For Us, The Living

XV

"It is implicit in all of our American institutions that there are but two things that every man wants; first, that he should be as secure as possible economically, able to face the future without fear of cold or hunger for himself or his loved ones; and second, the chance to do anything that he wants to do, that interests him, that seems worthwhile to him. The first we could accomplish collectively where no man could accomplish it alone. It's an impossibility alone. So we did it—together—with the dividend. The second is perfectly possible in so far as the things he wants to do don't damage others. Now most people area pretty good sort, who don't want to damage other people, who would not do it knowingly. Our Code of Customs is designed to prevent such damage, and for no other purpose. We take the point of view that, if a man wants to do something and it does not hurt other people—By God, let him do it!"

— President Montgomery at the Tri-Centennial Celebration of the Bill of Rights, 2089.

Diana, Perry, and Olga sat around a table in a small but pleasant living room. Before them were the remains of a gourmet repast. Perry was pouring wine into two tiny cups. He handed them to the women.

"Here's luck. Save the bottle and I'll finish it when I get back." The girls drank and Perry refilled their cups. "We were certainly delighted that you could come, Olga. We haven't seen enough of you this past year."

"You know that I couldn't stay away, Perry."

"Thanks." He arose and stepped to a window. It was night. A gibbous moon rode high to the south and turned the desert soil of Arizona into unearthly fairyland. "I'm glad it's a nice night. Not that it makes any real difference, but it's pleasanter." He glanced at the wall chronometer. "About an hour until meridian. We don't need to leave yet."

Olga fussed with a cigarette and broke it. "How long will you be gone, Perry?"

"A little less than twenty-four hours"

"So short a time? But the moon is so far away!"

"It's far enough, about three hundred and eighty thousand kilometers. My orbit will be about eight hundred thousand kilometers all told. But I'm going to travel pretty fast."

"How fast, Perry?"

"My average speed will be around six hundred kilometers per minute, five eight six point two to be exact. I'll be going faster on the swing around old Luna, but that is because I want to stay down low and take some pictures."

"That seems terribly fast. Won't it crush you to accelerate to such a horrible speed?"

"No, not at all. I could come up to speed in little over half an hour, using only half a 'g'. Except for the first few minutes, though, I won't even use that. I'll get a big shove in the first four minutes, then drop off my first-stage rocket entirely."

"It uses your new fuel, doesn't it?"

"Yes, it uses the picroid. I designed it after a high explosive we used to use, but I've got it controlled. We used to use the stuff it's made from, picric acid, in bombs and shells, but not in guns, because it was too fast and would split a gun wide open. But this stuff I can control and get a tremendous boost with it. When it's gone I drop off its tanks and nozzles, and so forth, and what I've got left is a fairly ordinary little rocket ship."

Diana got up from where she had been sitting and faced him. "Perry, how do you know that stuff won't go off all at once?"

He smiled tenderly. "Don't worry, honey. It hasn't yet on any tests, and it can't, or else I'm no mathematician."

Olga spoke again. "Perry, you are determined to go?"

"What do you think?"

She shook her head. "Oh, you're going all right. Oh Lord, was it for this that we re-made the world? Made it safe to rear babies? Brought sanity into the world?" She walked to the far end of the room and stood with her back to them. Perry followed her, took her by the shoulders and turned her around.

"Olga, look at me. This is what men have striven for. Economic systems are nothing, codes of customs are nothing, unless they are the means whereby man can follow his urge to fulfill himself, to search for the meaning of things, to create beauty, to seek out love. Listen to me. If there were a deadly new plague you'd go where it was, wouldn't you?"

"Yes, but that is to save people's lives."

"Don't tell me that. That is your secondary reason, your justification. You'd go in the first place to study something, to find out what made it tick."

"But your trip is so useless."

"Useless? Perhaps. But Pasteur didn't know what use there was in it when he studied one-celled life. Newton thought his calculus was a mathematical toy. I don't care whether it's useful or not, but you've no way of knowing that it won't be. All I know is that there is another face to the moon that we never see, and I'm going out there and seeing. After me someday will come a man in a better ship, who will land and walk on the moon, and come back to tell about it. Then in the next few years and centuries the human race will spread through the planets like bees swarming in the spring time—finding new homes, new ways to live, new and more beautiful things to do. I won't live to see it, but, by God, I can live long enough to show them the way.

"But I won't be killed this trip. At least I don't feel it in my bones. This time tomorrow I'll be back, and we'll all sit down to supper again." He consulted the chronometer. "Come on. It's time to go."

The reception hall of the Moon Rocket Station was crowded with people. Perry was met at the stair by the Director who kept back a crowd of excited visitors. A husky youth in greasy coveralls pushed through the mob. Perry caught his eye.

"All set, Joe?"

"All set, Master Perry." Perry clapped him on the shoulder.

"Cut out the master stuff, kid. It's soon enough when I get back. Besides you go on the next trip."

Joe smiled. "I'll hold you to that, Perry."

