24

DA CAPO AL FINE

The “Da Capo” story had been on Heinlein’s professional agenda, in one form or another, for more than thirty years. In 1972, he wanted to put a grand cap on the Future History—close it off with the science-fiction version of the Solar myth, a return to Lazarus Long’s origins—which were, roughly speaking, Heinlein’s own.

Ginny urged him to write up an embellished-dinner-table yarn about the Midshipman Who Was Too Lazy to Fail “… the most interesting story in the way of personal history that I had ever heard.”1 The tale—a modified version of the real-life story of his Annapolis classmate Delos Wait—was really “about” life wisdom that ran across the grain of the “received wisdom” of the culture, and that was a vein Heinlein had been working for decades.

He had tried, before, to get across the most important thing, and it was always—always!—misread. He had just gotten an intriguing fan letter from one Tim Zell, who seemed to “get” that “Thou Art God” in Stranger was not a permission, but instead a token of ultimate personal responsibility. Heinlein wrote, rather carefully, that he was not hostile to Stranger spinoffs like Zell’s Church of All Worlds, as the canaille among the organized fans apparently had it. But he wanted to be explicit: Zell had lumped him together with Ayn Rand and Robert Rimmer, and these two were, he felt, different kinds of writers than he, who made their stories fit their propaganda purposes:

I was asking questions.

I was not giving answers. I was trying to shake the reader loose from some preconception and induce him to think for himself, along new and fresh lines. In consequence each reader gets something different out of that book because he himself supplies the answers.

If I managed to shake him loose from some prejudice, preconception, or unexamined assumption, that was all I intended to do. A rational human being does not need answers, spoonfed to him on “faith,” he needs questions to worry over—serious ones. The quality of the answers then depends on him.…

But anyone who takes that book as answers is cheating himself. It is an invitation to think—not to believe.2

That letter might have helped give shape to Heinlein’s thinking about the new book—most likely what not to do with his men-like-gods theme—as he began pulling what amounted finally to eight hundred of the three-by-five index cards of ideas he had collected over the years.

What makes a god, ultimately, is the power of choice. Taboos are about things that human beings overwhelmingly desire to do—or would ordinarily wander into just because of the circumstances of living—unless they were sternly prohibited by custom internalized so intensely that people enforce their own mental “cages.”

But adults don’t need mental cages. Adults choose their behavior, sanely based on their circumstances, taking direct and full responsibility for their own acts.

Taboos are for emotional children. “One of Robert’s ambitions was to break every taboo,” Ginny later said.3

In addition to “The Man Who Was Too Lazy to Fail,” Heinlein had some novella-length stories to tell, as well as “Da Capo,” which had grown into a novel-sized return to the world of 1912 or thereabouts, his own golden age, when he was five. He carpentered all these stories together by setting up a Tale of the Thousand Nights and a Night, with the ironic twist of Lazarus Long (in the Scheherezade role) telling stories to entertain the Caliph of the then Howard Families—in exchange for the privilege of dying.

Heinlein did one other piece of professional writing before he actually got the book under way—his first, except for the aborted libretto, in two and a half years. Arthur C. Clarke and Chesley Bonestell were collaborating on a big picture book about the “Grand Tour” of the solar system NASA had proposed for a robotic spacecraft mission when all the planets were on the same side of the sun at the same time and would actually line up in the 1980s. Clarke was writing the travelogue and Bonestell was painting the images for Beyond Jupiter: The Worlds of the Grand Tour—and Little, Brown, their publisher, wanted an introduction from Heinlein.4

He was then able to start writing his book on March 13, 1972—Lazarus Long: Being the Memoirs of a Survivor. Heinlein was no longer able to work sixteen-hour days, but he spent the time he needed to, to get it exactly right—and did not stop until he wrote “The End,” 119 days later, on his sixty-fifth birthday. The collection of aphorisms he called “the notebooks of Lazarus Long” involved particularly finicky work, reworking the sayings he had collected over the years as they occurred to him, to get the phrasing just right. He split the collection in two and placed half on either side of the centerpiece of the book, to give the reader a gently comic break from the pathos of his story about adorable Dora.5 “He did not hurry it—” Ginny later remarked, “tomorrow was good enough. But no one really ever knew about that careful work. He tried to make it look easy…”6

