Assignment in Eternity Read online

  BAEN BOOKS

  by ROBERT A. HEINLEIN

  Assignment in Eternity

  Beyond This Horizon

  Between Planets

  Farmer in the Sky

  Farnham’s Freehold

  The Green Hills of Earth

  The Green Hills of Earth & The Menace from Earth (omnibus)

  The Man Who Sold the Moon

  The Menace from Earth

  Orphans of the Sky

  Revolt in 2100 & Methuselah’s Children

  Expanded Universe

  The Rolling Stones

  The Puppet Masters

  Starman Jones

  Sixth Column

  Star Beast

  ASSIGNMENT IN ETERNITY

  This is a work of fiction. All the characters and events portrayed

  in this book are fictional, and any resemblance to real people or incidents

  is purely coincidental.

  Copyright © 1953 Robert A. Heinlein, © 2003 by The Robert A. and Virginia Heinlein Prize Trust. Introduction copyright © 2012 by Bill Patterson. Afterword copyright © 2012 by David Drake.

  “Gulf” copyright © 1949; “Elsewhen” copyright © 1941 by Street and Smith Publications, Inc.; “Lost Legacy” copyright © 1941 by Fictioneers, Inc.; “Jerry Was a Man” copyright © 1947 by Better Publications, Inc.

  All rights reserved, including the right to reproduce this book or portions thereof in any form.

  A Baen Book

  Baen Publishing Enterprises

  P.O. Box 1403

  Riverdale, NY 10471

  www.baen.com

  ISBN: 978-1-4516-3785-4

  Cover art by Bob Eggleton

  First Baen paperback printing, July 2012

  Distributed by Simon & Schuster

  1230 Avenue of the Americas

  New York, NY 10020

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Heinlein, Robert A. (Robert Anson), 1907-1988.

  Assignment in eternity / by Robert A. Heinlein.

  p. cm.

  ISBN 978-1-4516-3785-4 (trade pb)

  I. Title.

  PS3515.E288A93 2012

  813'.54--dc23

  2012009327

  Printed in the United States of America

  10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

  For Sprague

  and Catherine

  INTRODUCTION

  * * *

  WILLIAM H. PATTERSON, Jr.

  OUT-AND-OUT FANTASY—stories of ghaisties and ghoulies and magical rings—did not have much appeal for Heinlein as a writer, but, then, neither did much of science fiction in the 1930’s, which was widely regarded as children’s literature—and for emotionally retarded (excuse me, challenged) children at that. What Heinlein wrote, as he was later at pains to tell us explicitly, was speculative fiction, that might sometimes look like fantasy—and a lot of the time looked like science fiction. “Coventry,” he remarked to his editor John Campbell in 1940 “was not a science fiction story, except by misdirection!” A few months later he was concerned that the readers of Astounding might not accept “Methuselah’s Children” as science fiction because it had space ships, but not a single space battle (this was not an unreasonable concern at the time, as readers had rejected the new pulp book, Thrilling Wonder Stories, four years earlier because of its high concentration on exotic adventure romances that had space ships but no space battles). But “modern science fiction” was in its infancy, flowing out of Robert Heinlein’s typewriter. Even as he was establishing his street [and Smith] creds with the earliest of the Future History stories, Heinlein made time to write two stories important for their philosophical content rather than for science speculation—for values of “philosophical” that involved speculative metaphysics and speculative anthropology. “Elsewhen” in fact was one of his very earliest stories—Opus 5—and “Lost Legacy”—Opus 10—was written even before 1939 was out.

  The new type of fantasy being defined just then in Astounding’s sister magazine Unknown did appeal to Heinlein, with its requirement to treat a fantasy premise by the strict rules of science fictional “extrapolation,” thus allowing him to treat the fantasy worlds as an alternity—a Possible World (as it has come to be known in the branch of Modal Logic developed to deal with such things) of speculative (philosophical) thought. And in fact, in 1953, the year that science fiction put itself out in hardcovers in a big way, Heinlein’s original title for this collection was Possible Answers: Four Long Science Fiction Stories.

