Heinlein Doesn't Get Tuberculosis

Major Major

Ensign, and then LTJG, Heinlein, Robert A., USNA ‘29, had a very promising career. He had scored well on the pistol course, showing a good face to the public. He had a rabbi, a mentor, someone in high places who was well-disposed to him; Rear-Admiral Ernest J. King, who was himself a comer.

Then he was medically retired.

Heinlein told about his bout with tuberculosis in both fact and fiction. He never quite speculated about what he might have done without it, but others did that for him.

The story that actually made it to print was Larry Niven’s “The Return of William Proxmire”, where a prominent critic of government waste with a less than positive take on scientific research decides to use scientific research to cut the idea off at the root. Some might say that the story was libelous about Proxmire; this is an arguable theory, for while many of his “Golden Fleece” awards were to dubious projects, he also (for example) criticized a study intended to make airplane crashes more survivable.

Niven has the Senator being sent back in to the past to give Heinlein an injection of antibiotics. When he has been returned forthwith to the space-time whence he came, he finds that he had not surprisingly done the opposite of what he had intended; being miraculously cured, the lieutenant pursued his military and subsequent political careers even more vigorously, becoming in a position to directly instead of indirectly influence science and technology.


When Heinlein died, Charles Sheffield abandoned his similar story, only describing it in the Heinlein Memorial Issue of New Destinies (WN #6, Winter 1988). Heinlein, he said, was cured by an experimental application of penicillin, went on to serve in the Navy. (He makes a comment about his having annoyed a superior officer along the way, but doesn’t seem to have done anything with it.) When WWII breaks out, Captain Heinlein is assigned to a PT boat squadron sent to do undercover work in Europe.

He goes out with his boys to recover a French scientist. The men going inshore are delayed, and, against orders, he leads a party inland to rescue them. As a result of this insubordination, he gets dismissed, and offered an alternative assignment, overseeing rocket research in New Mexico, which he accepts. (The parallel to the Martian in Double Star perhaps is to be expected.)

There are a number of shaky concepts in this summary, but then it was only a summary, and research would help correct it. For example, penicillin was not the treatment for tuberculosis — it was streptomycin, which was only isolated in 1943. Similarly, there was a PT boat squadron in Europe that carried out undercover missions, seconded to the OSS. Its commander was, like most PT boat officers, a reservist — no less than Douglas Fairbanks, Jr.!

The specifics of the mission are a little odd. Presumably, the idea of the commander not putting himself in a position to be captured would be out of concern over security. Yet, this unit would be under the OSS. General Donovan of the OSS observed the Normandy landings and went ashore afterwards, not the most sensible thing to do, given his position. From what I have read of his personality and way of operating, it seems unlikely he would penalize such behavior in a subordinate.

So . . . is there a plausible alternative career choice for LTJG Heinlein? Perhaps.
 

Major Major

Point of Departure:

Lieutenant (JG) Heinlein is assigned to BuAer under its new commander, Admiral King. He becomes qualified as an observer, his eyesight ruling out pilot training, and devotes considerable time to researching technological innovations. He is promoted to Lieutenant in 1934.

In 1936, Lieutenant Heinlein finally has to have sea duty. BuPers wants him to be Gunnery Officer on a destroyer; remembering the Nelsonian time he fed the fishes while on a destroyer observing flight tests, Lt. RAH wants to serve on a carrier. They compromise and he finds himself on a cruiser in the Atlantic Fleet.

This gives him a bit of time to write, and after penning a manuscript set in an ideal future world, he decides that long fiction isn’t quite his metier just yet. During layovers in New York, he trolls various editors, and after having boxing stories and westerns turned down by such magazines (the story of Longhorn McCoy, for example, turns out to be too much for even Spicy Western Tales) he finally manages to settle on a publication for people who were looking for surprises Understandably, he writes under a pseudonym, since like with fellow writer Catherine Lucille Moore, superiors might object. After penning a few short tales, he goes for a longer one. Darkness and Dawn, the story of Captain Perry Nelson, U.S. Navy (ret), and his struggle against the Southern demogogue Governor the Rev. Nehemiah Scudder, makes the career of Anson MacDonald. (The “restored version” published in 1980 includes more of the relationship between Nelson and fellow opponent Magdalene Andrews, a reporter who falls for the captain and vice versa.)

With the outbreak of war, Lieutenant Commander Heinlein is sent by the Bureau of Aeronautics as an assistant attache to London, over the objections of his mentor. During this time he meets not only with various British aviation officials but with members of a temporarily suspended organisation that is interested in more than rocketry.

After an unintentionally and unplanned dramatic cruise on the British carrier HMS Victorious in April of 1941, Commander Heinlein returns to the United States for reassignment in December of that year. Thus, on the first Sunday of the month, he is half-asleep, having spent the night writing about the story of the first flight to the moon, when Leslyn shakes him awake with the news of the call from Old Navy.

In January, the new Chief of Naval Operations assigns the newly promoted Captain Heinlein to the new Office of Special Research. He spends the war travelling across the country, nagging the Army to let Dr. Goddard build real spaceships instead of powder rockets, drafting Jack Parsons’s Suicide Squad into working on the project, ringing in a mere reservist named de Camp (another fellow he tried to get turned out to be downchecked as a security risk), and even going back to England to consult with people.

