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ROBERT A. HEINLEIN
TO Sail BEYOND THE Dusk
In this latest addition to ane of the most prestigious bodies of literature in the field of science fiction, bestselling author and Grand Main Robert A. Heinlein has written a novel that is the culmination of his life'due south work, tying together themes and characters from previous stories every bit no book has done before.
On page ane of To Sail Beyond the Dusk Maureen Johnson wakes upwards in bed with a man and a cat. The cat is Pixel, well-known to readers of the New York Times bestseller The Cat Who Walks Through Walls. The man is a stranger to her, and besides that he is expressionless. This, Maureen says to herself, is not a good way to start the twenty-four hours.
But it is a wonderful way to outset To Sail Beyond the Sunset, the autobiography of Maureen Johnson, the mother of that most infamous Heinlein graphic symbol, Lazarus Long. As we would expect in a Heinlein novel, straightforward plot description barely scratches the surface. Maureen Johnson is not just Lazarus Long's mother but too somewhen his wife, and perhaps his daughter equally well; the twists of time and universes are total of paradox. As we leap along through the wonderfully intricate multiverses, we are reassured that both Pixel and other favorite characters are alive and well and apt to plow upwardly in surprising new guises.
As a wonderful side-order to this feast, Robert Heinlein adds more than about his own life than has ever been told before. Maureen Johnson is built-in in southern Missouri in 1882. Robert Heinlein was born in the same state in 1907. He has ever woven generous amounts of himself into his characters, but hither every bit never earlier we experience the warmth and strength of his own long life radiating through the irresistible blood-red-haired Maureen. No reader of Heinlein—and of course there are millions of them—tin neglect to be fascinated and genuinely moved by the experience of To Sail Beyond the Dusk, as the creator gathers his characters and all their universes together in a novel that is both adventurous and life-affirming.
ROBERT A. HEINLEIN is the writer of dozens of novels, including the bestselling The True cat Who Walks Through Walls and Friday. He lives in California.
BY ROBERT A. HEINLEIN
Consignment in Eternity
The Best of Robert A. Heinlein
Between Planets
The True cat Who Walks Through Walls
Citizen of the Galaxy
Destination Moon
The Door into Summer
Double Star
Expanded Universe: More Worlds of Robert A. Heinlein
Farmer in the Sky
Farnham'southward Freehold
Friday
Glory Road
The Green Hills of World
Take Infinite Arrange—Will Travel
I Will Fright No Evil
Job: A One-act of Justice
The Homo Who Sold the Moon
The Menace from Earth
Methuselah's Children
The Moon Is a Harsh Mistress
The Notebooks of Lazarus Long
The Number of the Beast
Orphans of the Sky
The Past Through Tomorrow: "Futurity History" Stories
Podkayne of Mars
The Puppet Masters
Red Planet
Defection in 2100
Rocket Ship Galileo
The Rolling Stones
Sixth Column
Space Cadet
The Star Beast
Starman Jones
Starship Troopers
Stranger in a Strange Country
3 by Heinlein
Time Enough for Love
Time for the Stars
Tomorrow the Stars (Ed.)
To Canvas Beyond the Sunset
Tunnel in the Sky
The Unpleasant Profession of Jonathan Hoag
Waldo & Magic, Inc.
The Worlds of Robert A. Heinlein
AN ACE / PUTNAM Book
Published by Thou. P. Putnam's Sons
Publishers Since 1838
200 Madison Avenue
New York, NY 10016
Copyright © 1987 by Robert A.
and Virginia Heinlein, trustees U.D.T., vi/twenty/83
All rights reserved. This book, or parts thereof,
may not exist reproduced in any class without permission.
Published simultaneously in Canada by
General Publishing Co. Limited, Toronto
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Heinlein, Robert A. (Robert Anson), appointment
To sheet beyond the dusk.
I. Title.
PS3515.E288T6 1987 813'.54 86-25449
ISBN 0-399-13267-eight
Printed in the U.s.a. of America
one 2 3 iv 5 half-dozen 7 8 ix x
To fiddling girls and butterflies and kittens.
