8

WORLD TRAVELERS

“I recall quite well,” Ginny later remarked, “that the first long sea voyage we made together it took Robert five days to get the gumption to load a camera!”1 The Gulf Shipper was a passenger-freighter, with excellent, though not luxurious, accommodations. The Heinleins began making shipboard friends, and Robert took the opportunity to show off Ginny’s talent and good nature, offering her barbering skills to the entire crew—all forty-seven of them. It took her all of one day, but netted them a fifth of Scotch whisky.

The ship made for the Atlantic side of the Panama Canal, an approach familiar to Robert through many transits while in the Navy, but not to Ginny. Seeing the operation of the locks, raising the whole ship eighty-five feet in a concrete box, to float out into Gatun Lake, was as fascinating and awe-inspiring for her as it still was for him, and the reverse process, lowering in the Miraflores Locks to the Pacific, was just as impressive.

Their first real port of call was Buenaventura, Colombia. It rained almost continuously while they were in port—Buenaventura gets 350 inches of rainfall each year. Nothing dried out—ever. Heinlein developed a bad case of athlete’s foot overnight, and his portable typewriter froze up, rusted to immobility.2

By the time they got to Callao, the seaport of Lima, Peru, they were out of the tropical summer and into more temperate climates. A routine delay gave them an extra day for sightseeing in Lima, and they had a chance to see Pizarro’s mummy, parks, and the slums by which Heinlein gauged the “real” standard of living of the countries they were visiting. They chatted amiably with anyone they were thrown together with, and Heinlein found his own assumptions and world view challenged by the understandings and assumptions that made South American politics work.3

The news from the United States was filled with the doings of Senator Joseph McCarthy. Of his general attitude toward McCarthy, Heinlein later explained, “Let me take time to make it clear that I regard McCarthy as a revolting son of a bitch, with no regard for truth, justice, nor civil rights—also that I think his purposes were demagogic and personally ambitious, not patriotic. All clear?”4 The local news was a sharp and strange contrast. His attitudes toward the McCarthy hearings, he said, were shaped by what he saw there:

I read most about them while in Lima, Peru—and at the same time passed back and forth in front of the Colombian Embassy where Haya de la Torre had taken sanctuary. Here was this poor devil, on the short end of a South American political difference, hiding in one room for years on end, because the alternative was to come out and face a firing squad. I could not help comparing him to Fifth Amendment “martyrs” [in the U.S.]. I concluded that the whole McCarthy incident was a shining example of just how strong our Bill of Rights can be.…

I think that the most regrettable thing about the whole McCarthy teapot tempest is the way hordes of usually sensible people let themselves be panicked. “Run, run, the sky is falling!” If we can’t stand up to a pipsqueak threat like McCarthy, what would we do in the face of a real menace? Preposterous! All out of proportion to the irritation. Have we lost our wits, to let such a bogeyman frighten us?5

Dismayingly, he found almost zero comprehension of what the American ideal of political freedom might mean in practice. Even when otherwise sophisticated people believed what they heard of American political life (not universally the case), they reinterpreted the reportage to fit their own customs and conditions. “McCarthyism”—which, he observed, “they conceive to be a policy of take-him-away-and-lock-him-up-I-don’t-like-his-politics”—was ramping up, and there was a disturbingly widespread assumption that the McCarthy “reign of terror,” an expression understood in the United States as metaphorical (though serious), had the scale and violence of the French Revolution:

… the political institutions of another country are hard to understand. Outside the United States very few people comprehend the nature of a congressional investigation and it is almost impossible to explain it to them. They have it mixed up with the Inquisition, with Senator McCarthy having all the functions and powers of Torquemada. The idea that a private citizen can answer or refuse to answer a series of questions put to him by a senator [as to treasonable activities] … and then get up and walk out a free man—is so foreign to most other people that they simply cannot believe it.6

