Astounding

by Alec Nevala-Lee

  On the evening of the Apollo 17 launch, the Statendam held station in the water near Cape Canaveral, waiting beneath a darkened sky crossed by distant lightning. A series of holds postponed takeoff until after midnight, but at last, the rocket ascended. As Mailer and Downs smoked a joint with a pair of stowaways, the sky brightened to a dull copper and the stars disappeared.

  Glancing back, Pohl saw Asimov, Heinlein, and Sturgeon standing together with their faces lit by the flare. A sound like thunder caused the hull of the ship to vibrate. Heinlein compared it to an atomic explosion, while Asimov was more struck by the reaction of the underground publisher Rex Weiner, who was gazing up behind him, stoned out of his mind: “Oh, shit. Oh shi-i-i-it.”

  The ship continued on to the Virgin Islands, where Mailer disembarked, taking some of the air out of the proceedings—the press was more interested in him than in any of the science fiction writers on board. Carl and Linda Sagan took his place, and the second half of the trip passed pleasantly. Heinlein gave a speech, but he was told just beforehand that he could speak for only fifteen minutes, or half as long as he had expected. Asimov felt that the talk was “rather wandering.”

  Voyage Beyond Apollo was more aptly named than any of its participants could have known. While Mailer sparred with Asimov, the journalist Tom Wolfe was in Florida, trying to persuade the astronauts to open up about their experiences—and, in retrospect, the week marked a high point in the dialogue between science fiction and the intellectual establishment. It was the final act of the drama in which the genre had made its most profound impact on the imagination of the world, and some of the writers there had reason to wonder if they would live to see what came next.

  IN JANUARY 1970, HEINLEIN HAD ENTERED THE HOSPITAL WITH AN UNTREATED CASE OF PERITONITIS. After a colectomy, in which he was given blood transfusions from five donors, he was left nauseous and weak. He knew that his new novel I Will Fear No Evil—about a dying billionaire whose brain is transplanted into the body of his female secretary, with a minor player named Judge McCampbell—had to be cut by thirty thousand words, but he was too exhausted to revise it. As published, it was a repellent combination of radical weirdness and smug complacency, with the barest hint of what it might have been if the reader had been able to care about the characters.

  By the end of the year, Heinlein felt well enough to try for a comeback, conceiving of an ambitious novel, Time Enough for Love, to close out his Future History. It centered on Lazarus Long, the effectively immortal protagonist of Methuselah’s Children, whose superhuman fecundity—women beg to have his children—came off as a wishful reaction to the author’s own childlessness. The result was his last major work, and it included a few nostalgic nods to Hubbard, whom he had never ceased to see as a war hero. Lazarus uses the pseudonym “Lafayette Hubert, M.D.,” and he refers to another Lafe, a naval officer, with some familiar qualities:

  He had hair so red that Loki would have been proud of it. Tried to choke a Kodiak bear to death. . . . Lafe tackled him with bare hands . . . and mind you, when he had no need to. I would have faded over the horizon. Want to hear about Lafe and the bear and the Alaskan salmon?

  Heinlein put more of himself into it than perhaps any other story, and it became his first bestseller in hardcover.

  The world had caught up with him, and as fans of Stranger in a Strange Land sought out his other books, a lucrative chain reaction ensued. Much of his newfound wealth went toward his medical bills, as well as those of his mother, who died in 1976. He also assisted with the hospital expenses of Philip K. Dick, who wrote to him with awe, “I am trembling as I write this, to address a letter to you. . . . You made our field worthy of adult readers and adult writers.”

  Despite such testimonials, Heinlein felt wounded by criticism from fans, and he was distracted by other causes. He credited the transfusions that he had received during surgery for saving his life, and he spent the better part of a year researching an article on blood sciences, seeking advice from Asimov, whom he admiringly described as a renaissance man: “If Isaac doesn’t know the answer, don’t go look it up in the Encyclopedia Britannica, because they won’t know the answer either.” On a visit to the Jet Propulsion Laboratory—which must have reminded him of Jack Parsons—for the launch of the Viking spacecraft, the writer Jerry Pournelle informed him that half of the scientists there had been drawn to their profession by his stories.