  Two of the three stories Heinlein wrote for Unknown are definitive examples of the genre, and in fact Heinlein’s first proposal (in 1947) for the book that would become Assignment in Eternity included both “They” and “Magic, Inc.,” as well as the third story, “The Unpleasant Profession of Jonathan Hoag” (a haunting collision between Dashiell Hammett’s The Thin Man and Thorne Smith’s—well, anything by Thorne Smith—with bits of James Branch Cabell thrown in for good measure) is probably not mainstream enough even within this oddball subgenre of fantasy to be considered a defining classic.

  The bulk of Heinlein’s fantasies are speculative science stories in masquerade, which I call the “ambiguous fantasy.” The speculation that they might take place in many alternative universes, each with its own physical laws, was philosophy when Heinlein was born but became “grandfathered” into physics as theoretical physicists debated the nature of time during his youth and into the 1930’s. “Elsewhen” gives us a picture of that transition from speculative philosophy to speculative physics. Thirty years later, Wheeler and Everett’s “Many Worlds” theory integrated it with Quantum Mechanics, and the theory of alternative realities became physics entirely—speculative physics (at least until someone figures out how to test M Theory), but science enough to be grist for legitimate science fiction (and even “sci-fi,” as the television show Fringe tells us again and again, every week). “Elsewhen,” however, may remain in the realm of fantasy, because the apparition of an angel remains beyond the pale of even the most speculative of physics. Nevertheless, “Elsewhen” was an important idea, and Heinlein revisited its underlying ideas forty years later in the World As Myth books (1980-1987).

  In fact, Heinlein regarded all of the stories collected in Assignment in Eternity as exceptionally important at the time of their initial publication, and he revisited all of them later in life, making of them his last and in some ways greatest literary achievement, the World as Myth super-novel. The contribution of the ideascape of “Lost Legacy,” it is true, went mainly to Heinlein’s great masterwork, Stranger In a Strange Land (the description of the adept’s artforms in “Lost Legacy” is in all essentials the same as that given for Martian art in general, for example)—but, then again, Jubal Harshaw shows up as a principal player in the World As Myth, so it comes to the same thing in the end. The “plasto-biology” of “Jerry Was a Man” (another Martian invention) is the basis of the medical science of the Future History, and it is also how Marjorie “Friday” Baldwin is assembled out of the genetic material of 23 donor-parents including “Joe” and Gail “Greene” of “Gulf.” Even Kettle Belly Baldwin makes an appearance, much aged—another bridge from “Gulf” (1948) to Friday (1982)—and he has apparently adopted Friday.

  Heinlein thought well of the intellectual carrying capacity of speculative fiction, and, indeed, it is this quality perhaps more than any other that made Heinlein a leader in developing modern science fiction, pushing the boundaries of what was acceptable for children’s literature in the 1930’s. His boy’s books for Scribner pushed beyond what was acceptable for children’s literature of the 1950’s (he called The Star Beast a fantasy “in the mood of Dean Swift” but he had “disguised it as science fiction for co
mmercial reasons”), and then he pushed beyond the boundaries of even “adult” science fiction of the 1980’s. A reviewer for the New York Times Review of Books called Heinlein’s late works “books that bear only the most superficial relation to either science fiction or the conventional novel.”

  These early stories collected together in Assignment in Eternity marked out the intellectual pathway Heinlein was to follow once his great commercial success finally outran even his enormous medical expenses and he was finally freed from the need to observe the boundaries of genre at all.

  GULF

  * * *

  GULF

  * * *

  THE FIRST-QUARTER ROCKET from Moonbase put him down at Pied-a-Terre. The name he was traveling under began—by foresight—with the letter “A”; he was through port inspection and into the shuttle tube to the city ahead of the throng. Once in the tube car he went to the men’s washroom and locked himself in.

