Man Who Sold the Moon / Orphans of the Sky (48 page)

Ertz came forward. “What’s happened, Hugh?”

Hugh waved at the view port. “We’re there.” He was too tired to make much of it, too tired and too emotionally exhausted. His weeks of fighting a fight he understood but poorly, hunger, and lately thirst—years of feeding on a consuming ambition, these left him with little ability to enjoy his goal when it arrived.

But they had landed, they had finished Jordan’s Trip. He was not unhappy; at peace rather, and very tired.

Ertz stared out. “Jordan!” he muttered. Then, “Let’s go out.”

“All right.”

Alan came forward, as they were opening the air lock, and the women pressed after him. “Are we there, Captain?”

“Shut up,” said Hugh.

The women crowded up to the deserted view port; Alan explained to them, importantly and incorrectly, the scene outside. Ertz got the last door open.

They sniffed at the air. “It’s
cold,”
said Ertz. In fact the temperature was perhaps five degrees less than the steady monotony of the Ship’s temperature, but Ertz was experiencing weather for the first time.

“Nonsense,” said Hugh, faintly annoyed that any fault should be found with “his” planet. “It’s just your imagination.”

“Maybe,” Ertz conceded. He paused uneasily. “Going out?” he added.

“Of course.” Mastering his own reluctance, Hugh pushed him aside and dropped five feet to the ground. “Come on—it’s fine.”

Ertz joined him, and stood close to him. Both of them remained close to the Ship. “It’s big, isn’t it?” Ertz said in a hushed voice.

“Well, we knew it would be,” Hugh snapped, annoyed with himself for having the same lost feeling.

“Hi!” Alan peered cautiously out of the door. “Can I come down? Is it all right?”

“Come ahead.”

Alan eased himself gingerly over the edge and joined them. He looked around and whistled. “Gosh!”

Their first sortie took them all of fifty feet from the Ship.

They huddled close together for silent comfort, and watched their feet to keep from stumbling on this strange uneven deck. They made it without incident until Alan looked up from the ground and found himself for the first time in his life with nothing
close
to him. He was hit by vertigo and acute agoraphobia; he moaned, closed his eyes and fell.

“What in the Ship?” demanded Ertz, looking around. Then it hit him.

Hugh fought against it. It pulled him to his knees, but he fought it, steadying himself with one hand on the ground. However, he had the advantage of having stared out through the view port for endless time—neither Alan nor Ertz were cowards.

“Alan!” his wife shrilled from the open door. “Alan! Come back here!” Alan opened one eye, managed to get it focused on the Ship, and started inching back on his belly.

“Alan!” commanded Hugh. “Stop that! Sit up.”

Alan did so, with the air of a man pushed too far. “Open your eyes!” Alan obeyed cautiously, reclosed them hastily.

“Just sit still and you’ll be all right,” Hugh added. “I’m all right already.” To prove it he stood up. He was still dizzy, but he made it. Ertz sat up.

The sun had crossed a sizable piece of the sky, enough time had passed for a well-fed man to become hungry—and they were not well fed. Even the women were outside—that had been accomplished by the simple expedient of going back in and pushing them out. They had not ventured away from the side of the Ship, but sat huddled against it. But their menfolk had even learned to walk singly, even in open spaces. Alan thought nothing of strutting a full fifty yards away from the shadow of the Ship, and did so more than once, in full sight of the women.

It was on one such journey that a small animal native to the planet let his curiosity exceed his caution. Alan’s knife knocked him over and left him kicking. Alan scurried to the spot, grabbed his fat prize by one leg, and bore it proudly back to Hugh. “Look, Hugh, look! Good eating!”

Hugh looked with approval. His first strange fright of the place had passed and had been replaced with a warm, deep feeling, a feeling that he had come at last to his long-lost home. This seemed a good omen.

“Yes,” he agreed. “Good eating. From now on, Alan, always Good Eating.”

Afterword

Mark L. Van Name

I’m going to tell you something I’ve never told anyone:
The Man Who Sold the Moon
helped save my life. Really.

That’s part of my Heinlein. More about it later.

I expect your Heinlein is different.

Over a lifetime of meeting and talking with Heinlein readers and fans, though, one commonality has surfaced: For a great many of us, our Heinlein was a writer who influenced us profoundly.

The Man Who Sold the Moon
and
Orphans of the Sky,
the two collections in this volume, serve to illustrate why Heinlein’s influence was so strong on so many.

Passionate Certainty

Heinlein wrote with passion and certainty.

The passions that were paramount in his fiction changed over time, but you could always spot them. Most of the stories in these two books are from the early 1940s, when Heinlein began publishing. (Only “The Man Who Sold the Moon” was from much later, the end of that decade. Even the story that reads as its sequel, “Requiem,” in fact came first.) Throughout these tales, one of Heinlein’s enduring passions, the value of the ultra-competent man, shines through. This man possesses real knowledge, useful skills, and the will to attack problems with both. Engineers and scientists save the day. Though it’s tempting to chalk this up to Heinlein writing in science fiction, that answer is too easy. Heinlein’s heroes were engineers and scientists and renegade doers precisely because they had the knowledge and skills necessary to solve real problems.

