Glory Road by Robert A. Heinlein
Other times I round that turn and a solid wave of freeway traffic, five lanes wide, is coming at me. That one is worst.
I started writing this after the dreams started. I couldn’t see going to a headshrinker and saying, “Look, Doc, I’m a hero by trade and my wife is Empress in another universe—” I had even less desire to lie on his couch and tell how my parents mistreated me as a child (they didn’t) and how I found out about little girls (that’s my business).
I decided to talk it out to a typewriter.
It made me feel better but didn’t stop the dreams. But I learned a new word: “acculturated.” It’s what happens when a member of one culture shifts to another, with a sad period when he doesn’t fit. Those Indians you see in Arizona towns, not doing anything, looking in shop windows or just standing. Acculturation. They don’t fit.
I was taking a bus down to see my ear, nose, and throat doctor—Star promised me that her therapy plus that at Center would free me of the common cold—and it has; I don’t catch anything. But even therapists that administer Long-Life can’t protect human tissues against poison gas; L.A. smog was getting me. Eyes burning, nose stopped up—twice a week I went down to get horrid things done to my nose. I used to park my car and go down Wilshire by bus, as parking was impossible close in.
In the bus I overheard two ladies: “—much as I despise them, you can’t give a cocktail party without inviting the Sylvesters.”
It sounded like a foreign language. Then I played it back and understood the words.
But why did she have to invite the Sylvesters?
If she despised them, why didn’t she either ignore them, or drop a rock on their heads?
In God’s name, why give a “cocktail party”? People who don’t like each other particularly, standing around (never enough chairs), talking about things they aren’t interested in, drinking drinks they don’t want (why set a time to take a drink?) and getting high so that they won’t notice they aren’t having fun. Why?
I realized that acculturation had set in. I didn’t fit.
I avoided buses thereafter and picked up five traffic tickets and a smashed fender. I quit studying, too. Books didn’t seem to make sense. It wasn’t the way I learned it back in dear old Center.
But I stuck to my job as a draftsman. I always have been able to draw and soon I was promoted to major work.
One day the Chief Draftsman called me over. “Here, Gordon, this assembly you did—”
I was proud of that job. I had remembered something I had seen on Center and had designed it in, reducing moving parts and improving a clumsy design into one that made me feel good. It was tricky and I had added an extra view. “Well?”
He handed it back. “Do it over. Do it right.”
I explained the improvement and that I had done the drawing a better way to—
He cut me off. “We don’t want it done a better way, we want it done our way.”
“Your privilege,” I agreed and resigned by walking out.
My flat seemed strange at that time on a working day. I started to study Strength of Materials—and chucked the book aside. Then I stood and looked at the Lady Vivamus.
“Dum Vivimus, Vivamus!” Whistling, I buckled her on, drew blade, felt that thrill run up my arm.
I returned sword, got a few things, traveler’s checks and cash mostly, walked out. I wasn’t going anywhere, just thataway!
I had been striding along maybe twenty minutes when a prowl car pulled up and took me to the station.
Why was I wearing that thing? I explained that gentlemen wore swords.
If I would tell them what movie company I was with, a phone call could clear it up. Or was it television? The Department cooperated but liked to be notified.
Did I have a license for concealed weapons? I said it wasn’t concealed. They told me it was—by that scabbard. I mentioned the Constitution; I was told that the Constitution sure as hell didn’t mean walking around city streets with a toad sticker like that. A cop whispered to the sergeant, “Here’s what we got him on, Sarge. The blade is longer than—” I think it was three inches. There was trouble when they tried to take the Lady Vivamus away from me. Finally I was locked up, sword and all.
Two hours later my lawyer got it changed to “disorderly conduct” and I was released, with talk of a sanity hearing.
I paid him and thanked him and took a cab to the airport and a plane to San Francisco. At the port I bought a large bag, one that would take the Lady Vivamus cater-cornered.
