31
ENTOTIC
They boarded Lindblad Explorer in Punta Arenas, far in the south of Chile on the Strait of Magellan. It was the end of summer in Antarctica: They would be skirting the coastline in the Bellingshausen Sea and touching at the scientific station on the Ross Ice Shelf on the way to New Zealand and going home from Auckland. The crew used an unfamiliar adjective, “entotic,” and it was a few days before Ginny realized that was the Australian pronunciation of “Antarctic.”
They were almost immediately confronted with the fact this would not be a luxury tour ship: The showers had “minutieres” shutting down the water after a minute—barely possible. Lindblad Explorer was built specifically to be an “expedition cruising,” passenger-cum-exploring vessel, “to take small groups of adventurous travelers to remote or inaccessible places.”1 They were not so much tourist-sightseers as they were being allowed limited participation in the scientific enterprise.
The Heinleins had to practice getting into their Arctic gear in the strait confines of their cabin. They found themselves in the immemorial dilemma of small boys onionized by their mothers in layers of bulky winter clothing, unable to bend far enough to get on their boots.
But this struggle was worth the effort when they hit the beach the first time. The excursions were conducted by a kind of rubberized-fabric-raft-with-frills called a Zodiac, the lineal descendant of the aircraft lifeboats Ginny had worked on in World War II—and nearly gotten herself court-martialed over.2 The Zodiac had an engine and a lightweight wooden floor. Passengers sat on the flotation tubes and held on to loops of rope wound around the sides. Sometimes they could not land at all, but watched wildlife—whales, mostly—from the boats.
Their first beach was dark and rocky and smelly and indescribably noisy: They had come to see a rookery of Chinstrap Penguins that one of their ship’s experts estimated held a million birds. And there were clusters of seals—males with harems, they were assured—on the fringes. The smell was very strong—fish (krill actually, tiny pink shrimp with huge black eyes that made up the majority of the penguins’ diet) and guano.
Robert and Ginny made their way to the beach following the “outbound” lane of the double line of commuter penguins on their mile-long waddle to and from the ocean where they fed and caught krill for their young, emerging from the water with their white breasts stained pink by the krill caught in the feathers.
The birds were about knee-high. If you got down to their height, they might walk right up to you and inspect you. The next time they were out penguin-watching, Robert brought along a copy of Friday and propped it open in the snow. He got a series of photos of “penguin critics” inspecting the book, apparently reading it, then turning tail on it and waddling away.3
On another occasion, a pod of humpback whales surfaced nearby to feed on the same krill the penguins were eating. Each whale, weighing something like thirty tons, took in huge gulps of water, throats pouching out, then expelled it through their filter structures called balleen, seawater cascading from them. Curious as dolphins (their evolutionary cousins), they swam underneath the Zodiacs. The boats suddenly seemed frighteningly flimsy as they rocked in the whales’ wake.
And then they went about their business, leaving the puny Zodiacs and their even punier human cargo to the seals and the ice floes in the Bay and the cormorants nesting on the surrounding cliffs. This trip was truly “primarily a spiritual experience rather than a physical one.”4
From the Argentine zone near South America, they stopped by the stone hut the 1914 Shackleton expedition built for shelter after ice crushed their ship, then headed for McMurdo Sound and the Ross Ice Shelf in the American zone, arriving at the main American base at McMurdo Sound on the coldest day of the entire trip, 45 degrees below zero Fahrenheit with wind chill factored in.
There were about twelve hundred people at McMurdo Sound. Heinlein found many fans among the scientists there, and the “visit” continued for him even after returning to the ship: One of the scientists who happened to be sleeping when they were at Palmer Station discovered he had missed them and called the ship. Heinlein radiophoned him back. The route to Siple Station was not open at the time, but one of the men stationed there sent a letter and a gift sweatshirt.
On the way out from McMurdo Sound, the captain spotted two icebergs and gave them a slow cruise around the bergs. While they were watching, a huge wall of ice split off from one of the icebergs and fell into the ocean—an awe-inspiring sight.