It was a theme he encountered over and over again throughout this trip—and the others he made in later years. It seemed to him that virtually nobody got the essential lesson here: Nobody was killed in the United States; nobody was even jailed except by due process of law; the worst that happened was that some people had reputations blackened, possibly deservedly if they had in fact been engaged in treasonous activities. The system worked exactly the way it was supposed to—protecting the rights of individuals. Heinlein was resilient, but it did take some of the shine off his long-standing one-world sentiments. How could people unite in mutual self-interest if they couldn’t even comprehend that politics might not be pursued by Latin vendetta?7

… in the wider sense we have made the greatest cultural contribution of any society to date, by demonstrating that 160,000,000 people can live together in peace and freedom. Nothing else in all history even approaches this cultural accomplishment, and sneers at our “culture” are both laughable and outrageously presumptuous when emanating from a continent that habitually wallows in its own blood. I’ll take Coca-Cola, thank you; it may be vulgar, no doubt it is simply impossibly American, it may lack the bouquet of a Continental wine—but it is not flavored with ancient fratricidal insanities.8

From Lima the Gulf Shipper made for the Chilean port of Arica. Heinlein occupied his time brushing up his navigation skills and shooting the sun each day with the ship’s navigator.9

Their time aboard the Gulf Shipper came to an end early in December—midsummer—in Valparaiso, Chile. They gave a farewell dinner party the night before they left the ship, exchanging addresses with newfound friends. The line’s local agent shepherded them through customs and onto a train bound for Santiago, where they would spend a week or more at the luxurious Hotel Carrera.

There, Robert drafted a brief portrait, about eight thousand words, of the bemused and somewhat surreal mental state they were enjoying, “Ms. Found in a Pisco Bottle or Around the World Backwards and Upside Down”—the introduction of which would become the opening paragraphs of chapter 2 of his travel book Tramp Royale.10 They enjoyed Chile enormously but had a deadline to meet in Buenos Aires, Argentina. They flew across the continent on December 12, 1953, to catch the ship for the next leg of their trip and get back on the schedule laid out in their itinerary. Both of them were apprehensive about going into Argentina, the last fascist state left over from World War II.

This trip was three hours across the continent (though they did get to see the enormous Christ of the Andes statue from the air) and three hours getting through customs. Ginny had scheduled them for only four days in Buenos Aires—the original Big Apple—on the theory that that was the absolute maximum length of time she could possibly keep her mouth shut (Robert thought she was unduly optimistic).11 Then Ruys delayed in sailing, and they had more time. They were, therefore, relieved and pleasantly surprised to find that they liked Juan Perón’s Buenos Aires: It was relaxed and above all civilized. Perón’s presence was felt everywhere, true—but the general run of opinion seemed supportive, popular attitude mirroring in an apparently genuine way the Perón cumple posters seen around town: “Perón keeps his promises”; “Perón performs.” Santa Evita had been dead for only a year and a half, and her memory was everywhere, too. Unlike her husband, though, Eva Perón seemed to be almost universally despised—by the middle classes.

The major hazard to the tourists, Robert remarked, was the alligators—the empty ones sold as bags and shoes.12 But they found some of Robert’s books on sale, and once when they were out trying to find American cigarettes on the black market (Heinlein’s attitude toward a wartime black market was one thing—but to black markets created by busybody regulations he had a strictly pragmatic attitude), Heinlein incautiously admitted to the man giving them directions that he was a writer. Word spread quickly, and he was besieged by reporters. He agreed to a radio interview on Friday, December 18, 1953, for the Servicio Internacional—the International Broadcasting System of Argentina13—that went surprisingly well despite some cultural differences that made him uncomfortable.14 One part of the interview he feared might give him trouble: He was expected to say “something really nice about Papá.”15 He was able, however, to approve at least one sentiment seen around town on banners prominently displayed: “In the new Argentina, the only privileged ones are the children.”

After eleven days they boarded M.V. Ruys for the next leg of their voyage, to Brazil by way of a two-day stopover in Montevideo, Uruguay, where a chance meeting in a sidewalk café, five minutes socializing with a spaniel and its human family, led to a warm personal relationship with a young Uruguayan diplomat, Mauricio Nayberg, and to introductions around the world, particularly in Singapore, that would open unexpected doors.

