15

SCISSORBILL PARADISE

They were “debriefed” a third time in Colorado Springs, by someone from the CIA who tried to swear them to silence about anything they had seen and heard. “This is nonsense,” Heinlein said, and handed back the secrecy form. Heinlein intended to tell anyone who would listen, as long as his breath held out. He had already been invited to speak to the Cadet Forum at the Air Force Academy—and Ginny got to be in some demand as an after-dinner speaker for her talks about the trip.1

The American Mercury magazine, which was, regrettably, no longer so cutting-edge or chic as when H. L. Mencken had edited it in the 1920s and 1930s, immediately recognized the timeliness and potential importance of the “‘Pravda’ Means ‘Truth’” article. The editor, Shields ReMine, wanted to rush it into the October issue—at half its length as written. Heinlein reedited some of the editorial opinions ReMine had inserted and got the galleys off to Blassingame on the last day of August 1960.

Both Robert and Ginny were reading proof on the typed manuscript for The Man from Mars, and both were in a state of exhaustion, but Heinlein decided to take time out to appear at the World Science Fiction Convention in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. Starship Troopers had won the Hugo Award for Best Novel of 1959—by what science-fiction historian Sam Moskowitz called “a decisive plurality.”2 “I had … been lured there by being told, just before the convention, and under seal of confidence, that I was due to receive a Hugo and wouldn’t I please show up!”3 Heinlein had become aware that a Hugo could mean substantial extra sales, if the publisher had time to put the announcement on book covers.4 When he appeared suddenly at the Pittcon awards banquet, he received a spontaneous ovation—very gratifying, and somewhat unexpected, since the mail and notices he had received on this book so far were overwhelmingly negative. “I’m not sorry I made the effort—” he continued. “It’s fun to get a Hugo and the Pittcon itself was fun. But I got there beat to the heels and should have been cremated at the end of it.”5

The trip to Pittsburgh had a secondary benefit: He was able finally to meet Arthur George “Sarge” Smith in person—one of the older, wiser mentor-figures he so valued. They had been corresponding for a long time, and Heinlein considered Sarge Smith his best friend.6 This particular occasion was also particularly appropriate for this meeting, as he had dedicated Starship Troopers to Sarge Smith.

Returning to Colorado Springs—he had let the euphoria of the convention trap him into agreeing to be guest of honor at the next year’s convention in Seattle—Robert and Ginny got the Man from Mars manuscript to Blassingame on September 15. It was obviously too long at 220,000 words and would have to be cut, “but even the extraneous material is so interesting,” Blassingame told him, “I would hate to see it go.”7

Doubleday turned down The Man from Mars, and so did Scribner. When he found out it had been offered there, Heinlein instructed Blassingame explicitly not to offer anything to that house, ever again: Alice Dalgliesh had left Scribner, it was true—but Charles Scribner himself had participated in the shabby treatment given to the Patrick Henry campaign and to Starship Troopers, and to Heinlein personally. He no longer had any ambition to appear under the Scribner imprint.

Putnam’s wanted The Man from Mars for their adult line and concurred that it was too long. Howard Cady, the line editor assigned to the book, began suggesting story points that could be cut or condensed. Heinlein initially misunderstood this discussion as a fundamental disagreement with the nature of the book. “We did not grok the whole last part of the book,” Cady had told him, “in which religion and love become so completely associated on a physical level.” Some of Cady’s other ideas were even more troublesome: Cady was enthusiastic about the book, Blassingame told Heinlein, but the combination of sex and religion would probably hurt sales—and the miracles were weak sellers, too.

