The World Beyond the Hill: Science Fiction and the Quest for Transcendence (66 page)

As Heinlein fit these ideas together to make
Methuselah’s Children,
it was the long-lived people of the first projected story who would serve as his space explorers. And, rather than the threat of yet another cosmic catastrophe, it would be Earthly persecution that would be their reason for traveling to the stars and meeting the Dog People and the Rapport People.

In
Methuselah’s Children,
the Howard Families are a select group of Americans bred for longevity beginning in 1875. Some two hundred and fifty years later, in the days of the Covenant, there are 100,000 of them. Among their number are people who can stand up and say, “ ‘I was here when the First Prophet took over the country. I was here when Harriman launched the first Moon rocket.’ ”
⁵⁰⁸

Oldest of them all is Lazarus Long, Heinlein’s central character. Lazarus may be 213 years old and still counting, but at heart he is another ageless perpetual adolescent, not unlike Edgar Rice Burroughs’ John Carter.

It is Lazarus more than any other single thing that ties the Future History together and makes a whole of it. He was born before the Future History chart begins and remains alive after it ends. Long, long ago, Hugo Pinero of “Life-Line” took his reading, and then returned his money. Andrew Jackson Libby, the boy genius of “Misfit”—who proves to be another Howard Family member—becomes Lazarus’s best buddy. Lazarus embraces the entire Future History from beginning to end; he can vouch for it all.

Because they are different from the ordinary run of mankind, the Howard Families have done their best to remain publicly invisible. Fifty years after the overthrow of the Prophets, however, they finally feel secure enough to reveal the fact of their existence to society-at-large.

This turns out to be a mistake. Greedy and powerful men, jealous for longer life, suspend the Covenant and begin to arrest and torture the members of the Howard Families to extract their supposed secret of immortality.

Lazarus isn’t really surprised. He says, “ ‘If there is any one thing I have learned in the past couple of centuries, it’s this: These things
pass.
Wars and depressions and Prophets and Covenants—they pass. The trick is to stay alive through them.’ ”
⁵⁰⁹

Back during the difficult years when the Prophets ruled, Lazarus chose to sit things out on Venus. Now he proposes that the Families pack up and leave Earth until this current wave of hysteria passes.

With the connivance of one responsible short-lived politician, Administrator Slayton Ford, Lazarus steals the giant spaceship
New Frontiers
—a twin to that in “Universe.” Andy Libby whips up a superior space drive, and the Families, plus Ford, flee to the stars.

Here, however, things do not go well for them.

The Families have left Earth because the very fact of their existence is intolerable to ordinary men. As one member puts it:

“It is clear to me now that our mere presence, the simple fact of our rich heritage of life, is damaging to the spirit of our poor neighbor. Our longer years and richer opportunities make his best efforts seem futile to him—any effort save a hopeless struggle against an appointed death. Our mere presence saps his strength, ruins his judgment, fills him with panic fear of death.”
⁵¹⁰

But amongst the stars, the long-lifers find beings who are even more dismaying to them than the Howard Families are to normal humanity.

The first stop of the Families is the planet of the Dog People—or, as they call themselves, the Jockaira. These tall thin humanoids are scientifically and mathematically advanced. Not only is their planet a near-twin of Earth, but they are very hospitable folk. They empty a city and turn it over to the Earthmen for their use.

After a time, however, a price is demanded. The Jockaira talk constantly of their gods. Now they say that the Earth people must pick a temple and a god to worship.

The Earthmen decide to play along with this charade. Administrator Ford is the first to be initiated. He and Lazarus go to the temple of Kreel; Ford enters, while Lazarus waits for him outside.

However, when Ford comes out of the temple again, he is a broken man. He can’t even communicate what has happened to him. But Lazarus believes he knows what has occurred. He says:

“Here’s my opinion: we’ve had these Jockaira doped out all wrong from scratch. We made the mistake of thinking that because they looked like us, in a general way, and were about as civilized as we are, that they were
people.
But they aren’t people at all. They are . . .
domestic animals. . . .
There are people on this planet, right enough. Real people. They lived in the temples and the Jockaira called them gods. They
are
gods!”
⁵¹¹

By this, Lazarus makes clear, he doesn’t mean they are supernatural beings. He means these are beings so evolutionarily advanced that next to the Jockaira—or to humanity—they might as well be gods.

