The Door into Summer

by Robert A. Heinlein

I have spent too much of my life opening doors for cats—I once calculated that, since the dawn of civilization, nine hundred and seventy-eight man-centuries have been used up that way. I could show you figures.

Housekeeping is repetitious and unnecessary drudgery; as an engineer it offended me.

fingers burned, you have to trust people. Otherwise you are a hermit in a cave, sleeping with one eye open. There wasn’t any way to be safe; just being alive was deadly dangerous...fatal, in the end.

“There’s a divinity that shapes our ends, rough-hew them how we will.” Free will and predestination in one sentence and both true. There is only one real world, with one past and one future. “As it was in the beginning, is now and ever shall be, world without end, amen.” Just one...but big enough and complicated enough to include free will and time travel and everything else in its linkages and feedbacks and guard circuits. You’re allowed to do anything inside the rules...but you come back to your own door.

“Back” is for emergencies; the future is better than the past. Despite the crepehangers, romanticists, and anti-intellectuals, the world steadily grows better because the human mind, applying itself to environment, makes it better. With hands...with tools...with horse sense and science and engineering.

Pete is getting older, a little fatter, and not as inclined to choose a younger opponent; all too soon he must take the very Long Sleep. I hope with all my heart that his gallant little soul may find its Door into Summer, where catnip fields abound and tabbies are complacent, and robot opponents are programmed to fight fiercely—but always lose—and people have friendly laps and legs to strop against, but never a foot that kicks.