  Quickly he buckled on the safety belt he found there, snapped its hooks to the wall fixtures, and leaned over awkwardly to remove a razor from his bag. The surge caught him in that position; despite the safety belt he bumped his head—and swore. He straightened up and plugged in the razor. His moustache vanished; he shortened his sideburns, trimmed the corners of his eyebrows, and brushed them up.

  He towelled his hair vigorously to remove the oil that had sleeked it down, combed it loosely into a wavy mane. The car was now riding in a smooth, unaccelerated 300 mph; he let himself out of the safety belt without unhooking it from the walls and, working very rapidly, peeled off his moonsuit, took from his bag and put on a tweedy casual outfit suited to outdoors on Earth and quite unsuited to Moon Colony’s air-conditioned corridors.

  His slippers he replaced with walking shoes from the bag; he stood up. Joel Abner, commercial traveler, had disappeared; in his place was Captain Joseph Gilead, explorer, lecturer, and writer. Of both names he was the sole user; neither was his birth name.

  He slashed the moonsuit to ribbons and flushed it down the water closet, added “Joel Abner’s” identification card; then peeled a plastic skin off his travel bag and let the bits follow the rest. The bag was now pearl grey and rough, instead of dark brown and smooth. The slippers bothered him; he was afraid they might stop up the car’s plumbing. He contented himself with burying them in the waste receptacle.

  The acceleration warning sounded as he was doing this; he barely had time to get back into the belt. But, as the car plunged into the solenoid field and surged to a stop, nothing remained of Joel Abner but some unmarked underclothing, very ordinary toilet articles, and nearly two dozen spools of microfilm equally appropriate—until examined—to a commercial traveler or a lecturer-writer. He planned not to let them be examined as long as he was alive.

  He waited in the washroom until he was sure of being last man out of the car, then went forward into the next car, left by its exit, and headed for the lift to the ground level.

  “New Age Hotel, sir,” a voice pleaded near his ear. He felt a hand fumbling at the grip of his travel bag.

  He repressed a reflex to defend the bag and looked the speaker over. At first glance he seemed an under-sized adolescent in a smart uniform and a pillbox cap. Further inspection showed premature wrinkles and the features of a man at least forty. The eyes were glazed. A pituitary case, he thought to himself, and on the hop as well. “New Age Hotel,” the runner repeated. “Best mechanos in town, chief. There’s a discount if you’re just down from the moon.”

  Captain Gilead, when in town as Captain Gilead, always stayed at the old Savoy. But the notion of going to the New Age appealed to him; in that incredibly huge, busy, and ultramodern hostelry he might remain unnoticed until he had had time to do what had to be done.

  He disliked mightily the idea of letting go his bag. Nevertheless it would be out of character not to let the runner carry the bag; it would call attention to himself—and the bag. He decided that this unhealthy runt could not outrun him even if he himself were on crutches; it would suffice to keep an eye on the bag.

  “Lead on, comrade,” he answered heartily, surrendering the bag. There had been no hesitation at all; he had let go the bag even as the hotel runner reached for it.

  “Okay, chief.” The runner was first man into an empty lift; he went to the back of the car and set the bag down beside him. Gilead placed himself so that his foot rested firmly against his bag and faced forward as other travelers crowded in. The car started.

  The lift was jammed; Gilead was subjected to body pressures on every side—but he noticed an additional, unusual, and uncalled-for pressure behind him.

  His right hand moved suddenly and clamped down on a skinny wrist and a hand clutching something. Gilead made no further movement, nor did the owner of the hand attempt to draw away or make any objection. They remained so until the car reached the surface. When the passengers had spilled out he reached behind him with his left hand, recovered his bag and dragged the wrist and its owner out of the car.

  It was, of course, the runner; the object in his fist was Gilead’s wallet. “You durn near lost that, chief,” the runner announced with no show of embarrassment. “It was falling out of your pocket.”