No sex. No religion—and none of the miracles that function as persuaders. That knocked the props out from the characters’ motivation and destroyed the story, turned it into a “non-alcoholic martini.”8 This was not censorship of taboo material, Cady went on to assure Heinlein, but an inability to connect with the story on an empathetic level.9

Putnam’s had already been exploring ways to cut the risk, by making a very early release to the Doubleday Science Fiction Book Club. An editor in the book club division insisted Putnam’s cut the book almost in half, to 125,000 words (still very large for a science-fiction novel at the time). Cady passed this along as his own idea.10

The contract was signed on October 5, but Heinlein decided not to accept Putnam’s advance until they had an approved manuscript. He took the opportunity to express his appreciation for Blassingame’s effort in placing this very difficult property:

Lurton, I do not think I have told you what a wonderful job I think you have done in placing this ms. I wrote the thing with my eye intentionally on the market with the other on the copy in this mill (yes, even when I disagreed with editors or producers). But I knew that I could never get away from slick hack work, slanted at a market, unless I cut loose and ignored the market … and I did want to write at least one story in which I spoke freely, ignoring length, taboos, etc.

When I finished it and reread it, I did not see how in hell you could ever sell it, and neither did Ginny. But you did. Thank you.11

The lawsuit against the producers of The Brain Eaters was coming down to the wire, with a trial scheduled in December 1960. In almost all legal actions, the lawyers for each side put comprehensive sets of questions—“interrogatories”—to each other, ostensibly to establish the facts. A few days after sending his attorney, Fendler, his draft answers to interrogatories, Heinlein received a phone call from Roger Corman, who introduced himself as the producer of The Brain Eaters. This direct contact between litigants was highly improper, but Corman explained that he had read The Puppet Masters for this suit and was impressed with Robert’s writing. If they could get this plagiarism suit settled quickly enough, he wanted to hire Robert to write a screenplay based on Jules Verne’s The Floating City—a five- or six-week job for $3,000.12

Not tempted, Heinlein told Corman: That was about half what he would earn if he put the same effort into a boys’ book.

The next day, Corman offered to mount a full production of The Puppet Masters—and maybe other Heinlein properties.

Heinlein was not born yesterday. This series of unsolicited offers was essentially an admission by Corman that he didn’t have any real defense against the charge of piracy and was fishing for what it would take to get him to drop the suit entirely. Heinlein referred Corman to his lawyer and his agent, to see whether Corman could come up with some proposal that might actually tempt him. But the suit had essentially collapsed. By November Corman made him an offer he could live with: He had put together a co-development deal with an English film group to do a full screen version of both The Puppet Masters and “If This Goes On—.” The money end of the deal would be a complicated arrangement of cash and participation—$2,000 up front and an additional $2,000 in ninety days to secure the option on The Puppet Masters. An additional $6,000 would be deferred against revenues, secured by 15 percent of the net proceeds. In addition to this $10,000 (more than he had realized from Destination Moon), Corman would pay a $4,000 option on “If This Goes On—.”

But it would mean a net loss: $2,000 to settle an infringement that had cost him a $10,000 sale of the same property.

Heinlein could live with that. It was three days before the scheduled trial date: The lawyers would agree to a ninety-day continuance (which cost them nothing, as the action was expected to trail until April, anyway), by which time Corman either would or would not perform on the agreement, and they could talk about dismissing the action at that time. The settlement papers were executed on December 27, with Corman’s check in the lawyer’s hands. Fendler would get 50 percent of the proceeds—his contingent fee. But Heinlein’s $1,000 share of the first payment brought up a problem: What with the increasing foreign book contracts, and no expensive travel plans in mind, the cash was starting to mount up. Perhaps this is when Ginny started investing their surplus cash in stocks and bonds.

Interest in Heinlein’s work had only increased recently, as a result of the publicity Starship Troopers was generating. On October 23, a radio program in New York City, Marion Selby’s “Young Book Reviewers” on WMCA, had a debate-like discussion of the theory of government he had put into Starship Troopers, with a panel of high school teenagers from Teaneck, New Jersey. Heinlein did not hear about it until much later, but it represented exactly the kind of “best use” that could be made of the book, in his opinion: to provoke discussion, let people—especially young people—figure out just what it was they believed and why …

… and he was invited to join the Playboy Club as a charter member. In 1960, Playboy magazine was the height of cool, smart and trendsetting. The world had changed a great deal during his lifetime—and was changing still and would change even more. G. Harry Stine had seen in operation the Dean Drive that Campbell was pushing in Astounding/Analog and thought he had a mathematical model that might explain the apparent violation of Conservation of Mass-Energy. If it panned out, it might shake up physics and mechanics—overdue in Robert’s opinion. He was skeptical of miracles out of Astounding, he told Stine—but you never could tell.