They had only three days in Brazil, so started inland by bus the first day from booming, industrial Santos to São Paulo, and then overnight, two days before Christmas, up the coast to Rio de Janeiro.16 They had only one day in Rio, a native guide who spoke almost no English, and a day of overpowering heat and humidity—but they drove up Corcovado mountain to see at first hand the monumental Christ the Redeemer statue overlooking the steep hills over Rio—and, what the Heinleins may not have realized they were overlooking, Rio’s favelas, some of the worst slums in the world, so legendary in their poverty, violence, and crime that they are still being used as the setting for many “shooter” video games.

Ruys headed for Cape Town, South Africa, next, and the weather was rough. There was a fire extinguisher low outside their stateroom door that would catch them whenever the ship lurched. Ginny, who always bruised easily, got a vivid collection of bruises from hip to knee. One day she startled some of the South Africans returning home, who were lounging by the ship’s swimming pool. “What happened to you?” they asked, concerned. The devil got into Ginny at that moment: “My husband beats me,” she told them. They were indignant on her behalf—never stopping to ask themselves why a wife-beater would localize his abuse to her upper legs. Ginny let them go on, amused. But it got around the ship that Robert was a wife-beater. One of them even wrote him a stern letter about it. It was the kind of thing it was hard to take seriously—but also hard to shrug off. Fortunately, they would leave it behind them when the ship got to South Africa.17

The captain decided to risk an unscheduled stopover at the most isolated inhabited spot on Earth, the island of Tristan da Cunha—an opportunity like catnip to Robert in both his “official” capacities as loafing tourist and working writer. A British possession midway between South America, Antarctica, and Africa, Tristan da Cunha rarely had ships more often than once every three to seven years. Ruys arrived on January 2, 1954, and Heinlein posted a handwritten letter on ship’s stationery to Ron Hubbard—also an avid world traveler (and member of the Explorer’s Club)—for the curiosity value of the postmark.

The Tristans were friendly and hospitable, but lack of cultural context made it nearly impossible to converse with them—a stark contrast with the way they had managed to chat with strangers with whom they had no language in common over all of South America. They were able to conduct commerce, however: Crew members bought some penguins from the islanders. But the Tristans did not have disease resistances the others all shared: A cold was going around the ship—a very minor thing that didn’t even disturb the ship’s surgeon’s routine. But the islanders caught it from them, and four of them died in the ten days after Ruys left.18

Two days later, the ship grounded at the Cape of Good Hope.

South Africa under apartheid was a problem for Heinlein, his aggressive anti-racist impulses at continuous war with his deliberate policy of openness to autres moeurs, of trying to understand the different folkways, how they came to be and what functions they served in a living society. But South Africa was an intensification of his dilemma at home. The Union of South Africa is the other USA, and his dilemma is set out on the first page of the South Africa chapter of Tramp Royale: It was, like Robert’s USA, a stunning, gloriously beautiful country—“a paradise where you expect to wake up some morning with your throat cut.”19

They had ten days to get overland from Cape Town to Durban to join their next ship. One of their shipboard friends on Ruys, Sam (not otherwise identified), invited them along on a road trip overland from Cape Town to Johannesburg, through the Karoo Desert, where they encountered African cattle (rangier than their American counterparts), exotic birds, and springboks, the national emblem of South Africa, a kind of gazelle that has no American counterpart, through the Orange Free State and into the Transvaal (literally, across the Vaal River).

Johannesburg was where their host’s trip ended,20 and the Heinleins rented a taxi for a day to tour Kruger Park. No zebras, unfortunately, and no rhino, but an abundance of birds, impalas and other African gazelles, and even buffalo. And many lions—out of season and therefore unexpected—blended into the landscape and looking like termite hills, like abysses looking back at you.21 Robert was shaking with excitement. This was the Africa he had come for.22

They almost did not get back. Their train was fully booked, and they had to stay overnight in Nelspruit and hire the taxi to drive them back to Johannesburg the next day—expensive, but it did give them a chance to inspect the Voortrekker Monument outside of Pretoria, a brother-under-the-bronze of the Mormon migration monument in Salt Lake City.23