To Susan and Eleanor and Chris and (ever) to Ginny.
With my love,
R.A.H.
Contents
ONE The Committee for Aesthetic Deletions
Ii The Garden of Eden
THREE The Serpent in the Garden
4 The Worm in the Apple tree
Five Exit from Eden
Six "When Johnny Comes Marching Dwelling house—"
SEVEN Ringing the Cash Annals
EIGHT Seacoast Bohemia
NINE Dollars and Sense
X Random Numbers
Xi A Dude in a Derby
TWELVE "Hang the Kaiser!"
13 Over There!
FOURTEEN Black Tuesday
FIFTEEN Torrid Twenties, Threadbare Thirties
Xvi The Frantic Forties
SEVENTEEN Starting Over
EIGHTEEN Bachelorhood
Xix Cats and Children
TWENTY Soothsayer
TWENTY-ONE Serpent'southward Tooth
20-Two The Better-Dead List
Xx-THREE The Adventures of Prudence Penny
TWENTY-FOUR Decline and Fall
Twenty-FIVE Rebirth in Boondock
TWENTY-Six Pixel to the Rescue
20-Seven At the Coventry Cusp
TWENTY-EIGHT Eternal Now
APPENDIX People in This Memoir
Come, my friends,
'Tis non too late to seek a newer earth.
Push off, and sitting well in order smite
The sounding furrows; for my purpose holds
To sail beyond the sunset, and the baths
Of all the western stars, until I dice.
TENNYSON, "Ulysses"
Chapter
1
The Committee for
Aesthetic Deletions
I woke upwards in bed with a human and a cat. The human was a stranger; the cat was not.
I closed my eyes and tried to pull myself together—hook "now" to my retentivity of concluding dark.
No good. There wasn't any "final night." My concluding clear memory was of being a rider in a Burroughs irrelevant motorcoach, leap for New Liverpool, when there was a loud bang, my head hit the seat in forepart of me, then a lady handed me a infant and we started filing out the starboard emergency get out, me with a cat in one arm and a baby in the other, and I saw a man with his right arm off—
I gulped and opened my eyes. A stranger in my bed was better than a man bleeding to decease from a stump where his right forearm ought to exist. Had it been a nightmare? I fervently hoped so.
If it was not, then what had I washed with that infant? And whose baby was it? Maureen, this won't practise. Mislaying a baby is inexcusable. "Pixel, have you lot seen a baby?" The cat stood mute and a plea of non guilty was directed by the courtroom.
My father once told me that I was the only ane of his daughters capable of sitting down in church and finding that I had sat on a hot lemon meringue pie…anyone else would have looked. (I had looked. Simply my cousin
Nelson—Oh, never mind.)
Regardless of lemon pies, encarmine stumps, or missing babies, at that place was still this stranger in my bed, his bony back toward me—husbandly rather than loverly. (But I did not recollect marrying him.)
I've shared beds with men earlier, and with women, and moisture babies, and cats who demand well-nigh of the bed, and (once) with a barbershop quartet. Simply I do like to know with whom I am sleeping (just an quondam-fashioned daughter, that's me). So I said to the true cat, "Pixel, who is he? Practice we know him?"
"No-o-o-o."
"Well, allow'south check." I put a hand on the man's shoulder, intending to milkshake him awake and then ask where we had met—or had we?
His shoulder was cold.
He was quite expressionless.
This is not a practiced style to start the twenty-four hour period.
I grabbed Pixel and got out of bed past instantaneous translation; Pixel protested. I said sharply, "Shut upwardly, you! Mama has problems." I forced a thalamic break of at least a microsecond, maybe longer, and decided non to abscond headlong outdoors, or out into the hallway, equally the case might be…but to slow down and attempt to assess the situation, earlier screaming for aid. Perhaps just likewise, as I found that I was barefooted all the fashion up. I am not jumpy about skin only it did seem prudent to dress before reporting a corpse. Police were certain to want to question me and I have known cops who would exploit whatever reward in order to throw 1 off balance.
