The Door into Summer

by Robert A. Heinlein

If you are fifty-five and your retirement fund pays you two hundred a month, why not sleep away the years, wake up still fifty-five, and have it pay you a thousand a month? To say nothing of waking up in a bright new world which would probably promise you a much longer and healthier old age in which to enjoy the thousand a month?

That is what it boils down to with a cat: You either carry out the Chinese obligation you have assumed—or you abandon the poor thing, let it go wild, destroy its faith in the eternal rightness.

Your own life may have gone as sour as dill pickles; that did not excuse you in the slightest from your obligation to carry out your contract to this super-spoiled cat.

The changes in the last thirty years (my own lifetime) had been enough to bug a man’s eyes out—two big wars and a dozen little ones, the downfall of communism, the Great Panic, the artificial satellites, the change to atomic power—why, when I was a kid they didn’t even have multimorphs.

I picked a San Francisco fertilizer firm too; it had been experimenting with yeasts and edible algae—there were more people every year and steak wasn’t going to get any cheaper.

Only crooked gamblers claim to give the sucker the best of it, and insurance is legalized gambling.

dropped money into the parking attendant, set the bug on arterial-west,

Los Angeles traffic was too fast and too slashingly murderous for me to be really happy under automatic control; I wanted to redesign their whole installation—it was not a really modern “fail safe.”

Los Angeles was safe from invasion; the invaders wouldn’t find a place to park

MY OLD MAN named me Daniel Boone Davis, which was his way of declaring for personal liberty and self-reliance. I was born in 1940, a year when everybody was saying that the individual was on the skids and the future belonged to mass man.

I’ll say this for military research: If money and men can do it, it gets results. Print another billion, hire another thousand scientists and engineers, then in some incredible, left-handed, inefficient fashion the answers come up.

But housewives were still complaining about the Servant Problem long after servants had gone the way of the mastodon. 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 at wages a plumber’s helper would scorn.

That’s why we called the monster Hired Girl—it brought back thoughts of the semi-slave immigrant girl whom Grandma used to bully.

The “spark of genius” required by our laws lay in getting a good patent lawyer.

Amazingly little real thought had been given to housework, even though it is at least 50 percent of all work in the world.

Ricky had been “my girl” since she was a six-year-old at Sandia, with hair ribbons and big solemn dark eyes. I was “going to marry her” when she grew up and we would both take care of Pete.

my sister and mother got it the day they bombed us.

cat protocol is more rigid than that of diplomacy.

I fully sympathize with the mandarin who cut off a priceless embroidered sleeve because a kitten was sleeping on it.