From Jo’burg, they flew to Durban in a DC6B workhorse. Ruys was delayed an extra day, which gave them a chance to make a hundred-mile day trip into Zululand and visit the atelier of Ntuli, then a world-famous African sculptor. They bought a bust of a Zulu Matron, “strong and proud,” for a ridiculously small fee. “And I met Ntuli himself—” Heinlein wrote later to a friend:

[I]t turns out that we are twin brothers, save that he is younger than I am and (of course) several shades darker as he is a Zulu. But our skulls have the same bony structure and the close resemblance is unmistakable—I got Ginny to preserve the fact in Kodachrome, the two of us.”24

They returned to Durban with enough time left over to try to book the leg from Singapore, where they would leave Ruys, through to Australia by way of Indonesia—perhaps by way of Bali. Heinlein wanted to see for himself the bare-breast fashion in sarongs that was even then being suppressed by the new Indonesian government.25 But Bali was not possible this trip.

They left Ruys in Singapore early on the morning of January 29. Ginny’s sense of humor was not always appropriate for the perilous world outside America. To the routine inquiry “Anything to declare?” when they were going through Singapore customs, Ginny replied tartly, “Two pounds of heroin.” Robert went cold, and the customs inspector’s eyes bugged out. Though Ginny remembered only that he said “Oh, you Americans!” and stamped them through,26 Robert remembered it differently: “… he decided to treat it as a joke, laughed hollowly, said, ‘Yes, yes, no doubt,’ and refrained from searching us. But I did not draw a breath until we were outside and in a taxi.”27 He never did succeed in impressing on Ginny how very much real trouble they had narrowly escaped.

Singapore was “a three-ring circus and a year-long Mardi-Gras,”28 with a million people packed into a space that could not possibly hold more than fifty thousand. Predominantly Chinese in population, “properly speaking, the whole city is a slum, so tightly stacked they are one on another. But it is so alive, so cheerful, so bursting with energy that the slumlike quality of it is not depressing.”29

They settled in for a week or more at Raffles, a hotel chosen for its associations in romantic fiction. They wound up with Nelson Rockefeller’s suite and enjoyed “Oriental splendor” that they almost could not have imagined—including the services of a sixty-year-old “houseboy,” Foo, who lavished attention on them. In the hotel’s gift shop Heinlein found a Tom Corbett comic book, which he purchased for his working files back home in Colorado Springs.30

Their pick-up acquaintance with Mauricio Nayberg in Montevideo had resulted in an introduction to one of his father’s business connections, a Mr. Ho Chuy Moo. Mr. and Mrs. Ho lavished hospitality on the Heinleins, even more startling and abundant than the Naybergs’—superlative Cantonese food (plus instruction in the use of chopsticks), introductions to tailors, amusement parks, a day trip to the Sultanate of Johore, and the Tiger Balm Garden/Har Paw Villa (an extravagant oriental garden and collection of exotica built by the heir of the Tiger Balm fortune) that stretched even the imaginative/descriptive faculties of this science-fiction writer.

The Heinleins were finally able to book passage to Brisbane, on the northwest coast of Australia, by way of Indonesia on a China coast vessel, Tjibadak—the last cabin left. Their preferred route from the west coast of Australia, possibly Derby or Darwin in the north, or even Perth in the far south, then by rail to Sydney on the east coast, was not possible. Australia and New Zealand were open-ended for them now, since they had not yet been able to find transport back to the United States.

With Mr. Ho’s assistance, they were even able to obtain an Indonesian visa—not for Bali, but for Jakarta, where they would have a three-day layover. They sailed from Singapore on about February 10.

On the night before they left, they decided to give a thank-you dinner for the Hos at Raffles. While they were dressing for dinner, it suddenly occurred to Heinlein that Raffles might have the same “non-European” prejudice they had run across everywhere from Africa to Asia. The telling of this incident in Tramp Royale (at pp. 225–6) is more genteel than the somewhat more bloodthirsty version Robert saved for friends: “Say, hon,” Robert remarked to Ginny,

“I don’t recall having seen any orientals in the dining room—is this joint still ‘pukka-sahib’ and all that crap? We don’t want to embarrass Mr. and Mrs. Ho.”