  Gilead liberated the wallet and stuffed it into an inner pocket. “Fell right through the zipper,” he answered cheerfully. “Well, let’s find a cop.”

  The runt tried to pull away. “You got nothing on me!”

  Gilead considered the defense. In truth, he had nothing. His wallet was already out of sight. As to witnesses, the other lift passengers were already gone—nor had they seen anything. The lift itself was automatic. He was simply a man in the odd position of detaining another citizen by the wrist. And Gilead himself did not want to talk to the police.

  He let go that wrist. “On your way, comrade. We’ll call it quits.”

  The runner did not move. “How about my tip?”

  Gilead was beginning to like this rascal. Locating a loose half credit in his change pocket he flipped it at the runner, who grabbed it out of the air but still didn’t leave. “I’ll take your bag now. Gimme.”

  “No, thanks, chum. I can find your delightful inn without further help. One side, please.”

  “Oh, yeah? How about my commission? I gotta carry your bag, else how they gonna know I brung you in? Gimme.”

  Gilead was delighted with the creature’s unabashed insistence. He found a two-credit piece and passed it over. “There’s your cumshaw. Now beat it, before I kick your tail up around your shoulders.”

  “You and who else?”

  Gilead chuckled and moved away down the concourse toward the station entrance to the New Age Hotel. His subconscious sentries informed him immediately that the runner had not gone back toward the lift as expected, but was keeping abreast him in the crowd. He considered this. The runner might very well be what he appeared to be, common city riff-raff who combined casual thievery with his overt occupation. On the other hand—

  He decided to unload. He stepped suddenly off the sidewalk into the entrance of a drugstore and stopped just inside the door to buy a newspaper. While his copy was being printed, he scooped up, apparently as an afterthought, three standard pneumo mailing tubes. As he paid for them he palmed a pad of gummed address labels.

  A glance at the mirrored wall showed him that his shadow had hesitated outside but was still watching him. Gilead went on back to the shop’s soda fountain and slipped into an unoccupied booth. Although the floor show was going on—a remarkably shapely ecdysiast was working down toward her last string of beads—he drew the booth’s curtain.

  Shortly the call light over the booth flashed discreetly; he called, “Come in!” A pretty and very young waitress came inside the curtain. Her plastic costume covered without concealing.

  She glanced around. “Lonely?”

  “No, thanks, I’m tired.”

  “How about a redhead, then? Real cute—”

  “I really am tired. Bring me two bottles of beer, unopened
, and some pretzels.”

  “Suit yourself, sport.” She left.

  With speed he opened the travel bag, selected nine spools of microfilm, and loaded them into the three mailing tubes, the tubes being of the common three-spool size. Gilead then took the filched pad of address labels, addressed the top one to “Raymond Calhoun, P.O. Box 1060, Chicago” and commenced to draw with great care in the rectangle reserved for electric-eye sorter. The address he shaped in arbitrary symbols intended not to be read, but to be scanned automatically. The hand-written address was merely a precaution, in case a robot sorter should reject his hand-drawn symbols as being imperfect and thereby turn the tube over to a human postal clerk for readdressing.

  He worked fast, but with the care of an engraver. The waitress returned before he had finished. The call light warned him; he covered the label with his elbow and kept it covered.

  She glanced at the mailing tubes as she put down the beer and a bowl of pretzels. “Want me to mail those?”

  He had another instant of split-second indecision. When he had stepped out of the tube car he had been reasonably sure, first, that the persona of Joel Abner, commercial traveler, had not been penetrated, and, second, that the transition from Abner to Gilead had been accomplished without arousing suspicion. The pocket-picking episode had not alarmed him, but had caused him to reclassify those two propositions from calculated certainties to unproved variables. He had proceeded to test them at once; they were now calculated certainties again—of the opposite sort. Ever since he had spotted his erstwhile porter, the New Age runner, as standing outside this same drugstore his subconscious had been clanging like a burglar alarm.