Expanded Universe

by Robert A. Heinlein

  Dr. Edward E. Smith

  August 1940—a back road near Jackson, Michigan—a 1939 Chevrolet sedan:

  "Doc" Smith is at the wheel; I am in the righthand seat and trying hard to appear cool, calm, fearless—a credit to the Patrol. Doc has the accelerator floor-boarded . . . but has his head tilted over at ninety degrees so that he can rest his skull against the frame of the open left window—in order to listen by bone conduction for body squeaks.

  Were you to attempt this position yourself—car parked and brakes set, by all means; I am not suggesting that you drive—you would find that your view of the road ahead is between negligible and zero.

  I must note that Doc was not wearing his Lens.

  This leaves (by Occam's Razor) his sense of perception, his almost superhuman reflexes, and his ability to integrate instantly all available data and act therefrom decisively and correctly.

  Sounds a lot like the Gray Lensman, does it not?

  It should, as no one more nearly resembled (in character and in ability—not necessarily in appearance) the Gray Lensman than did the good gray doctor who created him.

  Doc could do almost anything and do it quickly and well. In this case he was selecting and road-testing for me a secondhand car. After rejecting numberless other cars, he approved this one; I bought it. Note the date: August 1940. We entered World War Two the following year and quit making automobiles. I drove that car for twelve years. When I finally did replace it, the mechanic who took care of it asked to be permitted to buy it rather than have it be turned in on a trade . . . because, after more than thirteen years and hundreds of thousands of miles, it was still a good car. Doc Smith had not missed anything.

  Its name? Skylark Five, of course.

  * * *

  So far as I know, Doc Smith could not play a dulcimer (but it would not surprise me to learn that he had been expert at it). Here are some of the skills I know he possessed:

  Chemist & chemical engineer—and anyone who thinks these two professions are one and the same is neither a chemist nor an engineer. (My wife is a chemist and is also an aeronautical engineer—but she is not a chemical engineer. All clear? No? See me after class.)

  Metallurgist—an arcane art at the Trojan Point of Black Magic and science.

  Photographer—all metallurgists are expert photographers; the converse is not necessarily true.

  Lumberjack

  Cereal chemist

  Cook

  Explosives chemist—research, test, & development—product control

  Blacksmith

  Machinist (tool & diemaker grade)

  Carpenter

  Hardrock miner—see chapter 14 of First Lensman, titled "Mining and Disaster." That chapter was written by a man who had been there. And it is a refutation of the silly notion that science fiction does not require knowledge of science. Did I hear someone say that there is no science in that chapter? Just a trick vocabulary—trade argot—plus description of some commonplace mechanical work—

  So? The science (several sciences!) lies just below the surface of the paper . . . and permeates every word. In some fields I could be fooled, but not in this one. I've been in mining, off and on, for more than forty years.

  Or see Spacehounds of IPC, chapters 3 & 4, pp. 40–80 . . . and especially p. 52 of the Fantasy Press hardcover edition. Page 52 is almost purely autobiographical in that it tells why the male lead, "Steve" Stevens, knows how to fabricate from the wreckage at hand everything necessary to rescue Nadia and himself. I once discussed with Doc these two chapters, in detail; he convinced me that his hero character could do these things by convincing me that he, Edward E. Smith, could do all of them . . . and, being myself an experienced mechanical engineer, it was not possible for him to give me a "snow job." (I think he lacked the circuitry to give a "snow job" in any case; incorruptible honesty was Dr. Smith's prime attribute—with courage to match it.)

  What else could he do? He could call square dances. Surely, almost anyone can square-dance . . . but to become a caller takes longer and is much more difficult. When and how he found time for this I do not know—but, since he did everything about three times as fast as ordinary people, there is probably no mystery.

  Both Doc and his beautiful Jeannie were endlessly hospitable. I stayed with them once when they had nine houseguests. They seemed to enjoy it.

  But, above all, Doc Smith was the perfect, gallant knight, sans peur et sans reproche.

  And all of the above are reflected in his stories.

