Man Who Sold the Moon / Orphans of the Sky (2 page)
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Authors: Robert A Heinlein
Tags: #Fiction, #General, #Science Fiction, #Space Opera, #Action & Adventure
The
Man Who
Sold the
Moon
To Ginny
Introduction
John W. Campbell, Jr.
Every editor is always pleased to hear from one of his regular, good authors. Being as human as his readers, he, too, tends to read first stories arriving from known authors; in reading a magazine, most people do the same thing—read first the stories by the authors they know and like. But the editor’s real pleasure comes when, from that pile of manuscripts from unknowns—technically known as the “slush pile”—a manuscript of real impact and value appears.
Bob Heinlein, completely unknown, sent in a yarn called “Life-Line”—and gave me that pleasure. You’ll read it yourself in this book—but you won’t have the pleasure I did, because you know beforehand that it’s a good story, or it wouldn’t be here.
When such a new star appears, the editor’s next worry and wonder is “Can he repeat—or is he another one-shot?” There are a lot of men who have one good story; having told it, they lapse dismally back into mediocrity. Heinlein, however, was no one-shot, he never did repeat—he progressed. Many of the readers of this book are old-time science-fictioneers, many are newcomers to the field. To the old timers, some realization of Heinlein’s achievement has already come. To the newcomers, reading these stories, the quality of workmanship displayed conceals itself. A really good acrobat makes all his feats seem easy, natural, graceful movements—his technique is so smoothly flawless that the audience never fully appreciates the near-impossibility of the act. Similarly, once a master workman has shown how to handle a problem in story technique, the answer seems so easy, natural and simple that the actuality of a major literary invention is completely missed.
This is the first volume of the Future History series; it is worthwhile here to consider the problem of science-fiction presentation, and point out the easily overlooked neatness of Heinlein’s solutions. For Heinlein was one of the major molders of the science-fiction medium.
First, science-fiction is an extremely difficult medium in which to produce good work—really good work. In the story of here-and-now, the author starts with the reader already coached on the background. The author need only say “New York City,” and the reader has a sort of mental vision montage of skyscrapers, Broadway theaters, East Side slums and millions of people. If the author mentions “taxi,” a very real mental image of a taxicab is called to mind in the reader’s memory.
But if the science-fiction author says “Luna City”—there is no mental image whatsoever, save a very vague association with the full moon riding in a night sky, as seen from Earth. If the author has laid his scene a century hence, and mentions a taxiplane—no mental image results. Helicopter? Antigravity mechanism? Some sort of repulsion beams? Rocket-type drive? Atomic engine, or gasoline powered? Nothing—no image, no conception of the limitations, abilities, or characteristics.
This sort of problem isn’t limited to those two things, of course; the entire background against which the story is to be acted out is completely unknown to the reader. Where a here-and-now short-story writer need only develop his characters, the reader supplying in full detail the background, the science-fiction short-story writer must first supply background, and then character before he can tell his story.
The Romans had human slavery; the Middle Ages called it serfdom. And neither bore any marked resemblance to Colonial America’s institution of slavery. Here, in a period of some 2000 years, there has been a vast alteration in the social pattern that we can all understand. In India we have the caste system, and the Untouchables. In China, one of the supreme disgraces is to have someone commit suicide on your doorstep.
True, human nature doesn’t change over the years—but human nature is a reaction to group mores and the cultural pattern. Those do change, and change drastically. The people of one South Pacific island hold in highest esteem the man who can lie, cheat, murder, steal and blackmail most successfully. The basic of human nature is to win and hold the admiration of friends in the group; if murder, dishonesty and blackmail are held to be virtues—the motivations of a man are different.
Cultural patterns change; one of the things Heinlein “invented,” was the use of that fact. But to do so, it was necessary to invent a technique that would permit an author, in the course of a story, to build up not only characters, but also to give the reader an understanding of the cultural pattern, since the characters must react in normal, human-nature fashion, to
that
pattern,
not
on the basis of our cultural pattern.
H. G. Wells did something of the sort in some of his novels. But Wells’ method was to spend two chapters or so describing, for the reader, the cultural pattern he wanted to operate against. In the leisurely ’90s and early twentieth century, that was permissible. The reader accepted it. Long descriptive passages were common. But the development of literary techniques in the last third of a century has changed that; stage techniques, where long character-descriptions are ruled out, have moved into the novel field. Today, the reader won’t stand for pages of description of what the author thinks the character is like; let the character act, and show his character.