But first a look at the corpse—
Still clutching Pixel I went around and aptitude over the other side of the bed. (Gulp.) No ane I knew. No ane I would cull to bed with, even were he in perfect health. Which he was not; that side of the bed was soggy with blood. (Two gulps and a frisson.) He had bled from his mouth—or his throat had been cut; I was not certain which and was unwilling to investigate.
So I backed abroad and looked around for my clothes. I knew in my bones that this chamber was office of a hostelry; rooms for hire practise not gustation like private homes. Information technology was a luxury suite; it took me a longish fourth dimension to poke through all the closets and cubbyholes and drawers and cupboards et cetera…and then to practise it all over once more when the first search failed to locate my apparel. The second search, fifty-fifty more thorough, found not a rag—neither his size nor my size, neither women's dress nor men'southward.
I decided willy-nilly to telephone the manager, tell him the problem, and let him telephone call the cops—and ask him for a courtesy bathing robe or kimono or some such.
And then I looked for a phone.
Alexander Graham Bong had lived in vain.
I stopped in frustration. "Proper name of a dog! Where have they hidden that frimping telephone?"
A bodyless voice said, "Madam, may we offer you breakfast? We are proud of our Harvest Brunch: a lavish bowl of assorted fresh fruits; a tray of cheeses; a handbasket of freshly baked hot breads, crisp breads, and soft breads with jams and jellies and syrups and Belgian butter. Basted baby barlops en brochette; drawn eggs Octavian; smoked savannah slinker; farkels in sweetness-sour; Bavarian strudel; your choice of yet and sparkling wines, skull-buster Strine beer, Mocha, Kona, Turkish, and Proxima coffees, composite or directly; all served with—"
I repressed a gagging reflex. "I don't want breakfast!"
"Perhaps Madam would relish our Holiday Eyeopener: your choice of fruit juice, a roll hot from our oven, your pick of gourmet jams or jellies, your selection in a filling simply nonfattening hot cup. Served with the latest news, or background music, or restful silence."
"I don't want to eat!"
The vox answered thoughtfully, "Madam, I am a machine programmed for our food and potable services. May I switch you to another program? Housekeeping? Head porter? Engineering?"
"Become me the director!"
There was a brusk delay. "Invitee services! Hospitality with a smile! How may I help you?"
"Get me the manager!"
"Practise you lot have a problem?"
"You're the problem! Are yous a homo, or a automobile?"
"Is that relevant? Delight tell me how I can help you."
"If yous are not the manager, yous can't. Do you run on testicles? Or electrons?"
"Madam, I am a machine merely a very flexible ane. My memories include all curricula of Procrustes Institute of Hotelier Science, including all case studies updated to midnight yesterday. If you will be so good as to state your problem, I will lucifer it at once with a precedent case and bear witness how it was solved to the satisfaction of the guest. Please?"
"If you don't put me through to the manager in null flat, I guarantee that the manager volition accept an axe to your rusty gizzard and install a Burroughs-Libby analog encephalon in your identify. Who shaved the barber? What do your case studies say about that? Moron."
This time I got a female voice. "Managing director's function. How may I help you?"
"Y'all tin take this expressionless man out of my bed!"
Curt intermission—"Housekeeping, Hester speaking. How may we help you?"
"At that place's a expressionless human in my bed. I don't like it. Untidy."
Another intermission—"Caesar Augustus Escort Service, serving all tastes. Do I understand that i of our gentleman companions died in your bed?"
"I don't know who he is; I just know that he's dead. Who takes intendance of such things? Room service? Garbage removal? Business firm physician? And I want the sheets changed, too."
This time they gave me background music while I waited…and waited—through the kickoff two operas of the Ring Cycle and well into the third—
"Accounting and accounting, our Mister Munster speaking. That room was not rented for double occupancy. There will be an boosted—"
"Look, buster, it's a corpse. I don't retrieve a corpse counts toward 'double occupancy.' Blood is dripping off the bed and onto your rug. If yous don't get somebody up here right away, that rug will be ruined."
