he could not even get press credentials. He could go back to writing his “2-part serial intended for Playboy—Intended length ca. 30,000 words.”27

  Over the last eight years while he was out of the game, a sort of amorphous “movement” had started to show up in magazine science fiction, called—mostly by detractors—“The New Wave.” The individual writers lumped together in this way—Harlan Ellison, Michael Moorcock, Norman Spinrad, Brian Aldiss, Harry Harrison, others—denied there was anything like a “movement” going on. There were publishers now that were sometimes willing to publish experimental writing—refreshing in a genre that could get pretty hidebound with formula. Most readers, most of the time, Heinlein had long since concluded,28 don’t want experimentation—don’t want fresh, new material at all. They want more of what they had been getting all along—“mixture as before.” It was his biggest problem writing particularly those children’s books for Scribner. Heinlein was naturally sympathetic to experimentation; it kept the field fresh and growing—and a great deal of the new stuff was clearly trying out different storytelling conventions than the somewhat stale magazine story formulas that had dominated SF for decades.

  Unfortunately, a lot of it just wasn’t very good experimentation; too much of it was simply recapitulating the Modernist prosodic experiments made in the 1920s and 1930s—stuff that had by and large been abandoned because it made the reading harder work for the reader. On the other hand, some of science fiction’s readers wanted to enshrine Campbell-era story conventions, and that wasn’t the way to go, either.

  Although Heinlein rarely discussed his process with the story that became I Will Fear No Evil, he seems to have been acutely aware of these developments. It was as if he was working on crafting a New Wave kind of story that worked as story—the kind of thing for fiction that Frank Lloyd Wright had done with the Bauhaus when he designed Fallingwater in 1935: Let a “washed-up” old-timer show the young turks how it ought to be done …

  This new story he was working out had a foot in both worlds. He took two of the hoariest clichés in science fiction—the mad scientist and the brain transplant—and turned the ideas upside down and inside out and shook until something interesting fell out.

  The immediate inspiration for this story came out of an article he saw in Parade magazine in 1968, about rare blood types and an astonishing one-man operation of volunteer rare-blood donors, the National Rare Blood Club.29 He had clipped it at the time and found his thoughts returning to the issues it covered.

  Heart transplants were in the news then, so I extrapolated and did a brain transplant story and used blood matching as a gimmick, with this Club, as a minor plot gimmick.30

  We now have endless complications of identity, money, his-her marital status (she was married), sex complications (cf. Thorne Smith’s Turnabout—and stay well clear of it!) as this new body is horny as hell—for men—and his old brain is still horny—for women—and he-she is AC-DC as Noel Coward … [sic] and he of he-she is terribly intrigued by female libido.31

  Matching up an old man’s brain and a young woman’s body gave him a story about that other hot topic in the editorial pages, the “generation gap.” So in an odd way it was echoing in story form his real-life dialogue with the field of science fiction—the old man learning from the new kids on the block, even as he teaches …

  He was able to start outlining the story by June 18, 1969, and start writing “A Dirty Old Man” two days later. But he crossed out that working title and penciled in the pun “Now I Lay Me—.” On June 24, he changed the title to a more explicitly Biblical quotation: I Will Fear No Evil, which continues “for thou art with me.”

  His female protagonist, Eunice Branca, was to be racially ambiguous, so he took clippings from two magazines—a sunny blonde and a stunning black woman, and posted them on the ledge over his typ
ewriter, alternating looking at them, so he wouldn’t unconsciously drift into racially stereotyped language.

  Heinlein had always said he had a tough time getting started until he could hear the characters talking in his head, and then it took off on its own. This one took off and dragged him along with it: The character(s), it appeared, had no intention of confining themselves to a novella: The story kept unfolding and unfolding. The theme of what a modern young woman—the body—had to teach a ninety-year-old man—the brain—and conversely, what age and life experience could give to youth and beauty—ran away with the story, and it came to be about both kinds of life-wisdom, with the ironic twist that the transplanted brain goes slowly insane as it acquires this wisdom: The brain accepted Eunice’s life experience, even while the Eunice body rejected the brain.