And Putnam’s finally came to a decision about the target length for The Man from Mars. Cutting to 175,000 words would be relatively easy, Heinlein had told them; 150,000 would be difficult but doable. Cutting to 125,000 words would be very difficult and would probably take him months of work—“and the patient would probably die on the table.”13 They finally agreed to the 150,000-word cut.

Heinlein had not been able to work up any enthusiasm for either candidate in the 1960 presidential election. Vice President Nixon was—well, Richard Nixon. And he had no great expectations of John F. Kennedy, however bright he was (perhaps pro-fascist Joe Kennedy’s boy was not the likeliest candidate he would have picked). “We are fiddling, waiting the outcome of the election,” Heinlein told G. Harry Stine.

If Kennedy gets in, I may just sit back and await the debacle while staying pleasantly drunk. Ginny feels about the same way—she is continuing Russian but neither of us can get really interested in anything, at least not until after 8 November.14

And to his brother, after the election, he wrote:

… the difference between Nixon and Kennedy was much too small to be important. The only reason I voted at all this time is because I will always stand up and be counted—make a choice, even if the choice is bad and difficult. But the only satisfaction I take in this election is that Eisenhower is through, thirty days from now.15

Over the last several years, politics in America had been shifting around in a puzzling way. The people who were calling themselves “liberal” had taken on a bizarre kind of internationalist pseudo-pacifism, while he was finding liberals he could actually recognize, as he understood the term from his own liberal politics of the 1930s, billing themselves as conservatives and Republicans—including some New Dealers, such as Barry Goldwater.16 Robert was a determined pragmatic: When Goldwater’s Conscience of a Conservative came out in 1960, the Heinleins bought dozens of copies for friends and family. “Party no longer concerns me,” Heinlein told his brother. “I simply want a President strong enough to stand up to the Russians. I guess I am an ex-FDR-liberal, i.e., I am more libertarian than ever.”17 He reflected on his ambiguous position respecting political parties.

Rex, I am not attempting to “make a conservative out of you.” In the first place, I do not consider myself to be a conservative; I am an individualist with strong libertarian views, but my approach to both domestic economy and to foreign affairs is pragmatic, not doctrinaire.…

My approach is always pragmatic.… During the ’thirties I was an all-out New Dealer (even though I saw lots of things wrong with the New Deal). I am no longer a New Dealer without having changed my basic evaluations. Instead, circumstances have changed; the problems of the ’thirties are not the problems of the ’sixties … The central problem of today is no longer individual exploitation but national survival … [sic] and I don’t think we will solve it by increasing the minimum wage …18

The first half of The Man from Mars was cut by January 2, 1961, and finished two weeks later. It was not going to be 150,000 words: He had cut it as much as he possibly could without damaging the story, and it was 160,083 words. He was geared up for battle: “I am tempted,” he said, “to type those eighty-three excess words on a postcard.”19

But Howard Cady replied calmly that if that was the length of the book, that was the length at which they would publish it—and agreed that promotion should be oriented toward the mainstream market; Heinlein’s reputation would carry the SF readers’ market without any help from Putnam’s promotion department.

Heinlein was hit almost immediately by a sling—or possibly an arrow—of outrageous fortune: Samuel M. Moskowitz, a fan-turning-pro usually referred to in the fan press as “SaM,” wrote that he had contracted for a series of biographical sketches of living science-fiction writers, and Heinlein’s was to be the first of this new series. Due in three weeks.20 Heinlein had enjoyed Moskowitz’s sketches of historical science-fiction figures as they came out but told Moskowitz he had “no slightest wish to be the central figure in a fan dance while I am still alive.”21

Nevertheless, it evidently was going to happen. “I would rather this article never appeared,” he told Moskowitz, “but since you have already contracted to write it, I would prefer for it to be accurate.”22 He wrote a long and detailed response to SaM’s questions, but he specifically withheld permission to quote from the letter: SaM could use the information to confirm or contradict any information he dug up from other sources, adding, “I wish to Christ that you would not discuss me, as a person, in print.”23