That’s not too tough an assignment—provided the author and reader are talking about characters against a mutually understood cultural background. But in science-fiction, the problem is a dilly. Briefly stated, the science-fiction author must put over to the reader (1), the mores and patterns of the cultural background, (2), interwoven with that—stemming from it, and in turn forcing it into existence—the technological background and then, finally, the characters. He may not use long descriptive passages for any of this necessary material.
The cross-influence of cultural patterns and mores on technological background is one of the prime fields of exploration for science-fiction. The invention of the cotton gin made unnecessary the slave-labor engaged in separating cotton from the seeds—but so cheapened and increased the demand for cotton that more slaves were needed for the field work. Had an efficient mechanical cotton-picker and weed-killer, like those available today, been invented in 1850, the institution of slavery would have been uneconomic, and an entirely different cultural pattern would have grown up in the South.
So long as hand tools were the only way of manufacturing, the corporation and the labor union alike were impossible. When technology advanced to the point of developing a half-million dollar machine for producing a ten-cent article, both became necessary. This interaction of technology and social pattern works both ways, of course. The invention of the machine to produce zippers is dependent on the social custom of wearing complex clothing.
This complexity of interaction of technology and social custom must then be added to the third factor: the reaction of human nature to the resultant mixture. There is the true field of science-fiction—and the difficulty of handling the problem, the near impossibility of doing it well, becomes evident.
Heinlein was one of the first to develop techniques of story-telling that do it. Like the highly skilled acrobat, he makes his feats seem the natural, easy, simple way—but after you’ve finished and enjoyed one of his stories—“The Roads Must Roll” for example—notice how much of the cultural-technological pattern he has put over, without impressing you, at any point, with a two-minute lecture on the pattern of the time. It’s a fine action yarn—with an almost incredible mass of discussion somehow slipped in between without interrupting the flow of action.
Finally, Heinlein was one of the first to build up the description of cultural background to its logical point. He developed a carefully mapped out “history of the future,” a succession of events which serve as the great, broad background against which these stories are laid. For the casual reader of the magazine, each story is complete in itself. But for the regular reader, the individual stories added up one by one into an even larger, even stronger structure.
But all this talk of the technical business of story-telling gives a false impression. These stories do a good job of presenting a new cultural pattern—but that’s not why they’re worth reading. They’re good
stories
. That’s important. I have dwelt on their technique primarily because they are such smooth work that the reader is apt to miss completely the precision work behind the swift-moving, smoothly told yarn.
The important thing is that these, sirs, are high adventure. The high adventure of the years to come—the years we, unfortunately, may not live to see. These are a window on tomorrow; a television set tuned to the future. But we lack the key to the door that would let us walk through into that future; we must only watch and listen to the highest of all adventure—the conquest of the stars!
Westfield, N.J.
21 September 1949
Preface
“It does not pay a prophet to be too specific.”
—L. Sprague de Camp
The stories in this and later volumes of this series were not written as prophecy, nor as history. The author would be much surprised if any one of them turned out to be close enough to future events to be classified as successful prophecy.
They are of the “What-would-happen-if—” sort, in which the “if,” the basic postulate of each story, is some possible change in human environment latent in our present-day technology or culture. Sometimes the possibility is quite remote; sometimes the postulated possibility is almost a certainty, as in the stories concerned with interplanetary flight.
The pseudo-history of the immediate future outlined in the chart you will find in this volume makes it appear that I was seriously attempting prophecy. The appearance is illusory; the chart was worked up, a bit at a time, to keep me from stumbling as I added new stories. It was originally a large wall chart in my study, to which I added penciled notes from time to time. This was an idea I had gotten from Mr. Sinclair Lewis, who is alleged to maintain charts, files, notes and even very detailed maps of his fictional state of Winnemac and its leading city, Zenith. Mr. Lewis has managed to make Zenith and its citizens more real to more people than any real midwestern city of comparable size. I figured that a technique which was good for Mr. Lewis would certainly be good for me; I swiped the idea. I am glad to be able to acknowledge publicly my debt.
In 1940, I showed the chart to John W. Campbell, Jr.; he insisted on publishing it. From then on I was stuck with it; it became increasingly difficult to avoid fitting a story into the chart. I was forced to invent several pen names for use when I had a story in mind which was entirely incompatible with the assumed “history.” By now I hardly need the chart; the fictional future history embodied in it is at least as real to me as Plymouth Rock.