By contrast, Heinlein’s passionate dislike and distrust of bureaucracy is also evident in almost all of the stories. The people who do, the ones who make things happen, the ones we need to move humanity forward, are almost always the ones who are willing to buck the system.

Larry Gaines, the protagonist of “The Roads Must Roll,” may at first appear to be a notable exception because he is the head of a bureaucratic organization. That organization, however, is one of engineers, and his enemies, those who stop the roads, are members of a union of lower-echelon workers. It’s only natural given Heinlein’s passionate support of engineers that Gaines and his organization of engineers triumph over them.

Engineers are not the only Heinlein heroes, of course. D.D. Harriman, the man who took humanity to the Moon in “The Man Who Sold the Moon,” does not for the most part play the role of engineer in this story. He did, however, make his fortune inventing things that his business partner then sold, so he brings a strong scientific background to the task he undertakes. What makes him successful, however, is his possession of another trait Heinlein passionately valued: The willingness to pursue a vision, no matter the cost or obstacle, because it is the right thing to do. Harriman manipulates friends, wreaks havoc on his marriage, breaks laws, and does whatever is necessary because he, and at times he alone,
knows the truth
: Humanity must go to the Moon. He pursues this vision no matter the cost, even when it becomes clear that he will most certainly not be one of the people who make the trip. What others say does not matter; Heinlein
knows
that greatness comes from the dedication of determined, skilled men.

Heinlein does not advance his passions or his stories or his characters timidly. No qualifications here, no authorial doubt. Heinlein wrote these tales with a surety that gave them narrative drive and great appeal. For readers seeking stability in the rough times of World War II—and in all the rough times since then—Heinlein provided a calming and appealing measure of certainty.

Clarity and Focus

Heinlein delivered these strong and certain passions with the straightforward delivery of the natural storyteller. He didn’t spend a lot of time on flourishes, preferring instead to write with a straight-ahead style that at its best brought no attention to itself and instead focused the reader squarely on what was happening in the story.

He also chose his scenes well and told just enough of each to move the story along. He trusted the reader to fill in the missing pieces, to take the bits he had provided and to make them more vivid, as readers inevitably do. In scene after scene in these stories, Heinlein gives us enough data to paint the picture and advance the plot, but no more. We supply the rest. If Heinlein didn’t consider a scene essential, he didn’t provide it.

Consider, for example, the moment in “Universe” in which Hugh Hoyland and his fellows are ambushed by the “muties.” This attack is a clear opportunity for exciting action, a battle that is sure to grab readers and spice up the story. Instead, Heinlein skips right by it with four simple sentences.

“The project of cleaning out the muties required reconnaissance of the upper levels to be done systematically. It was in carrying out such scouting that Hugh Hoyland was again ambushed by a mutie.

“This mutie was more accurate with his slingshot. Hoyland’s companions, forced to retreat by superior numbers, left him for dead.”

Most writers, certainly most writers of popular fiction, would have written that scene. We would have made it as exciting as possible, and we would have built up to the moment of Hugh’s buddies leaving him. We might even have succumbed to the temptation of indulging in melodrama at the end, perhaps by having Hugh’s vision fade as his fellows ran off.

Heinlein gave us only this short text because the ambush was not relevant to the main point of the story he wanted to tell. The action, in fact, was not even the point of the scene. The job at that moment was to bring together Hugh and Joe-Jim, the two-headed leader of the muties, so as to advance the greater story, the discovery of what their shared universe really was and how each group evolved to become what it was. Heinlein did that by opening the next scene with Hugh the captive of Joe-Jim, and on he went with the story.

In these stories, as in this transition between scenes, Heinlein kept his sights focused squarely on the tales he wanted to tell. He wrote tightly in these early works, not wasting any scenes, each bit contributing to the story at hand.

Your Heinlein, Our Heinlein

The combination of all of these factors—passion, certainty, clarity, and focus—made Heinlein’s tales powerful. They enabled each of us to find in them the parts that resonated the most with us, to care about those parts, and to carry them with us, sometimes for years and years. Every time I’ve asked a Heinlein fan about what she or he most remembers from a favorite story or book read long ago, the answer has been broad—inspiration, sense of wonder, the impression of heroes behaving heroically—and emotionally strong. No two have ever been close to identical.

Some of that is due, of course, to the fact that many Heinlein readers discovered him first when they were quite young, when strong impressions rather than detailed memories are more common reactions to fiction than anything else. Even those who first read him later in life, however, have answered similarly.

Some of it is also due to the wonderfully collaborative nature of all written fiction. We readers inevitably remember not all the words but rather the stories and scenes and characters our minds have built from the words in front of us. (This is, I firmly believe, one of the great joys of books and stories, more than enough reason for them to be irreplaceable by any other medium.) In my experience, though, it is particularly strong among Heinlein fans, because he was so very good at delivering just enough to engage our inner story completers but not so much that those parts of us ever became bored or lost the narrative thread.