In the meantime, The Man from Mars had moved from editing toward production—and marketing. In order to pitch it for a mainstream audience, Heinlein suggested they eliminate “Mars” from the title—or any obvious appeal to the science-fiction audience:

The book is not science fiction even though I have made use of two of the common devices of science fiction (i.e., space travel and a future scene, ca. 1990). But space travel is no longer science fiction, not in 1961 when it is on every front page … The story belongs in the same category as Gulliver’s Travels and Pilgrim’s Progress—philosophical fantasy—rather than with the works of Jules Verne.24

He suggested alternate titles: All Who Grok, The Grokking Work, The Fallen Caryatid, No Sparrow Shall Fall, or A Sparrow Falls.25 Cady agreed with the general idea but wanted a title that would play better. The Fallen Caryatid was the best of that particular lot, but wouldn’t entice a buyer in a bookstore.

Cady had for years been collecting unused titles as they occurred to him. He suggested one of these, taken from the Bible (Exodus 2:22): A Stranger in a Strange Land. That name appealed, and in a telephone call on March 22, the final title was set without the initial article. This book was a make-or-break test for him, he had told Lurton Blassingame:

The Man from Mars is an attempt on my part to break loose from a straitjacket, one of my own devising. I am tired of being known as a “leading writer of children’s books” and nothing else. True, those juveniles have paid well—car, house, and chattels all free and clear, much travel, money in the bank and a fairish amount in stocks, plus prospect of future royalties—I certainly shouldn’t kick and I am not kicking … but, like the too-successful whore: “Them stairs is killing me!”

I first became aware of just how thoroughly I had boxed myself in when editors of my soi-disant “adult” books started asking me to trim them down to suit my juvenile market. At that time I had to comply. But now I would like to find out if I can write about adult matters for adults, and get such writing published.

However, I have no desire to write “main stream” stories such as The Catcher in The Rye, By Love Possessed, Peyton Place, The Man in The Grey Flannel Suit, Darkness at Noon, or On the Road. Whether these books are good or bad, they each represent a type which has been written more than enough; there is no point in my adding more to such categories—I want to do my own stuff, my own way.

Perhaps I will flop at it. I don’t know. But such success as I have had has come from being original, not from writing “safe” stuff—in pulps, in movies, in slicks, in juveniles. In pulp SF I moved at once to the top of the field by writing about sociology, sex, politics, and religion at a time (1939) when these subjects were all taboo. Later I cracked the slicks with science fiction when it was taken for granted that SF was pulp and nothing but pulp. You will recall that my first juvenile was considered an experiment by the publisher—and a rather risky one.

Lurton, I have never written “what was being written”—nor do I want to do so now. Oh, I suppose that, if it became financially necessary, I could imitate my own earlier work and do it well enough to sell. But I don’t want to. I hope this new and different book sells. But, whether it does or does not, I want my next book to be still different—neither an imitation of The Man from Mars, nor a careful “mixture as before” in imitation of my juveniles and my quasi-juveniles published as soi-disant “adult” SF books. I’ve got a lot of things I’d like to write about; none of them fits this pattern.26

A bonus materialized when Roger Corman made his second payment on the Brain Eaters settlement, though the co-production arrangements for “If This Goes On—” had fallen through, and he did not pick up the other option.27

Heinlein put off the next writing job to put a dam and catch basin in their arroyo, so they would not be so vulnerable to the area’s periodic droughts. He added a decorative stonework pool—stonework was his favorite form of exercise (other than sex of course)—with a geyser-like fountain. Ginny marked her approval of the work and its progress by fixing a flower in his hatband. Working at stonework again took more off his waist.