"Right. Now, look. You're all through, aren't you? Will you look after the girls here, and see that they get good spots to watch? Thanks." He turned back to Diana and Olga. "I'm going now. It's less than ten minutes to zero. I don't want you out on the field. Give a fellow a kiss and go." He looked around and called out, "Private sphere!" The televue scanners stopped clicking. Then he kissed each of them and they clung to him. He patted them clumsily, arm about each, then gently pulled away. The scanners picked up again. Joe led them to the observatory stairs and Perry stepped through the field lock.

Joe found them places in the observatory tower. They saw Perry in the white flood lights, moving toward his ship with a parade ground swing. The ship itself was silver in the moonlight, huge, uncouth. It rested on a cradle in which it leaned away from vertical and pointed a trifle west of meridian. Perry was climbing a ladder which scaled the framework of the cradle. He reached the manhole in the side of his rocket and slid his legs inside. Then, half seated, he looked back at the buildings and waved his right arm. Diana fancied that she could catch the glint of his smile. Then he slid inside and was gone. The port cover swung into place from inside the rocket, rotated clockwise a quarter turn, and rested.

THE END

APPENDIX TO CHAPTER IX

NOTE: This need not be read in sequence. It is included to amplify Davis' remarks in order that the reader may understand the causes of economic confusion in the early 20th century.

There is an old tale of five blind men who were taken to "see" an elephant. Each examined it as best he could, and described it in terms of his experience.

One felt a leg and said, "It is like the trunk of a tree."

One had grasped the tail and answered, "How ridiculous! It is a rope."

A third countered, "You are slightly mistaken, brother. It is somewhat like a rope, but is actually a mighty snake." He had touched the trunk.

Another ran his hand across the broad solid side of the beast and exclaimed, "How can you be so deceived? Verily, it is a wall."

The last touched the elephant not at all, but heard him trumpet. He fled, for he thought the Spirit of Death was upon him.

They were all correct insofar as their data went. Each in grasping a part of the truth had reached a different wrong conclusion.

Twentieth century economists, of whatever school, almost unanimously fell into the same sort of error. Illustrations of how they made such errors, through examining some special case of the production-consumption cycle, are set forth below:

RENT TROUBLE (The Single Tax Argument)

Use the same data as used by Perry and Davis, except:

(1) the banker spends all of his interest.

(2) the land owner does not spend his rent.

OVER-PRODUCTION: two playing cards.

Nevertheless, title to land frequently results in individuals receiving returns in rent disproportionate to investment. This is Henry George's "un-earned increment." But un-earned increment does not in itself cause over-production, and taxing it away will not balance the cycle. On the contrary, it throws it further out of balance. Taxing un-earned increment out of existence is only a means of social readjustment.

PROFIT TROUBLE (The Socialist Argument)

Same data except:

(1) Banker spends his interest.

(2) Entrepreneur spends only two shekels.

OVER-PRODUCTION: 3 playing cards.

Same situation as above. If a concern's profits seem disproportionately high, they may be lowered by punitive taxation, but to do so will not tend to balance the cycle, unless shekel for shekel (or dollar for dollar) an equal amount of money is given away to someone who will spend it.

LABOR TROUBLE (The Conservative Argument)

Using the same data, but with banker spending all the interest, run two cycles side by side. Let the additional cycle suffer from labor trouble, the workers striking for high wages, and winning the strike. Let the additional labor cost be 31.5 shekels. Necessary price of cards will be 2.5 shekels per card in this cycle. But the other cycle can sell to the same market at 2 shekels per card. No matter what the final market price, both cycles will have overproduction, or the second cycle will fail to obtain a return equal to cost, or both.

Results:

(a) Market price 2 shekels, 1st cycle balances, 2nd cycle sells all its goods, but is insolvent by 31.5 shekels.

(b) Market price 2 1/2 shekels, combined over-production is 15.75 playing cards.

DUMPING FROM ABROAD (The High Tariff Argument)

Using the same data, place on the market from another cycle with lower costs of any sort, especially labor, playing cards to sell at one shekel. Our entrepreneur is forced to cut prices and goes broke. Orthodox solution, XXth century: protective tariff. Rational solution: Cease to manufacture the type of articles being dumped on us, and pay for them with our currency. We gain the increment in real wealth.

INTEREST (The Anti-Semitic Argument)

There is an element of truth to this argument—that interest not spent as purchasing power unbalances the cycle. The illustration given in the narrative is proof of this. And there were undoubtedly many Jews in the banking business, though by no means a majority. Yet somehow on this slender pedestal, an incredible structure of half-truths and outright falsehoods was constructed many times in history to 'prove' that Jewry was engaged in a conspiracy to enslave the rest of mankind. It is difficult for us, in the enlightened 21st century, to realize that this preposterous myth was the cause of torture, mass murder, and an endless number of vicious acts of racial discrimination.

MONOPOLY (The Trust-Buster's Argument)

This problem should be set up in three ways, monopoly of raw materials, monopoly of technique, and monopoly of a field of enterprise. In each case modify the data to cause the holder of the monopoly to (a) receive too large returns (b) freeze out a competitor.

