Heinlein's Children: The Juveniles

By Joseph T. Major

2007 Hugo Award finalist for Best Related Book

with an introduction by Alexei Panshin

Almost half a century ago Robert A. Heinlein began writing a series of juvenile science fiction novels whose influence is still being felt. Many scientists and engineers--in the space program and elsewhere--have said those stories inspired them to commit their lives to research and technology.

The first of those books, _Rocket Ship Galileo_ in 1947, followed the traditional pattern of juvenile fiction in those days: Three teen-age boys and the scientist uncle of one of them set out to design, build, and fly the first spaceship to the Moon. And when they get there, they discover a secret base of Nazi renegade holdouts from World War II.

Heinlein had planned this to be the first in a series about *The Young Atomic Engineers*. But that fell through, and starting with the second in the series, _Space Cadet_ in 1948, the Heinlein juveniles were independent stories not connected to each other. And they do not fit into his famous "Future History."

Perhaps the most notable characteristic of the Heinlein juveniles is that they are juvenile only in that the protagonists are youngsters, usually in their late teens. (Of course, in keeping with publishers' requirements of that time, sexual matters are either absent or very discreetly veiled.) But the stories are not in any way "written down" to their young readers and can be fully enjoyed by adults. That may explain why they have worn so well--those who loved them as children find that they are just as good when reread thirty or forty years later. That's also why they have stayed in print most of these years.

Mr. Major's study of Heinlein's juveniles emphasizes plot development and incident, considers what Heinlein was trying to do in each story and how well he succeeded, and also points out possible influences from other sources.

Major does not waste the reader's time trying to "deconstruct" stories to make political points about our own times. The closest he comes to that is in considering the controversy that exploded around _Starship Troopers_ (1959) and why the book was denounced as militaristic and fascist by some critics (many of whom understood little about the military and even less about fascism). Scribner's published the first twelve of Heinlein's juveniles, but balked at Starship Troopers--too much red meat for young readers, apparently--so Heinlein sold the last two of his juveniles to Putnam's.

This book is introduced by Alexei Panshin, whose own Advent books Heinlein in Dimension and SF in Dimension reflect a quite different way of analyzing the works of Robert A. Heinlein.

• Language: English
• Publisher: ReAnimus Press
• Release date: Feb 19, 2021
• ISBN: 9781005951191

Book preview

HEINLEIN'S CHILDREN: THE JUVENILES

by

JOSEPH T. MAJOR

Produced by Advent:Publishers / ReAnimus Press

Other books by from Advent:Publishers:

The Reading Protocols of Science Fiction, by James Gunn and Michael Page (coming in 2021)

The Issue at Hand

More Issues at Hand

In Search of Wonder

The Tale that Wags the God

Of Worlds Beyond

The Science Fiction Novel

Heinlein's Children: The Juveniles

Heinlein in Dimension

SF in Dimension

Modern Science Fiction

PITFCS: Proceedings of the Institute for Twenty-First Century Studies

Footprints on Sand: A Literary Sampler

The Hugo, Nebula, and World Fantasy Awards

The Universes of E. E. Smith

Galaxy Magazine: The Dark and Light Years

Have Trenchcoat--Will Travel and Others

The Encyclopedia of Science Fiction and Fantasy, 3-Volume Set

© 2021, 2006 by Joseph T. Major. All rights reserved.

https://ReAnimus.com/store?author=Joseph+T+Major

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~~~

Dedication:

There are two kinds of people: those who divide people into two kinds and those who don’t.

Accordingly, I’m dedicating this book to two kinds of people:

Those who have read Heinlein’s juveniles and want to know more about them,

and

Those who haven’t yet read Heinlein’s juveniles, and want to know more about them.