I’m real purty. So is the pool, as I gave it a tumbled-boulders appearance with the engineering concealed, then used my irrigation pump to create a miniature jet d-eau, like the one in Geneve but only twenty feet high. I put spot lights on it at night. Total added cost: one shower head and ten feet of garden hose.28

Midway through “Project Stonehenge,” Yuri Gagarin—a Russian cosmonaut—became the first human being to orbit the Earth, on April 12, 1961. Four years after Sputnik, the Russians were still making firsts in space—a prospect that could only be grim for mankind’s future. It was not until May 1961 that Alan Shepard became the first American to orbit the Earth. Ginny continued lecturing on their trip to the USSR, and Heinlein was not entirely off the hook for public speaking. Even as galley proofs for The Man from Mars arrived for correction, Heinlein complained about his own obligations:

I have two speaking dates hanging over me—and I do mean “hanging over me.” Despite the fact that I can and do speak in public and rather enjoy it at the time despite the fact that I used to, as a politician, speak in public half a dozen times a day, now that I am a writer I find that the anticipation of a speaking date hangs over me, interferes with the work in hand by monopolizing my imagination—I think about what I am going to say instead of thinking about plots.

.… every one of these overhead chores reduces the time I spend in original composition at this machine by exactly the amount of time lost; If I could avoid all correspondence and all public appearances I would at least double my real working time and have more time for fun as well.29

One of those engagements was his guest of honor speech for the Worldcon coming up in September, but the other was more immediate: On April 29 the Oklahoma State Library Association was to present him with the Sequoyah Award for childrens’ literature, for Have Space Suit—Will Travel. Travel arrangements for that trip were inconvenient:

Alva [Oklahoma] turns out to be like the post office in Brooklyn; you can’t get to it. No air service, other services impossible. Can drive, of course, but just far enough away to kill five days—three if we really knocked ourselves out, but neither one of us like to be on the highway when exhausted, especially at night.30

They wound up chartering a plane: “leave here after breakfast, speak at a luncheon meeting, home the same night. Only one day’s work lost and, believe it or not, cheaper than driving, going by bus, train, or commercial air—quite a bit cheaper considering hotels, and enormously cheaper if my time is figured at any cash value.”31

Starting in June, they had Jack Williamson as a temporary neighbor: He came to nearby Boulder, Colorado, to do ten weeks of coursework in preparation for his comprehensive doctoral oral examination in English literature (plus a class in Middle English).32 The neighborhood was not quite as idyllic as it had been, though: By the time Williamson got there, construction had started on the Cheyenne Mountain Combat Operations Center, which would coordinate all the telemetry for NORAD (the North American Aerospace Defense Command). It also coordinated missiles and aircraft defense for the entire country.

The Colorado Springs area had seen a considerable military buildup in the previous ten years, particularly since 1958 when the Air Force Academy went in.33 Overnight, NORAD would make Colorado Springs the number-one nuclear target in the United States.

Putnam’s test-readers for Stranger in a Strange Land had been surprisingly enthusiastic about the book. The Doubleday Science Fiction Book Club released Stranger as its selection for June 1961—a month before the Putnam’s release—and word of mouth started.

The early reviews were encouraging: Kirkus Reviews dwelled on the book’s comic aspects. Baker & Taylor, the world’s largest book distributor, compared Stranger (favorably) in the July 1961 Book Buyers Guide to “that best-seller of blessed memory,” Pat Frank’s Mr. Adam (1946). Putnam’s was very pleased with the advance orders stacking up before their release in July.34 It was beginning to look as though Stranger had a good chance.35

Sprague and Catherine de Camp came by train for a visit in July—mostly to see Jack Williamson this trip—with their youngest son, Gerry, and a cousin. Ginny set up an impromptu cocktail party for the de Camps in the garage, since Sprague was allergic to cat dander and couldn’t spend any time in the house without breaking into alarming wheezing.36 Later, Robert took the boys to a nearby animal park where they could pet the tame deer.37

Lucky Herzberger threw a fifty-fourth birthday party for Robert the next day. A few days later, the first fan letter arrived for Stranger: It was the best book—and the best science fiction—the fan had ever read.38 This was a pleasing change from the negativity over Starship Troopers. Although many people didn’t “get” what was going on in the book—including the reviewer Orville Prescott, for The New York Times (singularly clueless, even for a book reviewer: “A disastrous mishmash of science fiction, laborious humor, dreary social satire and cheap eroticism”39)—the mail was overwhelmingly positive, and it apparently affected a lot of people very deeply. Heinlein was startled to learn, at the end of the month, that Putnam’s planned to place $1,000 ads promoting the book.40