  * * *

  It is customary today among self-styled "literary critics" to sneer at Doc's space epics—plot, characterization, dialog, motivations, values, moral attitudes, etc. "Hopelessly old-fashioned" is one of the milder disparagements.

  As Al Smith used to say: "Let's take a look at the record."

  Edward Elmer Smith was born in 1890, some forty years before the American language started to fall to pieces—long, long before the idiot notion of "restricted vocabulary" infected our schools, a half century before our language was corrupted by the fallacy that popular usage defines grammatical correctness.

  In consequence Dr. Smith made full use of his huge vocabulary, preferring always the exact word over a more common but inexact word. He did not hesitate to use complex sentences. His syntactical constructions show that he understood and used with precision the conditional and the subjunctive modes as well as the indicative. He did not split infinitives. The difference between "like" and "as" was not a mystery to him. He limited barbarisms to quoted dialog used in characterization.

  ("Oh, but that dialog!") In each story Doc's male lead character is a very intelligent, highly educated, cheerful, emotional, enthusiastic, and genuinely modest man who talks exactly like Doc Smith, who was a very intelligent, highly educated, cheerful, emotional, enthusiastic, and genuinely modest man.

  In casual conversation Doc used a number of clichés . . . and his male lead characters used the same or similar ones. This is a literary fault? I think not. In casual speech most people tend to repeat each his own idiosyncratic pattern of clichés. Doc's repertory of clichés was quite colorful, especially so when compared with patterns heard today that draw heavily on "The Seven Words That Must Never Be Used in Television." A 7-word vocabulary offers little variety.

  ("But those embarrassing love scenes!") E. E. Smith's adolescence was during the Mauve Decade; we may assume tentatively that his attitudes toward women were formed mainly in those years. In 1914, a few weeks before the war in Europe started, he met his Jeannie—and I can testify of my own knowledge that, 47 years later (i.e., the last time I saw him before his death) he was still dazzled by the wonderful fact that this glorious creature had consented to spend her life with him.

  Do you remember the cultural attitudes toward romantic love during the years before the European War? Too early for you? Never mind, you'll find them throughout Doc Smith's novels. Now we come to the important question. The Lensman novels are laid in the far future. Can you think of any reason why the attitudes between sexes today (ca. 1979) are more likely to prevail in the far future than are attitudes prevailing before 1914?

  (I stipulate that there are many other possible patterns. But we are now comparing just these two.)

  I suggest that the current pattern is contrasurvival, is necessarily most temporary, and is merely one symptom of the kaleidoscopic and possibly catastrophic rapid change our culture is passing through (or dying from?).

  Contrariwise, the pre-1914 values, whatever faults they may have, are firmly anchored in the concept that a male's first duty is to protect women and children. Prosurvival!

  * * *

  "Ah, but those hackneyed plots!" Yes, indeed!—and for excellent reason: The ideas, the cosmic concepts, the complex and sweeping plots, all were brand new when Doc invented them. But in the past half century dozens of other writers have taken his plots, his concepts, and rung the changes on them. The ink was barely dry on Skylark of Space when the imitators started in. They
have never stopped—pygmies, standing on the shoulders of a giant.

  But all the complaints about "Skylark" Smith's alleged literary faults are as nothing to the (usually unvoiced) major grievance:

  Doc Smith did not go along with any of the hogwash that passes for a system of social values today.

  He believed in Good and Evil. He had no truck with the moral relativism of the neo- (cocktail-party) Freudians.

  He refused to concede that "mediocre" is better than "superior."

  He had no patience with self-pity.

  He did not think that men and women are equal—he would as lief have equated oranges with apples. His stories assumed that men and women are different, with different functions, different responsibilities, different duties. Not equal but complementary. Neither complete without the other.

  Worse yet, in his greatest and longest story, the 6-volume Lensman novel, he assumes that all humans are unequal (and, by implication, that the cult of the common man is pernicious nonsense), and bases his grand epic on the idea that a planned genetic breeding program thousands of years long can (and must) produce a new race superior to h. sapiens . . . supermen who will become the guardians of civilization.