  But there was another reason that contributed to this story running away with itself: Heinlein was not working purely within the conventions of science fiction, and not recapitulating the high modernist experiments either. He had always followed current general fiction, including the experimental writing that was occasionally published. Heinlein never made reference to Ada or Ardor, published that year, 1969, but Nabokov was clearly on Heinlein’s radar (because of Lolita, 1955, 1958, which was referenced periodically in Heinlein’s correspondence). A number of story figures in Ada or Ardor are suggestive—the merging of the incestuous couple into Vaniada and the extended meditation on death. Perhaps Ada or Ardor helped kick off Heinlein’s train of thought.

  Heinlein did not like to take long breaks once he got a piece under way, but this time it couldn’t be helped: Exactly a week after his sixty-second birthday, his mother was having her ninetieth, on Bastille Day. On July 12 he stopped writing, 60,000 words into his 30,000-word story,32 and flew with Ginny south to Arcadia, an eastern suburb of Los Angeles, where Bam was living with MJ and Andy Lermer.

  In fact, this became a long and worthwhile interruption: Lee Atwood (who had hosted them so sumptuously in 1968) invited them to the Apollo 11 launch as his personal guests.

  The sudden, unlooked-for prospect of it really coming to pass put Heinlein into a very strange emotional state. He watched with a sense of unreality as it took all four of the wives plus another miscellaneous relative to light the ninety candles on the cake simultaneously—

  … at times during that whole period I had a dream-like quality to the effect that well, I’m going to wake up and discover that tomorrow morning I have to take a plane to Florida because it’s about to happen.… it was not only a tremendous spiritual experience, but also, it still had a dream-like quality, I’d dreamt so long.… [sic]33

  This is how Robert Heinlein was, overwhelmed.

  After Bam’s birthday party on the fourteenth, they flew out to Orlando with Atwood and his stepsons in Atwood’s private jet. They were ferried like royalty to a motel in Coco Beach.

  They were taken to a quick succession of parties—first, one for the astronauts before they had to buckle down to the pre-liftoff checks, and then to a party of their science-fiction colleagues, where they talked with Hank and Barbie Stine and with Arthur C. Clarke and his wife, Connie. Then on to a dinner party, where Ginny finally got to meet Barry Goldwater in person.

  The viewing stands, on the morning of July 16, 1969, were four miles away from the launch pad—and, in fact, it wasn’t practical to get much closer anyway: The Saturn V was so gigantic that close up you couldn’t take in the top of it.

  There were more than a million people there, most coming on foot from the surrounding area. The traffic was snarled—the Reverend Ralph Abernathy, president of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference and Martin Luther King’s immediate successor as leader of the civil rights movement, was conducting a small march of the Poor People’s Campaign, to protest the money being spent on space exploration. Of course, not investing in growth is the best and easiest way to keep people poor—and the poor segment of the population growing. But this is not a truth Rev. Abernathy was ready to hear.

  It became almost impossible to move. Heinlein almost didn’t notice.

  He recognized the feeling in the crowded VIP stands: It was the feeling you get in a midnight Christmas church service or at a Bar Mitzvah or such.34 Politicians, engineers, everyone (even the Reverend Abernathy, who got caught up in the spirit of the thing), were welded into a spiritual community here.

  When he was in high school, Heinlein had made a $10 bet that man would be on the Moon before his fortieth birthday. He had missed it by a full generation—he should look up the boy, if he were still alive, and pay him that sawbuck.35

  It was worth the wait.

  As 9:30 A.M. approached, the zero hour and minute, there was the familiar tension that any rocket launch inspires. It was not real—it could not be; it was his living dream …

  … and yet it was real, it was as real as could be. The rumble in the ground, the rumble in the air, the smoke, the flame, the seeing that enormous big thing lift up and go up in the sky and know it was going to the moon.…

  You know, when that thing went off, there was a dead silence. There was over a million people there, absolute dead silence. And then, spontaneous cheering. Cheering that rumbled over miles, just like the rocket did. And then, separation. The same thing, dead silence … [sic] and then this rumbling of cheering, all over the place.