Two weeks after his birthday, Heinlein received an affirmation that he was making a real mark on working science. Some time previously, he had a short but satisfying exchange of letters with Harold Wooster. Wooster had noticed his coining of “xenobiology” in The Star Beast (1954), and they had a short etymological discussion comparing the Latinate “exo-” prefix used by some scientists for extraterrestrial subjects with the Greek root “xeno-” that Heinlein preferred. Wooster wrote a letter about their correspondence to the editors of Science, the weekly organ of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, quoting one letter almost in full.41

Other of Heinlein’s coinings had become established over the years—“astrogation,” for example, and related words like “astrogator” (and, truth be told, he wasn’t absolutely sure he had coined “xenobiology” from scratch, though he was pretty sure of “xenic” for any extraterrestrial subject).42 He had had a certain amount of influence in the missile field just after World War II—he hadn’t been able to get his name attached (as the “Heinlein Grid”43) to the pole-to-pole, orange-slice orbit he had first described in 1947, but Robert Cornog had told him that his description of radio and radar-jamming techniques had been called the “Heinlein Effect” in in-house reports created by Northrup at Wright Field for Guided Missiles.44 Neither of those had caught on, but “Waldo” was in use for remote manipulators, and this was an even more solid acknowledgment of influence among working scientists.

So he was in an expansive mood when Sam Moskowitz’s “Robert A. Heinlein, Man, Myth or Monster” appeared in the June 1961 issue of Amazing—“a swell job,” he told SaM (in spite of the ludicrous title the editor had given it)—the best and most level-headed job he could have anticipated. “You even managed to teach me some things about myself that I had not consciously been aware of.… I greatly appreciate the meticulous care you took not to invade my privacy.”45

Reaction to Stranger inside the SF field—if Stranger was in any realistic sense “inside” science fiction—was coming in very mixed. The fan letters were overwhelmingly positive, and several of his colleagues (including dedicatee Philip José Farmer) wrote approvingly about the book’s “experimental” qualities. Fred Pohl commissioned a correspondingly experimental extended review for Galaxy from Algis Budrys.46

Budrys began writing science fiction in the early 1950s. His 1958 Cold War novel Who? was adapted for the screen in 1973, starring Elliot Gould as Sean Rogers, and his 1960 novella “Rogue Moon” was nominated for a Hugo Award. When the review came in, it looked a little too experimental, a little too self-conscious a performance. Pohl queried Heinlein for a rebuttal.

Heinlein had managed to be a science-fiction writer for more than twenty years without ever saying a critical word about a colleague in public, and he was not about to start now. Furthermore, there just wasn’t any point in trying to explain a book to someone who didn’t get it from reading it. Budrys had managed to talk about the book for three thousand words, blathering on about reincarnation (a subject that was not actually in the book in any significant way47), without ever once noting that the central character was engaged in a quest—a religious quest—“and that he found his answer in sexual human love … [sic] I have just searched through his ms. word for word—and do you know, there is no word about, no inkling of any sort that Stranger has any sex in it.”48 Between Heinlein’s comments and Pohl’s own reservations about the review—whether it actually represented Budrys’s views or was mainly a “performance piece”—Pohl decided not to run it.

Heinlein had a chance to meet Budrys in person two weeks later, at SeaCon, the 1961 World Science Fiction Convention in Seattle, Washington. Budrys was a Lithuanian patriot, and Heinlein wanted feedback from him about the section of his guest of honor speech that was about the long history of Lithuania, crushed out of pravda = official truth inside the Soviet Union.49 Harlan Ellison was toastmaster that year, which represented a chance to meet another colleague—and a very promising one—for the first time (he wrote Ellison a fan letter about Final Shtick when he got home).50

But shortly after arriving in Seattle, a case of the sniffles turned into influenza, and the flu was threatening to turn into something more serious: He had that “drowning from the inside” feeling that might presage pneumonia.

