Starman Jones
Page 1
STARMAN
JONES
ROBERT A.
HEINLEIN
BAEN BOOKS
by ROBERT A. HEINLEIN
Assignment in Eternity
Beyond This Horizon
Between Planets
Farmer in the Sky
Farnham’s Freehold
The Green Hills of Earth
The Green Hills of Earth &
The Menace from Earth (omnibus)
The Man Who Sold the Moon
The Menace from Earth
Orphans of the Sky
Revolt in 2100 & Methuselah’s Children
Expanded Universe
The Rolling Stones
The Puppet Masters
Starman Jones
Sixth Column (forthcoming)
The Star Beast (forthcoming)
STARMAN JONES
This is a work of fiction. All the characters and events portrayed
in this book are fictional, and any resemblance to real people
or incidents is purely coincidental.
Starman Jones copyright © 1953 by Robert A. Heinlein.
Copyright © 1981 by the Robert A. and Virginia Heinlein Prize Trust.
Introduction copyright © 2011 by William H. Patterson, Jr.
Afterword copyright © 2011 by Michael Z. Williamson.
All rights reserved, including the right to reproduce this book
or portions thereof in any form.
A Baen Book
Baen Publishing Enterprises
P.O. Box 1403
Riverdale, NY 10471
www.baen.com
ISBN: 978-1-4516-3749-6
Cover art by Bob Eggleton
First Baen printing, October 2011
Distributed by Simon & Schuster
1230 Avenue of the Americas
New York, NY 10020
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Heinlein, Robert A. (Robert Anson), 1907-1988.
Starman Jones / by Robert A. Heinlein.
p. cm.
Summary: When his stepmother's remarriage drives him from home, Max and a hobo fake their way into the Space Stewards, Cooks, and Purser's Clerks brotherhood to get an opportunity for space travel in an age when only the wealthy are privileged.
ISBN 978-1-4516-3749-6 (trade pbk.)
[1. Interplanetary voyages--Fiction. 2. Science fiction.] I. Title.
PZ7.H368St 2011
[Fic]--dc23
2011023180
Printed in the United States of America
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
Dedication
For My Friend, Jim Smith
INTRODUCTION
by William H. Patterson, Jr.
Max Jones is such a likeable young man that we forget he is one of science fiction’s collection of bad boys—very bad by the standards of 1953 when Starman Jones was first published. Holden Caulfield (The Catcher in the Rye, 1951) is a punk by comparison.
Max is a runaway (from an abusive stepfather and a multiply broken home), an orphan, homeless, and hangs around with a Bad Crowd (if you count quondam Space Marine “Sam Richards” as a “crowd”). He stages (or participates in, which is much the same thing) an elaborate hoax to get a job he wants—and then makes good in a spectacular way and repents his sins.
He is, in short, the very model of a Horatio Alger hero-in-potentia (he even comes this close to marrying the boss’s daughter, another trick from Alger’s grab-bag of poor-boy-makes-good formulas), brushed up and modernized for the 1950s—and Heinlein knew exactly what he was doing. Six years later, recapping his entire career as a writer of children’s books, he told his editor:
I have been writing the Horatio Alger books of this generation, always with the same strongly moral purpose that runs through every line of the Alger books (which strongly influenced me; I read them all). “Honesty is the best policy.”—“Hard work is rewarded.”—“There is no easy road to success.”—“Courage above all.”—“Studying hard pays off, in happiness as well as in money”—“Stand on your own feet”—“Don’t ever be bullied”—“Take your medicine”—“The world always has a place for a man who works, but none for a loafer.” These are the things that the Alger books said to me, in the idiom suited to my generation; I believed them when I read them, I believe them now, and I have constantly tried to say them to a younger generation which I believe has been shamefully neglected by many of the elders responsible for its moral training.
Alger has fallen under a cloud and far out of fashion now—and the very idea of “moral training” has a quaint ring to it in the first decades of the twenty-first century. But it is a subject Heinlein visits over and over again (what else is the class in History and Moral Philosophy in Starship Troopers but the kind of intellectual prelude to moral training suitable for teenagers in a public school?). Heinlein was a firm believer in the principle—taken from Emerson and Thoreau as much as anyone—that you build yourself from the ground up, and that the process of bildung, especially, is a conscious craft. This book is in fact dedicated to a teenaged acquaintance who shaped his own character out of adversity.
You participate in making your own character. That is another lesson he got from Horatio Alger (who got it from Ralph Waldo Emerson and Henry David Thoreau, as American as you can get) and repackaged for the generation that was to become the parents of the generation of entitlement and victims. The debates he and his editor, Alice Dalgliesh (another award-winning writer of books for young people) had about the moral position of Starman Jones show that these values lived then—and the longevity of Starman Jones now, after more than fifty years and well into the twenty-first century, shows that those value of hard work, seizing opportunities, “fortune favors the prepared” (and, yes, sometimes even marrying the boss’s daughter) are alive to us even now.