Soon they found themselves in a field of about sixty icebergs—some of which might, they were told, be as much as a century old—and they put out for a Zodiac cruise among them. Once the ice mountains split off from an ice sheet or glacier, they assumed a flat, squared-off shape called “tabular” (“table-like”). At some point, after a certain amount of melting and sculpting by the winds, the tabular bergs would turn over in the water, underside exposed to the winds, which carved the ice into fantastic shapes called “Aeolean sculptures”—castles and dragons and fantasies of the imagination.
While they were out in the Zodiacs, some of the crew had landed on one of the tabular bergs and prepared a champagne party for them all, carving an ice chest out of the berg.
On the way back, they put in at several of the islands south of New Zealand and approached the South Island of New Zealand on its west side, coming in to Milford Sound and New Zealand’s Fjordland, finding the Tasman Sea unexpectedly calm and glassy.
The rest of the trip was almost an anticlimax after the adventure of the Antarctic. They returned home to Santa Cruz in the middle of a “hundred-year storm.” The ground was saturated with the heavy rains, and there were many landslides in the area. The aggravating hours and wheelbarrow full of money spent reengineering the swamp in the driveway years before, until it graded and drained properly, were effort well spent. They got their house-sitter, Paul Edmonds, back to Montreal safely by March 7, “full of superlatives about the Heinleins.”5
Friday had been nominated for a Nebula Award that year. Heinlein was scheduled to go to the L5 Conference in Houston in April, so the Nebula banquet at the Statler in New York would not be possible for him. He spent time writing, offering a sympathetic shoulder to one correspondent who was depressed about the state of the world and, more pleasantly, writing a letter-appreciation for Jack Williamson, who was this year’s guest of honor at Leprecon, a small science-fiction convention in Phoenix, Arizona, on Williamson’s birthday. Heinlein totted up the numberless influences Williamson had had on him over the years, and wound up:
Your own life has been as romantic as your stories, I think—and not alone in returning, like Ulysses, after many years and much wandering, to the home of your youth, there to marry the sweetheart of your school days. That tops it off, surely, but I do not mean that alone. How many settlers have migrated west by covered wagon … [sic] then lived to the age of spaceships?6
He also wrote a congratulatory letter to Brad Linaweaver, a young writer on the same Nebula Award ballot as he, for a novella, “Moon of Ice.”
It’s a good story and I hope you win the Nebula with it. It reminded me sharply how close we came to losing World War II. Some of the younger people today seem unaware that there was a long bitter time when every day was a new disaster and victory seemed most uncertain, ever.7
And on March 23, 1983, President Ronald Reagan made a major speech calling on the scientific community “to give us the means of rendering … nuclear weapons impotent and obsolete.” In phrases and even entire sentences lifted from the Citizens Advisory Council papers, Reagan enunciated the new national policy that would come to be the Strategic Defense Initiative (SDI).8
There was, predictably, opposition from the press and from Congress, and SDI was soon dubbed “Star Wars.” Soviet Ambassador Anatoly Dobrynin said SDI would “open a new phase in the arms race.” It did indeed—a phase in which the faltering Soviet economy could no longer compete. The mere anticipation of a defensive research project�
��deployment was something indefinitely far into the future—threw the Soviets into paroxysms of fear and rhetoric. But Reagan never allowed SDI to be put on the negotiating table as a bargaining chip: All the Soviet rhetoric about “stability” meant keeping the Soviets’ current military superiority and was not to be permitted.
The work of the Citizens Advisory Council continued as the policy debate ramped up and the most preliminary testing of the technology commenced in 1983 and 1984. But the great victory was already won, and the world had already shifted: The “unthinkable” again became unthinkable.
Heinlein continued to work with the Citizens Advisory Council, but this policy initiative was only a side issue for him: His real interest, all along, was space, and the defense-in-space was simply a pragmatic application of the more lastingly important task of getting a permanent presence off the planet.