We have all become Heinlein’s children, and it is fitting and proper that we understand how we came to be.

~~~

Table of Contents

INTRODUCTION: HEINLEIN'S CHILD

NOTES ON BIBLIOGRAPHY

1. DESTINATION MOON

2. THE STAR VOYAGER ACADEMY

3. THE MAN FROM MARS

4. DESTINATION GANYMEDE

5. THE SYNECDOCHE OF LOVE

6. WE KEEP GETTING RICHER, BUT

7. RAIN MAN IN THE SKY

8. A LONG-TERM PROJECT

9. NOW THIS IS THE TALE OF OUR CASTAWAYS

10. THE BROTHERHOOD OF PSI

11. THE CRYING OF LOT NINETY-SEVEN

12. TINKER, TAILOR, SPACEMAN, SPY

13. WHO ARE THE HEIRS OF ROBERT HEINLEIN?

14. DADDY, CLIFF, THE BULLETIN BOARD, AND CLARK

TABLES OF CONTENTS OF FIRST EDITIONS

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

BIBLIOGRAPHY

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

INTRODUCTION: HEINLEIN’S CHILD

by

Alexei Panshin

Few writers for children are able to command attention fifty years after their books were originally published from the adults those children would grow up to become. But Robert Heinlein is one.

I was perfectly placed to read Heinlein’s science fiction stories for children. When the first of them, Rocket Ship Galileo, showed up on the shelves of the East Lansing Public Library, I was seven years old.

In those days, I was exploring the wider world beyond picture books by cruising the shelves of books intended for older kids, scanning titles, checking blurbs, reading sample pages, even daring to take some of them out of the library.

It was on one of those sallies that I noticed a new book called Rocket Ship Galileo. What was that strange word in the title?

I sounded it out to myself as ga-LIL-ee-oh. It would be a few years before I learned better.

The picture on the front of the jacket drew me to the book. It showed a rocket ship blasting off from Earth, heading for the Moon. But I was also intimidated. There was nothing else in the children’s collection like that.

So I tested the book the way I tested other books. I even peeked at the ending. And then I put it back on the shelf.

I did that on a number of different occasions. It must have taken six months—perhaps even a year—before I was ready to read it.

Scribner’s would publish a new Heinlein book annually from 1947 to 1958, twelve of them in all. By a good measure, Rocket Ship Galileo was the simplest and most conventional, but it was more than enough to challenge me.

There might be other stories I read about trips to the Moon or Mars, but they were just kid fantasies. Rocket Ship Galileo felt as though it could almost happen.

However, it stood alone. In the late Forties, very little serious science fiction had been published in book form for either adults or children. It was still thought of as pulp literature, more than a bit dubious in the eyes of old-fashioned small town librarians, and Rocket Ship Galileo was the only one of Heinlein’s juveniles the East Lansing library would acquire.

Several years passed before I came upon Heinlein again. Then, in 1950, Satellite Scout, the story of a boy in an overpopulated future Earth who emigrates with his father to Jupiter’s moon Ganymede, was serialized in four monthly parts in my older brother’s Boy Scout magazine, Boys’ Life.

I read the first part and was hooked. I wasn’t supposed to read my brother’s magazine before he did, but I liked the story so much that I dared my brother’s wrath and read each succeeding installment before he got home from school.

Where could I find more science fiction? It occurred to me to look in the State Library in Lansing. And there in the children’s stacks I came upon a small stash of Heinlein books.

They didn’t have Rocket Ship Galileo. But that was all right, they had the three books that came after it.

There was Space Cadet, with the title lettering upside down and backward on the spine. And there was Red Planet: A Colonial Boy on Mars, with endpapers showing a compass and slide rule and a Percival Lowell map of the Martian canals lying on a background of graph paper on which portentous equations were written. Best of all, there was Farmer in the Sky—the book version of Satellite Scout, only with a different title and much longer than it had been in the magazine.

Wow! More of it to savor! That would be the book I read first.

All three books were illustrated by Clifford N. Geary, who also drew the covers. There were three or four of his distinctive pictures in each book, sometimes splashing across two pages. Geary’s drawings—often white on black, and strongest in their design—showed cadets on a space station learning to spacewalk, Martian colonists in individually-decorated breathing masks, and immense globular atomic torchships capable of traveling to Ganymede or even the stars.

For some reason, there was also a copy of Waldo and Magic, Inc., two Heinlein short novels from 1941 and 1940 that Doubleday published as a book for adults in 1950. How that book found its way into a children’s library I cannot explain. But it would call for some growing up on my part before I could read it.

I searched the collection, but found no other science fiction there. As far as I could tell, Heinlein was alone in writing seriously about the future and outer space. I thought of his books as a special personal discovery.

Later that year, a new Heinlein book showed up among the others. It was called Between Planets, about a boy who has to determine where his loyalties lie in a colonial war between Earth and Venus. This book was illustrated by Clifford Geary, too, including a picture of a Venerian dragon who calls himself Sir Isaac Newton and is the wisest character in the story.

After that, each time I went to the State Library I’d be hoping to discover a new Heinlein book waiting for me. And, after another year, I’d be rewarded with The Rolling Stones, the story of an extended family named Stone—a grandmother, her son and his wife, and their four children—who leave their home on the Moon to travel in their own spaceship to Mars and then on to the asteroids, selling bicycles and Martian flatcats as they go.

In the first six books that he wrote for Scribner’s, from Rocket Ship Galileo through The Rolling Stones, Heinlein showed me around the Solar System. He took me to the Moon, to Venus and Mars, to the asteroids, and as far as the Jovian moon Ganymede. And he promised to go even further.

At the conclusion of The Rolling Stones, the Stone family is setting off in their spaceship for Titan, the largest moon of Saturn. The book ends:

The blast cut off her words; the Stone trembled and threw herself outward bound, toward Saturn. In her train followed hundreds and thousands and hundreds of thousands of thousands of restless rolling Stones... to Saturn... to Uranus, to Pluto... rolling on out to the stars... outward bound to the end of the Universe.

After that, however, in spite of all my hoping, it would be two full years before I saw another new Heinlein juvenile.

Partly making up for the absence of new Heinlein was the appearance of other juvenile science fiction books, which finally began to be published in 1952, five years after the publication of Rocket Ship Galileo. Without Heinlein’s example, it’s doubtful that they would have been either written or published.

There was the Adventures in Science Fiction series from Winston, which kicked off with five titles in the spring of 1952 and followed with another five in the fall. They were identifiable on the shelves by their brightly colored jackets and a distinctive little rocket symbol at the base of the spine.

Among them were books by people who didn’t usually write science fiction, such as a young Evan Hunter. But some of them were by established science fiction writers like Arthur C. Clarke, Poul Anderson and Lester del Rey. These books took me to the depths of the ocean and around the solar system, and looked within a time-vault five hundred years after human disaster.

Also published that year was Starman’s Son by children’s book writer Andre Norton. It was okay—an after-the-Bomb story with scary mutants—but nonetheless I found it a bit disappointing. From the title I’d been hoping for a story about the son of someone who’d been to the stars.