That night in San Francisco I went to a party. I met this chap in a bar and bought him a drink and he bought me one and I stood him to dinner and we picked up a gallon of wine and went to this party. I had been explaining to him that what sense was there in going to school to learn one way when there was already a better way? As silly as an Indian studying buffalo calling! Buffalos are in zoos! Acculturated, that’s what it was!
Charlie said he agreed perfectly and his friends would like to hear it. So we went and I paid the driver to wait but took my suitcase inside.
Charlie’s friends didn’t want to hear my theories but the wine was welcome and I sat on the floor and listened to folk singing. The men wore beards and didn’t comb their hair. The beards helped, it made it easy to tell which were girls. One beard stood up and recited a poem. Old Jocko could do better blind drunk but I didn’t say so.
It wasn’t like a party in Nevia and certainly not in Center, except this: I got propositioned. I might have considered it if this girl hadn’t been wearing sandals. Her toes were dirty. I thought of Zhai-ee-van and her dainty, clean fur, and told her thanks, I was under a vow.
The beard who had recited the poem came over and stood in front of me. “Man, like what rumble you picked up that scar?”
I said it had been in Southeast Asia. He looked at me scornfully. “Mercenary!”
“Well, not always,” I told him. “Sometimes I fight for free. Like right now.”
I tossed him against a wall and took my suitcase outside and went to the airport—and then Seattle and Anchorage, Alaska, and wound up at Elmendorf AFB, clean, sober, and with the Lady Vivamus disguised as fishing tackle.
Mother was glad to see me and the kids seemed pleased—I had bought presents between planes in Seattle—and my stepdaddy and I swapped yarns.
I did one important thing in Alaska; I flew to Point Barrow. There I found part of what I was looking for: no pressure, no sweat, not many people. You look out across the ice and know that only the North Pole is over that way, and a few Eskimos and fewer white people here. Eskimos are every bit as nice as they have been pictured. Their babies never cry, the adults never seem cross—only the dogs staked-out between the huts are bad-tempered.
But Eskimos are “civilized” now; the old ways are going. You can buy a choc malt at Barrow and airplanes fly daily in a sky that may hold missiles tomorrow.
But they still seal amongst the ice floes, the village is rich when they take a whale, half starved if they don’t. They don’t count time and they don’t seem to worry about anything—ask a man how old he is, he answers: “Oh, I’m quite of an age.” That’s how old Rufo is. Instead of good-bye, they say, “Sometime again!” No particular time and again we’ll see you.
They let me dance with them. You must wear gloves (in their way they are as formal as the Doral) and you stomp and sing with the drums—and I found myself weeping. I don’t know why. It was a dance about a little old man who doesn’t have a wife and now he sees a seal—
I said, “Sometime again!”—went back to Anchorage and to Copenhagen. From 30,000 feet the North Pole looks like prairie covered with snow, except black lines that are water. I never expected to see the North Pole.
From Copenhagen I went to Stockholm. Majatta was not with her parents but was only a square away. She cooked me that Swedish dinner, and her husband is a good Joe. From Stockholm I phoned a “Personal” ad to the Paris edition of the Herald-Tribune, then went to Paris.
I
If a man wanted to settle down for forty years or so, wouldn’t Nevia be a nice place? Okay, it has dragons. It doesn’t have flies, nor mosquitoes, nor smog. Nor parking problems, nor freeway complexes that look like diagrams for abdominal surgery. Not a traffic light anywhere.
Muri would be glad to see me. I might marry her. And maybe little whatever-her-name was, her kid sister, too. Why not? Marriage customs aren’t everywhere those they use in Paducah. Star would be pleased; she would like being related to Jocko by marriage.
But I would go see Star first, or soon anyhow, and kick that pile of strange shoes aside. But I wouldn’t stay; it would be “sometime again” which would suit Star. It is a phrase, one of the few, that translates exactly into Centrist jargon—and means exactly the same.
“Sometime again,” because there are other maidens, or pleasing facsimiles, elsewhere, in need of rescuing. Somewhere. And a man must work at his trade, which wise wives know.