OSR send people to London to view the sharp end of the V-2, even the C.O. As Commodore Heinlein says to Wing Commander Clarke, his British oppo, observing one such incident, “We’re seeing the beginning of the Space Age, Ego.”

The first successful American rocket, the XMJ-3N “Caleb Catlum” [named after one of the Commodore’s favorite characters created by someone else], flies on July 15, 1945 from the White Sands Testing Range. It achieves an altitude of seven miles. The rocket is nineteen feet long and weighs about a ton. The Commodore himself makes a telephone call to the dying Robert Goddard, saying, “It’s a boy!”
 

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After the War

The immediate postwar period is something of a decline. Captain (his rank reverts) Heinlein has to deal with the disintegration of his marriage, the disinterest in rocket research, the end of cooperation with the British, and other personnel problems. Moreover, the Navy has to compete with the Army, which has taken most of the German rocket experts. Moreover, his current writing outlets are turning sour

In 1948 everything comes to a cusp. Mrs. Heinlein is committed to a sanitarium for alcoholism. The Inspector General drops a hint about Heinlein’s relationship with a former WAVE officer, now a civilian employee of the OSR. The Parsons Affair causes a crisis in the new Department of Defense. And it comes out who “John Riverside”, author of this new book from Scribner’s, The Young Atomic Engineers, really is. His twenty years were up in 1945 and Heinlein thinks he might just retire and write full-time.

Then the Soviet Atom Bomb explodes. We Need A Unstoppable Delivery System — Now! Congress runs to the Army and the Navy with large wads of money in hand. CNO Admiral Nimitz calls Captain Heinlein to the Pentagon and agrees that they can go through with the divorce thing provided he does it discreetly.

The new XMJ-7N “Storisende”, an uprated version of the A-4/V-2, flies by the end of the year. Already in the planning stages is a missile capable of projecting a capsule into orbit, the “Niafer”. (Before it gets into service, the powers that be will suggest more common names.) The Army has only the “Redstone” under development, while the National Advisory Committee on Aeronautics, the civilian aviation development group, is working on a vehicle called the “Vanguard”.

There springs up a competition for not only resources but even publicity. For every thrilling article appearing in Collier’s by Wernher von Braun, there is one in the Saturday Evening Post by “Simon York”, a “prominent Naval rocket scientist”, often in the same issue with a story by “Lyle Monroe” on humanity’s expansion into the Solar System; such noted titles as “It’s Great to Be Back!”,“The Tourist”, “Nothing Ever Happens on the Moon”, “Ring Around the Moon”, and “Home Sweet Home” come from this period. The Young Atomic Engineers series describes another side of this extraordinary efflorescence.
 

Major Major

Success Breeds

In April of 1952, the XMJ-9N “Atlas” [they finally got him to agree on names from books other people read; in his home in Richmond, Virginia, author James Branch Cabell sighs] is launched from White Sands; it flies ten thousand miles to the South Atlantic, beating out the Army’s Redstone and NACA’s Vanguard, as well as this rumored Soviet rocket being built by their German scientists in Siberia.

In testimony before the Senate Committee on Astronautics, Captain Heinlein cites the well-known Soviet secrecy, their access to German scientists, and other such measures. “We may awaken one morning to hear that they have established a colony, and the Lunar Soviet Socialist Republic is made a part of the U.S.S.R.” One prominent Senator says, “Ah foah wun do not want to go to bed bah the lite of a So-viet Moon!” and in the appropriation bill for the Navy’s OSR, the Army’s Redstone Arsenal, and the NACA, is a clause promoting Heinlein to Rear-Admiral.

The flight of the XMJ-9N causes much excitement amid the space community. Articles predicting a nuclear rocket for America’s Bicentennial and commercial space stations, colonies on the Moon, and flights to the outer planets within twenty-five years become popular in the slick press.

The OSR begins interviewing Naval Aviators for positions in the MISS (Man In Space Soonest) project. Similar interviews are being conducted among Air Force pilots by the Redstone Arsenal, and among civilian pilots by NACA. (A notorious claim by a women’s group that several women were after going through the same training were denied flight status will be derailed by the testimony of the head of the OSR Space Pilot Bureau stating that none of the thirteen women in the group had the requisite flight experience; they were a control group.)

By now, Admiral Heinlein is almost to rockets what Admiral Rickover is to nuclear power. He would have to be named head of NACA and have it absorb Redstone Arsenal to ensure this. Several aides suggest that he lobby President Eisenhower to this end, but in vain; the Admiral does not like the President.

1954 sees the launch of OSR’s Discoverer satellite, followed in very short order by the mysterious Soviet Chief Designer’s satellite “Satellite” [sputnik in Russian] and the Army’s Explorer on their Juno rocket. Designs for a manned vehicle are already on the drawing boards. The Army is reported to be exploring an updated version of the Sanger Antipodischbomber; the Air Force is proceeding with work on an uprated version of the Bell X-2, and NACA is said to be working on a vehicle called “Silver Bird”.
 
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