DOOR INTO SUMMER

Man and a cat drift into a seedy bar, and the man is Daniel Boone Davis, robotics engineer, who has just been cheated out of his life’s work by a Femme Fatale. She Done Him Wrong. As far as I can recall, this is the only truly villainous villainess in Heinlein’s whole body of work: Belle Schultz. Curvaceous and covetous, Belle maneuvers her lovesick fiance DB Davis into a financial bind, seduces his partner, steals his best friend, his company, his cat and his robot. Before the evening is out, she will also turn out to be a master forger (mistress?) and hypnotist, and she kidnaps DB into taking a cryogenic suspension nap for 30 years. So, adieu to the near future year of 1970, and hail to the far future year of 2001, Great Los Angeles.

He wakes, he adjusts to the far-future year of 2001, and he spends some time tracking down his lost life, trying to piece together the crime of 30 years ago. He is looking for his cat and the girl, eleven years old when last he saw her, whom he is destined to marry. In that sense it is a mystery story: because the clues never quite add up. Who actually took the robot Frank out of the garage? Where is Petronius the tom-cat? Why does the keyboard-controlled drafting board look so much like DB’s own personal type of engineering design? 

The clues never add up, that is, until we find out we are in a time paradox story. DB tracks down the browbeats the one mad scientists in 2001 who happens to have a working time machine: he chronoports back to 1970, happens to land in the lap of a trusting and trustworthy lawyer, sets up a rival corporation to his old engineering firm, unfinagles the finagled finances, and arranges things with his eleven-year-old True Love, to have her grow up, cold sleep a few years, and gain vast wealth based on his inventions. She cold sleeps her way into the future, and wakes to find him waiting for her. All live in the lap of futuristic luxury happily ever after in the nice, clean future.

There are many things to like about this book. It is a quick read, it hangs together well, and it has that distinctive Heinlein touch of humor and realism. The scene where a still-young DB goes to confront the now-old-and-fat Belle is well done, and not lacking a certain sense of pity for the boozy criminal dame. The humor of the scene where the time traveler, who does not know if he is in the future or the past, lands in the middle of a nudist colony is also well done. All nudists in a Heinlein books, by the bye, are automatically as trustworthy as boyscouts, as polite as the Queen of England.

Heinlein is the quintessential SF writer. The quintessence if speculative fiction is speculation: a practical concern with how the impractical or impossible would work if it could work.  In a fantasy story, the Ghost of Christmas Past takes Scrooge back thirty years to review his life. But in an SF story, Dan the Engineer tells his buddy he is planning a dangerous one-way time trip back thirty years, the friend asks: “What are you going to use for money?”

Because the look of the banknotes is different, the serial numbers are wrong.

Well, an SF author is one who takes the time to tell you what the time traveler uses for money: dental gold alloy drawn into wire, legal to own in 2001 which is not legal in 1970, but can be sold on the sly by a friendly lawyer, who semi-truthfully can claim the gold was found no later than 1970.

The descriptions of the near-future of 1970 (the book was published in 1957) now come across as quaint, descriptions of the far-future of 2001 as rather wide of the mark: but, come now, friends, science fiction is in the business of telling yarns, not predicting trends. That is what the stock market is for, and they are paid much more handsomely than SF writers, believe you me. 

But the automatically-driven cars of 1970 have not eventuated, albeit I hear that the army has a working model even now. On the other hand, the radio-actively tagged checkbook which allows you to drawn out money instantly against your account, because all banks are computerized and telegraphically systematized, sounds like a fair-to-middling description of an ATM card, something as unheard-of as a moonshot in 1957.

He also mentions an automatic telephone answering machine,  which people could rent from Ma Bell,  and an automatic guest-welcoming door opener: neither of these were bad guesses.

As best I recall, the way robots are handled in this book was unique for its time. Even Asimov did not depersonalize his robots to this degree. Here, instead of Frankenstein, the “Flexible Frank” is simply and merely an appliance, labor-saving devices built mostly with off-the-shelf technology. The goofiness of Space Opera engineering, where a Sir Austin Carndyne invents a negasphere or Blackie DuQuesne a fourth-dimensional gizmo,  and has it work right the first time, is entirely absent here.

But we do not have ‘grabbies’ and stick-tight fastenings and window-washing robots, manned ships to Mars or scientific colonies on Venus. All those things were easily in the realm of possibility, indeed, a little conservative as guesses go, considering that the gap between ’57 and ’01 is the same as between ’57 and the first flight of the Wright Brothers’ Flying Machine. This gap spans the beginning of the Space Age and the Atomic Age. Science fiction readers of my age are uncomfortably aware that the human race could have and should have accomplished more than we have in the time we wasted.

But let us not be too ungrateful for the history we missed. The atomic war which pasted New York and DC did not happen, thank God, nor was the federal capital moved to Denver. Here one must pause to admire the economy and artistry of Heinlein’s journalistic writing style. In the first paragraph of this book, he casually refers to, without describing, the atom-bombing of New York, immediately giving the reader a sense of future wonder (or horror) and a sense of realism: realism, because real people casually refer to things, without describing. Heinlein is the past master of his particular gimmick, and he does it better than anyone else I know. Jules Verne would have spent three paragraphs telling you how the automatic door of the future worked. Robert Heinlein says, “the door dilated” and leaves it at that. Your imagination fills in the Star Trek foosh-swoosh sound effect of a door dilating.

Any drawbacks to this book? No, not really. I can imagine a sensative soul being slightly creeped-out by the time traveler looking with the eyes of romance and love on the eleven-year-old girlscout who is destined to turn into his future bride, but, of course, when you meet your wife as a pixie-cute little girl or your mom as a hot-looking teenager, time travel is supposed to creep you out. That is the point.

Any author’s hobbyhorses? Again, no. There is a one-paragraph Heinleinesque speech at the end about the glories of progress and the folly of nostalgia: but this speech is perfectly in keeping with the character of the speaker, and flows smoothly, imperceptibly, into the plot logic. You don’t write a time travel story, or even a Rip Van Winkle story, without contrasting the present and the past. Again, that is the point.

The author, or, should I say rather, the character DB Davis, quite surprised me at the end of the book by introducing a note of religion in his puzzled mediation on the logic of time travel: paradoxes are apparently accounted for by the sound engineering principles of the Great Draftsman in the Sky, who does not permit His engine of cause and effect to go awry, nor to impose on the free will of His created beings. This surprised me in the same way that, for example, Captain Kirk smirking to the Great God Apollo that “the One God is enough for us” surprises me: religion was not perceived as the enemy of progress and enlightenment back in the early Boomer days, before John Lennon’s ‘Imagine’. The sick, sad, doomed war of the Peacock Generation against religion had not yet been declared. It was invisible, merely part of the culture, to assume everyone was a Protestant.