Samuel J. Moskowitz made the observation that Starman Jones is an expansion of Heinlein’s second story, “Misfit.” Heinlein often revisited his earliest story materials, but in this case he was also revisiting a recent story, Between Planets, his “boy’s book” for 1951. The “Horst-Conrad-Milne” interplanetary space drive of Between Planets has become in Starman Jones a sophisticated interstellar drive (though Milne got left off the name this time—as sometimes happens in real life; there is plenty of Einstein in Starman Jones, but no mention of Hermann Minkowski).
But Heinlein is reworking more than story figures. Starman Jones is almost unique among Heinlein’s books by having so much of it taken from real life. About the basic plot line, Heinlein said in his Accession Notes for the Robert A. Heinlein Archive at Special Collections and Archives of the University Library, U.C. Santa Cruz:
This book was written without an outline from a situation in the early 19th century. Two American teenagers took off in a sail boat, were picked up by a China Clipper, were gone two years—and returned to Boston with one of them in command. This incident is true and consequently preposterous. I came across this note card in a file and decided to try to make it plausible in terms of space travel—set up the situation and let the story write itself.
Well, not quite “write itself”—the character of the abusive stepfather was drawn from life, a contractor Heinlein had dealt with in Colorado Springs. Max at least got away; Heinlein had to carry a gun for most of 1950 to dissuade his own Montgomery from carrying out his threats.
And then his editor objected to Montgomery as too “pulp-villainish.”
Miss Dalgliesh was always objecting to something or other she feared librarians would not like. As Heinlein often remarked, that’s the trouble with real life: it lacks the plausibility of fiction. He almost did not write Starman Jones for that very reason .
. .
I’m glad he did.
Come travel, then, to the stars with the boy from Arkansas.
1
THE TOMAHAWK
Max liked this time of day, this time of year. With the crops in, he could finish his evening chores early and be lazy. When he had slopped the hogs and fed the chickens, instead of getting supper he followed a path to a rise west of the barn and lay down in the grass, unmindful of chiggers. He had a book with him that he had drawn from the county library last Saturday, Bonforte’s Sky Beasts: A Guide to Exotic Zoology, but he tucked it under his head as a pillow. A blue jay made remarks about his honesty, then shut up when he failed to move. A red squirrel sat on a stump and stared at him, then went on burying nuts.
Max kept his eyes to the northwest. He favored this spot because from it he could see the steel stilts and guide rings of the Chicago, Springfield, & Earthport Ring Road emerge from a slash in the ridge to his right. There was a guide ring at the mouth of the cut, a great steel hoop twenty feet high. A pair of stilt-like tripods supported another ring a hundred feet out from the cut. A third and last ring, its stilts more than a hundred feet high to keep it level with the others, lay west of him where the ground dropped still more sharply into the valley below. Half way up it he could see the power-link antenna pointing across the gap.
On his left the guides of the C.S.&E. picked up again on the far side of the gap. The entering ring was larger to allow for maximum windage deviation; on its stilts was the receptor antenna for the power link. That ridge was steeper; there was only one more ring before the road disappeared into a tunnel. He had read that, on the Moon, entrance rings were no larger than pass-along rings, since there was never any wind to cause variation in ballistic. When he was a child, this entrance ring had been slightly smaller and, during an unprecedented windstorm, a train had struck the ring and produced an unbelievable wreck, with more than four hundred people killed. He had not seen it and his father had not allowed him to poke around afterwards because of the carnage, but the scar of it could still be seen on the lefthand ridge, a darker green than the rest.
He watched the trains go by whenever possible, not wishing the passengers any bad luck—but still, if there should happen to be a catastrophe, he didn’t want to miss it.
Max kept his eyes fixed on the cut; the Tomahawk was due any instant. Suddenly there was a silver gleam, a shining cylinder with needle nose burst out of the cut, flashed through the last ring and for a breathless moment was in free trajectory between the ridges. Almost before he could swing his eyes, the projectile entered the ring across the gap and disappeared into the hillside—just as the sound hit him.
It was a thunderclap that bounced around the hills. Max gasped for air. “Boy!” he said softly. “Boy, oh boy!” The incredible sight and the impact on his ears always affected him the same way. He had heard that for the passengers the train was silent, with the sound trailing them, but he did not know; he had never ridden a train and it seemed unlikely, with Maw and the farm to take care of, that he ever would.
He shifted to a sitting position and opened his book, holding it so that he would be aware of the southwestern sky. Seven minutes after the passing of the Tomahawk he should be able to see, on a clear evening, the launching orbit of the daily Moonship. Although much farther away and much less dramatic than the nearby jump of the ring train, it was this that he had come to see. Ring trains were all right, but spaceships were his love—even a dinky like the moon shuttle.
But he had just found his place, a description of the intelligent but phlegmatic crustaceans of Epsilon Ceti IV, when he was interrupted by a call behind him. “Oh, Maxie! Maximilian! Max . . . mil . . . yan!”
He held still and said nothing.
“Max! I can see you, Max—you come at once, hear me?”