The book was more of a virtuoso turn than anything Heinlein had done before—some of the finest pure writing he had ever done, and full of clever tricks: The opening of the book, for example, was an almost word-for-word retelling of a passage from Caleb Catlum’s America (Vincent McHugh, 1936), one of the books he had used in the 1930s and 1940s as a compatibility touchstone for new acquaintances. There was a section of blank verse tucked away in prose form at the start of one chapter—a trick he had picked up from James Branch Cabell.7 The “Dora” story—“The Tale of the Adopted Daughter”—is tremendously affecting.

Oddly, the more Heinlein engaged with the science-fiction genre, the more his last two books had turned out like “mainstream” fiction, as the SF fans called it. Heinlein had always kept up with what was being published currently in general fiction, and his writing came more and more to bridge between general fiction and the specialized conventions of science fiction. This one had migrated over to that corner of literature occupied by Izaak Walton and Laurence Sterne—and nowadays by John Barth and Philip Roth. During the 1960s, the “death of the novel” had become an issue in literary criticism, and some critics thought that the satire—or as critic Northrop Frye termed it, the “anatomy” (after Robert Burton’s 1621 Anatomy of Melancholy)—might be the next prestige literary form. Stranger in a Strange Land (1961) had been part of the satire/anatomy movement in literature (and note that Burton’s Anatomy was Jubal Harshaw’s favorite book), flanked by Joseph Heller’s Catch-22 (1961) and Giles, Goat Boy by John Barth (1966)—as had Glory Road (1963) and Farnham’s Freehold (1964). Lazarus Long returned to the anatomy form to organize its complex structure—while remaining core science fiction with its extension of the Future History twenty-three hundred years into the future.

The interlocking structure of the book was so complex he started his first cut on the manuscript while Ginny read the draft. In three weeks of concentrated work, Heinlein cut the book from 960 to 850 manuscript pages and changed the title to the “punchier” Time Enough for Love. Once the book was sent to a professional typist, he and Ginny took the vacation they both had been needing for some time. An opportunity fell into their hands for an interestingly different sea cruise.

Richard C. Hoagland was an energetic young man, a former science advisor for CBS at the time of the Apollo 11 coverage. At the end of July in 1972, Hoagland was promoting a Caribbean cruise in December to see the last of the Apollo missions launched. Apollo had achieved its purposes, and it was time to move on to the next goals—a permanent orbital station, a permanent lunar colony—perhaps a manned mission to Mars. This last Apollo launch would also be special because it was to be the only night launch in the program. Hoagland wanted to get a stellar group of scientists and journalists, science-fiction writers, and fans together, standing off the Florida coast when that Saturn V lifted off in the dark of night, the whole event surrounded by a seminar on space flight.

It was a grand idea—inspirational, educational, and in itself newsworthy. Arthur Clarke and Isaac Asimov both supported the venture, Asimov with a small cash investment. Hoagland wanted Heinlein as a speaker/lecturer, but Robert and Ginny decided to invest in the project, providing two thousand dollars in seed capital on September 6, 1972. After the launch, Statendam would go on to several ports in the Caribbean—and they would wind up in New York for Christmas and be on hand for the contract negotiations for the new book.

Early in August, Blassingame forwarded a letter from the Superintendent of the U.S. Naval Academy, Vice Admiral Mack, asking Robert to speak in April 1973 to the entire Brigade of Midshipmen plus faculty for the third annual series of public figure lectures inaugurated in honor of James Forrestal, the wartime Secretary of the Navy.

There could not be greater personal validation—particularly when Robert discovered that the Superintendent did not seem to be aware he was an Academy alumnus:8 The request had come purely because of his status as a public figure. He said nothing,9 but when the Admiral’s assistant, C. M. Walter, wrote asking for a photo and bio, the cat was out of the bag. Heinlein regularized the situation by becoming a Life Member of the USNA Alumni Association.