And, very quickly, these higher beings demonstrate their power. Through the Jockaira, they inform the humans that they must leave this planet and go to another thirty-two light years away. The gods then enforce this dictate by teleporting the humans through the air, stuffing them into their ship, and then directing the ship through space to the destination they have selected.

This second planet is gentle and sweet and tranquil. It is populated by the Little People, small furry androgynous beings who are not individuals in themselves, but exist in telepathic rapport groups. These creatures are far superior to us in physical science, although they avoid employing physics and machines any more than they absolutely must. They are even more superior to us in biology. So adept are the Little People that they can create plants that taste like steak and mushrooms or mashed potatoes and gravy.

In a state of considerable disquiet, Lazarus mentally reviews the situation of the Howard Families:

The hegira of the Families had been a mistake. It would have been a more human, a more mature and manly thing, to have stayed and fought for their rights, even if they had died insisting on them. Instead they had fled across half a universe (Lazarus was reckless about his magnitudes) looking for a place to light. They had found one, a good one—but already occupied by beings so superior as to make them intolerable for men . . . yet so supremely indifferent in their superiority to men that they had not even bothered to wipe them out, but had whisked them away to this—this overmanicured country club.

And that in itself was the unbearable humiliation. The
New Frontiers
was the culmination of five hundred years of human scientific research, the best that men could do—but it had been flicked across the deeps of space as casually as a man might restore a baby bird to its nest.

The Little People did not seem to want to kick them out, but the Little People, in their own way, were as demoralizing to men as were the gods of the Jockaira. One at a time they might be morons but taken as groups each rapport group was a genius that threw the best minds that men could offer into the shade. Even Andy. Human beings could not hope to compete with that type of organization any more than a backroom shop could compete with an automated cybernated factory. Yet to form any such group identities, even if they could, which he doubted, would be, Lazarus felt very sure, to give up whatever it was that made them
men
.
⁵¹²

And almost immediately, the question of what makes a man is put to the test. One of the oldest humans, fearing death, chooses to swap her individuality for a permanent continuing existence as an element in a Little People rapport group. And a human child is born that has been modified and improved by the Little People:

It lacked even the button nose of a baby, nor were there evident external ears. There were organs in the usual locations of each but flush with the skull and protected with bony ridges. Its hands had too many fingers and there was an extra large one near each wrist which ended in a cluster of pink worms. There was something odd about the torso of the infant which Lazarus could not define. But two other gross facts were evident: the legs ended not in human feet but in horny, toeless pediments—hoofs. And the creature was hermaphroditic—not in deformity but in healthy development, an androgyne.
⁵¹³

At this point, only a very few of the long-lifers wish to continue exploring among the stars. A larger handful is content to remain with the Little People. But the vast majority, Lazarus chief amongst them, wants to go home.

So homeward they go. When they arrive, they find that seventy-four years have passed on Earth. They aren’t received as outlaws and fugitives as they had feared, but rather as heroic stellar explorers. Nobody is mad or jealous anymore. Thanks to positive thinking and radioactive vitamins everyone is a long-lifer now, and everything is just swell.

The story concludes with Lazarus whistling
“California here I come! Right back where I started from!”
⁵¹⁴
and hoping that his favorite Dallas chili house from way back when is still in business.

What an unsatisfactory ending this is! Here we have Robert Heinlein—the man who assured us that any custom, technique, institution, belief, or social structure
must
change—concluding a novel about a stellar voyage longer than the entire reign of the Prophets with the earnest hope that nothing has changed on Earth and that things will still be the same as when the Families left.