The new science fiction book I liked best was David Starr: Space Ranger by Paul French, a pseudonym of Isaac Asimov. This mystery-adventure set on Mars had some of the same touches of difference-treated-as-normal that made Heinlein fascinating.

However, as exciting as it might be to encounter this small flood of science fiction books, I didn’t think that any of them was as good as Heinlein. As far as I was concerned, he set the standard for what this kind of story should be like, and these books didn’t do for me what his did.

It wasn’t that I couldn’t read many of them more than once and enjoy myself. But I liked Heinlein better.

He was my favorite writer. I relished the flavor of his prose, the pithy way he had of putting things and the impression he gave of total self-assurance.

But Heinlein wasn’t just fun to read—he was growth food. I was able to read his books innumerable times and never wear them out. It seemed that each time I re-read a story, I’d find something new I hadn’t appreciated before.

So confidently did Heinlein write about the future that he almost might have been there. He could tell me how things worked and how they fit together. It made a big impression on me, a boy living in a world of long distance operators and party lines, when on the second page of Space Cadet the main character is riding down an outdoor slidewalk in Colorado and has to dig into his pouch to answer a call from his father back in Iowa on his own personal portable phone. That was an exhilarating taste of tomorrow.

In Heinlein’s stories, things could be radically different from the way they were in the familiar world around me. In Red Planet, for example, Mars is a frontier society and it is normal for kids to carry sidearms. That gave me something to think about. I had to ask myself whether I’d be ready to live up to that order of responsibility.

Heinlein addressed serious subjects that the other SF books I read did not—economics, revolution, overpopulation—and introduced me to concepts I hadn’t previously encountered, even in the adult books I’d begun to read. I first ran into the word ecology in Farmer in the Sky and had to look it up. It would be years before I saw it anywhere else.

At any moment, Heinlein was capable of presenting some startling new perspective in which things I took for granted as normal were cast into doubt, like the assertion of the makeshift nature of the automobile—a preposterous collection of mechanical buffoonery—which appears in The Rolling Stones. He was convincing about it, too.

It seemed there was nothing that Heinlein didn’t have the true scoop on. He certainly knew more than my schoolteachers did. They were only able to teach me what was ordinary and obvious.

I thought of Heinlein as my real teacher. He stretched my understanding in ways that school never did and taught me of the existence of a broader and deeper universe beyond the present, often by including evidences of sentient beings who had come and gone before us.

There was a moral dimension to his work, too, that I valued and tried to apply—a sense that in the future as much as now life would present us with hard choices and what we chose to do would matter.

In the absence of a new Heinlein juvenile, I finally worked up the nerve to read Waldo and Magic, Inc. Both stories suggested that alternate modes of thought might be valid. Waldo was particularly head-bending, with its conclusion that existence doesn’t have a fixed nature, but shapes itself according to the conception we have of it.

So I shaped a little reality myself. I looked for more science fiction downstairs in the adult collection of the State Library, and by the act of looking for it, brought it into being.

The first thing I did was to look on the fiction shelves under H, but there was no Heinlein there. In fact, I wasn’t able to find any SF books at all in the fiction collection.

The next thing I thought to do was to look in the card catalog under science fiction. But that gave me no help in identifying science fiction novels, as I’d hoped it would and thought it should.

However, there were a number of cards for science fiction collections. And all of them had the same Dewey Decimal number in the corner—808.2.

So I followed the numbers and tracked these books down in the stacks. 808.2 proved to be the number for all story collections. But I had no trouble identifying the science fiction anthologies. They were the books with time, space, or science fiction in the title.

Some of them were very fat. I started with the two fattest—Adventures in Time and Space, edited by Raymond J. Healy and J. Francis McComas, which contained 35 stories, and The Best of Science Fiction, edited by Groff Conklin, which contained 40. Both of them had multiple Heinlein stories in them.

I read what I could, not always understanding what I read. It was as though I had to learn a language that was new to me to make sense of these books.

But gradually I worked my way through them all—The Big Book of Science Fiction, A Treasury of Science Fiction, The Astounding Science Fiction Anthology, The Galaxy Reader, The Best Science Fiction Stories: 1949, New Tales of Space and Time. These books and the rest of them provided me with my basic education in adult science fiction.

I loved science fiction, even though I wasn’t completely sure what it was. I would read every book about it I could lay my hands on—Science-Fiction Handbook, by L. Sprague de Camp, Modern Science Fiction: Its Meaning and Its Future, edited by Reginald Bretnor, and In Search of Wonder, by Damon Knight—in an attempt to figure it out.

But even after I’d found my way to adult science fiction—the real thing—I would continue to read Heinlein’s new juveniles. Other SF for kids might seem watered-down to me now; Heinlein never did.

As he wrote in 1952: A book so juvenile that it will insult the intelligence of adults is quite likely to insult the intelligence of the kids.

As though to demonstrate how much he thought youngsters could deal with, following The Rolling Stones in 1952, Heinlein’s science fiction stories for kids would only grow more challenging. They were longer now, and after one final book illustrated by Clifford Geary, ceased to have illustrations except on the title page.

In his first six books for Scribner’s, Heinlein had made his readers at home in the Solar System. In the next six he broadened their frame of reference. These stories would all be set against a background of interstellar travel and have titles like Time for the Stars and Citizen of the Galaxy.

The first one of them I saw, two full years after The Rolling Stones, was The Star Beast. Unlike any of Heinlein’s previous juveniles, it was satiric in tone.

John Thomas Stuart XI, like other John Thomas Stuarts before him, is the keeper of an oversized alien creature named Lummox who talks in a childish voice and eats automobiles. The final paragraph of the book would turn all my previous understanding on its head. Here it was revealed that in her own mind, it is long-lived Lummox who regards herself as having been busy raising a series of John Thomas Stuarts as pets.

That wasn’t standard kid fare.

I found clues on the back of The Star Beast that filled me in on the Scribner’s book I’d missed. It was called Starman Jones. A one-sentence blurb told me that it was about a farm boy who rises to become astrogator on a starship.

As someone who thought of himself as a dedicated Heinlein fan, I would be tireless in seeking out his stories. But it took me another three years before I caught up with Starman Jones.

I finally came across it in the newly-established Okemos branch of the Ingham County Library in the back of a fire station. It was the one Heinlein book they had.

When I read it, I discovered that the farm boy who rises to astrogator—and even temporary captain—on a starship comes from an abusive family and lives in a repressive society. In order to join the starship crew, he has to resort to forged documents.

That wasn’t the ordinary stuff of kids’ books, either.