Ginny went right on dressing. “Don’t give it a thought.”

“Huh?”

“If they try to keep our guests out of the dining room, we then go straight to the front desk and check out—and once our luggage is outside, we set fire to the place.”

She’s a practical woman. Get the luggage out first—

.… So I suppose I will never be a real literary-type author, because I can’t learn to be a detached and analytical observer; I get involved, I take sides.

And so does Ginny. But she need never worry about my getting annoyed with her over this, because her instincts in such matters always suit me. She is what I feel to be a good person in the word’s simplest and plainest meaning. Which includes lashing out with her claws on some occasions when others may consider it improper—I don’t give a damn whether Ginny is “proper” or not; I like her. I like her values.31

But Raffles was civilized: They were not put to the necessity of rescuing their luggage.

Tjibadak is not mentioned by name in Tramp Royale, because it was a filthy and appalling tub—an unpleasantly fitting introduction, as it turned out, to Sukarno’s Indonesia. “[W]e could have quit this ship only at Djakarta [as it was then spelled]—which we would have done had Djakarta been an improvement, which it is not.”32

Heinlein does not mention the fact in Tramp Royale, but the “body search” to which he was subjected at Indonesian customs (while Ginny was waved through), was conducted at bayonet-point33—which could only have reinforced the advice given them in Singapore not to argue with an Indonesian policeman or soldier, as they would have no hesitation executing you on the spot if angered.34

Jakarta itself Heinlein characterized in 1954 as a city the size of Chicago, but without plumbing of any sort, except for a foul canal running through the city, which was used for all water purposes. They did locate a friend of a friend at the city’s one modern hotel, Hotel del Indes—Lothar Wolf, the producer of Irving Pichel’s Martin Luther, who was there to help build up an Indonesian film industry.35 They stayed aboard ship that night and watched the festivities for Chinese New Year celebrated by the largely Chinese crew. On the second day, they were scheduled to visit the botanical gardens in Bogor, sixty kilometers south of Jakarta. Ginny defied currency restrictions and smuggled cashier’s checks off the ship, to buy batiks and sarongs. Cashier’s checks they found not as desirable as cash—they can be traced.

The passage to Brisbane—the first place they could realistically get off Tjibadak—took an additional two weeks around Australia’s northeastern “corner.” They were in rough weather, having clipped the edge of a cyclone that was wreaking havoc at Queensland. By that time, most of the remaining passengers were Australian sheep men and their families, returning home, whom the Heinleins found almost uniformly rough but sociable—“easy as an old shoe.”36

They arrived in Brisbane on about February 15. Brisbane’s “feel” reminded Robert overpoweringly of “home”—the American Midwest, circa 1920–30. “I liked Australia and wanted it to like me.”37 They had only a few hours in Brisbane and elected to see teddy-bear koalas at a private zoo just outside town. Koalas are cuddly creatures—“left to themselves they cuddle with each other.”38 Ginny was given Little Mo to cuddle and had her picture taken. Little Mo was then returned to her cage, stopping to nibble at the concrete curbstone. Robert and Ginny were delighted with them: Their “unique genius for being pets”39 makes them Earth’s natural flat cats. The other Australian fauna they saw delighted them as “determined to be as exotic as possible … they are all on the lunatic fringe of the animal kingdom.”40

Later that day they made their way the few hundred miles down the coast by a commuter vessel.

The Heinleins had originally planned to spend a month or more in Sydney, but the combined delays had reduced their time to only nine days before their March 1 sailing date for New Zealand. In addition to the normal planned tourism—the Sydney Zoo they found one of the most interesting on the entire trip—there was business to be attended to in Australia.