Some of the luster wore off for him when he asked what subject they wanted him to talk about, and Commander Walter suggested he talk about how science fiction had changed over the years and its impact on the country.10 Heinlein was “inside” the genre, and perhaps he could not appreciate what was plain to outsiders: Science fiction’s conversation about technology of the future had become the vocabulary for how to think about science and technology in the now. Science fiction had even become an instrument of policy—probably why Herman Kahn had asked Heinlein to participate in his think-tank scenarios.

But still, Robert was not satisfied with the prospect of speaking only in his capacity as a professional clown. He would do as they asked—but he had a few miscellaneous observations to make in the leftover bits of time.

Robert and Ginny flew to New York, boarding Statendam on December 4. Holland America had put an announcement of the cruise in the Travel section of the November 19 New York Times, touting “a series of symposiums chaired by Capt. Edgar Mitchell,11 and featuring such speakers as authors Arthur C. Clarke, Isaac Asimov, and Norman Mailer.”12

It does not seem to have done the trick: There were, indeed, scientists and journalists and science-fiction writers aboard, but the ship was largely empty—only 100 paying passengers on a ship meant for 650. The conference administration was not as well organized as the ship: Meetings were called and canceled at a moment’s notice, panelists were often unprepared, and the quality of the discussions ranged from incisive to whimsical.

Robert and Ginny socialized as much as possible, renewing acquaintance with friends and colleagues—Isaac Asimov, Marvin Minsky, Fred and Carol Pohl, Ben Bova,13 Theodore Sturgeon and his wife. Television personality Hugh Downs was there acting as master of ceremonies.14 Heinlein was granted courtesy of the bridge as an old Navy man. He was fascinated by the improvements in navigation technology since his day—since his last major cruises—particularly the real-time photoprints of weather satellite views.15

Norman Mailer and Katherine Anne Porter were on board as literary celebrities. Mailer had written a very arresting coverage of the Apollo 11 trip in 1969 and he was covering the last Apollo as well. He seemed also to have the same kind of remarkable memory Robert had, as he greeted Ginny by name, recalling them from a casual meeting years ago.16 Unfortunately, some of the things he had to say were a little “out there”: The Apollo missions might be disturbing the delicate vibrations of the “thanatosphere,”17 he said, out beyond the biosphere. The reporters lapped up the drivel, and the New York Times report of the trip called him the “star” of the cruise—aside from the launch itself. When Mailer said that NASA had managed to make the most exciting event in human history boring, he may have had a point—but he did come down on the side of the angels: “I believe finally and fundamentally in the need and the necessity for us to voyage into space, for I think it is part of our human design, part of our inner imperative.”18

Porter had been commissioned by Playboy to cover the night launch—somewhat unfortunately, as the journalists could not pass up unpleasantly whimsical references to her 1962 bestseller, Ship of Fools. Porter and Heinlein were distantly related through Daniel Boone, but the eighty-two-year-old writer was standoffish, and the fact that she had in her day been both a Communist sympathizer and a personal friend of Hermann Goering was not a combination that might have encouraged fraternization.

But they had the launch, and it was a glorious thing—“incomparably beautiful at night,” Heinlein called it.19 On December 6, Statendam anchored seven miles off Cape Kennedy. The launch was delayed two hours, but at 12:33 A.M. on the 7th, the flame flickered silently and illuminated from within the clouds of vapor venting from the launch vehicle, in flashes of brilliant white and orange. Slowly and silently it rose in the sky. “The lift off was every bit as fascinating as it had been for [Apollo] 11, but much much more spectacular! It was as if the sun had risen at midnight, but in the west, not in the east.”20 The Saturn V glowed golden and “lighting the night into a copper-colored semi-day,”21 “making droplets of vapor glow like trillions of tiny stars.”22

A full minute later, the roar of the rocket engine reached the ship like a physical blow, making Statendam’s hull drum with the sheer energy of it.23 Porter talked about the experience in a newspaper interview: “I came out of a world so primitive you can scarcely imagine it. We barely had gaslight in New Orleans when I was a girl. When I saw them take off I wanted with all my soul to be going with them.”24 Amen. They had the earthbound next-best thing that evening in the ship’s theater: a showing of 2001: A Space Odyssey.25

The next day, Statendam lifted anchor and made for the Caribbean part of the cruise. Several new passengers and participants had joined the ship in Florida, and they picked up more in St. Thomas—including, particularly, astronomer Carl Sagan, with his wife Linda. Sagan brought with him poster-sized blow-ups of the photos that had just come in from the Mariner 9 mission that was mapping the surface of Mars for the first time.