But again and again, Heinlein would test the limits of what was usual in children’s publishing.

Tunnel in the Sky was about survival class students accidentally stranded on an alien planet and forced to survive for real.

Citizen of the Galaxy began with the main character as a slave boy being sold on the auction block to a crippled beggar.

Because he demanded so much of his young readers, Heinlein’s juveniles would be of interest to older readers, as well.

Of the later Heinlein juveniles, three would be serialized in adult science fiction magazines. The Star Beast appeared in The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction as Star Lummox before its publication as a book by Scribner’s. I first read Citizen of the Galaxy as a serial in Astounding in 1957, and Have Space Suit—Will Travel the following year in F&SF.

And Time for the Stars would come to me as a selection of the Science Fiction Book Club.

That book had one of my favorite Heinlein touches.

The main character is one of a set of telepathic twins recruited as communicators for an extended voyage of interstellar exploration sponsored by the Long Range Foundation ...To make the LRF directors light up with enthusiasm you had to suggest something that cost a billion or more and probably wouldn’t show results for ten generations, if ever...

But the price of participating in this project is that the narrator grows radically out of touch with the society he left behind. He expresses his culture shock this way after his return from the stars:

... The changes had been more than I had bargained for. Take female styles, for example—look, I’m no Puritan, but they didn’t dress, if you want to call it that, this way when I was a kid. Girls running around without a thing on their heads, not even on top... heads bare-naked, like an animal.

It was a good thing that Dad hadn’t lived to see it. He never let our sisters come to the table without a hat, even if Pat and I were the only unmarried males present.

The narrator’s no Puritan. He’d like you to know that. But he also wants you to understand that some things—like the sight of a female with her head bare-naked like an animal—might be difficult for a man to get used to.

I loved that. One of the things I valued most about science fiction was the insight into cultural imprinting and human psychology that its strange situations and skewed perspectives gave me. And the flavor was so Heinlein.

I was eighteen when Have Space Suit—Will Travel, Heinlein’s final book for Scribner’s, was published.

I’d grown up on Heinlein. I’d read his books all my life. I’d raised myself reading his stories. I considered myself his number one fan, since no one could possibly enjoy his writing more than I did.

And Have Space Suit—Will Travel was a fitting climax to the series of Scribner’s juveniles. It was all the preceding books rolled into one.

Kip Russell, who tells the story, begins by refurbishing a used space suit he’s won in a contest. The story then takes him from his back yard to the Moon, to Pluto, to a planet of the star Vega, and finally to a planet in another galaxy where the human race is judged. And then back home again.

I remember sitting in the car reading Have Space Suit—Will Travel in F&SF and laughing in pure delight as the kind of trip Heinlein was taking me on dawned on me. I think that moment of recognition was the high point in all my reading of science fiction.

Perhaps because with Have Space Suit Heinlein had completed what he’d set out to do with his SF books for kids, with the next book he wrote, he deliberately sabotaged his relationship with Scribner’s and established a new one with Putnam’s.

It wasn’t difficult to convince Scribner’s to drop his work. They were an old-fashioned aristocratic house who looked upon publishing as a social responsibility as well as a business.

Starting with those gun-toting kids in Red Planet, Heinlein had tried Scribner’s by constantly testing the bounds of what was considered suitable for children. Now he sent them a contract-breaker of a book—the story of a Mobile Infantry soldier in an interstellar war-to-come—knowing full well that Scribner’s would think its violence and militance was inappropriate for children.

Starship Troopers would be issued instead by Putnam’s, a publisher who had a policy of courting controversy, as a book for teens, but also as a book for adults. It was serialized in The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, and won a Hugo Award as Best Novel of the Year. It was the first of a number of heretical Heinlein novels that Putnam’s would publish.

Heinlein may have moved on as a writer, but the twelve juveniles that he wrote for Scribner’s would remain as a unique and valuable body of work.

A whole generation of readers would be introduced to science fiction by these books. They formed thinking, expanded horizons, and influenced lives.

Now, for the benefit of all of us who were Heinlein’s Children, Joseph Major offers the close examination of these books they’ve long deserved. Joe has read widely, thought much, and knows his Heinlein. Read and enjoy.

NOTES ON BIBLIOGRAPHY

1. The heading of each chapter gives the Opus and NHOL numbers for the book under discussion.

Opus numbers are those used in Mr. Heinlein’s files, as reported in Robert A. Heinlein: A Bibliographic Research Guide to Heinlein’s Complete Works, the doctoral dissertation of Marie Guthrie Ormes (University of Kentucky, 1993), © 1993 by Marie Guthrie Ormes.

NHOL numbers are taken from The New Heinlein Opus List, pages 253-270 in Robert A. Heinlein: A Reader’s Companion, by James Gifford, © 2000 by James Gifford. Used with permission.

2. The page citations to Robert A. Heinlein’s juvenile novels are keyed to the hardcover U.S. first editions. Since many readers will not have these books readily available, their tables of contents are given in the appendix, showing where each chapter begins and ends. This is to enable the reader to see approximately where in the chapter a cited item is located, and then interpolate to the corresponding page in other editions.

3. Damon Knight’s In Search of Wonder is cited a number of times. The citations are keyed to the Third Edition (1996). Since many readers will have only the Second Edition (1967) or even the First Edition (1956), it may help to know that pages 12, 43, and 86-99 in the Third Edition correspond respectively to pages 1-2, 33, and 76-89 in the Second Edition and pages 1-2, 24, and 60-64 in the First Edition. However, note that the First Edition lacks the commentary on Tunnel in the Sky, Time for the Stars, and Citizen of the Galaxy—as well as some other material—which Knight added to the later editions.

1. DESTINATION MOON

ROCKET SHIP GALILEO

New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1947.

Opus 42; NHOL G.048b; written February-March 1946; 62,000 words.

I. A PERIOD OF EXTREME CHANGE

After what L. Sprague de Camp referred to as their Ortygian days at the Philadelphia Naval Air Experimental Station, Robert Heinlein decided that new ways of life and new fields of endeavor were in order. He got divorced (from Leslyn) and remarried (to Virginia), moved to California, found an agent (Lurton Blassingame), and began writing for markets above and beyond Astounding Science Fiction.

In particular, he decided to influence the youth market, hoping to impress the tabula rasa of youthful minds with a stamp of technology and adventure. Working in this particular field required writing at novel length. And six months after he began trying to sell his manuscript—though the first publisher he submitted it to didn’t think the idea was plausible—it sold:

Young Atomic Engineers—I am delighted to hear that Alice Dalgliesh [editor at Scribner’s] likes this ms. In my letter of 16 March 46 you will find a list of titles for a proposed series of sequels and considerable discussion of what I would like to do in re juveniles, as well as what I think might be done further to exploit this story. I expect to be guided by you in all those matters—my opinions are not final. I certainly would be willing to rewrite to editorial order and to plan stories to fit editorial desires in order to have my book brought out by so distinguished a house as Scribner’s.