This series was started ten years ago; this past decade has been as revolutionary in technology as the century which preceded it. Increasingly each year the wild predictions of science-fiction writers are made tame by the daily papers. In my chart you will find “booster guns” assigned to one hundred years in the future—but the Germans designed such guns during World War II. The chart gives 1978 as the date of the first rocket to the Moon; I will give anyone odds that 1978 is the wrong date, but I will
not
bet that it will not be sooner.
Details change; the drama continues. Technology races ahead while people remain stubbornly the same. Recently I counted fourteen different sorts of astrology magazines on one newsstand—but not one magazine on astronomy. There were only three hundred years from Plymouth Rock to atomic power; there are still more outhouses than flush toilets in the United States, the land of inside plumbing. And the ratio will not have changed much on the day when men first walk the silent face of the Moon. The anomalies of the Power Age are more curious than its wonders.
But it is a great and wonderful age, the most wonderful this giddy planet has yet seen. It is sometimes comic, too often tragic, and always wonderful. Our wildest dreams of the future will be surpassed by what lies in front of us. Come bad, come good, I want to take part in the show as long as possible.
—
Robert A. Heinlein
Colorado Springs, Colo.
5 May 1949
Life-Line
The chairman rapped loudly for order. Gradually the catcalls and boos died away as several self-appointed sergeants-at-arms persuaded a few hot-headed individuals to sit down. The speaker on the rostrum by the chairman seemed unaware of the disturbance. His bland, faintly insolent face was impassive. The chairman turned to the speaker, and addressed him, in a voice in which anger and annoyance were barely restrained.
“Doctor Pinero,”—the “Doctor” was faintly stressed—“I must apologize to you for the unseemly outburst during your remarks. I am surprised that my colleagues should so far forget the dignity proper to men of science as to interrupt a speaker, no matter,” he paused and set his mouth, “no matter how great the provocation.” Pinero smiled in his face, a smile that was in some way an open insult. The chairman visibly controlled his temper and continued, “I am anxious that the program be concluded decently and in order. I want you to finish your remarks. Nevertheless, I must ask you to refrain from affronting our intelligence with ideas that any educated man knows to be fallacious. Please confine yourself to your discovery—if you have made one.”
Pinero spread his fat white hands, palms down. “How can I possibly put a new idea into your heads, if I do not first remove your delusions?”
The audience stirred and muttered. Someone shouted from the rear of the hall, “Throw the charlatan out! We’ve had enough.” The chairman pounded his gavel.
“Gentlemen! Please!” Then to Pinero, “Must I remind you that you are not a member of this body, and that we did not invite you?”
Pinero’s eyebrows lifted. “So? I seem to remember an invitation on the letterhead of the Academy?”
The chairman chewed his lower lip before replying. “True. I wrote that invitation myself. But it was at the request of one of the trustees—a fine public-spirited gentleman, but not a scientist, not a member of the Academy.”
Pinero smiled his irritating smile. “So? I should have guessed. Old Bidwell, not so, of Amalgamated Life Insurance? And he wanted his trained seals to expose me as a fraud, yes? For if I can tell a man the day of his own death, no one will buy his pretty policies. But how can you expose me, if you will not listen to me first? Even supposing you had the wit to understand me? Bah! He has sent jackals to tear down a lion.” He deliberately turned his back on them. The muttering of the crowd swelled and took on a vicious tone. The chairman cried vainly for order. There arose a figure in the front row.
“Mr. Chairman!”
The chairman grasped the opening and shouted, “Gentlemen! Doctor Van RheinSmitt has the floor.” The commotion died away.
The doctor cleared his throat, smoothed the forelock of his beautiful white hair, and thrust one hand into a side pocket of his smartly tailored trousers. He assumed his women’s club manner.
“Mr. Chairman, fellow members of the Academy of Science, let us have tolerance. Even a murderer has the right to say his say before the state exacts its tribute. Shall we do less? Even though one may be intellectually certain of the verdict? I grant Doctor Pinero every consideration that should be given by this august body to any unaffiliated colleague, even though”—he bowed slightly in Pinero’s direction—“we may not be familiar with the university which bestowed his degree. If what he has to say is false, it cannot harm us. If what he has to say is true, we should know it.” His mellow, cultivated voice rolled on, soothing and calming. “If the eminent doctor’s manner appears a trifle inurbane for our tastes, we must bear in mind that the doctor may be from a place, or a stratum, not so meticulous in these little matters. Now our good friend and benefactor has asked us to hear this person and carefully assess the merit of his claims. Let us do so with dignity and decorum.”
