Adventure classics – You expected a ticker tape parade?

Time for the Stars

by Robert A. Heinlein

***

You’d think if you were among the few surviving heroes whose efforts led to almost-unimaginable benefits for humanity that you might get a little respect once you made it back home. Maybe that’s not what young Tom Bartlett expected when he signed up for a galaxy-wide survey of habitable planets, knowing that even if he returned, everyone he knew on Earth would probably be long dead. Maybe he didn’t think that far ahead. He was, after all, still a teenager.  But even in his wildest dreams, he couldn’t have expected what he found when he returned from the near light-speed expedition chronicled in Robert Heinlein’s 1956 Time for the Stars.

Tom and his identical twin brother, Pat, were among the mindreading pairs chosen by the nonprofit, nongovernmental Long Range Foundation for one of its very longest research projects. One expected to last, as Tom and Pat told their mother at the beginning, more than a century. Their mother understandably fainted at the news.

Not that she expected to lose both of her boys. One twin (Pat as it turned out), would stay on Earth. The other twin, Tom, would take flight on the nuclear-powered “torchship” Lewis and Clark, whose speed would approach that of light. According to the theory of relativity, as the speed of the ship increased, those on board would experience a slowed down version of time relative to observers back on Earth.

Except that those observers would include several telepathically-linked partners. What the foundation hopes to find is that the telepath pairs will be able to remain in simultaneous communication with each other despite the increasing distance between them and despite the difference in their experience of time.

What could that mean for Tom and Pat (as well as the other telepaths)? A proof that telepathic communication may be the only thing in the universe that can travel faster than the speed of light.

“Telepathy,” the project’s head psychologist informs them, “is faster than the speed of light. . .”

And she knows this “. . . because we measured it. . . we sent this one twin out to Ganymede – such an awfully long way. Then we used simultaneous radio-telephone and telepathy messages, with the twin on Ganymede talking by radio while he was talking directly – telepathically, I mean – to his twin back in Buenos Aires. The telepathic message always beat the radio message. . .”

Even to the young Bartlett twins, this sounds like hocus-pocus. But adventure beckons! And the money is great – with Tom’s salary being banked by his Earth-bound family.

Although the Lewis and Clark has two clocks, one showing ship time, the other Earth time, it isn’t until the clocks show a week’s lag between the twins’ birthday on Earth (as reported telepathically by Pat) and the day Tom’s shipmates present him with a birthday cake that the time difference begins to feel real. Then a year on the ship translates into 12 years on Earth and time stretches ever further. On Earth, Pat marries, has children, and forms “Bartlett Brothers, Inc.,” to receive Tom’s accruing salary. An aging Pat passes the telepathic link to his daughter (Tom’s niece), then to a granddaughter, then a great-granddaughter, until more than 60 years have passed on Earth, but only four aboard the Lewis and Clark, now suddenly recalled to Earth, its mission – irrelevant.

“Don’t you see, Tommie?” says the ship’s mathematician. “You (telepaths) proved that ‘simultaneity’ was an admissible concept. . . and the inevitable logical consequence was that time and space do not exist.”

Tom’s head begins to ache. “Then what is that we seem to be having breakfast in?” he asks. “Just a mathematical abstraction, dear," she answers. "Nothing more.”

And the torchship and its crew pass into irrelevance, virtually ignored as they return to an Earth that has changed beyond their imaginings.

“We were going to be a short paragraph in history and a footnote in science books,” Tom muses. “I decided that even a footnote averaged well and forgot it.”

Tom can afford to forget fame. Physically barely in his 20’s, he finds himself fabulously wealthy from his accrued salary, and more than a match psychologically for the extremely aged twin who had bullied him all his life. And confronted by his current telepathic partner, Pat’s beautiful young great-great-granddaughter who doesn’t find Tom at all uncle-like. Life and love, Tom decides, are the best revenge.

(Next week, Adventure classics concludes a July of science fiction adventures with Gregory Benson’s Heinlein-influenced Tides of Light.)

Adventure classics – Cain and Abel among the stars

Time for the Stars

by Robert A. Heinlein

***

Tom Bartlett and his mind-reading identical twin Pat knew only one of them could board the spaceship Lewis and Clark for a voyage in search of new Earth-like planets for humanity to colonize. By the terms of their contract with the Long Range Federation in Robert Heinlein’s 1956 Time for the Stars, one twin of each of the pairs selected for the project would have to stay home of Earth to provide a faster than light speed) simultaneous telepathic information link as the spaceship neared another solar system.

Although each young man insisted he was eager to go to space, Pat was the one chosen. So when he sustained an injury before the launch that prevented him from going into space, Tom was thrilled to take his brother’s place. Or wasn’t he?

He must be worried about his brother’s condition, he tells himself. But after Pat is cured by a surgical procedure (during which Tom is telepathically present) he can’t shake his feelings of unease.

“. . . I should have had the world by the tail,” Tom muses, “for I had everything I wanted. Somehow it did not work that way. Before (Pat) was hurt, I had known why I was down in the dumps: it was because he was going and I wasn’t. After he was hurt, I felt guilty because I was getting what I wanted through his misfortune. . . So I should have been happy once he was well again.”

