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Assignment In Eternity

by Robert A. Heinlein, 1953

Published: 2021.05.20

Home > Book Reviews > Robert A. Heinlein > Assignment In Eternity

 

Photo by Wil C. Fry

★★★★ (3.5 of 5)

 

Summary

An anthology consisting of four novelas, Assignment In Eternity explores the general idea of what makes humans human — culminating in the final story, in which a court is forced to issue a legal ruling on the human rights of genetically engineered intelligent animals. The first three spend a lot of time on pseudoscience — clairvoyance, ESP, mind-over-matter, levitation, and so on — and offer non-scientific speculative alternatives to the known tracks of human evolution. All four stories were first published in the 1940s in various periodicals.

None of the stories fall into Heinlein’s Future History timeline, though there are foreshadowings of later novels and themes. (I’ll mention the ones I spotted in my mini-reviews below.)

My paperback copy of the book, purchased used in the late 1990s, has a typeface so small that my reading glasses were barely strong enough to help me parse it. I marvel that I read it unassisted a couple of decades ago. There were also several noticeable typographical errors throughout, as if Signet was in something of a hurry to push this through the presses. (I’ve heard that Baen Books offers a more modern trade paperback edition.)

 

★★★★ Gulf, 1949, pages 7-67

SUMMARY: Gulf concerns a highly trained and competent secret agent who we eventually learn is named Joe Greene (likely not related to the Joe Greene of professional football fame, who grew up a few miles from where I am now but currently lives in the same town as my younger brother, and who starred in the very first football game I watched on TV in the late 1970s; he was only three years old when this novella was originally published). In the first part of the story, Agent Greene fights off various enemy agents while trying to save the world, is captured, escapes, and eventually resigns his post. The action scenes are well-written and precarious; it becomes quickly obvious that Greene is superior to average men in both physique and mental abilities. In the second half of the story, Greene reconnects with a man named “Kettle Belly” Baldwin, whom he met while imprisoned earlier. Baldwin runs a secret society of “supermen” (some of them women), people who are like Greene — a bit advanced, evolutionarily speaking, beyond the average human. Greene and his girlfriend Gail end up saving all humanity by sacrificing their lives on the Moon at the end, stopping the “Nova Effect” (which was part of Greene’s original mission at the beginning).

TIES TO OTHER WORKS: The super-agent motif reminded me of Sam Nivens in 1951’s The Puppet Masters, and the astoundingly powerful but secret discovery of the Nova Effect is similar to some of the background history in 1951’s Between Planets. Kettle Belly makes an appearance in 1982’s Friday, in which he’s the boss of the titular character, and Joe Greene and his wife are mentioned as genetic progenitors of Friday. Friday also mentions that at some point in the past, the “supermen” of Gulf have emigrated to a planet known as Olympia. For these reasons, it could loosely be considered a sequel to Gulf.

I remember some of the themes in the story having a powerful effect on me when I first read it — at a time when I had not yet learned enough about evolution to be convinced of it. And there are still some interesting quotations.

“We defined thinking as integrating data and arriving at correct answers. Look around you. Most people do that stunt just well enough to get to the corner store and back without breaking a leg. If the average man thinks at all, he does silly things like generalizing from a single datum. He uses one-valued logics. If he is exceptionally bright, he may use two-valued, ‘either-or’ logic to arrive at his wrong answers. If he is hungry, hurt, or personally interested in the answer, he can’t use any sort of logic and will discard an observed fact as blithely as he will stake his life on a piece of wishful thinking. He uses the technical miracles created by superior men without wonder nor suprise, as a kitten accepts a bowl of milk. Far from aspiring to higher reasoning, he is not even aware that higher reasoning exists. He classes his own mentional process as being of the same sort as the genius of an Einstein. Man is not a rational animal; he is a rationalizing animal.

“For explanations of a universe that confuses him he seizes onto numerology, astrology, hysterical religions, and other fancy ways to go crazy. Having accepted such glorified nonsense, facts make no impression on him, even if at the cost of his his own life.”

—page 46

“Reason is poor propaganda when opposed by the yammering, unceasing lies of shrewd and evil and self-serving men. The little man has no way to judge and the shoddy lies are packaged more attractively.”

—page 48

Gail showed up promptly. “Joe,” said Baldwin, “when this young lady gets through with you, you will be able to sing, whistle, chew gum, play chess, hold your breath, and fly a kite simultaneously — and all this while riding a bicycle under water. Take him, sis, he’s all yours.”

Gail rubbed her hands. “Oh, boy!”

—page 51

 

★★★ Elsewhen, 1941, pages 68-95

SUMMARY: Originally published under the pen name Caleb Saunders, Elsewhen concerns the existence of multiple universes and timelines. The main character, Professor Arthur Frost, teaches a university class in “speculative metaphysics” and has discovered a way to hypnotize a human brain just enough so that the human can travel between one universe and another, or one timeline and another. Some timelines are absurd, some are moving backward relative to the traveler, etc. When five of his students go missing, Frost is arrested on suspicion of kidnapping (and possibly murdering) them, but they have, of course, simply traveled to other timelines. Frost easily escapes his imprisonment by traveling to another timeline.

TIES TO OTHER WORKS: The story ends with the line: “Time enough for...”, which reminds the Heinlein reader of his 1973 novel Time Enough For Love, but otherwise the motifs of the story remind one of the full treatment Heinlein gave to the multiverse concept in 1980’s The Number Of The Beast, 1985’s The Cat Who Walks Through Walls, and 1987’s To Sail Beyond The Sunset. Some of the language employed in Elsewhen reminded me strongly of those later works, though the method of traveling between worlds is different here.