Australian laws prohibited American publications—which Heinlein referred to as a “sinful embargo on American Books”41 (with the result that the bookstores and newsstands were filled with “some of the most amazing trash to be found anywhere”42). An Australian publisher had produced a pirate edition of “Life-Line”—a 7,200 word story—in paperback format. Shasta had sold the rights (for a mere ten dollars) and never even reported it, but just pocketed the money.43

Blassingame had found a solicitor for them, J. A. Campbell, Esq., to pursue the matter of literary piracy. Mr. Campbell was retained to see what recourse they might have on the Australian end. Not much, it turned out, but he had also agreed to act as their local business agent, which would be useful since Blassingame had been selling Australian rights for the Future History books for the last couple of years.

Their solicitor had a largish amount of mail for them. Blassingame had forwarded some business mail, as expected—Scribner wanted a retitle for The Star Lummox as there was another book on the stands currently with “Lummox” in the title. But the rest was fan mail. Their Colorado Springs house-sitters, Doc and Mimi Knowles, had apparently forgotten that they had asked that the fan mail not be forwarded. Wearily Robert and Ginny set out to answer the fan mail by handwritten postcard, since they didn’t have access to typewriters.44 Regrettably, they had plenty of time for the chore, as Australia’s bizarre income tax requirements kept them tied to Sydney and haunting government offices nearly every day, and there was literally nothing to do on weekends in Sydney: Nothing was open for business!45

Some of the fan mail was from schoolchildren on class assignments. In recent years, elementary school teachers all over the country had taken up the inconsiderate practice of having entire classes write to authors, often bombarding them with questionnaires for class projects. How a writer was supposed to get any writing done was a mystery best left unexplored.46

Somehow, word got out that he was visiting Australia, and Heinlein was lionized by Sydney science-fiction fandom, prevailed upon to give a “very interesting talk” to the Futurian Society of Sydney in the Club Room on Thursday, February 25, 1954.47 He offered copies of all his books to the club library.

It was New Zealand that turned out to be the great disappointment of this trip. Heinlein had been fascinated by the country for decades and was looking forward to encountering its legendary grandeur for himself. The statistics and articles he had been reading for twenty years made it sound like the kind of working, progressive socialism he had labored toward for decades. Their union policies alone sounded like a worker’s paradise.

Monowai cast off just two days after the then still-secret Castle Bravo H-bomb was detonated at Bikini Atoll. They docked in Auckland on March 5 after an uneventful passage of four days. Their stateroom had been uncomfortably cramped, but at least the ship was clean. Not as much as could be said for the hotel in Auckland—and the food they were given all during their stay in New Zealand.

They arranged a tour of the countryside as fast as possible, running into a snarl of red tape and incredible union featherbedding that gave his professional Democrat’s conscience twinges. They endured several days in Auckland, over a weekend buttoned up tighter than even Sydney—“Australian closing hours are inconvenient, but New Zealand closing hours are more in the nature of paralysis”48—before they were able to book a tour of North Island—a beautiful place. Waitomo, their first stop, did a great deal to take the taste of Auckland out of their mouths. The Glowworm Grotto fascinated them.

Otherwise, the trip itself was moderately grim. In the thermal geyser country of Wairakei and Rotorua, a guide, displaying all the characteristics of petty bureaucrats everywhere, disparaged Yellowstone’s geyser field, and Robert had enough. For a moment he lost his temper and sense of discretion enough to point out the facts and drew down the guide’s righteously arrogant—and factually wrong—wrath.49

Of New Zealand in 1954, he said it was a place, “where no one goes hungry, but where life is dreary and comfortless beyond belief, save for the pleasures of good climate and magnificent countryside.”50 Worst of all, it was grim because of the very features that had made him most hopeful for it—the British pattern of socialism, the overpowering, oppressive, death grip of the unions stifled all spirit of progress, all incentive to better the thousands of petty, daily inconveniences this often truculent, beaten-down people burdened themselves with as much as their visitors.51 “New Zealand is a fake utopia,” Heinlein concluded, “a semi-socialism which does not work and which does not have anything like the degree of civil liberty we have. In my opinion, it stinks.”52

They left New Zealand on a DC6 sleeper to Hawaii (by way of a dinner stopover in the Fiji Islands). In the eleven days they were in New Zealand, Ginny lost eleven pounds—and it was probably here, also, that she contracted both scurvy and pellagra. In the future, they carried vitamin tablets with them while traveling.