"There volition exist a charge for damage to the rug. That is more than than normal wear and tear."
"Grrrr!"
"I beg pardon?"
"I am about to set fire to the drapes."
"You lot're wasting your time; those drapes are fireproof. Simply your threat has been recorded. Under the Rooming Business firm Human action, section seven dee—"
"Get this dead homo out of here!"
"Delight concord. I'll connect you lot with the head porter."
"You practise and I'll shoot him as he comes through the door. I bite. I scratch. I'k foaming at the mouth. I haven't had my shots."
"Madam, delight contain yourself. Nosotros pride ourselves on—"
"And and so I'll come down to your office and discover y'all, Mister monster Munster, and pull you out of your chair and sit down in information technology myself and turn you over my knee and take your pants downwards and—Did I mention that I am from Hercules Gamma? Two and a half gravities surface acceleration; we eat your sort for lunch. So stay where you are; don't make me have to hunt for y'all."
"Madam, I regret that I must tell yous that you cannot sit down in my chair."
"Want to bet?"
"I do not have a chair; I am deeply bolted to the floor. And at present I must bid you lot bye and turn y'all over to our security force. Y'all will observe the additional charges on your statement of account. Savour your stay with united states."
They showed upward too quickly; I was however eyeing those fireproof drapes, wondering if I could do every bit well with them equally Ruby-red O'Hara had with the drapes at Tara, or if I could adjust a simple toga, like Eunice in The Last Days of Pompeii (Or was she in Quo Vadis?), when they arrived: a house doc, a house dick, and a house ape, the last with a cart. Several more oddments crowded in after them, until nosotros had plenty to choose up sides.
I need not take worried about being naked; no one seemed to notice…which irked me. Gentlemen should at to the lowest degree leer. And a wolf whistle or other applause would not be out of place. Anything less makes a woman feel unsure of herself.
(Perhaps I am too sensitive. Only since my sesquicentennial I take been tending to cheque the mirror each morning, wondering.)
There was on
ly 1 woman in this mob of intruders. She looked at me and sniffed, which made me experience better.
Then I recalled something. When I was twelve, my father told me that I was going to accept lots of trouble with men. I said, "Father, you are out of your veering mind. I'm not pretty. The boys don't even throw snowballs at me."
"A piffling respect, please. No, yous aren't pretty. It's the way you smell, my darling daughter. You are going to have to bathe oftener…or some warm nighttime y'all will wind up raped and murdered."
"Why, I breast-stroke every calendar week! You know I do."
"In your case, that's not enough. Mark my words."
I did mark his words and learned that Father knew what he was talking almost. My torso odor when I'one thousand well and happy is much like that of a cat in heat. Only today I was not happy. First that dead man scared me and then those bleeping machines made me angry…which adds upwardly to a unlike sort of stink. A tabby true cat not in heat can walk correct through a conclave of toms and they will ignore her. As I was being ignored.
They stripped the summit sheet off my erstwhile bedmate. The house physician looked over the cadaver without touching it, and so looked more than closely at that horrid red puddle—leaned downwardly, sniffed it, so fabricated my peel clamber past dipping a finger into the slop and tasting information technology. "Effort it, Adolf. See what you think."
His colleague (I assumed that he was another doctor) likewise tasted the bloody mess. "Heinz."
"No. Skinner'south."
"With all due respect, Dr. Ridpath, you lot accept ruined your palate with that cheap gin you guzzle. Heinz. Skinner'southward catsup has more than common salt. Which kills the fragile tomato flavor. Which you tin can't taste, because of your evil habits."
"Ten yard, Dr. Weisskopf? Even money."
"You're on. What practise you place as the cause of decease, sir?"
"Don't try to trap me, Medico. 'Cause of death' is your job."
"His centre stopped."
"Brilliant, Md, brilliant! But why did it cease?"
"In the case of Judge Hardacres for some years the question has been: What keeps him live? Before I express an stance I desire to identify him on a slab and slice him up. I may take been hasty; he may turn out not to have had a eye."
"Are you going to cut him up to larn something, or to make certain he stays dead?"
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