Heinlein was scheduled to give an interview for Canadian television at the same time as Sagan’s lecture, so Ginny went ahead to catch the first half. Heinlein joined her midway into the lecture, and they had a chance to talk with Sagan afterwards.

Things sorted themselves out socially on the ship. Ginny, who had the perspective of a passenger rather than a program participant, pointed out that the speakers tended to stick together in tight social groups, which meant that the paid attendees rarely got a chance to meet them. So Robert announced a mixer at about the halfway point of the cruise and undertook to make it happen, taking on the host role and breaking up the tight knots of speakers-speaking-only-to-speakers, and introducing the celebrities directly to the paying passengers. The atmosphere on board the ship changed as of that impromptu mixer, and the thing became an emotional success for everyone.26

With the launch behind them, the ship went on to San Juan, Puerto Rico, which was their principal Caribbean stopover. The seminars wobbled chaotically on. Heinlein’s talk had been postponed until the 11th—the day the Challenger lunar module was to separate from the America command module in lunar orbit and land at Taurus-Littrow. His talk—listed in the program as “The Apollo Flights Viewed Historically”—was scheduled to start at 2:30 P.M., during the radio coverage of the descent, and he was asked while he was making his way to the platform to keep his presentation down to fifteen minutes. He had a prepared presentation timed for thirty to forty minutes: He had to cut and paste in his mind as he finished mounting the stairs to the podium. Small wonder Isaac Asimov characterized his talk as “wandering.”27 They broke for the radio coverage of the touchdown, and resumed afterwards.

Statendam made its way back up the Atlantic coast, docking in New York on December 13. The new book manuscript had not reached Blassingame’s office yet, though the university copier in Santa Cruz had mailed it out on the 10th. The Heinleins were planning to be in New York for at least a couple of weeks, because they had found a gala way to go home: The P&O lines had a brand-new vessel on its maiden voyage in January, Spirit of London, for the Florida-to-San-Francisco route, going through the Panama Canal.

Challenger lifted off from Taurus-Littrow on December 14. It was scheduled to splash down in the Pacific on December 19—two days after the first copy of Time Enough for Love arrived in Blassingame’s office. This book was so large—and, the editors agreed, so tightly written28 that it could not realistically be cut—that they would have to issue it at an uncompetitive price. But Walter Minton, who was always eager to experiment with the newest technical methods, thought they could use computerized typesetting to keep the costs under control.

The immediate business concluded, Robert and Ginny then spent the remainder of their two weeks on the East Coast enjoying the decadent diversions offered by the Big Apple and environs (loosely defined), including a relaxed day with the Trottiers on the river in South Carolina and Christmas in New York. As Christmas presents, Ginny fed his recent interest in the immediate pre–World War I era by giving him a 1910 Sears catalog and a book about old—really old—cars.

In January they flew to Florida to catch the Spirit of London on its maiden voyage. Ginny was fascinated by the side jets that moved this brand-new ship sideways out of its slip. Robert was pleased with the ship’s exceptional stability—and the same state-of-the-art navigation technology he had seen on Statendam.

The Spirit of London’s route took her through the Panama Canal. They had a little rough weather coming up the West Coast. Robert didn’t succumb to seasickness, but he did pick up a case of the London flu. After clearing customs, Ginny got Robert bundled into a car and drove straight home, to a dismaying stack of mail and a dead garden (there had been a solid freeze, rare for the area, while they were away). Ginny promptly came down with the flu as well.