Future History

Heinlein’s skill at pulling us through the narrative is, as I’ve noted, strong and sure. A fun aspect of all the stories in the two books in this volume is that they also are part of a greater narrative thread, Heinlein’s “future history.” Though Heinlein, as his introduction here tells us, did not set out to make all of these tales part of a greater whole, he ultimately placed them all in a continuum that tracked humanity over roughly two centuries. The chart he created as an aid “to keep me from stumbling as I added new stories” defined a fictional history that went from roughly the present time of the author until well past 2100. Heinlein was not trying to be a prophet, as he said in his introduction, but he could not resist the siren call of tying together so much of his fiction. All of us who have written series fiction or sequels definitely know the appeal, as do the readers of those works and those who love certain TV and movie series—which is to say, most of us.

Readers responded well to the future history. Seeing how each new piece of fiction fit into the greater flow of events became part of the fun—and still is. It matters less how accurate Heinlein’s predictions were (not very) than that he built a fictional world with a long past and a long future, a world that followed humanity’s progress from where we were when he was writing these stories all the way to the stars.

Many other writers, of course, have done the same, creating long timelines for selections of their works, but Heinlein did it well and sufficiently memorably that his future history is still the one most SF fans I know associate with the term. (Google the term, and the Wikipedia entry that appears first cites as key background John W. Campbell’s use of the term for what Heinlein had created.)

Of His Time

For all that Heinlein spread the stories in this book over a couple of centuries, he was, like all writers, very much a creature of his time. Try as we might to visit and create (or recreate) other times, we inevitably bring to the task the baggage of our own times, our attitudes, societal norms, ways of thinking, and on and on. Some of us are better than others at embracing other times, particularly historical times on which much data is available, but we are also always dealing at some level with the issues that concern us—and those issues arise out of the human condition as shaped by our time.

Put differently, none of us can stop who we are from affecting our fiction, and each of us is unavoidably a creature of our time.

This fact is of more than academic import. When we read older fiction—most of these stories are over seventy years old—we should be aware that the norms of the times affected them. For example, Heinlein’s portrayals of women and African Americans in these stories often range from jarring to downright offensive—as did the portrayals of those groups in much, if not most, of the popular media of the time. That does not excuse them, nor do I mean to do so; they are wrong. It simply provides context for them.

Speaking of Context

Different editions of the book
The Man Who Sold the Moon
have wrapped the stories in different contexts. Some have included the Campbell introduction, others the Heinlein preface. Heinlein biographer William H. Patterson, Jr. has written a related introduction.

Thanks to the work of the good folks at Baen Books, the publisher of this volume, this edition includes all three introductions, a first. It also includes the Heinlein future history timeline.

That timeline tells the order in which the stories should appear, and so they appear here in that very order—which they did not in the previous edition.

The result is arguably the definitive edition of
The Man Who Sold the Moon.
No, I won’t throw out my original Shasta edition or the earlier Baen edition, but this one stands as the most complete and accurate one yet available.

All of these assembled supporting pieces beg two questions: Why this afterword? And, why did I get to write it?

The answer to the first is simple: Baen Publisher Toni Weisskopf. Toni decided to reissue all the Heinlein books to which Baen has rights in a set of editions with covers by SF and fantasy illustrator Bob Eggleton. As a treat to both readers and the writers involved, she commissioned afterwords to each edition.

The answer to the second question is also simple: I begged Toni to let me write the afterword to this volume. I was in the audience at a Baen panel at the 2008 Denver World Science Fiction convention, Denvention 3, listening to Toni talk about upcoming books and preparing to say a few words about my own. In the course of the presentation, she mentioned this Heinlein series and some of the books she would eventually be reissuing, including
The Man Who Sold the Moon
. The moment the event ended, I rushed up to Toni and said that she absolutely had to let me write this afterword, that this book had meant a great deal to me, that having my name, however small, on the cover with Heinlein was a treat, a moment of fanboy joy, that I had never anticipated would be possible. I begged, yes, and I also demanded, groveled, and otherwise persisted until she told me it would be mine.

When the previous edition would not go out of print, I wrote a blog entry imploring readers to buy up all the remaining copies. I threatened to do so myself if need be.

Finally, even though copies remain of the previous edition, Toni decided to bundle
The Man Who Sold the Moon
with
Orphans of the Sky
to create a nice, thick volume for readers.

My wish had come true.

It was time for me to write my afterword.

So, of course, I promptly began procrastinating (yes, that was the only time I was prompt about this book). I reread the two books, then reread them again. I sketched outlines and threw them away. I gave myself time, and then more time, and yet more, to think about the right approach. I gave myself so much time, in fact, that not only was this piece late, I finally could not avoid any longer the most important question I had never asked myself:

Why was
The Man Who Sold the Moon
so important to me?

My Heinlein

I knew the answer immediately. I’ve already mentioned it: This book helped save my life.

I truly never have told this to anyone before, however, and as I realized the answer I also immediately knew that I was unsure if I was willing to publicly relate how the book helped save me and what it meant to me.

I was, in other words, being a coward. As far from D.D. Harriman as I could get, I was not pursuing what I believed, not knocking down all the obstacles in front of me—as I had when I’d persuaded Toni to give me this assignment. No, I was hiding from telling a story of my own, a true story, but a story nonetheless.