Monopoly of raw materials is contrary to public interest. The state must exercise its right of control or expropriation to prevent it.

Monopoly of technique is now limited to the royalty rights of the inventor, but in former times the owner of a technique was legally able to monopolize it entirely, even to the extent of neither using it, nor allowing others to use it.

Monopoly of a field of enterprise, where it is not based on the other types of monopoly, usually indicates greater efficiency and should be controlled in the public interest rather than eliminated. We now believe that the interest of the consuming public is paramount. It was formerly held that the interests of the little businessman were paramount. This point of view is roughly equivalent to that of the machine breakers at the beginning of the industrial revolution in the 19th century.

It is obvious that natural causes alone are sufficient to destroy a big business which serves the public less efficiently than a small business, all other things being equal.

The above illustrations, while by no means exhaustive, show the type of error into which our forefathers fell. In each case, the proponents of the above-listed arguments took a special case of the production-consumption equation and treated it as if it were the general case. In each case they were right—as far as they went—but by assuming their special case to be the general case, their conclusions were invariably fallacious.

For comparison with 20th century economies the problem set up by Perry and Davis will now be worked as an illustration of the general case of the production-consumption cycle, applying the modern method of the dividend-discount for balancing the cycle.

Total cost of product: 126 shekels

Number of units (playing cards): 63 shekels

Assume that holders of purchasing power refrain from spending 26 shekels. Therefore, if the government issues a total of 13 shekels as a dividend, and authorizes a discount of 13.126 or approximately 10%, the spread between production and consumption will be eliminated. Capitalization of the country will be increased by 26 shekels and production will be greater in the next fiscal period, thereby increasing the real wealth of the country.

This problem must be worked out with the chessmen, or their equivalent, to be appreciated. This type of problem is worked out in more detail on page 171.

The invention of the discount method of preventing inflation is usually attributed to C.E. Douglas, a Scottish economist of the early 20th century.

AFTERWARD

"A Clean Sweep."

Fifty years before Robert Heinlein's death in 1988, he wrote For Us, The Living, his first novel.

Like many writers, Heinlein found himself repeatedly answering the same questions. In particular, "How did you get published?" His polished tale went like this: He had lost a political campaign in 1938, and faced a mortgage and no prospects of employment. He saw a contest in Thrilling Wonder Stories offering $50 for science fiction stories from unpublished authors and decided he would give it a try. In four days of April 1939, he wrote his first story, "Life-Line"—and decided it was good enough to submit to the top market of the day, John W. Campbell's Astounding Science Fiction. Campbell bought it, and Heinlein never went back to what he called "honest work."

But as James Gifford has pointed out in Robert A. Heinlein: A Reader's Companion (Nitrosyncretic Press, 2000), the story is not quite that simple. There was indeed a writing contest, but in the October 1938 Thrilling Wonder Stories. However, there was no $50 prize; instead, it was a call for submissions, at the normal word rates. Future great science fiction writer Alfred Bester won that contest and had his first story printed in the April 1939 issue, when Heinlein was just starting "Life-Line"—which shows another flaw in the polished myth: the contest was already publicly won before Heinlein even began his intended submission.

Bester never had a single story rejected by any editor or publisher—but Heinlein did.

In fact, Heinlein faced a number of rejections. His second sale to Campbell, "Misfit," was accepted only with revisions, and Campbell rejected six of his next stories, one right after another. Those six rejections accelerated a learning process into writing the kind of science fiction Campbell would buy. And before Astounding, even before For Us ,The Living, Heinlein had tasted literary rejection. When he was in the navy, serving on the aircraft carrier Lexington, he had entered a short story in a shipboard writing contest. "Weekend Watch," a little tale of espionage and intrigue at the Naval Academy, still survives in the Heinlein archives at UC Santa Cruz.

Heinlein lost that contest.

Perhaps his most significant rejection came before he wrote "Life-Line." He had already written a complete novel: For Us, The Living, which was rejected first by Macmillan, who kept it for some time, and then by Random House, who returned it after only a month in June of 1939.

Precisely when the novel was written is a matter for scholarly conjecture, but the general date is fixed in a letter Heinlein wrote to Campbell on December 18, 1939: "A year ago I wrote a full length novel." That places the window of composition between August 1938, when Heinlein lost his bid for California State Assembly, and April 1939, when he wrote "Life-Line." In August 1934, Heinlein returned to California with his second wife, Leslyn, from a long hospital treatment for the tuberculosis that ended his naval career (Heinlein had a very brief first marriage in the late twenties). He briefly sat in on classes at UCLA—he was never formally enrolled there, nor did he ever audit classes officially—and he soon realized that he would not be able to afford postgraduate study, even if he could surmount the fact that Annapolis granted no undergraduate degrees at that time, making it difficult, if not impossible, to convince UCLA to admit him to graduate school.