           —Grumbles from the Grave, letter of September 27, 1946, p. 44

Two and a half years down the road, the problems of sex and violence, or nudity and guns anyhow, in Red Planet would make Heinlein probably wish he had never written that last sentence; certainly his opinions and actions concerning rewrit[ing] to editorial order and plan[ning] stories to fit editorial desires in the case of that book are not to be associated with the term willing.

Somewhat earlier along the line, too, Heinlein seems to have discarded the idea of writing a series about the Young Atomic Engineers exploring the solar system. The last page of this book does not advertise the further exciting adventures that would be the destiny of The Young Atomic Engineers on Mars, as it would have if it had been in such a series. With the discarding of this idea, the book became focused on itself, and the title was changed from a series title to that of a standalone novel.

II. THE PILGRIM PROJECT

Ross Jenkins, Art Mueller, and Morrie Abrams might be excused for thinking themselves in the distinguished company of Lee Correy and Robert Willey as they prepare to test their latest model rocket, the Starstruck V. Yet as they prepare the dynamometer for its thrust measurements, events are developing which will propel them into the neighborhood of the Verein fur Raumschiffahrt, in more ways than one.

Anthony Boucher’s Rocket to the Morgue, with its portrait of a very familiar figure called Austin Carter—a name that happens to have the same rhythm and number of syllables as Robert Heinlein—features a similar rocket experiment. This challenging test has a familiar ending, too. The rocket is go for throttle up at T plus seventeen seconds and thrust increasing to, perhaps, 105% of nominal when it explodes. And you wonder why Robert H. Goddard was unpopular with his neighbors in Massachusetts.

The trio fall into a brown, and a von Braun, study analyzing the ruins of their test model. But it’s too late in the day to get the vital information so they decide to give things a better look in the morning. To their further dismay, there is something in the way when they get to the gate.

Or rather someone, a very unconscious someone, apparently knocked out by the exploding rocket.

The litigation culture is not entirely new and legal elements will crop up later in this story, as they do throughout Heinlein’s work. (Just in the juveniles we have such legal contests as the animal control hearing in The Star Beast and the various inheritance hearings in Citizen of the Galaxy.) Serious fears crop up right away and are only slightly abated when the target turns out to be someone Art knows: He’s my uncle.... You know—the one I’ve told you about. He’s my Uncle Don. Doctor Donald Cargraves, my ‘Atomic Bomb’ uncle. [p. 8] Nevertheless, Dr. Cargraves is not seriously hurt, for all the blood around (scalp wounds are usually bloody), and he had had a reason for loitering in the vicinity of that test.

The trio are representatives of a type now sadly vanishing from society; the mechanically minded tinkerers. Dr. Cargraves notes that his inadvertent assailants are scientifically minded, keeping extensive notes of their experiments and being organized—their simple basement lab is cleaner than most basements. His injury is minor, fortunately. (Morrie’s father had said: "So what? [sic for Nu?] So we have lawyers in the family for such things." [pp. 12-13]) The wounded hero is up to fraternizing with family and friends afterwards.

After cautiously observing the skills and resourcefulness of his targets, and plumbing the depths of their anomie, Dr. Cargraves comes to a conclusion and reveals his real motivation: Why don’t you go to the moon—with me? [p. 25]

From various internal clues we can assume that this story is set in the late Fifties. Art was just a kid the last time he saw his uncle, just after the war. [p. 9] Since he has just graduated from high school [p. 23], he is seventeen or eighteen which puts this visit between ten and fifteen years in the past.

The world they live in is a peaceful one. Nuclear weapons are under the control of the UN, the Baruch Commission proposal. (Whether they are controlled by a deliberately expatriated band of Janizaries as in Solution Unsatisfactory is not specified.) Commerce is spreading in unprecedented ways. Low-orbit rockets carry cargo across the oceans and passengers around the world. (Presumably, that world peace authority ensures that none of those rockets are going on one-way trips with nuclear weapons as cargo.)

This peace seems to have had other consequences. Later on there is a reference to reborn Berlin [p. 122] which presumably has neither been blockaded nor divided. Foreign affairs don’t reach our boys now.

Nowadays, that is. Art’s father had had some bad experiences with Aryan science at the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute, which resulted in his becoming a guest of another kind of facility of the Reich’s. Only being married to an American woman helped get him out of the concentration camp. [pp. 34-35] (Curiously, Morrie’s folks seem not to be mentioning that several million of their relatives hadn’t had such mazel.)

Offered adventure, excitement, achievement, and self-fulfillment, the boys take it up without a second thought. Those are in the minds of their parents, and Dr. Cargraves has to do some persuading.

Art’s mother takes a little—not much—persuading from her brother, and Morrie’s father acknowledges that five years since bar mitzvah means something. Ross’s father, however, is a little more skeptical, citing the immense costs, the substantial technical skills required, and the probability that the government would do it, or if not them, corporate enterprise. Here, Mr. Jenkins is serving as a spokesman for the author, who had said:

Young Atomic Engineers contains two conventional deviations from what I believe to be reasonably possible; I have condensed the preparation time for the trip and I have assumed that four people can do work which should require more nearly forty.

           —Grumbles from the Grave, letter of March 16, 1946, p. 43

Dr. Cargraves has a response that resonates more strangely now than it did at the time: The great majority of the scientists in the Manhattan Project were very young men. [p. 37] Indeed, one of them was only eighteen when he started work: Theodore Alvin Hall, much later to become known for rather unscientific reasons (see Bombshell by Joseph Albright and Marcia Kunstel for that story). A further odd resonance can be observed in the possible competition he cites: It wouldn’t surprise me to hear some morning that the Russians had done it. [p. 38]

Now it’s Cargraves speaking for the author:

However, we may wake up some morning and find that the Russians have quietly beaten us to it, and that the Lunar S.S.R.—eight scientists and technicians, six men, two women—has petitioned the Kremlin for admission of the Moon to the USSR. That’s another unknown variable.

           — Grumbles from the Grave, letter of March 13, 1947, p. 148

While it was indeed true that, as Cargraves says of the Soviets, They’ve got the technical ability and they seem to be willing to spend money on science [p. 38], there were other considerations. The Soviet space program was a technical spin-off of their intercontinental ballistic missile program—indeed, the principal Russian man-rated lift vehicle is still an only slightly updated version of Sergei P. Korolev’s Semyorka ballistic missile. The Soviet manned space program was substantially influenced by prestige considerations.

Mr. Jenkins in the end is influenced by prestige considerations himself. After proposing to hire skilled technicians to do the work of forty, and running into Cargraves’ paired contentions in response that the boys had the necessary skills already, and the combination of his pledge and their enthusiasm had made an unbreakable bond, the impasse is broken by a reminder from Mrs. Jenkins. She points out that they themselves descended from young pioneers, who had gone against the will of their parents.

