The Pursuit of the Pankera: A Parallel Novel About Parallel Universes

by Robert A. Heinlein

We don’t begrudge money spent on roads and public health and national defense and truly useful things.

“Hrrumph! ‘Architect’ is a dirty word. I studied engineering. Architects copy each other’s mistakes and call it ‘Art.’ Even Frank Lloyd Wright never understood what the Gilbreths were doing. His houses looked great from the outside—inside they were hideously inefficient. Dust collectors. Gloomy. Psych lab rat mazes. Pfui!”

While my unalloyed admiration of Heinlein in the halcyon days of my youth is past, upon greater experience, I remain in agreement with the old Admiral about this point. My god, I would never live in a Wright house.

Back to Rule One: no news broadcasts at meals, no newspapers. No shop talk, no business or financial matters, no discussion of ailments. No political discussion, no mention of taxes, or of foreign or domestic policy. Reading of fiction permitted en famille—not with guests present. Conversation limited to cheerful subjects—” “No scandal, no gossip?” demanded Aunt Hilda. “A matter of your judgment, dear. Cheerful gossip about friends and acquaintances, juicy scandal about people we do not like—fine! Now—do you wish to ratify, abolish, amend, or take under advisement?” “I ratify it unchanged. Who knows some juicy scandal about someone we don’t like?”

Most males have an unhealthy tendency to obey laws.

Take a simple pocket pen, so cheap that they are given away as advertising. Back of it lie several sorts of chemists, metallurgists, synthetic polymer experts, mechanical engineers, extrusion presses, computer programmers, computers, computer technicians, toolmakers, electrical engineers, a planet-wide petroleum industry, five or more sorts of mines with mining engineers, geologists, miners, railroads, steamships, production engineers, management specialists, merchandizing psychologists—et cetera to a splitting headache. It is impossible even to list the myriad special skills that underlie even the most trivial trade item of our enormously complex and interdependent industrial web. Hell, I didn’t even mention power grids.

Did Heinlein get his name in the hat?” “Four votes, but split. Two for his Future History, two for Stranger in a Strange Land. So he didn’t make it.” “Well I didn’t vote for Stranger and I’ll refrain from embarrassing anyone by asking who did. My god, the things some writers will do for money.”

“It is, but not very—any mother can do it. Having babies is like food and sex and sleep: necessary but not enough.”