He sat down to a rumble of applause, comfortably aware that he had enhanced his reputation as an intellectual leader. Tomorrow the papers would again mention the good sense and persuasive personality of “America’s handsomest University President.” Who knew? Perhaps old Bidwell would come through with that swimming pool donation.
When the applause had ceased, the chairman turned to where the center of the disturbance sat, hands folded over his little round belly, face serene.
“Will you continue, Doctor Pinero?”
“Why should I?”
The chairman shrugged his shoulders. “You came for that purpose.”
Pinero arose. “So true. So very true. But was I wise to come? Is there anyone here who has an open mind, who can stare a bare fact in the face without blushing? I think not. Even that so beautiful gentleman who asked you to hear me out has already judged me and condemned me. He seeks order, not truth. Suppose truth defies order, will he accept it? Will you? I think not. Still, if I do not speak, you will win your point by default. The little man in the street will think that you little men have exposed me, Pinero, as a hoaxer, a pretender. That does not suit my plans. I will speak.
“I will repeat my discovery. In simple language I have invented a technique to tell how long a man will live. I can give you advance billing of the Angel of Death. I can tell you when the Black Camel will kneel at your door. In five minutes time with my apparatus I can tell any of you how many grains of sand are still left in your hourglass.” He paused and folded his arms across his chest. For a moment no one spoke. The audience grew restless. Finally the chairman intervened.
“You aren’t finished, Doctor Pinero?”
“What more is there to say?”
“You haven’t told us how your discovery works.”
Pinero’s eyebrows shot up. “You suggest that I should turn over the fruits of my work for children to play with. This is dangerous knowledge, my friend. I keep it for the man who understands it, myself.” He tapped his chest.
“How are we to know that you have anything back of your wild claims?”
“So simple. You send a committee to watch me demonstrate. If it works, fine. You admit it and tell the world so. If it does not work, I am discredited, and will apologize. Even I, Pinero, will apologize.”
A slender stoop-shouldered man stood up in the back of the hall. The chair recognized him and he spoke:
“Mr. Chairman, how can the eminent doctor seriously propose such a course? Does he expect us to wait around for twenty or thirty years for someone to die and prove his claims?”
Pinero ignored the chair and answered directly:
“Pfiii!
Such nonsense! Are you so ignorant of statistics that you do not know that in any large group there is at least one who will die in the immediate future? I make you a proposition; let me test each one of you in this room and I will name the man who will die within the fortnight, yes, and the day and hour of his death.” He glanced fiercely around the room. “Do you accept?”
Another figure got to his feet, a portly man who spoke in measured syllables. “I, for one, cannot countenance such an experiment. As a medical man, I have noted with sorrow the plain marks of serious heart trouble in many of our elder colleagues. If Doctor Pinero knows those symptoms, as he may, and were he to select as his victim one of their number, the man so selected would be likely to die on schedule, whether the distinguished speaker’s mechanical egg-timer works or not.”
Another speaker backed him up at once. “Doctor Shepard is right. Why should we waste time on voodoo tricks? It is my belief that this person who calls himself
Doctor
Pinero wants to use this body to give his statements authority. If we participate in this farce, we play into his hands. I don’t know what his racket is, but you can bet that he has figured out some way to use us for advertising for his schemes. I move, Mr. Chairman, that we proceed with our regular business.”
The motion carried by acclamation, but Pinero did not sit down. Amidst cries of “Order! Order!” he shook his untidy head at them, and had his say:
“Barbarians! Imbeciles! Stupid dolts! Your kind have blocked the recognition of every great discovery since time began. Such ignorant canaille are enough to start Galileo spinning in his grave. That fat fool down there twiddling his elk’s tooth calls himself a medical man. Witch doctor would be a better term! That little bald-headed runt over there—You! You style yourself a philosopher, and prate about life and time in your neat categories. What do you know of either one? How can you ever learn when you won’t examine the truth when you have a chance? Bah!” He spat upon the stage. “You call this an Academy of Science. I call it an undertaker’s convention, interested only in embalming the ideas of your red-blooded predecessors.”
He paused for breath and was grasped on each side by two members of the platform committee and rushed out the wings. Several reporters arose hastily from the press table and followed him. The chairman declared the meeting adjourned.
