Seekers of Tomorrow (27 page)

The prose of
Sixth Column
was immaculate and the story well paced. The Anson MacDonald pen name was one of the poorest kept secrets in science fiction. Too many people knew it, yet, among the general readers, it must have understanda-bly seemed that an important new talent had appeared on the science-fiction horizon.

Outside of one month's temporary employment, Heinlein was devoting full time to science-fiction writing during this period, and there was no question that he had now hit his stride. ". . .
And He Built a Crooked
House,"
published in astounding science-fiction for February, 1941, was a de-lightful fantasy and the first of his works to be anthologized (
The Pocket Book of Science Fiction,
1943). An eight-sided house built in the form of a tessaract is shaken up in a California earthquake and its prospective buyers find it has cut catty-corner across the fourth dimension. Each side looks out on a different landscape and investigation of the paradox inspired Harry Walton to try to solve a postwar problem that way in
Housing Shortage
(astounding science-fiction, January, 1947), a classic in its own right.

Logic of Empire
(astounding science-fiction, March, 1941) was an extremely well-done exposition on the possibili-ty of a form of slavery reappearing when the planets are colonized (this theme is dealt with in considerably more detail in
Citizen of the Galaxy,
1957). Here, a Heinlein weakness for hastily tying up the endings of his stories is particularly apparent. It is as though the exploration of the idea is all that interests him and its culmination proves a burdensome chore to be dispensed with as expediently as possible. With this story a footnote appeared to the effect that Heinlein's "stories are based on a common proposed history of the world, with emphasis on the history of Amer-ica." Readers were fascinated by an editorial, "History to Come," in the May, 1941, astounding science-fiction, which called attention to a two-page chart outlining Heinlein's Future His-tory from 1940 to 2140, with published and proposed stories fitted into the framework. Interest in his work mounted tre-mendously as a result, aided by the appearance of one of Hein-lein's most inspired efforts,
Universe,
in the same number. The central idea of this story, a mammoth ship, a small world in itself, traveling toward the stars in a voyage that will take centuries, was first successfully used by Laurence Manning in
The
Living Galaxy
(wonder stories, September, 1934) but it was Heinlein whose example started a trend. His exposition of a human "crew" who had forgotten, through the centuries of traveling, the original purpose of the journey, of the formation of a religion to explain their strange, limited "uni-verse," was brilliant. A revolt and the division of the ship's inhabitants into two camps, one composed largely of bizarre mutations resulting from radiation, offer elements of conflict. Excellent action and characterization set against one of the most unusual backgrounds in the history of science fiction up to that time made the story a pattern against which to match many other outstanding efforts of the type, including
Far Centaurus
by A. E. van Vogt,
The
Voyage That Lasted 600 Years
by Don Wilcox,
One in Three Thousand
by J. T. McIntosh, and
Spacebred Generations
by Clifford D. Simak.

The same issue had Anson MacDonald's
Solution Unsatis-factory,
which, though it is dated today, was Heinlein's most prophetic effort. In it he predicted, before the United States entered the war, that we would develop atomic energy and produce a weapon from which there was "no place to hide." Heinlein envisioned radioactive dust, rather than a bomb, and was unable to offer any satisfactory solution for policing its use, hence the title.

With the exception of a below-par effort simulating the technique of L. Sprague de Camp,
Beyond
Doubt,
written with Elma Wentz and published in astonishing stories for April, 1941, Heinlein showed himself to be a master of the short story.
They,
appearing in unknown the same month, was an incisively effective piece, reminiscent of Mark Twain's
The Mysterious Stranger,
that suggested the world was little more than facade, an aggregation of props, and only one intelli-gence, the central character, was a certainty. "...
We Also Walk Dogs"
under the MacDonald pseudonym (astounding science-fiction, July, 1941) is a vastly entertaining, logical farce, about a company that will provide literally any service short of murder, from walking dogs to making other worldly aliens happy.