  The Lensman novel was left unfinished; there was to have been at least a seventh volume. As always, Doc had worked it out in great detail but never (so far as I know) wrote it down . . . because it was unpublishable—then. But he told me the ending, orally and in private.

  I shan't repeat it; it is not my story. Possibly somewhere there is a manuscript—I hope so! All I will say is that the ending develops by inescapable logic from clues in Children of the Lens.

  So work it out for yourself. The original Gray Lensman left us quite suddenly—urgent business a long way off, no time to spare to tell us more stories.

  SPINOFF

  On 2 July 1979 I received a letter calling me to testify July 19th before a joint session of the House Select Committee on Aging (Honorable Claude Pepper, M.C., Chairman) and the House Committee on Science and Technology (Honorable Don Fuqua, M.C., Chairman)—subject: Applications of Space Technology for the Elderly and the Handicapped.

  I stared at that letter with all the enthusiasm of a bridegroom handed a summons for jury duty. Space technology? Yeah, sure, I was gung-ho for space technology, space travel, spaceships, space exploration, space colonies—anything about space, always have been.

  But "applications of space technology for the elderly and the handicapped"? Why not bee culture? Or Estonian folk dancing? Or the three-toed salamander? Tantric Yoga?

  I faced up to the problem the way any married man does: "Honey? How do I get out of this?"

  "Come clean," she advised me. "Tell them bluntly that you know nothing about the subject. Shall I write a letter for you to sign?"

  "It's not that simple."

  "Certainly it is. We don't want to go to Washington. In July? Let's not be silly."

  "You don't have to go."

  "You don't think I'd let you go alone, do you? After the time and trouble I've spent keeping you alive? Then let you drop dead on a Washington sidewalk? Hmmph! You go—I go."

  * * *

  Some hours later I said, "Let's sum it up. We both know that any Congressional committee hearing, no matter how the call reads, has as its real subject 'Money'—who gets it and how much. And we know that the space program is in bad trouble. This joint session may not help—it looks as if it would take a miracle to save the space program—but it might help. Some, maybe. The only trouble is that I don't know anything about the subject I'm supposed to discuss."

  "So you've said, about twenty times."

  "I don't know anything about it today. But on July 19th I'm going to be a fully-qualified Expert Witness."

  "So I told you, two hours ago."

  * * *

  Ginny and I have our own Baker Street Irregulars. Whether the subject be Chaucer or chalk, pulsars or poisons, we either know the man who knows the most about it, or we know a man who knows the man who knows the most. Within twenty-four hours we had a couple of dozen spaceflight fanatics public-spirited citizens helping us. Seventy-two hours, and information started to trickle in—within a week it was a flood and I was starting to draft my written testimony.

  I completed my draft and immediately discarded it; galley proofs had arrived of Technologies for the Handicapped and the Aged by Trudy E. Bell, NASA July 1979. This brochure was to be submitted by Dr. Frosch, Administrator of NASA, as his testimony at the same hearing. Trudy Bell had done a beautiful job—one that made 95% of what I had written totally unnecessary.

  So I started over.

  What follows is condensed and abridged from both my written presentation and my oral testimony:

  "Honorable Chairman, ladies, and gentlemen—

  "Happy New Year!

  "Indeed a happy New Year beginning the 11th year in the Age of Space, greatest era of our race—the greatest!—despite gasoline shortages, pollution, overpopulation, inflation, wars and threats of war. 'These too shall pass'—but the stars abide.

  "Our race will spread out through space—unlimited room, unlimited energy, unlimited wealth. This is certain.

  "But I am not certain that the working language will be English. The people of the United States seem to have suffered a loss of nerve. However, I am limited by the call to a discussion of 'spinoffs' from our space program useful to the aged and the handicapped.

  "In all scientific research, the researcher may or may not find what he is looking for—indeed, his hypothesis may be demolished—but he is certain to learn something new . . . which may be and often is more important than what he had hoped to learn.

