"Robert A Heinlein - Expanded Universe UC" - читать интересную книгу автора (Heinlein Robert A)

A Bathroom of Her Own 244
On the Slopes of Vesuvius 267
Nothing Ever Happens on the Moon 276
Pandora's Box 309
Where To? 316
Cliff and the Calories 354
Ray Guns and Rocket Ships 372
The Third Millennium Opens 379
Who Are the Heirs of Patrick Henry? 386
"Pravda" Means "Truth" 403
Inside Intourist 418
Searchlight 446
The Pragmatics of Patriotism 458
Paul Dirac, Antimatter, and You 471
Larger Than Life 494
Spinoff 500
The Happy Days Ahead 514


To William Targ


FOREWORD


Warning! Truth in advertising requires me to tell you that this volume contains THE WORLDS OF ROBERTA. HEINLEIN, published 1966. But this new volume is about three times as long. It contains fiction stories that have never before appeared in book form, nonfiction articles not available elsewhere, a 30-year updating on my 1950 prognostications (as well as the 15-year updating that appeared in THE WORLDS OF R.A.H.), with the usual weasel-worded excuses as to why I guessed wrong-and (ruffles & flourishes) not one but two scenarios for the year 2000, one for people who like happy endings and another for people who can take bad news without a quiver-as long as it happens to somebody else.
On these I will do a really free-swinging job as the probability (by a formula I just now derived) that either I or this soi-disant civilization will be extinct by 2000 A.D. approaches 99.92+%. This makes it unlikely that I will again have to explain my mistakes.
But do not assume that I will be the one extinct. My great-great-great-grandfather Lawrence Heinlein died prematurely at the age of ninety-seven, through having carelessly left his cabin one winter morning without his gun - and found a buck deer on the ice of
his pond. Lack of his gun did not stop my triple-greatgrandfather; this skinful of meat must not be allowed to escape. He went out on the ice and bulldogged the buck, quite successfully.
But in throwing the deer my ancestor slipped on the ice, went down, and a point of the buck's rack stabbed between his ribs and pierced his heart.
No doubt it taught him a lesson-it certainly taught me one. So far I've beaten the odds three times: continued to live when the official prognosis called for something less active. So I intend to be careful-not chopped down in my prime the way my ancestor was. I shan't bulldog any buck deer, or cross against the lights, or reach barehanded into dark places favored by black widow spiders, or-most especially!-leave my quarters without being adequately armed.
Perhaps the warmest pleasure in life is the knowledge that one has no enemies. The easiest way to achieve this is by outliving them. No action is necessary; time wounds all heels.
In this peaceful crusade I have been surprisingly successful; most of those rascals are dead . . . and three of the survivors are in very poor health. The curve seems to indicate that by late 1984 I won't have an enemy anywhere in the world.
Of course someone else may appoint himself my enemy (all my enemies are self-appointed) but I would not expect such an unlikely event to affect the curve much. There appears to be some unnamed ESP force at work here; the record shows that it is not healthy to hate me.
I don't have anything to do with this. The character can be more than a thousand miles away, with me doing my utter best to follow Sergeant Dogberry's advice; nevertheless it happens: He starts losing weight, suffering from insomnia and from nightmares, headaches, stomach trouble, and, after a bit, he starts hearing voices.
The terminal stages vary greatly. Anyhow, they are
unpleasant and I should not be writing about such things as I am supposed to be writing a blurb that will persuade you to buy this book despite the fact that nearly a third of it is copy you may have seen before.
Aside from this foreword the items in this book are arranged in the order in which written, each with a comment as to how and why it was written (money, usually, but also- Well, money)-then a bridging comment telling what I was writing or doing between that item and the next.
The span is forty years. But these are not my memoirs of those four decades. The writing business is not such as to evoke amusing memoirs (yes, I do mean you and you and you and especially you). A writer spends his professional time in solitary confinement, refusing to accept telephone calls and declining to see visitors, surrounded by a dreary forest of reference books and somewhat-organized papers. The high point of his day is the breathless excitement of waiting for the postman. (The low point is usually immediately thereafter.)
How can one write entertaining memoirs about such an occupation? Answer: By writing about what this scrivener did when not writing, or by resorting to fiction, or both. Usually both.
I could write entertaining memoirs about things I did when not writing. I shan't do so because a) I hope those incidents have been forgotten, or b) I hope that any not forgotten are covered by the statute of limitations.
Meanwhile I hope you enjoy this. The fiction is plainly marked fiction; the nonfiction is as truthful as I can make it-and here and there, tucked into space that would otherwise be blank are anecdotes and trivia ranging from edifying to outrageous.
Each copy is guaranteed-or double your money back-to be printed on genuine paper of enough pages to hold the covers apart.
-R.A.H.


FOREWORD

The beginning of 1939 found me flat broke following a disastrous political Campaign (I ran a strong second best, but in politics there are no prizes for place or show). I was highly skilled in ordnance, gunnery, and fire control for Naval vessels, a skill for which there was no demand ashore-and I had a piece of paper from the Secretary of the Navy telling me that I was a waste of space-"totally and permanently disabled" was the phraseology. I "owned" a heavily-mortgaged house.
About then THRILLING WONDER STORIES ran a house ad reading (more or less):