Alan E. Nourse, the fan Sprague de Camp had introduced him to in Philadelphia years ago, had become a doctor and a professional writer.51 Nourse’s fast action with hypo and pills kept Robert on his feet enough to give his speech on Monday, September 4.

Heinlein had given the committee an open-ended title, “The Future Revisited.” That title played off his 1941 speech, “Discovery of the Future,” but when he fleshed out the speech, just days before leaving for Seattle, he compared the jittery state of the world in 1961 with his prior guest of honor speech, given on the verge of World War II,52 and then talked about the current situation in terms of the likeliest alternatives, concentrating on the nuclear war that everyone anticipated:

… very few Americans are prepared to stay alive while the fallout cools down. Nor am I criticizing, please note … My wife and I have no fallout protection of any sort. I’m not proud of it, I’m not ashamed of it—I’m simply in the same boat as almost everybody else and have paid as little attention to the warnings.… This is how it is. We are not now prepared to live through a heavy attack—and those figures of a third or maybe a half of us dead stand—unless we do prepare. If we do, and from what I’ve seen of American temperament I doubt if we will prepare.

The other part that makes up the ninety percent of all of our possible futures is simpler, slower—and just as deadly in the long run. In due course, with no more than minor brush wars unfelt by any but the poor blokes who get killed in them, the United States will find itself in a situation where the simplest, easiest, and safest thing to do will be to surrender … the idea is that the Kremlin will be giving the orders here rather than Washington.… The laddies who liquidated the trouble in the Ukraine [a “planned famine” in 1932–33 called the “Ukrainian genocide”] and used tanks on the school boys of Budapest [Hungarian Revolution, 1956] won’t hesitate to liquidate the bourgeois mentality here …53

American history might be wiped out, the way Soviet pravda had wiped out Lithuania’s. “Freedom and democracy we can lose … and then regain them in time. Not in your time and mine, probably—but when the human race needs these factors, we’ll use them again.”54

In order to deal realistically with the dangers, he urged them to “[t]reat the world the way a research scientist treats a problem—examine the data, try to organize, try to predict coldly and logically.”55 And the point that most clouds the picture is the picture of the enemy as villains:

Let me repeat it like a radio commercial: Communists are not villains!

They are devout, moral, very moralistic, kind, humane, and utterly convinced—by their standards! And they live by their standards!.… Until you learn this one thing about Communists, you have no chance of reading and understanding the Cold Equations.

Communists are nice people, almost all of them. They are sincere, they are true believers—and they won’t be seduced by sirloin steaks.56

If the American people and in particular American political leaders took the trouble to try to learn the mind and methods and high moral standards of their enemy, we would not behave as foolishly as we do.57

Heinlein was given an ovation—but he was running a temperature and wasn’t entirely sure he hadn’t just lapsed into incoherence:

… all I remember of it is the room moving slowly around me like a turn table (and once almost falling off the platform) while I tried fuzzily to pull myself together and remember what it was I had intended to say and in what order—and then a horrid feeling when it was over that I had certainly forgotten the logical sequence …58

He invited the entire convention—three hundred fans—back to the suite he and Ginny had taken for an informal “at-home” reception and went to change, drenched with fever sweat.

It was a disturbing speech—deliberately, of course. And, of course, what most of the audience heard was “it’s all over”—not what he said at all. F. M. Busby, one of the convention’s organizers who was later to be a science-fiction writer himself,59 was in the audience and told Heinlein, “You overestimated the ability of the audience to ‘fill in the punchlines.’” Years later, Busby reported publicly on the reaction:

It was pretty obvious to me that the speech was intended to have a deliberate effect and to rouse a specific response; I asked Heinlein about this, and in such a way as not to tip off my guess unless it turned out to be correct. As I’d guessed, his idea was to shatter complacency and to spark the listener to insist and act upon the third (unstated) alternative; that we can tough it out without either precipitating Atomigeddon or surrendering. About 10% of the audience responded in that fashion and not one of them seemed to realise that he was doing anything but refuting Heinlein.60

When Heinlein got back to his room after his guest of honor talk, he showered quickly and had just time before people started arriving to get on the long yellow corduroy bathrobe Ginny had made. He gave up the attempt to dress and rolled with the situation, receiving, like Thomas Jefferson, in his dressing gown.