It had gradually become clear that NASA was not going to accomplish that. The Space Shuttle program had already trapped NASA in military-industrial-bureaucratic amber, and the national legislature seemed disinclined to invest in the future (for that is what space exploration and exploitation really means), cutting NASA’s budgets each year.
But there were hundreds of thousands of space-concerned ordinary citizens: More than two hundred thousand people turned up at Edwards Air Force Base in July 1982 to see the first Shuttle landings, and a good many of them signed up for further contact by the L5 Society. The grassroots space movement was just beginning to get its legs under it. There was an active segment of the general public—large enough, as Bjo Trimble’s effort for the CAC had proved—to influence policy to some degree, at least, if properly mobilized.
And Heinlein had the means to do so at hand: He had been asked to join the L5 Society’s board of directors several years earlier—not, initially, as an active director but as part of its “dignity committee.”9 Now that there was a new administration that seemed at least willing to hear the message, Heinlein decided it was time for him—and some of the other space advocates on the Citizens Advisory Council—to take a more active role in grassroots space advocacy.
He had already started putting his wallet on the line: When budget cuts at NASA threatened to close down the Earth-based telemetry receiving stations for the Viking probes on Mars that were still functioning, years past their design lifetime, astronomer-activist Stan Kent got up a grassroots Viking Fund to collect money from the general public to keep those receiving stations open. “Feed a Starving Robot … and a Starving Space Program” was the Viking Fund’s motto. The effort to raise $1 million had been ongoing since 1979 by many organizations. Heinlein attended a small convention Kent organized at Ricky’s Hyatt House in Palo Alto, in 1982, and contributed $1,000 to the Viking Fund. “He said,” Kent explained, “he liked our philosophy of putting your money where your mouth was when it came to privately funding space exploration and he pulled out ten one hundred dollar bills and presented them to me.”10
The Heinleins were also investors in (and Robert was a board member for) the Sabre Foundation, which was trying to cut through international red tape to get tax-exempt equatorial spaceports sited (though there seemed little progress on that front).
The 1983 Space Development Conference was every bit as successful as the first (in April 1982)—one thousand people at the Houston Astrodome Hotel, with a televised banquet for five hundred (and it even made a profit).11 Heinlein brought two weeks of space-related activity to a close back in Santa Cruz, with a dinner bringing Richard Johnson of NASA Ames together with Jerry Pournelle and Larry Niven and Paul Bohannan.12
Heinlein needed to rest and recover—and get some writing done. He sent his regrets for the High Frontier meeting scheduled for May 1, saying that he was feeling “feebly.” By 1983, his hands were stiff and painful with arthritis, his breathing was shallow and difficult, and his energy was not what it used to be: Often he could work only a couple of hours at a time before he had to lie down—and he might or might not get back to it for another couple of hours, later. On June 2 he finished the principal writing on Job: A Comedy of Justice—just as Friday came out in mass market paperback and went onto the bestseller lists.
Ginny was enthusiastic about Job: “It’s as odd in its way as Stranger was in its own way. If you can understand that. But … I like it, so that’s all that matters. This one will be controversial, I am sure.”13
He had Job proofread and edited (three times) and printed out twice for the necessary corrections and revisions—and Xeroxed and mailed out to his agent—within two weeks of putting “-30-” to the rough manuscript. He recommended the word processor enthusiastically to Clifford D. Simak:
I figure that it has extended my professional life practically up to the day I take to my bed for the last time—and that’s the way I want it to be. I enjoy writing now … and writing had stopped being fun in late years. Now it’s fun again, because the drudgery is gone. It does not wear me out.14
The timing was perfect: Lars-Eric Lindblad called to notify them that he was going to take the Lindblad Explorer next year to attempt the Northwest Passage—the fabulous ocean passage seventeenth- and eighteenth-century explorers sought from Europe to the Orient north of the Canadian mainland. The trip was scheduled for August, to give them the best chance of getting through. An end-of-summer passage would give them their widest choice of sea clear of pack ice—and cross fingers!