Heinlein had additional cause to be miserable when the galleys came from Putnam’s: They were carbon copies, very odd, smudged and difficult to work with, and between the computer typesetting and a raft of errors added by a copy editor, Heinlein had to ask for page proofs to work with them at all. For this book he had to work very carefully. Clean manuscript, no revisions at all once it was in type, even though a limited number of revisions were permitted by contract. He studied Skillin & Gay’s Words into Type and Putnam’s house style sheet so he could anticipate the copy editor’s objections and mark any variance from house style with “stet.” When he was done with the galleys, they were the cleanest set he had ever seen.29

In February Heinlein began assembling his notes for the Forrestal lecture he had to give in two months. He had set himself a difficult task this time, because he did intend to comply with Cmdr. Walter’s suggestion and talk about life as a freelance writer—but he had some things to get off his chest, some important ideas that had been percolating for decades.

In Starship Troopers (1959), he had tried to articulate the learning curve for a teenaged boy who went from mouthing platitudes to understanding deep within himself why his values might require of him that “last full measure of devotion.” His “dead serious (but incomplete) inquiry into why men fight”30 had used a style of argument he had probably picked up from Philip Wylie’s wartime Generation of Vipers and An Essay on Morals (1947)31—one that starts with a factual observation instead of moral or religious explanations.32

Heinlein had gotten letter after letter from servicemen—in all the services—telling him they had found Starship Troopers personally very meaningful, that he had articulated something of what they felt emotionally about duty and personal honor and could not articulate for themselves. In the last few years, this mail had been taking a dismaying turn, of disillusionment. Robert traced this first to the demoralizing effects on the country as a whole of the undeclared and maddeningly inconsistently prosecuted “war”/“police action” in Vietnam—but also to the “liberalizing” going on now in the armed forces. He would give any help he could to these earnest young people, to help them recapture their sense of purpose and proportion.

It was hard to argue that the actual decisions under which these men operated were rational—or even sane!—but he could affirm for them that the task itself was worthwhile and that it made sense in the larger scheme of things. Perhaps he had at last worked out a way to articulate the thoughts prompted by a friend’s comment on the “generation gap” four years earlier:

“My generation was patriotic,” she wrote, “but the present generation thinks patriotism is a joke.”

I think she may be right. Oh, I know young people who are fervently patriotic—and people even older than I am who are downright disloyal—but statistically she may have put her finger on the great difference. And the hell of it is that there seems to be no way to get through to them the idea that patriotism is not just irrational sentimentality but an indispensable survival factor as practical as good brakes and good tires—and that a nation that loses its patriotism is on the skids and headed for disaster.33

Patriotism is a social manifestation of a biological imperative, he went on to say, as useful and as finely honed by evolution as the opposable thumb or the camera eye. Patriotism is a pragmatic tool of evolution.

The first draft of the lecture was finished at about 8,300 words—more than twenty minutes over the time he had available. All the other business was shunted aside. Scribner was seeking some releases from him, and Heinlein was still steamed over the casually careless way they were treating him as a cash cow now that they had decided to get on the paperback bandwagon, after depriving him of the huge paperback market for decades. It would all have to wait until they got back—and he would have to handle it himself: When they got back, Ginny was going to start a long and painful course of periodontic surgery.

They arrived in Annapolis on April 4, 1973, the day before the lecture, and were put up at the Annapolis Hilton—except that they arrived late and found their reservation had been given away, despite a hold-for-late-arrival. They were directed to a motel on the main thoroughfare, with trucks rumbling by all night that kept Robert awake. Early in the morning, Ginny took him over to the Maryland Inn for breakfast. She rented a quieter room there and put him to bed to get some sleep. Later that day they made rendezvous with the Superintendent.

Robert’s mind was, naturally, on his speech. He had memorized the text, but he had a printed manuscript with him, and he had made up three-by-five slips for his jacket pocket, with the bullet points of the speech, so he could recover quickly if he lost his place.

They took him to a huge outdoor tent, which was the temporary Field House. Half the interior was curtained off with canvas, and the four thousand plus seats were arranged in a horseshoe around the podium. He could not project enough to be heard—which meant he was tied to the microphone as well as the clock. The lecture was unofficially tape-recorded by one of the spectators.

The midshipmen seemed interested and applauded at the right places. In the first part, working into his subject, he was surprised at the cynicism he found in some of the responses from his young audience.34

For example, when Heinlein asks the question, “Why are you here, mister?” a cadet on the tape can be heard to reply, “To get a free education.” Heinlein replies with some asperity, “Better not let an officer hear you say that.” In the transcription, this exchange is trimmed to “Don’t answer that; it’s a rhetorical question.”35

The rot had set in, even here. But that made the second half of his message all the more urgent, and he trimmed what he could from the part about freelance writing.