Heinlein began to gather the threads of his future history together in one of the unifying "masterworks" of the series,
Methuselah's Children,
a three-part novel which began in astounding science-fiction for May, 1941. The powerful opening chapter owes a debt to A. E. von Vogt's
Slan,
a novel published less than a year previously. In
Methuselah's Children,
there is a widening group of "families" that have been inbreeding with individuals of exceptionally long life span until heredity has greatly increased their life expectan-cy. When the normal humans find out about this part of the population, a great wave of persecution proceeds, aimed at extracting the "secret." To save themselves, the "families" hijack a ship constructed for interstellar exploration to follow the voyage of the vessel in
Universe,
and start out on their own journey to the stars. Landing on a world of about earth's level of civilization, they leave in haste when they discover the "gods" these people worship are the true owners of the planet and far beyond the earthmen in mental power. The story almost breaks down into straight fantasy when they alight on a second world, whose friendly inhabitants can change the fruit of trees by thought impulses to taste like steak and potatoes or an ice cream soda, whatever the earthmen prefer. They leave to return to earth when they find these creatures have a community mind, similar to Olaf Stapledon's "cosmic mind," thus attaining a sort of immortal-ity, and that some of the earthmen are deserting.

References to characters from previous Heinlein stories are frequent and the effect is like a joyous old home week with the abundance of ideas combining as an intoxicating "sense of wonder" party. To many, Heinlein reached his peak in the October, 1941, issue of astounding science-fiction, which featured
By His Bootstraps.
Without question, this is one of the greatest time-travel paradox stories of all time. A man comes back from the future to meet himself, fights himself, while himself stands by and watches. The man from 30,000 years hence is sent back to obtain certain items for a resident of the future who also turns out to be himself. The effect is like examining a Moebius strip or a Klein bottle from the other side. Of course, the story is a trick, but it virtually takes mathematics to disprove it, and Heinlein doesn't forget in the process to tell a good tale which has touches of the magic of H. G. Wells'
The Time
Machine.

Heinlein had made his point. Nineteen months after the appearance of his first story in August, 1939, a nationwide poll of science fiction fans, published in the February, 1942, issue of fantasy fiction field, nominated Robert A. Hein-lein as the most popular author.

Nine months earlier, almost as if in rehearsal of the event, Heinlein had been guest of honor at the Third Annual World Science Fiction Convention in Denver, Colorado, over the July 4, 1941, weekend. He said then: "I think that science fiction, even the corniest of it, even the most outlandish of it, no matter how badly it's written, has a distinct therapeutic value because
all
of it has as its primary postulate that the world
does
change." He appeared as guest of honor again at the 19th World Science Fiction Convention in 1961. A dyed-in-the-wool military man, Heinlein found a way to serve his country after Pearl Harbor. As a mechanical engi-neer he put in long hours on highly secret radar and antikamikaze work. When he entered the service, science fiction lost three major authors: Robert A. Heinlein and Anson MacDonald for astounding science-fiction and Lyle Monroe who was doing short novels for super science stories. Two other Heinlein alter-egos, Caleb Saunders and John Riv-erside, had a single story apiece published when the call came.

The most heralded "last" story of this first phase of Hein-lein's writing was
Waldo,
which appeared under the MacDon-ald name in astounding science-fiction for August, 1942. Depicted on the cover was a remote control device for manipulating objects, since built and utilized for handling radioactive materials in atomic energy plants and actually called "waldoes," in acknowledgment of the story in which they were conceived. This precise scientific prediction was one of a number in a wildly imaginative story with two precious characters: Waldo, a fat boy, born with a muscular weakness that made it possible for him to function properly only in the weightlessness of an orbiting earth satellite, who is forced to develop his abilities for survival and becomes a supreme mechanical genius; and Schneider, an ancient Amish-country hex doctor, who seems to be able to make metaphysics less "meta" and more "physics" under certain circumstances.

Waldo's struggle to gain normal muscular strength, utiliz-ing the philosophy of the old hex doctor, is told in first-rank style with the superb science leavened by a touch of near witchcraft. For almost a year after the end of World War II, nothing by Robert A. Heinlein appeared. Then, quite unexpectedly
The Green Hills of Earth,
a story in the Future History series, appeared in the Saturday evening post of February 8, 1947. It was followed the same year by
Space Jockey, It's Great To Be
Back,
and
The Black Pits of Luna.
With the exception of
It's Great To Be Back,
a small masterpiece about the adjustment of long-term residents on the moon to the heavier gravitational pull of the earth, they were elemen-tary primer science fiction in polished prose.