Mr. Jenkins offers in his defense that he hasn’t been a confining father; as Roger Stone and Clifford C. Russell, Sr. will do, he has allowed his offspring to play around with explosives. Presumably outside the city limits and not in a frame building.

But for the kinds of explosives Dr. Cargraves has in mind they have to go outside the city limits, all the way to New Mexico in fact. On an abandoned U.S. munitions testing site off of Route 66, now a UN testing site (devoid of pads for black helicopters) where in 1951 (the first definite date, p. 48) the UN tested its Doomsday Bomb. Now Teller was proposing a fusion weapon even then, but Heinlein may not have been meaning this in particular. (If the bomb was detonated five miles up [p. 49] but left a crater that stretched for miles toward the horizon [p. 48] it must have been an odd one indeed.)

Preparing that work of forty requires a worksite, also tools. Had Heinlein written this later, after the housebuilding reflected in The Door into Summer he might not have been so sanguine about the fact that Art and Ross pour the foundation for the machine shop building in one day and have the building up soon thereafter.

And why are they doing it alone, anyhow? Cargraves has an aircraft pilot’s license; so does Morrie. Licensed aircraft pilots can get a rocket pilot’s license with a short training session, so that is what they are doing. All things considered, therefore, it really shouldn’t be so surprising that the new rocket pilots decided to save further money by flying their rocket out themselves. (At the time of writing, and given the circumstances at the time of the book’s action, the telegram notifying the advance echelon of the success of the main unit was the customary means of so doing.)

Now with their means, it is time to organize their ways. Unlike the contentious and anarchical foursome of The Number of the Beast, the young atomic engineers are willing to accept dictation. These are, all the same, aspects of a common attitude towards authority. Throughout Heinlein’s works, he depicts a basic principle of authority and leadership; followers may not be constrained to follow or restrained from departing the association—but, having consented to follow, they must follow straight-forwardly and obey diligently. This attitude is the basis of such attitudes as Baslim’s in Citizen of the Galaxy, where he would never confine anyone, but demands that Thorby do as told without explanation, all the way to the society of Starship Troopers. As Cargraves puts it, [There] comes a time when loose and easy isn’t enough, when you have to be willing to obey, and do it wholeheartedly and without argument. [p. 56]

Art, Morrie, and Ross are older than Thorby was when he was bought and more focused than Juan Rico was when he enlisted, not to mention more sensible than Zeb, Jake, Deety, and Hilda. Therefore they accept Cargraves’ assignments, suited to their knowledge and skills: Morrie, being the other trained pilot, will be second in command, while Art, the tinkerer, is medical officer. (Poor Ross.)

But the ship alone is not by any long shot the entirety of then-required equipment. They also need space suits in which to take one small step for a man, and said units arrive soon. In some ways the description of the suits will seem familiar to the contemporary reader, across the gulf of fifty years, but in others the technique seems positively eccentric. For example, while the considerations of the need to protect against heat loss by conduction are in order, the concerns about insulation of the suit in general have proven unfounded. The proper astronaut’s problem has been keeping cool, not warm. The informed modern-day reader will assume that the de Camp joints that ensure mobility under pressure [p. 58] had been invented by an engineer at the Naval Aviation Experimental Station in Philadelphia (see Time and Chance [p. 193] by L. Sprague de Camp for the story of the actual invention as told by the inventor, a colleague of the author) though the contemporary reader might not have been so fortunate. While Kip Russell might find some of the features inadequate for them to Have Space Suit—Will Travel, on the whole the presentation shows the plausibility and extrapolation required to satisfy the reader.

Somewhat more hazardous to one’s health is the item to be delivered, the thorium for the power plant. Before it can be handed over, the crew has to prepare to store it, and prepare the ship to use it. While some of the specifics of this shielding are overdesigned—alpha and beta particles do not require any elaborate shielding to be warded off—the composite design for the radiation shield is, as far as it is elaborated, in keeping with the level of knowledge at the time within standards. Thorium is element 90. Its most common isotope disintegrates to become radon, which is hardly a concern in space but on the ground is an additional problem of storage. (And one unmentioned by Heinlein.) By way of contrast, thorium is ductile, lacking those multiple crystalline phases of plutonium that make such an effective barrier to nuclear terrorism; thus making the task of fabricating fuel elements easier, allowing four to do the work of forty.

Accordingly, Cargraves institutes stringent radiological safety measures, requiring blood tests and exposure films, such as would inform (or perhaps even in their own future be informing) Patrol Lieutenant John Ezra Dahlquist that his shift on The Long Watch was sort of permanently up. The man who died testing critical mass at Los Alamos was an extreme example of why such safety measures are desirable.

A further consideration, the high cost, is not so much addressed as finessed. Cargraves proudly says:

... Under the UN trusteeship for atomics, a senior member of the Global Association of Atomic Scientists—that’s me! he stuck in, grinning, can get fissionable material for experimental purposes, if the directors of the Association approve. I can swing that. [p. 31]

Notice again the internationalization and the lack of concern about misuse. There seems to be no fear of a senior member of the GAAS deciding that Dr. Fu Manchu was a pretty good post-faculty advisor after all, say. Not to mention any orders from higher up.

Conducting long-range planning, the young atomic engineers’ shopping includes buying plants for oxygen conversion. This was the standard thesis of SF extrapolation but it seems to be too bulky for the oxygenization return. Whether it would have worked on the doomed Biosphere Two, which had hoped to set up such a system, cannot be told. The managers of that experiment had to pipe in substantial additional quantities of oxygen when the levels dropped to the lower limits of breathability, but they theorized that the concrete of the structure may have absorbed much of it.

Back at camp, a CAB inspector has come and gone, and it turns out that Cargraves has a lot more to be worried about than D. D. Harriman in Requiem did about inspectors. Next morning, as they begin the final preparations:

Cargraves looked up just in time to see a bright, bright flash, then to be hit in the face by a thunderous pressure which threw him back against the side of the ship. [p. 68]

III. ROCKET TO THE MORGUE

Back at the beginning there had been hints that not all was well with the program. In their postmortem on the Starstruck V the boys, helped by their victim, had gathered up all the parts. However, not only couldn’t they find the part that had knocked out Cargraves, they couldn’t find any evidence that there had been such a part. [pp. 16-17]

Then, when Ross and Art arrive to set up the buildings, they find that their key to the lock on the gate to the reservation doesn’t work. Someone had broken in, and the rangers had had to install a new lock. Since the intruder had stepped on a mine, he was unavailable to answer any questions, and their gear seemed all right. [pp. 46-47]