The midshipmen were all on their best behavior, yet as he worked into his dithyramb on the evolutionary role of patriotism, and their important part in it, they did not catch fire as he expected.36 As he built to his peroration, telling the story of the young stranger in Swope Park, when he was five years old, who sacrificed his life to save that of a young matron, he became caught up in the emotions of it: It was his own first encounter with the sublime, and powerful to him yet.37 He was overcome and choked up as he delivered the closing lines of the story:

This is how a man dies.

This is how a man lives.38

He was blinded by his own tears as the applause broke. Cal Laning, who was by then so deaf he had not actually caught enough of the speech to follow its progression, came on stage to help him off. He thought Heinlein was bitterly disappointed at their audience “sitting on their hands” for his homily on evolution and patriotism, Darwinism and duty.39

The truth was somewhat different. Robert and Ginny later found out there had been a power outage and a serious breach of discipline in Bancroft Hall the night before—a race riot!—that had been hushed up so that nothing reached the papers.40

Sometimes seed was sown on stony ground, but you sow it anyway.

The next day they were given a private tour of the facilities. April was in the middle of instruction, and he got a chance to observe some of the teaching and to discuss the revised curriculum. Since his day, the USNA had changed over from a technical college to a first-rate academic institution. Heinlein was suitably impressed: “The present Brigade is now receiving a far better education than we got without neglecting the professional subjects necessary to an efficient junior line officer,” he told his own classmates in his Muster Notes for the next year.41

The Superintendent’s luncheon for them was much less formal than the prelecture dinner had been. One Lt. (Miss) Johnson told him she taught Stranger as part of her class in The Contemporary Novel. “That floored me,” he wrote to a friend. “I know that book is all over the campuses but to find it being used in teaching at the N.A. I never expected.”42 He sat in on that class, that afternoon.

And then they went on for a week at Pennsylvania State University. One of Robert’s publishers had arranged for a long interview to appear in the New York Times Magazine as a profile in the fall and had commissioned the work from Phil Klass—an esteemed colleague who wrote under the pen name of “William Tenn.”43

Heinlein knew that the interest in Stranger was still peaking on campuses, and both he and Ginny knew he would be worn out after the Annapolis visit, so he had asked Klass to keep the meet-and-greet to a quiet minimum. But the invitations had apparently gotten out of hand: At one point he noticed some of the gravitas of the university sitting on the floor by his chair, literally at his feet.

Klass and his wife, Fruma, were greatly amused at Robert’s characteristic gusto. “Would you like to hear the paper I read at Annapolis?” Heinlein offered, and immediately went on, “Of course you would!” Klass recalled that, as he read again his peroration, he was overcome again with emotion:

—tears were rolling down his face, I mean he was sobbing as he read about people who died doing their duty for the country.

And Fruma said to him at one point … “When you read that paper at Annapolis, did you cry, too?” And he said, “My dear lady, when else should a man cry?”

God damn it! He was such a huge figure. Such a huge—so much larger than life.44

The week at Penn State allowed them to get their bearings before moving on to New York for business. Putnam’s intended to release Time Enough for Love in June 1973—and still no one was (very) nervous about the incest: It was the cover price they were worried about.

Publisher’s Weekly commissioned another old colleague, Alfred Bester, to do an interview with him, which would come out as publicity for the new book. Bester was best known for his seminal SF novels The Demolished Man (1953) and The Stars My Destination (1956), but he had been in the business exactly as long as Heinlein.45

Ben Bova also called on them, socially, but it turned into a professional meeting when he heard about the Forrestal lecture and asked to read the manuscript. Bova had been hired to edit Analog after John Campbell’s death. Intrigued by the Darwinian argument in favor of patriotism, Bova proposed printing the whole lecture as a “guest editorial.”

Heinlein had never expected to have this particular piece of work published—but he would pass up no opportunity to get the patriotism/evolutionary message disseminated. He marked in by hand the additional cuts he had made on the fly and gave Bova the reading copy he had brought with him.