  He was one of the undoubted big three authors in science fiction, along with Clarke—whom Heinlein criticized for having never written a memorable character—and Asimov. When Asimov jokingly suggested that one of them should die to make room for their successors, Heinlein replied, “Fuck the other writers!” But he had trouble maintaining his old levels of productivity. In 1978, he suffered a blockage of blood to the brain, and his doctor ordered him to quit smoking. Heinlein, who was holding an unlit cigarette at the time, slid it quietly back into the pack.

  Robert A. Heinlein, L. Sprague and Catherine de Camp, and Isaac Asimov at the Nebula Awards in 1975.

  Courtesy of the Jay Kay Klein estate. Used by permission of Special Collections & University Archives, UCR Library, University of California, Riverside.

  After a carotid bypass, he improved, returning to The Number of the Beast, a metafictional fantasy that owed something to Hubbard’s Typewriter in the Sky. The novel—with a villain who uses the alias “L. Ron O’Leemy,” an anagram of Heinlein’s pen name Lyle Monroe—was bought by Fawcett for half a million dollars, which he needed to pay for his operations. Its appearance also led to an exchange of letters with Hubbard, who wrote to him fondly, “Now they’re accusing us old-timers of being society’s fortune tellers. I’m glad they’ve come to that, actually.”

  Heinlein had become a statesman for the genre, testifying before the House Select Committees on Aging and Science and Technology on applications of space technology for the elderly—he said that he hoped to stay alive until he could buy a commercial ticket to the moon. He was also positioning his work for future readers. In the autobiographical material in the collection Expanded Universe, he minimized his relationship with his editors, stating that Alice Dalgliesh had “disliked” him, but liked the sales of his books, and that Sixth Column was “the only story of mine ever influenced to any marked degree by John W. Campbell, Jr.”

  When the writer George R. R. Martin asked him to contribute an introduction to a volume in honor of Campbell, Heinlein called back to refuse, saying that the editor had never taught him anything. It was in sharp contrast to Asimov, who agreed to write an essay for Martin, even if his private feelings were more conflicted than the ones that he expressed in print: “It sometimes seems to me that if I weren’t so insistent on speaking of Campbell in my own writings, he would vanish forever from the minds of people—and in that same way, I often think, my own name will vanish too after the first flurry of regret when I die.”

  Heinlein denied Campbell’s influence with equal intensity—although the issue hardly could have mattered to most readers—and his statements carried a trace of personal bitterness. Although he had achieved greater acclaim than any other science fiction writer, living or dead, he felt underappreciated. He distanced himself from the pulps, saying that he had sliced up his novels for serialization solely for the money, and at times, he resembled Hubbard, who insisted that he wrote science fiction only to finance his research and systematically erased all collaborators from his life story.

  There was also a dispute with Campbell’s successor. After the editor’s death, a search had begun for his replacement at Analog, with rumored candidates including Harry Harrison, Poul Anderson, and Fred Pohl. Asimov recommended del Rey, who was closest “in ability and character” to Campbell, but the publisher wanted someone younger. His second choice was Ben Bova, who landed the job. Bob Lapham, a vice president at Condé Nast, later said that he had read stories by all the contenders, and Bova’s was the only one that he could understand.

  Bova had big shoes to fill. After he
took over Analog, he met with Will Jenkins, who remarked, “Here we’ve had a good lunch and we haven’t come up with one single brilliant idea for a story.” In time, he rose to the occasion, and it was under his guidance that a sense emerged of what the magazine might look like without Campbell. He left in 1978, handing the reins to Stanley Schmidt, and accepted a position as the editor of Omni. It seemed like a natural home for Heinlein—but when he saw the draft of a negative review of Expanded Universe, he told Bova that unless it was pulled, he would never work for him again. It wasn’t, and he never did.