  … There was just nothing like it. The whole crowd was euphoric. Somebody would step on your feet and you’d smile, you’d step on somebody else’s feet, and they’d smile. It had a dream-like quality, and yet it wasn’t a dream.…

  I don’t know if seeing God is an appropriate comparison, but I do feel as if—not as if—I know that seeing the first moon ship take off is the greatest spiritual experience I’ve undergone in my life.36

  It was in orbit around the Earth before they got back to the motel for lunch. That afternoon, Atwood’s jet took them to Miami, and they caught a commercial flight to New Orleans, where Heinlein was interviewed for the New Orleans States-Item:

  On a stay in the Crescent City this week, world-renowned science fiction writer Robert Heinlein had this to say: “The human race has passed from adolescence to manhood. July 16, the day of the moon launch, was New Year’s Day of the Year 1.37

  It was a message he was to repeat many times, in many places.

  The next day they went on to Houston for an overnight research stop. CBS television had asked him to be on hand the following day at their remote facility in Downey, California, for color commentary when the lunar lander touched down in Mare Tranquillitatis. CBS had platoons of astronomers and specialists of every sort on hand. Among the luminaries they had gathered together in Downey—and a like crowd in New York—was Robert “RNS” Clark, Heinlein’s closest friend on the Lexington,38 now working with North American Rockwell. Clark told Heinlein:

  Our brief reunion, under such interesting circumstances, brought back wonderful memories. I was proud to be associated with my old friend Bob Heinlein—the good shipmate over all these years—who had the savviness and the gumption to make radical predictions about space exploration.39

  Heinlein was in his element for the entire forty-one and a half hours, through “Eagle has landed” and the incredible moment of “One small step”—televised! For all the hundreds of science-fiction stories about a landing on the Moon, nobody had thought it would be televised and broadcast live back to Earth.40 A staggering one billion human beings gathered around televisions and radios over the entire planet—until Eagle lifted and Apollo broke out of lunar orbit. “Robert was euphoric at the time,” Ginny later recalled.41 At intervals CBS arranged to have everyone fed; Robert and Ginny got a three-hour nap at one point, then back on the air.

  The Downey stage facilities were fairly basic—no complicated backgrounds to match to Walter Cronkite’s anchor desk in New York, which he was sharing for much of the time with Arthur C. Clarke (who had certainly earned a front-row seat) as the main “color commentator.” Asimov and Bradbury also
appeared as commentators.

  Robert envied Clarke his ease and composure on camera.42 Cronkite was obviously charged up and a little manic. Ginny told Lucy and Bill Corson about the event:

  Bob says he [Cronkite] never comes to a complete stop, ending every sentence with an—“and,” and then continuing. The camera cuts to someone he’s asked a question of, and Walter goes right on and answers it, leaving the answeree with a mouthful of teeth. He even talks during prayers, etc. Great talker.43

  But Heinlein’s politician reflexes were back online: He rearranged his three-by-five cards of notes44 and must have studied the coverage the way a platform speaker sizes up his crowd. He countered Cronkite’s manic style by taking a slow and deliberate approach, making Cronkite slow down to his speed.

  When Heinlein’s time on camera with Cronkite came, at 8:29 P.M.,45 July 20, 1969, Cronkite mentioned the “science-fiction quality” of the pictures coming in from the Moon—and how much like Robert’s imagined Moon landing twenty years earlier, in Destination Moon. Robert appeared calm and composed—certainly more than he felt! The main point was that this was a glorious, inspiring first step—but it was literally “one small step”—a first step.

  “This is a great day,” he told Cronkite.

  “This is the first day!…” This is the greatest event in all the history of the human race, up to this time. This is … today is New Year’s Day of the Year One. If we don’t change the calendar, historians will do so. The human race … this is our change, our puberty rite, bar mitzvah, confirmation … from infancy into adulthood for the human race. And we’re going to go on out, not only to the Moon, to the stars: we’re going to spread. I don’t know that the United States is going to do it; I hope so. I have … I’m an American myself; I want it to be done by us. But in any case, the human race is going to do it, it’s utterly inevitable: We’re going to spread through the entire universe.46