They did have very nearly the entire convention in their suite at one time or another during the night, including Jerry Pournelle, a young engineer from Boeing—a very stimulating person—who wanted to quit his job and take up writing as a living. Later, Pournelle wrote that he was happy to see Heinlein introducing SF fans to “Grand Strategy.”61 Within a few years, Pournelle would be working with think tanks and policy wonks himself.62

Heinlein was also happy to renew his professional acquaintances, especially with Poul Anderson and his pretty young wife, Karen. Karen camped at his feet when he sat down, gazing up at “God in a yellow bathrobe.”63

Somehow Heinlein got through the convention—enjoying himself though not getting nearly enough rest, in Ginny’s opinion.

I conceive it to be the g. of h.’s job to make himself available and to be sociable, rather than necessarily attending the formal meetings—and everybody was nice to us.… and we had a wonderful time.64 I had a good time in spite of being sick and getting sicker as the convention progressed. But I’m vague about what happened.65

He insisted on participating even in the Masquerade Ball, Ginny in cat costume as Vesta the Vegian from Doc Smith’s The Vortex Blaster, while he—“I am depending largely on green grease paint and crepe hair to create a Charles Addams horror: Minister Plenipotentiary and Ambassador Extraordinary from Arcturus III.”66

They got through the speech at the University of Washington the day after the convention ended and flew back to Colorado Springs, where Ginny caught Robert’s flu and took to her bed.67

That speech he had given at the convention would not let him go: All the way back home, he thought about the potential hypocrisy involved in telling these young people they should invest their futures in fallout shelters.68 One supercilious and ignorant “colleague” had already as much as accused him of hypocrisy in print, talking about (nonexistent) radiation proofing on his house in Colorado Springs.69 That stung more than he cared to admit in public. He had considered building a bomb shelter, but the house was built on a granite outcrop, and there was no place to put a shelter.

Do you recall Carl Sandburg’s anecdote in The People, Yes about the man who spread the rumor that they had struck oil in Hell … and spreads it so well that he sells the idea to himself—and leaves for Hell? Something like that happened to me:

I.e., in Seattle, in my talk, I told the audience that everyone, pacifist or fighter, should provide himself with a fallout shelter—and also noted that most Americans would not do so … with myself as a typical bad example of an American who, despite all warnings, had done nothing at all to protect himself and his family from possible atomic attack.

… I had a long string of excuses—no children and no overpowering desire to last through a fourth war in one lifetime, neighbors with children who had done nothing (and who would be certain to show up with their kids if I built a shelter—leaving me to sit outside and fry), the extreme expense of the thing, since my house has no basement and no attic and sits on a shelf of granite … no cheap and easy way to do it.…

Excuses—I had the money and I also had the strong conviction that the USSR is less likely to attack the stronger we are … in particular, if most Americans did their best to render themselves as nearly immune from attack as possible (without waiting for the government to do it for them), then the Kremlin would not attack, because those babies bet only on sure things.

The fact that I still believed that the majority of Americans would sit, fat, dumb, and happy, and take no steps to survive, in no way relieved me of my obligation to make my small piece of America as strong as possible. So wearily I undertook to design and build a fallout shelter.70

He got some chores out of the way first—thank-you letters, including a thank-you ad in the progress report for the next WorldCon, in Chicago; he offered to put Algis Budrys in touch with some high-level people in Washington, D.C., who might be interested in some of A.J.’s ideas about the Lithuanian resistance movement. And then General Kuter,71 from NORAD, invited him along to attend the Air Force Association meeting in Philadelphia on September 20 to 24.

Heinlein flew from Peterson Field in the General’s private plane. This was his third such meeting: He had attended the first in Denver during the Patrick Henry campaign—depressing for its dispiriting sense of defeatism. This one was invigorating, energizing him with the implication that there were things that could be done to check the long, slow slide into surrender. He came back to Colorado Springs on Sunday evening, following the banquet.