  On April 13, 1981, Leslyn Heinlein, who had suffered a stroke, died in Modesto. Her ashes were scattered at sea. Heinlein hadn’t been in touch with her for decades, and he might not even have known. If he had, he might have reflected that with both Leslyn and Campbell gone, no firsthand witnesses remained to the earliest stages of his development as an author.

  The most memorable episode of his twilight years didn’t involve writing at all. Jerry Pournelle was chairing the Citizens Advisory Council on National Space Policy, a loose consortium of writers, scientists, and public figures who prepared white papers on strategic defense for President Ronald Reagan. It was as close as anything ever came to Campbell’s dream of a direct pipeline to the halls of power, and Heinlein joined in avidly—he admired Reagan, who reminded him of Barry Goldwater, and he had registered for the first time as a Republican.

  Within two years, the council’s work seemed to pay off. On March 23, 1983, Reagan delivered a speech proposing a defensive shield to guard against missile attacks: “I call upon the scientific community who gave us nuclear weapons to turn their great talents to the cause of mankind and world peace—to give us the means of rendering these nuclear weapons impotent and obsolete.” The program’s official name was the Strategic Defense Initiative, but in a nod to its evident fictional precursors, it soon became known as Star Wars.

  The announcement and the first round of tests led to heightened tension, both on the international stage and within the genre. One prominent skeptic was Asimov, who said, “I don’t think Star Wars is feasible and I don’t think anybody takes it seriously. It’s just a device to make the Russians go broke. But we’ll go broke, too. It’s very much a John Wayne standoff.” On September 17, 1984, Arthur C. Clarke told the Senate Foreign Relations Committee that the principles behind Star Wars were “technological obscenities.” Heinlein was furious.

  Events came to a head when both writers attended a meeting at Larry Niven’s house. Clarke had written a critical article on the subject for Analog, arguing that an orbiting laser station could be destroyed by “a bucket of nails,” and when the aerospace engineer Max Hunter brought it up at the gathering, he replied lightly, “But Max, I learned everything I know about celestial mechanics from you.”

  “I didn’t teach you enough, Arthur,” Hunter responded. Clarke found himself facing a hard line of questioning from the other attendees, and he conceded a few technical errors. The discussion remained cordial and focused on the science, however, and Clarke stuck to his political views.

  Heinlein was less willing to let it drop. After the formal session had broken for lunch, Heinlein—who had remained silent—told Clarke, in a tone that shocked the others, that he had no business giving advice to Americans. Clarke recalled, “He accused me of typically British arrogance, and he really was vicious. It really hurt me. I was very sad about it.”

  When Clarke responded that he had a moral objection to the program, Heinlein advised him to avoid getting involved in matters in which he didn’t have a stake. Clarke felt that the issues in question affected everyone on the planet, but he ended on a conciliatory note, telling Heinlein, “I can’t help the British, but I’ll try to do something about the arrogance.”

  He never changed his position, and the encounter effectively ended their friendship. Clarke made a few attempts at reconciliation by mail, sending Heinlein a picture of two fighting bull elephants with the note “Does this remind you of anything?” He later remembered, “Though I felt sad about this incident, I was not resentful, because I realized that Bob was ailing and his behavior was not typical of one of the most courteous people I have ever known.”

  This may have come closest to the truth. Heinlein’s health had forced him to summon all his physical courage, while draining him of energy that he had used to keep other parts of himself under control, much as the war had revealed a strain of weakness in Hubbard that had been present all along—or as Campbell’s darker side had been exposed by gout and hypertension. Asimov drew a telling contrast:

  [Heinlein] had a definite feeling that he knew better and to lecture you into agreeing with him. Campbell did this too, but Campbell always remained serenely indifferent if you ended up disagreeing with him, whereas Heinlein would, under those circumstances, grow hostile. . . . I do not take well to people who are convinced they know better than I do, and who badger me for that reason, so I began to avoid him.

  And there was no doubt as to where Asimov’s own sympathies fell. When he heard what Heinlein had said to Clarke, he became enraged—and he banished all of Heinlein’s books from his library.