Fortunately, in the fall of 1934, Heinlein encountered something far more exciting than running an academic obstacle course. Upton Sinclair is best known today for the 1906 muckraking novel The Jungle. In 1934, he was also known for a whole series of novels and books crusading for socialism and radical change—and for running for California governor as a member of the Socialist Party. For the 1934 campaign, he had left the Socialist Party for the Democratic ticket. Sinclair's crusade electrified the nation, and terrorized the Republican Party, which had long been accustomed to controlling California. Robert Heinlein became deeply involved in Sinclair's Utopian vision for California: End Poverty in California, better known as EPIC.

EPIC was one of the many plans put forward by various American political figures to solve the problems of the Great Depression, including Franklin Delano Roosevelt and his New Deal; Huey P. Long's Share the Wealth (tax the rich 100 percent after their first million dollars of income, then redistribute the wealth to everyone else); Dr. Francis Townsend's Old Age Revolving Pension Plan (give senior citizens $200 a month); and the Technocracy movement (put engineers and scientists in charge of society). FDR curtailed many of these movements by co-opting their best ideas. He raised the income tax on the rich to disarm Share the Wealth's appeal and instituted Social Security in 1935 to supplant Dr. Townsend.

Sinclair's idea for EPIC can be boiled down to a single phrase:

"production for use"—a phrase which is ridiculed in the 1940 Cary Grant/Rosalind Russell classic, His Girl Friday. He suggested that California had two untapped resources: factories and farms that had been closed down, and the unemployed. Why not combine them, so that all the unused land and facilities could be used by the unemployed to produce the goods and services they needed for themselves? They would use scrip to run their economies, and anything left over as surplus could be sold to the general population. On paper, it looked like a simple equation.

In reality, it provoked two responses: one, a wild joy on the part of Sinclair's followers that the problems of the Depression could be solved, and two, a great fear on the part of California's wealthy that the Socialist Revolution had come for their heads—and wallets. The memories of the Russian Revolution were sharp for these wealthy capitalists, who viewed EPIC as a communist plot. The movie industry in particular went to war, producing phony "newsreels" that were far from representative of Sinclair's plans, making it seem as though the communists and the nation's unemployed would turn life in California into a nightmare. The Hearst newspapers and the Los Angeles Times went to work as well, destroying Sinclair's hopes for election at every opportunity. FDR hammered the final nail into the coffin when he refused to endorse Sinclair as the Democratic candidate, seeing little reason to spend political capital on a potential rival.

So Upton Sinclair lost the election.

But Robert Heinlein did not give up the fight.

He was a neophyte political volunteer in the 1934 election, although he was quickly given six precincts to run. But after Sinclair's loss, Heinlein began to move up in the Democratic Party, to carry on the EPIC fight over the next four years. Eventually, he helped write and edit the EPIC newsletter (with a circulation of two million in 1934), became a major player in the Democratic Party in Los Angeles, helped write the platform for the state EPIC movement, and served at the state level of the Democratic Party on the California State Central Committee. In 1938, Robert Heinlein moved from behind the scenes and took up the race for political office, running for California State Assembly.

His opponent was the Republican incumbent, corporate attorney Charles Lyons. Their district included Beverly Hills and part of Hollywood, which at that time were not only wealthy, but also conservative and Republican. Heinlein had only a small group of supporters in his campaign, because the Democratic Party believed there was no way to win that seat. He fought the good fight, but because his opponent had cross-filed as a Democrat for the primaries (which eventually became illegal in California), if Heinlein lost the primary, Lyons would automatically win the election—as the only candidate. Heinlein lost, by fewer than five hundred votes.

In many ways, the 1938 election was a triumph for the Democrats—they gained the governor's seat for former EPIC member Culbert Olson and a number of state assembly seats. Although Heinlein's loss stung, it did not end his political involvement. He continued in Democratic politics at least until 1940, when he attended the Democratic National Convention in Chicago as an observer with press credentials.

Still, with his formal education stalled and his political career stymied, where would he turn to pay off the mortgage on his house? His naval disability pension would be enough to keep the Heinleins fed and clothed, but not enough to cope with the mortgage, and in 1938, owing money to a bank was still somewhat shameful.

And how would he continue his efforts to help his country?

EPIC showed every sign of falling apart: the EPIC newsletter ceased publication even before the 1938 primaries were over, and most of the EPIC politicians stopped identifying themselves as such, in order to win elections. Sinclair himself had returned full time to writing.

Sinclair's writings had always harbored social commentary, not to mention social crusades. Heinlein knew Sinclair personally and had worked with him on the EPIC movement. Thus one writer's life and work provided the model for another's incipient career.

Heinlein turned to writing For Us, The Living.