“I cannot rest from travel; I will drink life to the lees.” A long road, a trail, a “Tramp Royal,” with no certainty of what you’ll eat or where or if, nor where you’ll sleep, nor with whom. But somewhere is Helen of Troy and all her many sisters and there is still noble work to be done.
A man can stack a lot of saucers in a month and I began to fume instead of dream. Why the hell didn’t Rufo show up? I brought this account up to date from sheer nerves. Has Rufo gone back? Or is he dead?
Or was he “never born”? Am I a psycho discharge and what is in this case I carry with me wherever I go? A sword? I’m afraid to look, so I do—and now I’m afraid to ask. I met an old sergeant once, a 30-year man, who was convinced that he owned all the diamond mines in Africa; he spent his evenings keeping books on them. Am I just as happily deluded? Are these francs what is left of my monthly disability check?
Does anyone ever get two chances? Is the Door in the Wall always gone when next you look? Where do you catch the boat for Brigadoon? Brother, it’s like the post office in Brooklyn: You can’t get there from here!
I’m going to give Rufo two more weeks—
I’ve heard from Rufo! A clipping of my ad was forwarded to him but he had a little trouble. He wouldn’t say much by phone but I gather he was mixed up with a carnivorous Fräulein and got over the border almost sans calottes. But he’ll be here tonight. He is quite agreeable to a change in planets and universes and says he has something interesting in mind. A little risky perhaps, but not dull. I’m sure he’s right both ways. Rufo might steal your cigarettes and certainly your wench but things aren’t dull around him—and he would die defending your rear.
So tomorrow we are heading up that Glory Road, rocks and all!
Got any dragons you need killed?
AFTERWORD
Heinlein
by Samuel R. Delany
Robert A. Heinlein was born July 7, 1907, and grew up principally in Kansas City. At Annapolis, where in 1929 he graduated twentieth in a class of 243, he excelled in fencing. Some of this sword-fighting expertise was to go into the experience of “Oscar” Gordon, the hero of his 1963 novel, Glory Road.
Science fiction’s history is littered with prodigies, from Asimov and Silverberg to Brunner and Gawron—all of whom published their first work before age 20. Heinlein did not begin publishing science fiction (nor, one suspects, did he seriously consider writing it) until 1939, when he was 32 years old and Thrilling Wonder Stories sponsored the contest that also seduced Alfred Bester into the SF precinct. (The prize? Fifty dollars!) This comparatively late start begins Heinlein’s career on a pattern more like that of Ursula K. Le Guin, or even—in another pulp field—Raymond Chandler. Heinlein’s energy, output, and consistent quality are even more remarkable, then, since it is during the period between 18 and 30 years of age that most science fiction writers are garnering the dozen to three dozen novels and dozens of short stories that will fill out their bibliographies, before, sometime in their middle thirties or later, they settle down to a series of concerted efforts to make the SF novel into what they believe it should be. Heinlein is the originator of, among other things, the term speculative fiction, which held brief currency in the middle 1960s, when it was resurrected by Michael Moorcock and the other writers around the British SF magazine New Worlds. (Heinlein had first used the term in a 1951 guest-of-honor speech at a world science fiction convention.) There is little one can say about the man—by and large a very private person—that suggests the import of his work to the SF genre.
Heinlein’s influence on modern science fiction is so pervasive that modern critics attempting to wrestle with that influence find themselves dealing with an object rather like a sky or an ocean. In many respects Heinlein’s limits are the horizons of science fiction. The bulk of his most influential work was done largely before any academic scholarship in the field got its methodological legs fully under itself in the 1960s. And that bulk is large. To come to terms with Heinlein one must be prepared to examine deeply over 20 of his more than 40 published volumes; nor does this mean slighting any of the rest. Basically, however, what he has provided science fiction with is a countless number of rhetorical figures for dramatizing the range of SF concerns. These are the rhetorical turns that still provide most SF readers with the particular thrill that is science fiction’s special pleasure: a fact about a character (her race, his gender, whether or not someone happens to be wearing clothes) that current society considers of defining import is placed at such a point in the narrative that it not only surprises the reader, but also demonstrates how unimportant such concerns have become to this particular future world; a historical reference is casually dropped that lets the reader know that some present historical trend has completely reversed; another reference, made by a character, suddenly reveals that the future world has completely misinterpreted or forgotten some historical fact that is a commonplace of our world, and the fallibility of “history” is pointed out. These are Heinlein’s.