However, what is apparent to the ship’s doctor, as well as anyone else who knows the brothers, is, “that you don’t like your brother. . . you have been told from birth that you love him. Siblings always ‘love’ each other; that is a foundation of our civilization, like Mom’s apple pie. People usually believe anything that they are told early and often. Probably a good thing they believe this one, because brothers and sisters often have more opportunity and more reason to hate each other than anyone else. . .”

It's a truism as old as the Bible's story of those very first brothers, Cain and Abel.

As William Shatner writes in Leonard, his memoir of fellow Star Trek cast member Leonard Nimoy, the bonds holding the show together were not the science fiction, but the relationships between the crew.

And in Heinlein’s pre-Star Trek vision, it is the relationships between the characters even more than their adventures in a starship that hold readers’ interest, even after the 60 years that have passed since Time for the Stars first saw print. The claustrophobically close relationships between the 200 crew members aboard the Lewis and Clark (LC or Elsie, as the ship is affectionately known), as well as the family members they have left behind (and in some cases are still telepathically linked to) that make Time for the Stars still relevant.

This shipboard camaraderie and antipathy wasn’t new to Heinlein, who served on board several ships as a U.S. Navy officer from his graduation in 1929 from Annapolis until receiving a disability discharge in 1934.

He had received a bachelor’s degree in naval engineering. He later took additional classes in mathematics and physics without obtaining any further degree, and held a variety of jobs, including unsuccessful dabbling in politics, before he began writing.

And – he had a brother with the successful military career Heinlein might have hoped for. Or did he?

(Next Friday, Adventure classics continues a July of science fiction with Tom Bartlett’s revenge on his grabby twin, in Robert Heinlein’s Time for the Stars.)

Adventure classics – The women behind the mission

Time for the Stars, by Robert A. Heinlein

Commentary from The Fifty-Year Mission: The First 25 Years, by Edward Gross & Mark A. Altman

***

A starship with a high-ranking female officer? Can’t be done, TV execs told Gene Roddenberry, scriptwriter for the original Star Trek series. So when Desilu Productions pitched the original pilot, which featured a woman, Majel Barrett (who would later become Mrs. Roddenberry), as second in command of the USS Enterprise, NBC rejected it. Still, the network was impressed enough to pay for a second pilot which aired, minus Majel but plus photogenic Captain James T. Kirk (aka William Shatner). The first regular episode was broadcast September 8, 1966, and TV history was made.

One of NBC’s initial gripes about the first pilot was the female officer. Somehow, nobody seemed to have noticed that the company behind the voyage to the stars already had a female executive officer – Lucille Ball, the not so ditzy redhead who had bought out ex-husband Desi Arnaz’s interest several years earlier and was turning Desilu Productions into the largest independent TV production company in the country.

But it was always part of Star Trek’s mission to push the boundaries of possibilities in its 20^th century vision of a 24^th century world of starships and planetary federations. Sometimes it just needed to disguise that mission behind the flirty miniskirt of Nurse Chapel, the sexy helpmeet’s disguise of a reinvented Majel Barret character.

“I had been a freelance writer for about a dozen years and was chafing at the commercial censorship on television,” Edward Gross and Mark A. Altman quote Roddenberry in their oral history of Star Trek, The Fifty-Year Mission: The First 25 Years. “It seemed to me that perhaps if I wanted to talk about sex, religion, politics, make some comments against Vietnam, and so on, that if I had similar situation involving these subjects happening on other planets to little green people, indeed it might get by, and it did.”

Nearly 30 years would go by before a Star Trek series could boast a woman captain, on Voyager, 1995-2001. But in one of the strange (or perhaps not so strange) coincidences of science fiction, Robert Heinlein’s 1956 Time for the Stars would also feature several strong female characters, including psychologist Dr. Mabel Lichtenstein, who picks Heinlein’s teenage protagonist Tom Bartlett and his twin brother Pat for a long term extraterrestrial mission.

(Mabel and Majel, Bartlett and Barrett? Are names karmic destiny?)

“(Dr. Mabel) was short and pudgy and . . . about as cute as a female can be and still look like a sofa pillow,” Tom muses in Time for the Stars. “It wasn’t until later that we found out she was boss of the research team and world famous.”

The mission of the Bartlett twins and the rest of the crew of their spaceship is a tad longer than the five-year mission of Star Trek’s USS Enterprise. Possibly as long as a century, the Bartletts inform their parents cheerfully. Their mother promptly faints.

How do the Bartletts and their fellow crew members expect to live long enough to complete a hundred-year long mission? Simply by relying on one of the paradoxes of Einstein’s general theory of relativity, by which time moves more slowly for fast-moving objects (including spaceships and their crews) the more closely those objects approach to the speed of light. 

It’s a paradox which will involve the Bartlett family in more complications than a space station full of tribbles.

(Next Friday, Adventure classics continues a July of science fiction adventures with Time for the Stars and Star Trek. And although I enjoyed the Smithsonian’s online discussion of Star Trek’s first 25 years, the full Gross-Altman version is available at both Barnes and Noble and Amazon.)