They were met at Honolulu customs by Bob and Violet Markham, shipboard companions from Gulf Shipper. The Markhams took them home out beyond Diamond Head and pampered them while they recovered from the assorted shocks of New Zealand (and of air travel, for Ginny).

Hawaii is nominally “home,” though they had several thousand miles yet to go. But it was an ideal place to recover from repeated culture shock. They continued as tourists, visiting pineapple fields and staying overnight at the hotel overlooking the Kilauea volcano, where Ginny enrolled herself in the cult of Pele, Hawaiian volcano-goddess. She gained back the weight she had lost, and Robert put on some extra weight, too: He was getting to be, if not quite “stout,” then “well fed.”

They found in Hawaii more mail from Blassingame: Miss Dalgliesh was disturbed by the girl-who-divorced-her-parents in The Star Beast (the new title for the Star Lummox book). Children “divorcing” their parents was a part—unpublicized—of our own legal system, not one of Heinlein’s fictional inventions. In any case, he didn’t need to do anything about it—Blassingame had arranged a compromise: Miss Dalgliesh would edit to minimize the impact.

It was probably on this trip that the Heinleins made their one visit to the Pearl Harbor Memorial. Cal Laning had been at Pearl the morning of the attack in 1941, but it was other friends and colleagues and shipmates Robert wanted to remember:

I have returned to Oahu many times, but I have been out to see USS Arizona just once, did not go aboard, did not stay long, and do not intend to go back a second time. Somewhere, down inside her, are more than a thousand bodies; one of them is my former Commodore, Captain van Valkenberg, commanding. Another is Tommy McClelland; we were cadet captains together in high school, corporals together in the 110th Combat Engineers. I don’t wish to stand over their bodies or any of the others. “They shall not grow old as we that are left grow old, age shall not weary them nor the years condemn; At the going down of the sun and in the morning, we will remember them…”53

Standing over the skeletons of his comrades, picked clean by the crabs and the fishes of the sea, must have been an emotional capstone for the trip.

Many things had changed for him and in him, many opinions overthrown. The great socialist ideals of his youth were wonderful dreams, but if his encounters on this trip meant anything at all, it was that the materials did not exist in the world to make them into reality, and even the attempt to put them into practice could do more harm than good.54 No world federation had a chance to be an instrument for liberation. The voice he had raised for such things he would still.

It was a short sleeper flight from Honolulu, orchid leis around their necks, to San Francisco on March 28, 1954. Robert had caught a cold and spent much of their three-day stay at the Hotel California resting, while Ginny shopped on Union Square. In the evenings they visited with friends and colleagues.

A. P. White now lived in Berkeley, and they were able to spend an entire evening with him—though Robert was not able to get any resolution on those mysterious remarks about differences of political opinion White had been making in correspondence for the last several years. Heinlein began to suspect it was not he who was turning away from traditional liberalism: White was evolving into something incompatible with liberalism as Heinlein understood it: he was becoming a leftist. Nor was he the only person making that evolution. As Lester del Rey later put it, the country was drifting to the left, “leaving those with mature ideas about what should be our political stances appearing to move rightward.”55

There was a gulf opening up in American politics, and Heinlein found himself on the far side of the divide: “leftism” was not “liberalism,” and he was and would remain a liberal.56

On March 30, they flew to Denver and just missed the day’s last shuttle flight to Colorado Springs. They were stuck just twenty-five minutes by air from home. The next day, they boarded the shuttle. Ten minutes into the flight, literally within sight of Cheyenne Mountain, the cabin began to fill with smoke “so thick that you could not see your hand in front of your face.”57 It wasn’t anything dangerous—excess oil smoldering in the cabin’s heating and air-conditioning system—but the pilot banked into a U-turn and headed back to Denver.

The second try was uneventful. They deplaned at Peet Field, met by friends and neighbors. Thirty minutes later, Pixie was greeting them, stropping their ankles, and they were home.