  LIKE HEINLEIN, HUBBARD HAD SPENT MUCH OF THE LAST THREE DECADES BROODING OVER THE threat of nuclear war, and he seemed equally unable to separate it from the ups and downs of his own career. An associate recalled, “If [his enemies] caught up with him they would cause him so much trouble that he would be unable to continue his work, Scientology would not get into the world, and there would be social and economic chaos, if not a nuclear holocaust.”

  Hubbard had sailed the Atlantic for years. Whenever they had to welcome “wogs,” or outsiders, onto the ship, his portraits were turned to the wall and materials relating to Scientology were hidden. He insisted that he was no longer connected to the church—which sent him fifteen thousand dollars a week—but he was just as involved as always. Wherever he went, he was followed by his “messengers,” a squadron of teenage girls in blue uniforms who conveyed his orders and lit his cigarettes. He never touched them sexually, but he took obvious satisfaction in their loyalty. During a family argument, he told one of them to spit in his daughter Diana’s face.

  He also rebuffed Alexis, his daughter with Sara Northrup, whom he had already excised from his official biography. When Alexis reached out to him, Hubbard dispatched two agents with a letter, which had been written on a typewriter that was discarded after a single use to prevent it from being traced. They informed an astonished Alexis that Hubbard had married the pregnant Sara only out of pity, with the strong implication that her real father was Jack Parsons. The letter was signed “Your good friend, J. Edgar Hoover.” Alexis never tried to see him again.

  His attempts to find a safe haven had failed. In 1972, after a rumor arose that France would seek his extradition for fraud, he took off for New York, where he went into hiding with a pair of staff members in Queens. Remarkably, he also found time for at least two visits to the house of George O. Smith in Rumson, New Jersey. The magician James Randi, who encountered him there at parties attended by science fiction writers, recalled that the other guests ignored Hubbard, who sat drinking by himself in the corner: “He was a mess.”

  One day, Hubbard asked an assistant to look up the names of the Seven Dwarfs. In a secret order written on April 28, 1973, he laid out his plans for what he called the Snow White Program, with projects for different countries named after characters from the Disney movie. It was part of a larger effort to go after the church’s enemies—including journalists—more aggressively, and it would ultimately succeed in planting spies in the Drug Enforcement Administration, the Department of Justice, the Federal Trade Commission, and the Internal Revenue Service.

  By September, the prospect of extradition seemed to have faded and Hubbard went back to his fleet. Any hopes of a turning point were dashed after he was hurt in a motorcycle accident in the Canary Islands—a bad skid on gravel left him with cracked ribs and a broken arm. Until then, it had occ
asionally seemed possible for him to enjoy his wealth, but now his most sadistic tendencies took hold, amplified by a closed world in which he had total authority, with nothing to prevent him from becoming the worst possible version of himself.

  He established an internal gulag—the outcasts wore black coveralls and were fed on food scraps—that expanded to encompass a third of the crew. After an unfortunate incident at a port in Madeira that ended with rocks being thrown on both sides, he decided to go to South Carolina. As they were nearing shore, they received a frantic message from the church’s intelligence arm, warning him that federal agents were waiting on the dock. Hubbard made for the Caribbean, where he was visited by his aging father. Harry Ross Hubbard, whose wife had died in 1959, had “a wonderful trip,” and he passed away soon afterward.

  Hubbard’s own declining health and the rising price of oil made it seem advisable to seek a permanent base, and his attention was drawn to the town of Clearwater, Florida, the name of which carried an obvious resonance. He hoped to take control of the local government, but he indiscreetly let his identity slip to his tailor, a science fiction fan. The word spread, and Hubbard, spooked, fled to Washington, D.C. A regional Scientology office was nearby, and he was handed fliers for the church in the street, to his considerable amusement.

  Under the direction of Mary Sue, the Snow White Program was going strong, but its agents grew reckless, and when their activities were exposed, Hubbard had no choice but to vanish again. Looking for a place to hide from process servers, they settled on Olive Tree Ranch in La Quinta, California. Quentin, their son, was growing visibly unstable: “He was talking about people coming from outer space and what we were going to do about it.” After admitting to a staff member that he had faked auditing results for a friend, he left the ranch.