Of course, Upton Sinclair was not the first writer to suggest solutions to social problems in the form of fiction—Utopias (perfect worlds) and dystopias (nightmare worlds) were well-known literary forms by 1938. Heinlein would have known of the genre's two most famous practitioners: Edward Bellamy and H. G. Wells, both major influences on Upton Sinclair's Utopian socialism. Bellamy's 1887 Looking Backward remains the most famous Utopian novel ever written by an American and may well be the book Heinlein had in mind when writing this first novel. In both novels, the main character awakens in the future to find an ideal society he does not understand. Through a series of Socratic dialogues, the protagonists (and the audience) learn how such a wonderful world can truly exist. Wells, whose "scientific romances" established the paradigms of science fiction for much of the twentieth century, also wrote many novels that portrayed future Utopias and dystopias. When the Sleeper Wakes was a particular favorite of Heinlein's (the 1910 revision The Sleeper Awakes was the book H. G. Wells autographed for Heinlein when they met). The 1936 film Things to Come, adapted by Wells from his earlier novel, The Shape of Things to Come, ends with a launch into outer space, as does For Us, The Living.

Heinlein was primed by these writers, as well as by the science fiction pulp magazines he read regularly, to trumpet the future as a wonderful opportunity for progress. When he sat down to write For Us, The Living he was trying to do what he had done throughout his four years of political activity and would continue to do for much of his writing career—generate change for the better. The title comes from Abraham Lincoln's Gettysburg Address:

It is for us, the living, rather, to be dedicated to the unfinished work which they who fought here have thus far so nobly advanced. It is rather for us to be here dedicated to the great task remaining before us—that from these honored dead we take increased devotion to that cause for which they gave the last full measure of devotion—that we here highly resolve that these dead shall not have died in vain, that this nation, under God, shall have a new birth of freedom....

If Robert Heinlein could not achieve social change through his political efforts, perhaps he might achieve it through the pen, to gain that "new birth" that is so central to his fiction.

Anybody who has read Robert Heinlein will recognize that he offered provocative commentary on our society and advocated for radical social change. Indeed, his politics have often confused people. How could a man who supported the Socialist Upton Sinclair and the Democrat FDR become a supporter of arch-conservative Republicans Barry Goldwater and Jeanne Kirkpatrick? As Heinlein once explained to Alfred Bester in 1959, "I've simply changed from a soft-headed radical to a hard-headed radical, a pragmatic libertarian...." Heinlein's apparent change in politics makes sense if viewed this way: he saw problems that were not being solved and went to the political forces he believed had the greatest chance of solving them. In 1938, the most dangerous problem he perceived was the Great Depression, and he looked to FDR and Upton Sinclair for results; in 1959, it was nuclear war and communism (a hatred for which Heinlein developed before World War II, not with the Cold War). He supported Barry Goldwater in 1964 because he believed Goldwater would be far more effective against the Soviets than Lyndon Johnson.

Throughout his career, he would suggest solutions to the problems he perceived in society, always implicitly, if not explicitly. Oliver Wendell Holmes said, "Man's mind, once stretched by a new idea, never regains its original dimensions." Heinlein's writing does just that, stretching our minds, teaching us to think and learn, even while entertaining us. If we want to solve persistent problems, we have to think about them in new ways. In criticism of his later works, particularly from the time of Starship Troopers on, the most frequent objection is that Heinlein is "lecturing" the reader. If only all of our teachers could hold such wonderful seminars! As is evident in For Us, The Living, from the very beginning he wanted to present controversial ideas in his work. In writing for Astounding, he learned to produce commercial fiction, focusing on plot and characters and sheer story. Once he built an audience who would read whatever he wrote, he moved the challenging themes back to the forefront, as in this first novel. If readers were outraged by his ideas or by their presentation, so much the better.

Late in life, Robert Heinlein told bookseller Alice Massoglia that he was going to have to change his name and write under a new one. Shocked, she asked, "Why?" His answer: "Because I think I've insulted everybody I can as Robert Heinlein!" Heinlein wanted to provoke response in order to wake up his readers and lead them to really think about the issues at hand.

As Heinlein told Campbell, For Us, The Living was "entirely concerned with the origin of certain dominant human thought patterns and how they might change if changes in the economic and social matrix shifted the survival values of these dominant mores. It attempted to show that most ethical standards were relative—that the terms vice and virtue depended on the psychological matrices." In this way, For Us, The Living reads more like one of his late novels, rather than one of his earlier works. The more didactic Heinlein of the later novels was always there, subdued in the Heinlein who wrote for Astounding and collected those paychecks. With the publication of For Us, The Living, the pattern of Heinlein's career takes a completely different shape—the later novels are not an aberration but the completion of a full circle.

So what unusual ideas does Heinlein present in this novel?

Ever hear of the metric system? Clearly, Heinlein felt it was a better standard of measurement, as his future society uses it exclusively.

Heinlein also believed that English spelling needed to be streamlined and made more logical; hence, the use of phonetic spellings such as "Astronomikal Almanak and Efmerides" and "corectiv masaj."

Interesting as well that Heinlein predicts a united Europe, although one different in governing structure and outcome than the one we see today. He also predicted a common European currency, which now exists as the euro.

In 1938, few people considered space travel anything but an insane fantasy. Here, as he so often did, Heinlein advocates rockets and space exploration. He was an avid follower of rocketry, even joining the American Interplanetary Society in 1931 (which became the American Rocket Society, later merged into the American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics). After his death, his third wife and widow, Virginia Heinlein, endowed the Robert Anson Heinlein Chair in Aerospace Engineering at the Annapolis Naval Academy.