 

★★★ Lost Legacy, 1941, pages 96-170

SUMMARY: The background of this story, which we don’t learn until halfway through, is that humans were once nearly all-powerful, possessed of innate psychic abilities to include telepathy, telekinesis, levitation, etc., but an evil, selfish cabal took over and banned the teaching of such knowledge to future generations. (The former leaders of this once great society were later mythologized into the “gods” of later mankind.) Fortunately, records of all this were secretly recorded and hidden in “high places” around the Earth. The story opens with Dr. Philip Huxley (professor of psychology) telling his friend Dr. Benjamin Coburn (neurosurgeon) about his recent discoveries in the area of “parapsychology”. Ben is of course skeptical but eventually becomes convinced when presented with evidence. Along with one of Phil’s students, a young woman named Joan, the two men explore the discoveries more deeply and soon are able to levitate, communicate telepathically, etc., all due to previously untapped portions of the human brain — “vestigal” abilities, Phil decides. Going on a hike up Mount Shasta, the trio discovers a group of other “adepts”, who have been hiding there for generations, studying and practicing their arcane psychic arts. One of them is Ambrose Bierce, and the group claims to have had other famous historical figures among its ranks, including Mark Twain. Learning the true history of the world, and that the evil cabal still lives and works among men to suppress the knowledge of these abilities, the trio decides to fight back. In the end, it requires the help of all the living adepts and a giant Boy Scout jamboree, during which they educate a thousand young men about the innate abilities, hoping to spread the knowledge across the country.

In order for Heinlein’s characters to convince themselves of these psychic abilities, he makes great use of the ridiculous argument often used by today’s religions: “There are things that science can’t explain, therefore my absurd claim must be true.” I can’t tell whether he was using this spurious argument seriously or whether he was mocking those who do use it.

TIES TO OTHER WORKS: I have seen multiple sources claim that Lost Legacy has the “same theme” as Heinlein’s 1961 Stranger In A Strange Land, as well as sharing characters — but neither of these claims is evident to me. The only similarity I can see is that the central character in the later book has some psychic abilities, which he learned while on Mars.

FOR ITS TIME...: The story opens with a “negro attendant”, later referred to as a “colored man”, in the faculty clubroom of Western University. The group of adepts at Mount Shasta includes “a Chinese” who is a master of these psychic abilities. Though these turns of phrase are anathema now, I believe they were entirely acceptable in the early 1940s (“negro” didn’t fall out of favor until the mid 1960s, for example). In fact, in context, it looks like an overt attempt at inclusion. The society of adepts includes many women, including several in leadership positions. Even the evil cabal includes a woman preacher (the word “televangelist” isn’t used, because it wasn’t invented until 1958, but she and another preacher both use television to preach sermons). When Phil or Ben begin to act too paternal toward Joan or start to mansplain to her, she stands up to them, puts them in their place.

 

★★★★ Jerry Was A Man, 1947, pages 171-192

The title is a bit of a spoiler for this one, as soon as the reader learns “Jerry” is a genetically engineered “worker” (derived from chimpanzees) and that the central question in the story is whether Jerry and other such workers should be guaranteed human rights. (This was very much ahead of its time, as the real-life movement to secure civil liberties for non-human great apes didn’t gain much traction until the 1990s.) It begins with the very wealthy Mr. and Mrs. Bronson van Vogel visiting a genetics facility so the husband can buy a Pegasus — a winged horse that can actually fly — but of course the chief scientist there assures him such a thing is physically impossible. After Mr. van Vogel agrees to buy a winged horse that can’t fly, he and his wife tour the facilities where the anthropoid workers are grown and trained. In this society of the future, old-style human hard labor has been replaced with the forced labor of these lab-grown intelligent chimps, monkeys, and gorillas — who are taught rudimentary speech and trained to the tasks for which they’ve been bought. Mrs. van Vogel meets title character Jerry during this tour; Jerry is one of the aged neo-chimps who doesn’t work anymore; he’s kept in a pen with others and asks for a cigarette through the fence. When Mrs. van Vogel gives him a cigarette, Jerry introduces himself. When she learns that the elder anthropoids are “liquidated” (ground into dogfood) rather than retired, she becomes furious, having already accepted them as sentient. In order to save Jerry, specifically, from such a horrid end, Mrs. van Vogel (who owns part of the company) takes him with her. Deciding she wants to save all the chattel workers and not just Jerry, she decides to buy a controlling interest in the company, but is foiled. Eventually, she hires a “licences shyster” to work up the case that will save Jerry and his fellow beings. When her husband tries to thwart her, she reminds him who’s in charge. When the defendants try to dismiss the case on the grounds that Jerry is not a human, the plaintiffs call a Martian to the stand (an employee of the defendant corporation), because Terran law considers the Martians “men” for purposes of the law. When the corporate attorneys cross-examined their employee, to coax him to at least point out that Jerry wasn’t as smart as a human, the Martian demurred, contending that — from his point of view — it was unclear whether humans were smarter than chimps. This testimony, plus Jerry’s rendition of Swanee River, convinced the court.

FOR ITS TIME...: This is possibly the first story of Heinlein’s with a female lead. Martha van Vogel begins the story as the wealthy but distracted wife of Bronson, but once she identifies Jerry as a person, she becomes the main character and comes into her own. When the men around her concoct schemes and play political games, “it confirmed her opinion that men should not be allowed to vote.” It helps that she’s the world’s wealthiest woman, but it is the sheer force of her will that carries the day — at least until the court hearing.

 

Conclusion

All four stories are enjoyable in their own ways, and I remember each of them having an impact on me when I first read them in the 1990s. Jerry Was A Man was the most memorable to me at the time, and I still think it’s the best of the four. Aside from the silliness of parapsychology, there are some Big Ideas addressed in these stories, and plenty of food for thought.

 





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