Heinlein’s immediate reaction was “let’s go—now, if possible!” but his health was a serious consideration. He was definitely growing feebler each year, and his breathing was becoming so labored, so often, that he was obviously in a race with the oxygen bottle and Chronic Obstructive Pulmonary Disease (COPD).
But he was not down until he was down. Ginny was up for it if he was, and he was ready to put down another round of betting against fate, for one last voyage of discovery and exploration, a real one, one for the record books.
But fate intervened: When he called back to make their reservation, Lindblad told them this voyage was already overbooked. The best he could do right now was to put them on the waitlist. There would be other voyages, later.
How much “later” might be practical for him was problematic.
Heinlein shrugged it off: What cannot be cured must be endured. Instead he started assembling his notes into a coherent story for his next book—a kind of wild Don Quixote (an early draft bears the title “The Reluctant Knight”) goaded on by a Sanchette—set in the same universe he had built up for The Number of the Beast, but also referring back to his 1957 story “All You Zombies—.”
Implicit in Heinlein’s organization of The Number of the Beast, possibly not fully worked out as early as 1980, was a tantalizing notion that there might be such a thing as the grand story of the multiverse. The last three books he had done could all be viewed as component parts of that master story, in much the same way all the books in Cabell’s Biography of the Life of Manuel were component parts of the same story.
It might be that Job brought this on. In Job, he had played around with world-switching; in this new book Heinlein followed H. G. Wells’s advice to bring “the fetish stuff up to date and ma[k]e it as near actual theory as possible”15 and upped the voltage on the quantum mechanics time-travel jargon to deal with all the different kinds of time travel science fiction had imagined over the years—single loops, multiple loops, switching from time track to time track, even isolated “bubbles” in time disconnected from their originating time tracks, bringing together quantum uncertainty and literary uncertainty—the Schroedinger’s Cat paradox meets “The Lady or the Tiger” …
On November 8, 1983, he began writing his sardonic comedy of manners—a murder mystery titled The Year of the Snake for the ancient16 tail-swallowing world-snake Ouroboros, since the Time Corps gimmick from “All You Zombies—,” with its Circle of Ouroboros, had assumed such prominence in the story. Heinlein had often revisited his earliest themes later in his career—in some ways, for example, Stranger in a Strang
e Land was a revisit of the themes he had first explored in “Lost Legacy” in 1939. Both Job (1984) and Friday (1982) had revisited earlier themes, as well. In The World Snake (another working title) he imagined the world of The Moon Is a Harsh Mistress a hundred years after its war of independence and in the kind of bureaucratic decay Manny foresaw at the end of the 1966 book. He broke after Thanksgiving for a trip to Los Angeles to attend a Citizens Advisory Council meeting. He was back at work on it before Christmas, and kept at it steadily until February 1984, when Lars-Eric Lindblad called again: There were enough cancellations for the Northwest Passage trip to make berths available, if they were willing to pay the entire fee for the trip up front.
Heinlein wanted those berths.
He would not be able to attend the 1984 World SF Convention in Los Angeles: The Northwest Passage trip was taking off from Newfoundland just days before the WorldCon was scheduled to start. Instead he wrote a few paragraphs in letter form to promote their blood drive.
That February also, Mary Collin passed away after a short bout with pneumonia.17 Her youngest daughter sent Heinlein Mary’s last postcard to him, left uncompleted at her death. She was not quite two years younger than he. Over the years Heinlein had joked about outliving his enemies. But that meant outliving your friends, too, and that is no joking matter. They had never managed to get together after reestablishing contact in 1955 and again in 1961, but the memory of what Mary Briggs had meant to him in 1929 stayed warm and living.
Robert A. Heinlein, In Dialogue with His Century, Volume 2 Page 56