The Golden Globe

Intimately tied up in all this, again involuntarily, was one Hildy Johnson, ace reporter for the News Nipple. Yes, that Hildy Johnson.

She has told some of her story publicly. She's told more of it to me. There is much she still has to tell, which she'll get to when she thinks it wise. And this presents me with a problem. As a sort of "member" of the group, I am constrained in what I can reveal about it. Luckily, much of it is superfluous to the story I'm telling. Here is what I can reveal:

1) The group got its name from a space vessel called the Robert A. Heinlein, named for a twentieth-century writer and radical political philosopher. The ship is very large, even by today's standards, and quite old. It was originally intended as an Orion-type starship, that is, a ship powered by large numbers of nuclear bombs exploding against a massive pusher plate. You can find the plans for one in any public library. Long ago the original builders went broke, and the shell of the ship ended up derelict on the edge of a vast junkyard. The Heinleiners took it over, and the junkyard as well. Today the ship, or parts of it, serve as the public face of the Heinleiners, the place reporters and politicians go when they want to talk to one. (Good luck! They don't do a lot of talking.)

2) These people do share some of Mr. Heinlein's political philosophy, the part that can be summed up as "Leave me alone!" They are not anarchists, but they brook little interference from the government. They are happiest where there is no government, and you'll find many of them, or their sympathizers, in the more remote regions of the system. But a lot of folks can't take that kind of isolation (me, for instance), and so live well concealed (if they are doing illegal things) or openly (where they work for a quasi-libertarian form of government). They don't plan to overthrow any governments; that would be entirely too much trouble and, as even the most doctrinaire of them will admit, the yoke of present-day governments is not intolerably onerous, when viewed historically. Things could be worse, and would likely get worse if there was a lot of radical political agitation to suppress. Don't look for Heinleiners to be publishing any manifestos, nailing any lists of demands to courthouse doors, storming any Bastilles. But they do have one secret, jealously guarded, in whose pursuit they are implacable:

3) They're going to the stars.

Hah! you say. Secret! you say. Tell me another one.

Very well. The fact that they intend to travel to the stars is very well known, and almost universally dismissed. Any number of Eminent Scientists will explain to you in great detail why the project is impossible. The Heinleiners think this is just fine. The fewer people take them seriously, the fewer there will be trying to discover the real secret, which is how they intend to do it.

Trust me. They're going to do it.

I am the least-qualified person in the system to look at a stardrive and say, "Aha! That will work!" You could spend a year showing it to me, explaining it to me, drawing nice pretty pictures and reading the manual (if there was such a thing) out loud, and at the end I would still be in a state of perfect ignorance concerning stardrives.

But others, people who know, tell me I can count on it. In a year, two years—however long it takes to patch it up—that magnificent hulk sitting out there on the surface is going to leap up and violate the virgin sky. How fast will it go? No one will say. But no one will raise a family during the journey, and you won't return to find all your friends a hundred years older than you.

Swamp gas, you say. How many "starships" have been sold to how many suckers in the last century? Hyperspace is to our age as lost treasure maps and gold mines and oil wells and Florida real estate were to a previous generation of confidence men. I should know; I've sold enough starships in my time.

Yes, and the way to sell them is not to hide out by a garbage dump and not tell anyone about it. You can invest, and this may be your last chance before the stock goes intergalactic. Check out the prospectus. It claims nothing, promises nothing. Believe me, this is not how you sell pirate gold. Call your broker at once. You'll thank me later.

And that is the secret, you see. Not that they are going, but how they're going to get there. The inventors and investors in this new space drive do not intend to turn it over to a grateful government, or have it confiscated by storm troopers. They don't intend to patent it, either. Patent examiners can be bribed, information can leak. If the Heinleiners have a religion, it is Free Enterprise. They intend to sell this new technology, and they intend to become dirty, rotten, filthy, stinking rich from it.

It was a short hike to the nearest entrance to the Heinlein. A few years ago there had been no way in but to stand around and wait for one of the inhabitants to notice you and invite you in or tell you to get lost. Now there were three or four standard air locks. Beyond them were rudimentary reception rooms, "customs shacks" to the Heinleiners. The notoriety of the Big Glitch had forced them to assume an unaccustomed organization, which they went about grudgingly and haphazardly, as was their style. These entrances were ma

And if you didn't know somebody, the custom shack was as far as you'd get.

We got lucky. Someone was ma

"Keep your helmet on," I told Poly as we cycled through. "You never know what you'll run into in here."

She soon saw what I meant, and her reaction was the usual one.

"These people must be crazy," she said.

It's not so bad within the ship itself. You see building and renovation happening here and there, but things always look a little loose around a construction site. Then you move out of the ship and into the vast junk pile behind it. And things just don't look right.

Everything has a haphazard, thrown-together look. Tu

"Do they have a death wish?" Poly asked, after a mile of this.

"They have a safety net," I told her, and didn't explain further. But I knew what she meant. People raised to the exacting safety standards of Lunar engineering were always shocked to see how the Heinleiners lived. Sort of like how you might feel to go up in an airplane, then look out the window and see a wing was being held on by two rusty bolts and a wad of gum.

But that wouldn't bother you if you were a bird. Something goes wrong, you just fly to the ground. And that's how the Heinleiners had come to view the world, because they had a safety net in the form of the force-field suit. Maybe we'd all come to view the world that way if they ever decided to sell the technology. If a blowout happened, a field was instantly generated around their bodies from a unit implanted in place of one lung. The unit also contained about an hour of highly compressed oxygen, dispensed directly into the bloodstream. To someone wearing a device like that, a blowout was nothing more than an inconvenience. Thus, Heinleiners didn't waste a lot of time and effort on making things triple-triple-triple redundant. One system and maybe a backup was good enough for them. Many things they made were no better than they had to be. These were busy people—they were going to the stars!—and there was always something else to do.