For today's readers (and for many in 1938), the most unfamiliar idea is that of his proposed economy. The economic program Heinlein advocates is not original to him, and is known by the name of Social Credit. He used the same economic system in Beyond This Horizon, where it is referred to as the "Social Dividend" paid to each member of that society.

Heinlein's interpretation of Social Credit Theory was that financial panics and the entire boom and bust cycle are caused by the relationship between production and consumption. Economists recognize that when consumption falls behind production, nothing good can follow. The Great Depression was caused in large part by overproduction in the twenties, followed by layoffs and the resulting decrease in consumption. Farming constantly overproduced, as did other "sick industries" such as textiles and coal mining. FDR's solution was to pay farmers not to produce—which we have continued to do, although the recipients are mostly agricultural corporations these days and not individual farmers. As Heinlein looked around him in the thirties, what he saw were failed attempts to restore consumption. He pointed out, in For Us, The Living, that FDR had attempted to hand out direct relief and to provide public works, but as we now know, only the massive expenditures of World War II ended the Great Depression—by putting everybody back to work, thus allowing them to consume the goods being offered. Direct relief and public works were simply not enough.

For Heinlein, Social Credit seemed a much better solution.

The economist C. H. Douglas had first proposed the idea of Social Credit in the twenties, and with the onslaught of the Depression, his ideas caught fire in Alberta, Canada. The Alberta Social Credit Party took control of Alberta's government in 1935, and Douglas became their economic adviser. Eventually, Alberta's attempts to implement Social Credit were shut down by the courts. But when Heinlein wrote this novel, there were Social Credit factions in the United States as well, including Los Angeles.

Heinlein's version of Social Credit argues that banks constantly used the power of the fractional reserve to profit by manufacturing money out of thin air, by "fiat." Banks were (and are) required by federal law to keep only a fraction of their total loans on reserve at any time; they could thus manipulate the money supply with impunity. By loaning out money that literally does not exist, and gaining in return actual cash, banks gather enormous profits. Abraham Lincoln once said, "If the American people knew tonight exactly how the monetary and banking system worked, there would be a revolution before tomorrow morning." If you took away that power from the banks by ending the fractional reserve system, and instead let the government do the exact same thing for the good of the people, you could permanently resolve the disparities between production and consumption. By simply giving people the amount of money necessary to spring over the gap between available production and power to consume, you could end the boom and bust business cycle permanently, and free people to pursue their own interests.

Until a society fully implements Social Credit, who can speak to the truth of this argument?

But Heinlein believed in it, as late as 1942 in Beyond This Horizon. And Lazarus Long uses the power of the fractional reserve when he works as a banker in Time Enough for Love, so Heinlein clearly hadn't changed his mind about the way banks functioned by the early seventies.

Similarly, he never changed his mind as to the importance of an individual's right to freedom and privacy. Throughout his entire canon, he argues extensively for the need of the government to remain out of the private affairs of individuals; it is most explicit in For Us, The Living when he suggests that the cornerstone of his future government is the constitutional recognition of the right to privacy. In this novel, a citizen should be allowed to do whatever he wishes, unless he harms another citizen. What he does in the "private sphere" is simply nobody else's business.

Heinlein's own life was predicated upon this distinction. His marriage to his second wife, Leslyn, was forced to take a dual character. In public, they were the polite couple, genteel, dedicated to public service, "moral" to a fault. In private, they had an open marriage, as Perry and Diana do in this novel, once Perry's jealousy is cured. They also pursued nude photography and actively attended nudist camps, as did several other science fiction writers, including Theodore Sturgeon. Catherine de Camp posed nude for Heinlein, and her picture was shown at a party with the de Camps and Isaac Asimov in attendance. After Heinlein's divorce from Leslyn in 1948, he repeatedly went out of his way to erase their marriage from any public mention. Heinlein's furious insistence on his own privacy, and the shrouding of his past from public inquiry, rests at least in part from a need to protect his public reputation as a political figure and as a writer—and throughout much of the 1950s, his major reputation outside the science fiction community (and most significant income) was that of a writer of children's books.

Yet when he wrote For Us, The Living, he crusaded for this revolution in privacy, sexuality, and economic consistency.

When he couldn't get it published, he took up the fight in the science fiction pulps.

These magazines would never have allowed him to write openly about sexual issues. In fact, Astounding edited out all sexual references, leading some of its contributors to look for ways to evade the puritanical restrictions, as when one writer inserted a reference to a "ball-bearing mouse trap" (a tomcat) and another used alien names that when pronounced correctly were sexual terms in other languages. But while sex was forbidden, Heinlein would still be able to crusade on issues of privacy, politics, religion—and do so while being paid for it.

Now we return to the matter of rejections. Heinlein's first two submissions to John W. Campbell in April and May of 1939 were accepted. Six of his next stories—"Let There Be Light," "Elsewhen," "Pied Piper," "My Object All Sublime," "Beyond Doubt," and "Lost Legacy"—were rejected. How frustrating for a writer who had already made two sales right out of the starting gate! And his novel, his social revolution, was dead in the publishing waters—by itself, the sexual freedom the novel embraces would have sunk it for mainstream publishers in 1939.