Heinlein, one of the most original of science-fiction writ-ers, was now taking the most basic, near-to-the-present, space themes and proving that stylistically he was so adroit that he could write them for a general audience, the saturday evening post was simply the first of the general magazines in which he appeared. He made argosy with
Water Is for Washing
(November, 1947), in which an earthquake turns a portion of Southern California into an ocean, and again with
Gentlemen, Be Seated
(May, 1948), which involves the prac-tical use of a man's padded rear end to stop a leak in a lunar excavation until help arrives, town and country bought
Ordeal in Space
(May, 1948), telling how the rescue of a kitten from an apartment outside ledge helps overcome a spaceman's fear of falling; blue book took
Delilah and the
Space Rigger
(December, 1949), which dealt with the prob-lem of a woman overcoming men's prejudice to help build a space station; the American legion magazine got
The Long Watch,
a story in which a moon-based member of the space patrol dies of radiation to prevent a military takeover of the earth, actually a variant of
The Green Hills of Earth,
in which the Blind Singer of the Spaceways, Rhysling, dies of radiation to save a spaceship from disaster.

In placing these stories, Heinlein broke down some of the barriers in the mass circulation magazines against the use of science fiction, the saturday evening post, which had used only a few such stories in the 520 issues they published between 1930 and 1940, notably,
Mr. Murphy of New York,
by Thomas McMorrow (March 22, 1930) and
The Place of the Gods,
by Stephen Vincent Benet (July 31, 1937), had a wide selection to choose from when they compiled an anthol-ogy of twenty such stories (all but one since Heinlein's appearance) in
The Post Reader of Fantasy and Science Fiction
(Doubleday, 1964). The pages—and the audiences—of collier's, esquire, playboy, as well as the post, became more receptive to science fiction.

Perhaps the most significant sale he made was a juvenile to Scribner's,
Rocket Ship Galileo,
concerning three boys and a scientist who discover a base on the moon, established by Nazis whose purpose is to reverse the decision of World War II with atomic weapons they have readied. Though written with more competence than most, as teen-age volumes go, the book was nothing much out of the ordinary, but elements of it were adapted by Heinlein (in collaboration with Alfred van Ronkel and James O'Hanlon) as a screen play. The story interested Hollywood Producer George Pal, who had re-ceived an Academy Award in 1944 for his specialty, the development of novel methods and techniques to attain un-usual screen effects. Obtaining backing for the project, Pal retained Heinlein as Technical Advisor and, to prepare the sets, hired Chesley Bonestell, an industrial and science-fiction artist who could render imaginary astronomical landscapes with such detail and scientific authenticity that they were nearly indistinguishable from color photographs.

Destination Moon,
the Technicolor production, was re-leased in 1950 (a fiction version appeared in short stories, September, 1950) to awed reviews of its unparalleled sets and special effects. The critics were not quite as kind to the story line, feeling that too much dependence had been placed on the natural sensationalism of the subject matter. Never-theless, the release of the picture marked a movie milestone. A spate of above-average science-fiction motion pictures immediately followed, including two more by Pal from fa-mous science-fiction novels, Balmer and Wylie's
When Worlds Collide
(1951) and Wells'
The
War of the Worlds
(1953), and Fox's production of
The Day the Earth Stood Still
(1951), based on Harry Bates' novelette
Farewell to the Master
(astounding science-fiction, October, 1940). Pal, who started the cycle, virtually killed it when he did an inferior job of fictionizing two factual books,
The Conquest of
Space
by Willy Ley and Chesley Bonestell (for the title) and
Mars Project
by Wernher von Braun (for the subject mat-ter), to produce
The Conquest of Space,
an inferior "documentary" of the future. No one realized it at the time, but the science-fiction magazines had sent a missionary to the masses. Their top writer, Robert A. Heinlein, had begun a process of education of the general public to science fiction, beginning with the public's basic media of entertainment: mass-circulation slicks, the teen-age magazines (including serialization of his material in boy's life), and, most influential of all, the motion picture screen, with all its attendant high-powered publicity and promotion.