The newspapermen caught up with him as he was going out by the stage door. He walked with a light springy step, and whistled a little tune. There was no trace of the belligerence he had shown a moment before. They crowded about him. “—How about an interview, doc?” “What d’yu think of Modern Education?” “You certainly told ’em. What are your views on Life after Death?” “Take off your hat, doc, and look at the birdie.”
He grinned at them all. “One at a time, boys, and not so fast. I used to be a newspaperman myself. How about coming up to my place, and we’ll talk about it?”
A few minutes later they were trying to find places to sit down in Pinero’s messy bed-living-room, and lighting his cigars. Pinero looked around and beamed. “What’ll it be, boys? Scotch, or Bourbon?” When that was taken care of he got down to business. “Now, boys, what do you want to know?”
“Lay it on the line, doc. Have you got something, or haven’t you?”
“Most assuredly I have something, my young friend.”
“Then tell us how it works. That guff you handed the profs won’t get you anywhere now.”
“Please, my dear fellow. It is my invention. I expect to make some money with it. Would you have me give it away to the first person who asks for it?”
“See here, doc, you’ve got to give us something if you expect to get a break in the morning papers. What do you use? A crystal ball?”
“No, not quite. Would you like to see my apparatus?”
“Sure. Now we are getting somewhere.”
He ushered them into an adjoining room, and waved his hand. “There it is, boys.” The mass of equipment that met their eyes vaguely resembled a medico’s office X-ray gear. Beyond the obvious fact that it used electrical power, and that some of the dials were calibrated in familiar terms, a casual inspection gave no clue to its actual use.
“What’s the principle, doc?”
Pinero pursed his lips and considered. “No doubt you are all familiar with the truism that life is electrical in nature? Well, that truism isn’t worth a damn, but it will help to give you an idea of the principle. You have also been told that time is a fourth dimension. Maybe you believe it, perhaps not. It has been said so many times that it has ceased to have any meaning. It is simply a cliché that windbags use to impress fools. But I want you to try to visualize it now and try to feel it emotionally.”
He stepped up to one of the reporters. “Suppose we take you as an example. Your name is Rogers, is it not? Very well, Rogers, you are a space-time event having duration four ways. You are not quite six feet tall, you are about twenty inches wide and perhaps ten inches thick. In time, there stretches behind you more of this space-time event reaching to perhaps nineteen-sixteen, of which we see a cross-section here at right angles to the time axis, and as thick as the present. At the far end is a baby, smelling of sour milk and drooling its breakfast on its bib. At the other end lies, perhaps, an old man someplace in the nineteen-eighties. Imagine this space-time event which we call Rogers as a long pink worm, continuous through the years, one end at his mother’s womb, the other at the grave. It stretches past us here and the cross-section we see appears as a single discrete body. But that is illusion. There is physical continuity to this pink worm, enduring through the years. As a matter of fact there is physical continuity in this concept to the entire race, for these pink worms branch off from other pink worms. In this fashion the race is like a vine whose branches intertwine and send out shoots. Only by taking a cross-section of the vine would we fall into the error of believing that the shootlets were discrete individuals.”
He paused and looked around at their faces. One of them, a dour hard-bitten chap, put in a word.
“That’s all very pretty, Pinero, if true, but where does that get you?”
Pinero favored him with an unresentful smile. “Patience, my friend. I asked you to think of life as electrical. Now think of our long pink worm as a conductor of electricity. You have heard, perhaps, of the fact that electrical engineers can, by certain measurements, predict the exact location of a break in a trans-Atlantic cable without ever leaving the shore. I do the same with our pink worms. By applying my instruments to the cross-section here in this room I can tell where the break occurs, that is to say, when death takes place. Or, if you like, I can reverse the connections and tell you the date of your birth. But that is uninteresting; you already know it.”
The dour individual sneered. “I’ve caught you, doc. If what you said about the race being like a vine of pink worms is true, you can’t tell birthdays because the connection with the race is continuous at birth. Your electrical conductor reaches on back through the mother into a man’s remotest ancestors.”
Pinero beamed. “True, and clever, my friend. But you have pushed the analogy too far. It is not done in the precise manner in which one measures the length of an electrical conductor. In some ways it is more like measuring the length of a long corridor by bouncing an echo off the far end. At birth there is a sort of twist in the corridor, and, by proper calibration, I can detect the echo from that twist. There
is
just one case in which I can get no determinant reading; when a woman is actually carrying a child, I can’t sort out her life-line from that of the unborn infant.”
“Let’s see you prove it.”