More than that. The early chapters of
Methuselah’s Children
were Heinlein’s most futuristic work yet, filled with casually fantastic detailing like this: “When Lazarus went to bed he stepped out of his kilt and chucked it toward a wardrobe . . . which snagged it, shook it out, and hung it up neatly. ‘Nice catch,’ he commented. . . .”
⁵¹⁵

But it isn’t even this world that Lazarus seems to expect to find upon his return. What he actually has in his head, at least, are the songs and cuisine of his boyhood, way, way back in the Twentieth Century. Seemingly Lazarus has encountered more than he can handle among the stars and it has shocked him out of 275 years or so of growth.

A fundamental Techno Age problem is presented for solution in
Methuselah’s Children
—the problem of evolutionary superiority. It is set forth no fewer than five times: by the Howard Families; by the gods of the Jockaira; by the Little People; by a human choosing to join a Little People rapport group; and by the human baby that the Little People redesign and improve.

The first of these cases, the longevity of the Howard Families, proves in time not to be a true example of evolutionary difference after all. Mere longer life doesn’t make the long-lifers any wiser or more competent or more successful as human beings. As Lazarus is frank to say in criticism of one Family member: “ ‘Bud, you strike me as a clear proof that the Foundation should ‘a’ bred for brains instead of age.’ ”
⁵¹⁶

In fact, it is precisely because this difference is only a superficial one that ordinary humanity can catch up to the Howard Families so quickly and that the long-lifers can be welcomed back to Earth at the end of the story.

But the other examples are far more serious challenges. They represent the prospect of fundamental change in human form and human mentation, of encounter with beings who can out-compete us on our own terms, and, most trying of all, of discovery of the existence of beings of another and higher order than our own.

The Howard Families and Lazarus Long simply are unequipped to cope with any one of these possibilities. Instead, they are left feeling bullied and baffled, horrified and demoralized. Like kids who have dared to cross the street to the next block and discovered more than they can deal with there, they must turn tail and scoot for home to climb into the safety and comfort of a nice hot bowl of chili.

But as hard as Lazarus and the others might try to pretend that nothing at all really happened on the voyage of the
New Frontiers,
we, who were along for the ride, certainly know better. We can remember Administrator Slayton Ford—a man of such “superior ability and unmatched experience”
⁵¹⁷
that he was able to take over executive direction of the Howard Families even though not a long-lifer himself—as he ran weeping and distraught from the temple of Kreel, gazed on Lazarus with “horror-stricken eyes”
⁵¹⁸
and then clutched him desperately for security.

With his ideal of an elite of human competence, Robert Heinlein was easily able to imagine coming to terms with a future of social and psychological change. But evolutionary change was another matter. Could even the most competent of men cope with creatures like Kreel? Maybe not. Probably not. As one character says ruefully to Lazarus: “ ‘Those creatures the Jockaira worshiped—it does not seem possible that any amount of living could raise us up to that level.’ ”
⁵¹⁹

We should note that Heinlein would not always feel this way. In 1958, a moment when faith in the efficacy of universal operating principles had reached its maximum, Heinlein would publish the revised and expanded book version of
Methuselah’s Children.
There he would drop out this line that we have just quoted, and he would add a concluding conversation between Lazarus and Andy Libby in which Lazarus expresses renewed zest for interstellar exploration and a determination to grow up enough someday to take on the gods of the Jockaira.

Libby says: “ ‘They weren’t gods, Lazarus. You shouldn’t call them that.’ ”
⁵²⁰

And Lazarus answers:

“Of course they weren’t—I think. My guess is that they are creatures who have had enough time to do a little hard thinking. Some day, about a thousand years from now, I intend to march straight into the temple of Kreel, look him in the eye, and say, ‘Howdy, bub—what do
you
know that
I
don’t know?’ ”
⁵²¹

With these changes, Heinlein would reduce the gap between Kreel and Lazarus from an evolutionary difference that can’t possibly be surmounted to a mere difference in state of knowledge. In the same way that the ordinary people left behind on Earth managed to scuffle and scramble and catch up to the Howard Families, so may Lazarus aspire to catch up to Kreel in another thousand years or so.