  "This is the Principle of Serendipity. It is so invariant that it can be considered an empirically established natural law.

  "In space research we always try to do more with less, because today the payload is tightly limited in size and in weight. This means endless research and development to make everything smaller, lighter, foolproof, and fail-proof. It works out that almost everything developed for space can be used in therapy . . . and thereby benefits both the elderly and the handicapped, the two groups requiring the most therapy of all sorts.

  "When you reach old age—say 70 and up—it approaches certainty that you will be in some way handicapped. Not necessarily a wheelchair or crutches or a white cane—most handicaps do not show. So all of us are customers for space spinoffs—if not today, then soon."

  Witness holds up NASA brochure. "There is no need for me to discuss applications that NASA has already described. But this I must say: NASA's presentation is extremely modest; it cites only 46 applications—whereas there are hundreds. Often one bit of research results in 2nd, 3rd, and 4th generations; each generation usually has multiple applications—spinoffs have spinoffs, branching out like a tree. To get a feeling for this, think of the endless applications of Lee DeForest's vacuum tube, Dr. Shockley's transistor.

  "Here is a way to spot space-research spinoffs: If it involves microminiaturization of any sort, minicomputers, miniaturized long-life power sources, highly reliable microswitches, remotely-controlled manipulators, image enhancers, small and sophisticated robotics or cybernetics, then, no matter where you find the item, at a critical point in its development it was part of our space program.

  "Examples:

  "Image enhancer: This magic gadget runs an x-ray or fluoroscope picture through a special computer, does things to it, then puts it back onto the screen. Or stores it for replay. Or both. It can sharpen the contrast, take out 'noise,' remove part of the picture that gets in the way of what you need to see, and do other Wizard-of-Oz stunts.

  "This is the wonder toy that took extremely weak digital code signals and turned them into those beautiful, sharp, true-color photographs from the surface of Mars in the Viking program and also brought us the Voyager photographs of Jupiter and its moons.

  "I first saw one in 1977 at the Medical School of the University of Arizona—saw them put a long catheter
up through a dog's body in order to inject an x-ray-opaque dye into its brain. This does not hurt the dog. More about this later—

  "I did not know what an image enhancer was until I saw one demonstrated and did not learn until this year that it came from our space program. Possibly the doctor did not know. M.D.'s can use instruments with no notion that they derive from space research. . . . and a patient usually knows as little about it as did that dog.

  "The most ironical thing about our space program is that there are thousands of people alive today who would be dead were it not for some item derived from space research—but are blissfully unaware of the fact—and complain about 'wasting all that money on stupid, useless space stunts when we have so many really important problems to solve right here on Earth.'

  "'—all that money—'!

  "That sort of thinking would have kept Columbus at home.

  "NASA's annual budget wouldn't carry H.E.W. ten days. The entire 10 years of the Moon program works out to slightly less than five cents per citizen per day.

  "Would you like to be a wheelchair case caught by a hurricane such as that one that failed to swing east and instead hit the Texas and Louisiana coast? That storm was tracked by weather satellite; there was ample warning for anyone who would heed it—plenty of time to evacuate not only wheelchair cases but bed patients.

  "A similar storm hit Bangladesh a while back; it too was tracked by satellite. But Bangladesh lacks means to warn its people; many thousands were killed. Here in the United States it would take real effort to miss a hurricane warning; even houses with no plumbing have television.

  "Weather satellites are not spinoff; they are space program. But they must be listed because bad weather of any sort is much rougher on the aged and the handicapped than it is on the young and able-bodied.

  "Portable kidney machine: If a person's kidneys fail, he must 'go on the machine' or die. 'The machine' is a fate so grim that the suicide rate is high. Miniaturization has made it possible to build portable kidney machines. This not only lets the patient lead a fairly normal life, travel and so forth, but also his blood is cleaned steadily as with a normal kidney; he is no longer cumulatively poisoned by his own toxins between his assigned days or nights 'on the machine.'