Heinlein, perhaps frustrated, but clearly determined, decided to reshape the material in For Us, The Living. The concept of a future history is often cited as Heinlein's greatest contribution to science fiction and remains the core concept of this novel. By lifting, revising, and expanding the most compelling ideas from For Us, The Living and turning them into stories, Heinlein found a way to break the dry spell with Campbell. Once he became dominant in the pulps, he was able to stretch the boundaries farther and farther with each tale.

Heinlein always found a way to open up science fiction to wider possibilities. After the war, he was the first science fiction pulp writer to break into the "slicks" of the mainstream. He was the first science fiction writer since H. G. Wells to write a screenplay for a Hollywood movie, the first American film to realistically depict a moon shot: Destination Moon. He was the first science fiction writer to begin a series of juveniles that would educate entire generations of readers to love science fiction and outer space. His later novels continually challenged the very definition of science fiction, provoking anger and debate—and, as always, a legion of imitators.

Throughout his career, Heinlein mentored other writers, particularly those just starting out. One of his five rules for writing compiled in "On the Writing of Speculative Fiction" stated, "You must keep it on the market until sold." Not having everything published gnawed at him, and as he once wrote to science fiction editor and writer Frederik Pohl in 1940, the stories "sit here and shame me." The six rejected stories were submitted elsewhere until finally sold—although a story-hungry Campbell actually bought one that he had initially turned down, "Elsewhen."

So why has For Us, The Living never been published... until now?

Shortly before Heinlein's death, as he and his beloved wife, Virginia, were preparing for his final days, their copies of this unpublished manuscript were destroyed.

By now, having read the novel, longtime fans may have noticed that some of Heinlein's earliest stories (and a few of his later ones) were mined from For Us, The Living. In a way, much of this novel has indeed been published, as "If This Goes On—," "The Roads Must Roll," "Coventry," and Beyond This Horizon, the most obvious extractions. Perhaps Heinlein thought there was no point in publishing a novel that had already been stripped and resold ...but his fans know better. His entire Future History, published primarily in The Past Through Tomorrow, uses recurring characters and themes, and the later novels are often a constant blending from previous works. No, there must be another reason.

Robert Heinlein often spoke disparagingly of his writing, rejecting the idea that his work was anything more than just "stories." That posture was a good defense against both the fans who wanted him to be their guru and the few literary critics who chose to write negatively about him. Heinlein showed in The Number of the Beast that he had little love for literary critics—he isolated them in an inescapable room, wherein they might practice their vicious and cannibalistic art on one another until they could escape by actually reading the books they were criticizing. The few books published about Heinlein before his death did not give him much reason for respect, given their persistent factual errors and ax-grinding interpretations. So the Heinleins had few expectations that his work would ever receive acceptance outside of the science fiction readership.

Before her death in January 2003, Virginia "Ginny" Heinlein came to realize that her husband's work is now being treated in contexts wider than science fiction. Scholars are beginning to recognize the connections between Heinlein's writing and that of Voltaire, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Mark Twain, Jerome K. Jerome, Rudyard Kipling, and James Branch Cabell, among others. She began to realize that the shroud of privacy surrounding their lives could finally be lifted, in order to help the literary reappraisal now taking hold. She authorized and collaborated on a full biography of Robert Heinlein, which is being written by William Patterson, the editor of the Heinlein Journal. She aided many other researchers, including Philip Owenby and Marie Ormes for their doctoral dissertations and me in my own research into the life of Leslyn Heinlein. Ginny helped found and support The Heinlein Society, a nonprofit group dedicated to furthering her husband's goals, including education, blood drives, space exploration, and eventually, publishing a scholarly edition of the Heinlein canon (you can join this noble cause at www.heinleinsociety.org).

In short, Ginny decided her husband's work and life should be treated openly and fully.

However, Ginny died before she knew that a single copy of For Us, The Living had survived. On Thanksgiving Day, 2002, weakened by a difficult recovery from pneumonia earlier that year, she broke her hip. She seemed to be recovering from her surgery and was to be released the week that I received a copy of For Us, The Living in the mail. I was looking forward to discussing my discovery with her when she suddenly passed away in January 2003.

Major writers often leave behind unpublished works. Heinlein himself had two unpublished nonfiction books released posthumously: How to Be a Politician (published as Take Back Your Government!) and Tramp Royale. Hemingway has had no fewer than four major books published after his death. Heinlein's favorite writer, Mark Twain, had several books published after his death, including the masterpiece The Mysterious Stranger. Literary scholars treat these works in their proper context, as pieces of the larger puzzle that comprise the writer's entire output.

As the first step in the fifty-year writing career of Robert Heinlein, For Us, The Living is like looking at Neil Armstrong's first footprint on the moon—a footprint Robert Heinlein played no small part in making possible, with his fiction glorifying space travel, and his work on Destination Moon.