He muttered to himself and got to his feet. He moved slowly down the path, watching the sky over his shoulder until the barn cut off his view. Maw was back and that was that—she’d make his life miserable if he didn’t come in and help. When she had left that morning he had had the impression that she would be gone overnight—not that she had said so; she never did—but he had learned to read the signs. Now he would have to listen to her complaints and her petty gossip when he wanted to read, or just as bad, be disturbed by the slobbering stereovision serials she favored. He had often been tempted to sabotage the pesky SV set—by rights with an ax! He hardly ever got to see the programs he liked.
When he got in sight of the house he stopped suddenly. He had supposed that Maw had ridden the bus from the Corners and walked up the draw as usual. But there was a sporty little unicycle standing near the stoop—and there was someone with her.
He had thought at first it was a “foreigner”—but when he got closer he recognized the man. Max would rather have seen a foreigner, any foreigner. Biff Montgomery was a hillman but he didn’t work a farm; Max couldn’t remember having seen him do any honest work. He had heard it said that Montgomery sometimes hired out as a guard when one of the moonshine stills back in the hills was operating and it might be so—Montgomery was a big, beefy man and the part might fit him.
Max had known Montgomery as long as he could remember, seen him loafing around Clyde’s Corners. But he had ordinarily given him “wagon room” and had had nothing to do with him—until lately: Maw had started being seen with him, even gone to barn dances and huskings with him. Max had tried to tell her that Dad wouldn’t have liked it. But you couldn’t argue with Maw—what she didn’t like she just didn’t hear. But this was the first time she had ever brought him to the house. Max felt a slow burn of anger starting in him.
“Hurry up, Maxie!” Maw called out. “Don’t stand there like a dummy.” Max reluctantly moved along and joined them. Maw said, “Maxie, shake hands with your new father,” then looked roguish, as if she had said something witty. Max stared and his mouth sagged open.
Montgomery grinned and stuck out a hand. “Yep, Max, you’re Max Montgomery now—I’m your new pop. But you can call me Monty.”
Max stared at the hand, took it briefly. “My name is Jones,” he said flatly.
“Maxie!” protested Maw.
Montgomery laughed jovially. “Don’t rush him, Nellie my love. Let Max get used to it. Live and let live; that’s my motto.” He turned to his wife. “Half a mo’, while I get the baggage.” From one saddlebag of the unicycle he extracted a wad of mussed clothing; from the other, two flat pint bottles. Seeing Max watching him, he winked and said, “A toast for the bride.”
His bride was standing by the door; he started to brush on past her. She protested, “But Monty darling, aren’t you going to—”
Montgomery stopped. “Oh. I haven’t much experience in these things. Sure.” He turned to Max—“Here, take the baggage”—and shoved bottles and clothes at him. Then he swung her up in his arms, grunting a bit, and carried her over the threshold, put her down and kissed her while she squealed and blushed. Max silently followed them, put the items on the table and turned to the stove. It was cold, he had not used it since breakfast. There was an electric range but it had burned out before his father had died and there had never been money to repair it. He took out his pocket knife, made shavings, added kindling and touched the heap with an Everlite. When it flared up, he went out to fetch a pail of water.
When he came back Montgomery said, “Wondered where you’d gone. Doesn’t this dump even have running water?”
“No.” Max set the pail down, then added a couple of chunks of cord wood to the fire.
His Maw said, “Maxie, you should have had dinner ready.”
Montgomery interceded pleasantly with, “Now, my dear, he didn’t know we were coming. And it leaves time for a toast.” Max kept his back to them, giving his full attention to slicing side meat. The change was so overwhelming that he had not had time to take it in.
Montgomery called to him. “Here, son! Drink your toast to the bride.”
“I’ve got to get supper.”
“Nonsense! Here’s your glass. Hurry up.”
Montgomery had poured a finger of amber liquid into the glass; his own glass was half full and that of his bride at least a third. Max accepted it and went to the pail, thinned it with a dipper of water.
“You’ll ruin it.”
“I’m not used to it.”
“Oh, well. Here’s to the blushing bride—and our happy family! Bottoms up!”
Max took a cautious sip and put it down. It tasted to him like the bitter tonic the district nurse had given him one spring. He turned back to his work, only to be interrupted again. “Hey, you didn’t finish it.”
“Look, I got to cook. You don’t want me to burn supper, do you?”
Montgomery shrugged. “Oh, well—the more for the rest of us. We’ll use yours for a chaser. Sonny boy, when I was your age I could empty a tumbler neat and then stand on my hands.”
Max had intended to sup on side meat and warmed-over biscuits, but there was only half a pan left of the biscuits. He scrambled eggs in the grease of the side meat, brewed coffee, and let it go at that. When they sat down, Montgomery looked at it and announced, “My dear, starting tomorrow I’ll expect you to live up to what you told me about your cooking. Your boy isn’t much of a cook.” Nevertheless, he ate heartily. Max decided not to tell him that he was a better cook than Maw—he’d find out soon enough.
Presently, Montgomery sat back and wiped his mouth, then poured himself more coffee and lighted a cigar. Maw said, “Maxie, dear, what’s the dessert?”
“Dessert? Well—there’s that ice cream in the freezer, left over from Solar Union Day.”
She looked vexed. “Oh, dear! I’m afraid it’s not there.”