They were home before Easter. Ginny started her dental work. Her dental problems over the years had reached the point at which ordinary dentistry would no longer fix the troubles, even temporarily: Her jaw was crumbling and would not even take fixed bridges. Robert discovered, in a lightning round of research, that a new procedure offered hope: They could use bone transplants to rebuild the jaw, then bridgework would be enough to supplement the sound teeth that remained.

The main drawback was the four to six months of multiple surgeries at the University of Pennsylvania while the bone transplants “took”—but it turned out there was a capable periodontist in San Mateo, about fifty miles north of Santa Cruz. Experimental dental surgery, without insurance, is … expensive—and their medical expenses had been going up as Medicare kicked in, not down. In San Mateo, Ginny would have a team of three specialists. Drs. Robinson (periodontics), Burns (endodontics), and Jeffrey. Sometimes, if the procedure was not too complicated, the doctors allowed Robert to observe.

They were not able to get any real domestic help. Robert had to be housekeeper, chief cook and bottle washer, and lavender extraordinaire—bo’sun tight and midshipmite and crew of the captain’s gig.46 He struggled gamely with the details, instead of going to work on another book right away.

The first major surgeries were the hardest on her. Gradually, she was able to help out more and took over particularly the cooking—probably in self-defense. And just in time: After his bout with peritonitis, shingles, and gallstones, Robert’s metabolism had shifted—not entirely surprising. It was something of a wonder, in fact, that it hadn’t done so when he was in his fifties. Perhaps the hormones and glandular extracts had given him a few more years of middle age. But during the writing of Time Enough for Love his blood pressure had gone disturbingly high—180/130—and his serum cholesterol and triglycerides were way up, as well. For this, he was seeing a new internist, Dr. Colin MacKenzie, who put him on medication and a very strict diet.

This diet was even more of a headache than the food allergy regimen twenty-five years before. Literally all of Heinlein’s favorite foods were off the menu—but Ginny figured out how to cope with the restrictions, exchanging tips and recipes with friends who had gone through much the same thing before them, planting berries and reading every book on the subject she could find. She even went on the diet along with him, and gradually their tastes adjusted. Within a very few months, his blood pressure was below the 120/70 magic numbers, his serum cholesterol and triglycerides were down to reasonable levels, and he had shed twenty-eight pounds. Heinlein was exultant:

Chilluns, I feel healthier than I have for forty years. I feel young. Every bite of the skimpy, very limited diet I must follow tastes like gourmet cooking … I’m happy all the time and filled with vigor and find working from reveille to taps a pleasure—while being driver for Ginny to San Mateo 2 or 3 times a week and sometime nurse & cook & housekeeper & household shopper I am nevertheless working on 5 books and expect to see every one of them published and perhaps more to come—when I had been thinking since 1969 “Maybe this one is my last.” But now I feel as if I could go on working forever.47

Time Enough for Love came out in June 1973 and within the first week of its release was on the bestseller lists in Seattle and Los Angeles—the first time he had ever hit the bestseller list for a hardcover initial release (I Will Fear No Evil was on the paperback list, and Stranger had been on the paperback list for years). By the end of the month, it was on the New York bestseller list. Putnam’s sold out the entire first impression, ordered a second and sold that out too, and was in the third reprint order—though, the lapse of time before the second printing could get to the stores caused the book to fall off the bestseller lists, and the slower, steadier sales after that never developed enough momentum to climb back on. Just before the initial release, Analog carried an excerpt from the book, “The Notebooks of Lazarus Long,” as a special feature.

The book came out at about the same time as Arthur Clarke’s book for 1973, Rendezvous With Rama, and the two books were reviewed in lockstep with each other. The New York Times gave them a midweek review as “Books of the Times” on August 22 that was curiously ambivalent about Time Enough.48 A month later, the Sunday New York Times Book Review featured a complimentary and much more insightful review by Ted Sturgeon: “Remember, too, that it hurts a man to think through and past his own conditioning—but nothing will stop [Heinlein]—ever. I like his new novel less than the celebrated Stranger, but love it more.”49