Now it appears that that CAB inspector was enforcing an injunction against flying to the moon by more than just legal means.

Cargraves quit North American Atomics, his former employers, because they were not interested in using his proposed power source for space flight. Recalling the legal constraints that Douglas and Martin had had to consider in Let There Be Light, one might wonder if the company thinks that it still owns the rights, Cargraves’ statement to the contrary [p. 30] notwithstanding, and wants to undertake covert enforcement thereof. One of the few worthwhile parts of H. Bruce Franklin’s Robert A. Heinlein: America as Science Fiction is its discussion of Heinlein’s early years, including an emotionally scarring encounter with corporate power and incompetence. Is North American Atomics as self-preserving as the insurance industry in Life-Line is?

The immediate concern is with their health. Ross had been so unfortunate as to be looking at the explosion; he has been blinded, temporarily they hope. In a despairing rerun Cargraves has been knocked unconscious.

The shippers would pick this time to deliver the thorium. In a spark of realization Cargraves orders them to send it back; Mr. Jenkins was right and he was in over his head. Then he collapses.

When he recovers, he finds that his orders have been obeyed. Not the ones he just gave, but the earlier ones when he made Morrie his number two and gave Art the power to put someone on the sick list. This added up to his order to return the thorium being ruled out of order; after his collapse Art had put him on the sick list, in which state of course he couldn’t validly give an order. Cargraves plumbs the depths of despair that night.

In the morning, morning-afters create a more positive mental status. The display of dedication by the boys has restored Cargraves’ optimism, and he decides that they should go on. These heightened feelings aren’t blunted even by his discovery of plastic explosive charges on the ship’s radiation shielding.

In this more advanced spirit the work continues, as Ross’s vision gradually returns. Cargraves’ rocket motor uses nothing so mundane as hydrogen as its propellant thrust component; taking advantage of the increased specific impulse to be derived from flinging more massive atoms out of the exhaust, his motor uses zinc. (Delivery problems in the pre-thrust might make this propellant—the fuel is the thorium—more difficult to use than it is presented as being.)

Now that they are down to final testing, a crucial item needs to be considered; what to call the ship? After considering several proposed names, and with less contentiousness than the Stone Family of The Rolling Stones, they decide on a name reflecting their organization and related to their destination: Galileo.

Whereupon the last of the building crises eventuates. Test equipment of the required scale isn’t readily available. Coming down to the wire, Cargraves decides on what other-world rocket scientists at Huntsville would call an all-up test, where he would simply fly the rocket, testing the motor and the other systems all at once. The boys try to dissuade him from doing this himself, he being less replaceable than they are, but he perseveres and his testing is successful. If it hadn’t been, there wouldn’t have been a flight in the first place.

And so, riding forward into the unknown, ¡más alla!, the valiant crew of the Galileo decides that the sooner the better to break the surly bonds of Earth and take one small step for a man.

There isn’t time to sign a contract with Life magazine but the press can be notified. The takeoff will be televised, which is less surprising than it would have been then. With no time to waste, the young atomic engineers spend all night making final preparations. What we now call the media begin arriving at T-2 hours and as usual every reporter thinks he is the one exception to the restrictions on coverage.

They must be hyper from the thought of actually going, as they keep on going, getting into the ship. Then there is an unusual sort of hold at T-10 minutes: Cargraves gets served with a court order, forbidding him from lifting off. Something about endangering the lives of minors (recall that 21, not 18, was the transition point in those days). This seems rather suspicious given the circumstances and Cargraves has to have federal sovereignty trample states’ rights (the order is from a state court) to ensure his liftoff. Fortunately the federal authorities are cooperative and the state authorities consenting. Something is up, though. (Polar expeditions in the heroic age sometimes had to set off quickly to escape process servers, a state of affairs reflected in James Blish’s The Frozen Year.)

With this last-minute obstacle out of the way, with an efficiency that D. D. Harriman (cf. Requiem) or Dr. Corley of Destination Moon might have envied, having faced similar problems themselves, the Rocket Ship Galileo lifts off. Real-world courts have proven less amenable to such antics, as shown by the failure of the attempt to halt the Cassini probe launch in 1997.

IV. DE LA TERRE A LA LUNE

The next few minutes depict the equivalence of gravitational mass and inertial mass, as the young atomic engineers are under the equivalent of various gravitations due to the shifting thrust of their rocket jet in its acceleration to escape velocity. This is a direct ascent mission mode, very direct, as they don’t even go into orbit. Waiting twelve hours to save a difference of about 1600 miles per hour was more than his nerves could stand [p. 90], reasons the frazzled Cargraves, and given the legal antics perhaps not unjustified.

The scientific facts depicted in this scene hold true but the technological ones were, even then, perhaps not what might have been done. Once the initial acceleration to escape velocity is over, the pilots hand over to the automatic control system—an electromechanical guidance system working off a cam. All right, it can be called an analog guidance data kernel but it’s still a lump of machined metal.

Once the initial thrust phase is over the young atomic engineers start (without credit) discussing some concepts from The Exploration of Space by some Treasury clerk over in Britain named Clarke, about different frames of reference, the dynamics of acceleration, and so on. Perhaps out of courtesy to the reader, they don’t mention the infamous New York Times editorial deriding Robert Goddard’s rocket experiments, which showed how the editors themselves lacked the knowledge handed out in high schools about Newton’s Laws.

For a change the mission proceeds smoothly, with no exploding oxygen tanks, lightning strikes, or whatever. Indeed, Cargraves tells Art, Then you can get some really unique pics—the earth from space. [p. 111] Presumably they will not also read from Genesis.

This speculation is followed by a typical Heinleinian digression into and on the topic of radical empiricism. Art provokes this philosophical digression by expressing his hopes to get pictures of the far side of the moon. To which Cargraves says [How] do you know there is any back side to the moon? You’ve never seen it. [p. 111] He proceeds to go on in that vein, justifying his qualifications to be a Fair Witness from Stranger in a Strange Land, if not a co-worker of the world-building stage crew in They. The capper is with one of the first of Heinlein’s criticisms of logic, a theme that would crop up from time to time all the way to at least Glory Road. It ends with Cargraves summing up empirically: Proof comes from experiment, or to put it another way, from experience, and from nothing else. [p. 115]

This epistemological interlude is followed by a short lecture on experimentation in nuclear physics, and then by a practicum in inner-ear medicine. The second thrust phase is about over, and the Galileo is about to go into free fall. Heinlein’s predictions of the details of the next step beyond airsickness haven’t yet been given their just due. Doubtless the boys wished they could get dropsickness shots the way that Bill Lermer did in Farmer in the Sky.