Heinlein’s first published story, “Life-Line,” embeds, Dos Passoslike, a collection of newspaper headlines, telegrams, and court transcripts within its narrative in order to tell its tale. The story’s specifically science-fictional accomplishment is the image of the branching pink vine with which it effects its major informative exposition. Rhetorical variety was a concern for Heinlein from the beginning. But it was in later works that he was to add to this received rhetoric a whole new battery of his own creation. And every SF writer, when negotiating some particular expository lump, must feel in competition with Heinlein’s purely informative skill—one of his hallmarks from the outset.
The concept that a necessary and socially acceptable violence rises as leisure rises was an idea first presented in science fiction in Heinlein’s Beyond This Horizon (1942). This has been a continuing attribute in the presentation of science fiction’s alternative societies ever since. A writer like Joanna Russ uses such an idea both in an unpleasant picture of Earth, in And Chaos Died, and in an idyllic picture of the planet Whileaway, in The Female Man. This is an example of the kind of thinking that separates the science-fictional presentation of alternative societies from the schematic utopian thinking of the nineteenth century and before. I believe it was Damon Knight who first traced out for me, in a 1966 conversation during my first Milford Science Fiction Writers’ Conference, some of the influences Heinlein’s novella Gulf (1949) has exerted on everything from James Bond (Gulf is the model for the SF oriented espionage tale) to an almost distressing number of things in my own work that I had inadvertently lifted from it! In “By His Bootstraps” and “All You Zombies—” Heinlein single-handedly almost exhausted the time-paradox story. David Gerrold’s The Man Who Folded Himself presents itself as a virtual homage to the Heinlein tales. Any time-tangled narrative has to be compared with them. That such comparisons are usually so invidious is the main reason
Heinlein’s novels have inspired a small bibliography of novel-length responses, from Dickson’s Soldier, Ask Not and Anderson’s Trader to the Stars, through Panshin’s Rite of Passage and my own The Fall of the Towers, to Haldeman’s The Forever War. And if Joanna Russ did not read James Blish’s critique of Heinlein’s metaphysical system in Stranger in a Strange Land shortly before beginning And Chaos Died, I’ll bite my gerbil. (That critique is contained in an October 1961 essay by James Blish, collected in The Issue At Hand, as by William Atheling, Jr., Chicago: Advent, 1964.) In all these works, the writers have taken on the social arguments Heinlein has posed in books like Starship Troopers and tried to wrestle with the contradictions as they have seen them. That these novels date from 1960 to 1974 (and include two Nebula/Hugo winners) gives some indication of how relevant Heinlein’s arguments continue to appear—especially to those who disagree with them!
In 1961, Heinlein published what bids fair to be the most popular SF novel ever written: Stranger in a Strange Land. Blish’s discussion (under the William Atheling, Jr., pseudonym and referred to above) remains to my mind the most balanced evaluation of the book.
The novel that followed it, in 1963, Glory Road, has probably received less attention than any other Heinlein work of comparable size and ambition. This is even stranger when one considers that it is one of Heinlein’s most formally satisfactory novels. The long didactic passages that for some readers mar the later novels (e.g., I Will Fear No Evil or Time Enough for Love) had put in only a comparatively brief appearance in the second half of Starship Troopers; they are almost wholly absent here. The ending involves as grandiose a peripeteia as seen in any Heinlein novel since Citizen of the Galaxy (1957) and is far more naturally and believably brought off. And there is a psychological veracity in Oscar’s response to his change of fortune that gives the book a character interest well beyond the earlier book, for all of Citizen’s considerable excellence.