This minor mid-50’s Heinlein novel doesn’t really belong in this series but I re-read it recently with some pleasure. I love the story behind the title and the book had two aspects that jumped out for me as relevant (enough) for this blog. Neither is “bio.” One is about robots and one about patents, but each will interest at least one of our readers:

But a little setting first. This is a time travel story. An engineer/inventor in 1970 Los Angeles is cheated by his fiancée and best friend/business partner so decides to leave it all behind by taking “the long sleep” for 30 years. Arriving in Los Angeles in 2000, he learns some very odd things that encourage him to go back in time through an actual time machine (a byproduct of “NullGrav,” not meaningfully explained). He goes back, does what he needs to do, takes the sleep forward again, and things happily for all the good guys involved – our hero, his eventual wife, and his cat, Petronius the Arbiter.

The long sleep might have been an interesting bio twist, but there’s nothing particularly surprising about it – suspended animation induced by drugs, hypnosis, and chilling to 4 degrees Celsius. It had a roughly 70 percent survival rate at the book’s start in 1970, when it was a thriving business, pushed by insurance companies with promises of sleeping your way to wealth. (That’s vaguely reminiscent of Lois McMaster Bujold’s much more spun out suspended animation in her Cryoburn.) Interestingly, it was developed for military uses; stacked and stored frozen soldiers, unknown to the enemies, won the Six Week’s War for the U.S.

Now, to the robots. Our engineer/inventor hero tinkers with robots, specifically a robot intended for use in a field overlooked by the rush to automate factories: the home. He started with Hired Girl, figuring “I had rarely met a housewife who did not have a touch of slaveholder in her; they seemed to think there really ought to be strapping peasant girls grateful for a chance to scrub floors fourteen hours a day and eat table scraps in return for wages a plumber’s helper would scorn.” (By the way, if sexist stereotyping troubles you greatly, almost nothing from the 1950s is readable.) The first model was a slightly sophisticated vacuum cleaner (Roomba, anyone?), though one that would put anything bigger than a BB shot (anyone remember those?) in a tray for human consideration. Then he developed Window Willie to clean windows and “ring around the bathtub” without supervision. For all his devices, he used modular parts – when something broke, it could be unplugged and a replacement plugged in.

Ultimately, though, he moved on to Flexible Frank, a household servant that could do anything. He bought hands, eyes, and ears off the rack; made extendable arms and a neck; and used a power wheelchair for the framework. The key, though, was the Thorsen memory tube, developed for intercontinental ballistic missiles. Walk the memory tube (or the machine it controlled) manually through an operation once and it could repeat it perfectly. (Don’t ask how – “No need to go too deeply into the theory of an electronic tube even Bell Labs doesn’t understand too well.”) Add more tubes and it could wash dishes, change diapers, polish silverware, make martinis, and do hundreds of other pre-programmed tasks.

His planned invention after Frank was to be a drafting machine (CAD/CAM in 1956), which he would then use to create Protean Pete. But before that can happen, the plot – involving drugs, sex, and money – kicks in, we learn nothing more of note about the robots, and we end up in Los Angeles in 2000.

Our hero finds many changes after his 30 years of sleep. I want to say more than actually occurred between 1970 and 2000, though I’m not sure that’s actually true. I’m just used to the real ones. But he finds the descendants of his robots doing quite well, in two different companies. He then decides to read some patents and see who else had been inventive in the field.

He looks at patent no. 4,307,909, from 1970. (That US patent was actually for a log handling device, granted in 1981 – the USPTO wasn’t quite as busy after 1956 as Heinlein imagined.) It is worth quoting him at length here:

I turned to the drawings, ignoring for the moment both the description and claims. Claims aren’t important anyway except in court; the basic notion in writing up claims in an application for patent is to claim the whole wide world in the broadest possible terms, then let the patent examiners chew you down ­– that is why patent attorneys are born. The descriptions, on the other hand, have to be factual, but I can read drawings faster than I can read descriptions.

As it was in 1956, so it is now, and so it will be forever? Heinlein may have known something about this. His BS, from the Naval Academy, was (effectively) in naval engineering and during World War II he worked at the Philadelphia Naval Yards on a classified project involving high altitude protective suits for pilots. (Undoubtedly the source of his love of spacesuits, as revealed later in Have Spacesuit, Will Travel.)

A few other things are worth noting.

In 1956, Heinlein wrote, about 1970, that “Los Angeles was safe from invasion; the invaders wouldn’t find a place to park….” Even more eternal than the patent process? To my amusement, at one point our hero said he was parked in the Pershing Square garage – the same underground parking structure I used almost every workday from April 1981 through June 1985. But Heinlein missed badly on another aspect of LA in 1970 – he had automatic traffic control on the main roads and freeways downtown.

In another miss, in Los Angeles in 2000, the hero found it amazing that, when he needed money late at night, he could go to the one 24 hour bank in downtown and “with a single cybernet as clearinghouse for the whole city and the radioactive coding on my checkbook, I got cash laid in my palm as quickly there as I could have gotten it in my home bank.” I first used an ATM in 1978 and I know I wasn’t the earliest adopter. And what’s with the radioactive coding on the checkbook?

And, a bit offputtingly, this hero ends up marrying someone he had first known and loved when he was 30 and she was 11. Thanks to some tricky time travel, they end up much closer in age when they marry, but they marry the first day they see each other at (very roughly) similar ages. In Time for the Stars, one of his 1950s juveniles, a combination of near light speed travel plus telepathy allows the same “grown man marries grown up little girl.” And in both cases the brides made their choices when little girls. Of course, in his later books, the marriages or liaisons get positively Oedipal, except for his perfect time travel story, “All You Zombies,” where solipsistic is the only word for it.

Oh, and last point – the title. Petronius the Arbiter (the cat, a.k.a. Pete) and our hero live at one point in Connecticut in a house with 11 regular doors and one cat door. Pete uses the cat door, except when it is cold and snowy. Then, he forces the hero to go to each of the other 11 doors and open it, always hoping that one of them will prove to be the door into the summer. As we near the equinox and night comes earlier, I, though without fears of ice and snow (or even of rain), would also love a door into the summer. With or without robots. Or patent attorneys.

Hank Greely

Director

Center for Law and the Biosciences