And that is how I believe Ginny would have come to see it: as the beginning, deserving of preservation.

So how did this manuscript survive?

Shortly before his death, Robert Heinlein decided he wanted his biography to be written. Dr. Leon Stover, an expert on H. G. Wells, had written a book on Heinlein that, by and large, Heinlein liked. After his death, Ginny informed Dr. Stover that he was to be the authorized biographer. Dr. Stover immediately began contacting Heinlein's surviving friends with the estate's full approval. One of those friends was the highly decorated Admiral Caleb Laning, Heinlein's best friend at the Naval Academy and his coauthor on two post-World War II nonfiction essays. Cal Laning had kept fifty years' of correspondence with Heinlein intact, and he handed this treasure trove over to Dr. Stover for use in the authorized biography.

But Dr. Stover and Ginny Heinlein soon had a falling out, and she revoked his permission to write the biography.

For the next decade, nothing further happened.

Through my research and contacts with those who knew Leslyn Heinlein, I found myself in possession of a partial manuscript of Dr. Stover's unpublished biography. In the few pages I had, Dr. Stover mentioned his possession of the manuscript of For Us,The Living, apparently given to him by Cal Laning.

Attempts to contact Dr. Stover failed, but I had the name of his student assistant, Michael Hunter. Hunter was quite surprised that I had found him, but forthright in discussing his work with Dr. Stover. When Hunter was a senior, Dr. Stover had asked him to read the novel, make a synopsis for use in the biography, and use it in a student project connecting Heinlein's first novel to both H. G. Wells and to Heinlein's later writings. Hunter never did anything with his copy of the manuscript, under the assumption that Dr. Stover's biography would soon be published and Heinlein's first novel revealed to the world. Life went on, and he never heard from Dr. Stover again.

Hunter simply forgot he had a copy of For Us, The Living.

At my request, he went digging through his garage and found it, buried in boxes from his college years. He willingly sent me a copy.

After Ginny's unexpected death, I passed the manuscript on to the estate, which decided the novel was well worth publishing.

And now, Robert Heinlein's first and final achievement is in your hands.

"You must keep it on the market until sold." A clean sweep at last.

Robert James, Ph.D. Culver City, California July 2003

ROBERT ANSON HEINLEIN

July 7 , 1907-May 8, 1988

Robert Heinlein was born in Butler, Missouri, the third of seven children. He spent the majority of his youth in Kansas City, taking jobs at a young age to supplement his family's income. It was apparent early on that Heinlein was a child prodigy of the sort that sometimes appears in his fiction. He learned chess at the age of four and took an early and abiding interest in astronomy, reading voraciously on the subject and giving lectures as a young student. His 1924 high school yearbook photo caption read, "He thinks in terms of the Fifth dimension, never stopping at the Fourth."

After high school, Heinlein applied to Annapolis—submitting one hundred letters of recommendation to his state senator—and graduated in 1929, twentieth in his class, with the rank of ensign. He was married shortly after graduation, though little is known of that union, which ended after approximately one year. In 1932 he married Leslyn MacDonald, an intelligent and politically radical woman who inspired many of his female characters.

Later that year, while serving aboard the destroyer Roper, Heinlein contracted pulmonary tuberculosis and was hospitalized. By 1934, his continual bouts with the disease rendered him disabled and forced his retirement from the military. He went on to study mathematics and physics at the graduate school of the University of California, though recurring illness forced his early withdrawal, and he campaigned unsuccessfully for a district assembly seat in Hollywood.

In 1939, after a failed naval career and a humbling defeat in his political endeavors, Heinlein turned to writing as a way to earn a living. This third career choice proved lucrative. By the early 1940s, he had paid off a large mortgage and was by all accounts a successful writer, having won the respect and admiration of the science fiction community. His first novel, Rocket Ship Galileo, was published by Scribner in 1947, and over the next twelve years, he wrote one book a year for Scribner, creating a highly respected and award-winning series of juveniles. During that time, Heinlein also wrote and published short stories, adult novels, and the script for Destination Moon, widely considered to be the first science fiction film. The movie was nominated for three Academy Awards and won in the category of Special Effects. During this time he was also divorced from Leslyn and married Virginia "Ginny" Gerstenfeld, a friend and colleague from his Navy days.

The Heinleins spent their marriage traveling, writing, entertaining, and working on behalf of many charitable causes—particularly blood drives, a tradition which is carried on by the Heinlein Society. In 1956 Heinlein won his first Hugo Award, for Double Star, and went on to win an unprecedented four Hugos, three Retro Hugos, and in 1975 received the first Grand Master Nebula Award for lifetime achievement from the Science Fiction Writers of America. He earned wide acclaim for novels such as Stranger in a Strange Land, Starship Troopers, The Moon Is a Harsh Mistress, and The Puppet Masters. Robert Heinlein continued writing, participating in political debate, and championing the cause of space travel well into the 1980's, when he retired to Carmel, California, with Ginny. His last novel, To Sail Beyond the Sunset, was published in 1987, one year before his death.