Other matters that have been empirically verified since then, demonstrated in the next few pages, include the problem of solar heating and the view of the Earth from space. However, the radios here don’t quite seem up to the task. As Space Cadet Matt Dodson lacked a Deep Space Network to keep in touch with Des Moines, so do the young atomic engineers remain out of contact with home.

The mission continues nominally and they achieve Lunar orbit. In contradiction to Cargraves’ derogation of analytic methodology, there is an Other Side to the moon. And in an echo of Blowups Happen, Morrie, observing the cratering, wonders if the Selenites blew up their planet with nuclear weapons. This is a topic that has been concerning Cargraves himself for the past few years (not, it is to be hoped, enough for him to be having long talks about sharing technology with Dr. Fuchs from England, that kid Hall, and Greenglass the tech).

The landing contains one incredible coincidence; their original chosen landing site turns out to be too rough, and only a last-minute intervention by human pilotage places the Galileo at Procellarum Base—well, Heinlein wasn’t that much of a prophet. Like the explorers in Destination Moon they have landed just beyond line-of-sight of Earth. With communications that chancy, evidently the possibility of seeing something new overrode any perceived need for communication. By way of contrast, in James A. Michener’s Space, his fictional Apollo 18 mission to the far side deployed communication satellites so Mission Control and the TV audience could hear the two lunar landing astronauts, LM pilot Paul Linley and mission commander and SF reader (maybe even of Rocket Ship Galileo) Randy Claggett, dying of their massive radiation overdose from the solar flare (an event not in the mission plan).

And having arrived, they can’t wait to get out. Going on with coincidences, Heinlein uses the interesting turn of phrase blistering desert desolation [p. 141] to describe the lunar surface. Buzz Aldrin, who would later describe the lunar surface as a magnificent desolation in his Return to Earth [p. 235], was just eighteen when Rocket Ship Galileo came out, annoyed because he had had to stay at West Point over Christmas. Inspired by the books he read, perhaps even including this one, Aldrin went on to write his own science fiction books, including Encounter with Tiber, which features a moon landing.

The second person on the moon, Art, says Swell! as his first words on the surface. [p. 143] Well, Cargraves’ Okay, kid? [p. 143] is no great statement for history. And in fact in the excitement Art forgot his camera. Neither are they taking samples in case of an early departure.

Morrie and Ross are all too eager to join their fellow explorers, and after a few more minutes Cargraves grants permission. Morrie again opines that this magnificent desolation is intentional, not natural, and in their exploration of the area thinks he has found a proof.

At least he thinks he has thought so. While the explorers trek towards Earthlight (no lunar rovers or even equipment carriers, much less golf clubs, for the young atomic engineers) Morrie becomes briefly separated from the others. Only to reappear talking maniacally. This situation necessitates an abort, and with great concern for brain damage they rush him back to the ship for resuscitation.

Maybe he was brain-damaged. He seems normal after recovery, but his tale of his descent into anoxia begins with the finding of a piece of machined metal. Proof of his theory of an inhabited moon? Unfortunately, he lost it, and a search of the area fails to turn up anything. This turns out to be an ambiguous hint, though not a misleading one.

The low gravity turns out to have certain advantages for walking, nevertheless. As Kip Russell would note in Have Space Suit—Will Travel [pp. 97-98], where fast travel became necessary.

V. THE MOUSE ON THE MOON

The response to Morrie’s brush with brain damage is a harbinger of the elaborate monitoring circuits that would on other Moons indicate that Peewee Reisfeld was getting dangerously close to the edge (Have Space Suit—Will Travel). The elaborate discussion there of the relevant technology was foreshadowed, though Oscar the suit might be feeling superior.

They seem better off for consumables, being able to plan and work for a long-term stay. Indeed, seleneology seems only an incidental consideration; the boys would have been far more likely to see how far they could throw Jim Irwin’s Genesis Rock in the lower gravity than to take it home for analysis.

As for lunar conditions itself the book has turned out to be considerably close to what was actually to be encountered. The lunar surface seems to be more like that which would be observed later, with lunar dust and rocks, not like the dried-out cracked lakebed of Destination Moon. The volcanic versus meteoric theories of the origin of craters were still a matter of contention. Even more exotic theories had flourished in the absence of data, with concerns about lunar dust thick enough to engulf a lander. These were not dispelled until the Surveyor lunar probe landing missions of 1966-1967. The rough terrain described was not encountered but then the Apollo mission landing plans took into consideration the need to land in flatter terrain; abort concerns and limited fuel were substantial factors in this.

But then this is an expedition that has come to, if not stay, at least set up the conditions for staying. Building the shelter is the first stage, Cargraves thinks, in building Luna City, which he imagines will be very soon, maybe even next year. They had planned for this, bringing a prefabricated shelter, which they set up, cover, and seal.

Finally, they raise the flags of the United Nations and the United States, a conjunction which would not seem to satisfy anyone. This claim (in the name of the UN, a prelude to Clarke’s declaration in Prelude to Space that Interplanetary—a very transparent disguise for the British Interplanetary Society—would take no frontiers into space) stirs Cargraves’ emotions:

He found that tears were trickling down his cheeks; he tried futilely to wipe them away—through his helmet. He caught Ross’s eye and was embarrassed. Well, sports, he said with forced heartiness, let’s get to work. Funny, he added, looking at Ross, what effect a few little symbols can have on a man.

Ross looked from Cargraves to the bits of gay bunting. I don’t know, he said slowly. A man isn’t a collection of chemical reactions; he is a collection of ideas.

Cargraves stared. His boys were growing up! [p. 154]

A further excursion into the domain of philosophical commentary than for most novels allegedly for adults, let alone for children. Here again we have an example of the dichotomy between Heinlein’s stated beliefs and his practices. The same Heinlein who wondered about metaphysics and epistemology is the one who in Expanded Universe declared philosophy to be of no more than entertainment value. [p. 531] This attitude is in parallel with his psychological insights, the ones that led James Blish to declare Heinlein a Freudian, the theoretician that Heinlein was to confidently assert would soon be declared obsolete. [Expanded Universe, pp. 331-332]

As for the UN flag—remember that this is the victorious alliance that put paid to the dreams of Nazi world domination, not the sinister conspirators plotting to send Chinese troops in black helicopters to seize Mr. Howell’s farm in order to further the evil New World Order’s schemes to establish the One World Socialist State. Things looked different then.

Now that they have a base they can start exploring—on foot, not point-to-point. Repeated takeoffs and landings increase the possibility of a crash. The site of their semi-permanent habitation has also been selected with consideration for communications; there is a location nearby with line-of-sight to Earth, and Art begins setting up his radio equipment so they can at least pick up signals from home. (With the giant vacuum tubes made possible by the local environment—the reliability problems of such tubes