Heinlein, Robert A – Expanded Universe

working hours? “Six days shalt thou work and do all thou art able; the seventh the

same, and pound on the cable.” A forty-hour week is standard for civilians-but not

for naval officers. You’ll work that forty-hour week but that’s just a starter.

You’ll stand a night watch as well, and duty weekends. Then with every increase in

grade your hours get longer-until at last you get a ship of your own and no longer

stand watches. Instead you are on duty twenty-four hours a day.. . and you’ll sign

your

night order book with: “In case of doubt, do not hesitate to call me.”

I don’t know the average week’s work for a naval officer but it is closer to

sixty than to forty. I’m speaking of peacetime, of course. Under war conditions it

is whatever hours are necessary-and sleep you grab when you can.

Why would anyone elect a career which is unappreciated, overworked, and

underpaid? It can’t be just to wear a pretty uniform. There has to be a better

reason.

As one drives through the bushveldt of East Africa it is easy to spot herds

of baboons grazing on the ground. But not by looking at the ground. Instead you look

up and spot the lookout, an adult male posted on a limb of a tree where he has a

clear view all around him- which is why you can spot him; he has to be where he can

see a leopard in time to give the alarm. On the ground a leopard can catch a baboon

. . . but if a baboon is warned in time to reach the trees, he can outclimb a

leopard.

The lookout is a young male assigned to that duty and there he will stay,

until the bull of the herd sends up another male to relieve him.

Keep your eye on that baboon; we’ll be back to him. Today, in the United

States, it is popular among selfstyled “intellectuals” to sneer at patriotism. They

seem to think that it is axiomatic that any civilized man is a pacifist, and they

treat the military profession with contempt. “Warmongers”-” Imperialists”- “Hired

killers in uniform”-you have all heard such sneers and you will hear them again. One

of their favorite quotations is: “Patriotism is the last refuge of a scoundrel.”

What they never mention is that the man who made that sneering wisecrack was

a fat, gluttonous slob who was pursued all his life by a pathological fear of death.

I propose to prove that that baboon on watch is morally superior to that fat

poltroon who made that wisecrack.

Patriotism is the most practical of all human characteristics.

But in the present decadent atmosphere patriots are often too shy to talk

about it-as if it were something shameful or an irrational weakness.

But patriotism is not sentimental nonsense. Nor something dreamed up by

demagogues. Patriotism is as necessary a part of man’s evolutionary equipment as are

his eyes, as useful to the race as eyes are to the individual.

A man who is not patriotic is an evolutionary dead end. This is not

sentiment but the hardest sort of logic.

To prove that patriotism is a necessity we must go back to fundamentals.

Take any breed of animal-for example, tyrannosaurus rex. What is the most basic

thing about him? The answer is that tyrannosaurus rex is dead, gone, extinct.

Now take homo sapiens. The first fact about him is that he is not extinct,

he is alive.

Which brings us to the second fundamental question: Will homo sapiens stay

alive? Will he survive?

We can answer part of that at once: Individually h. sapiens will not

Page 192

survive. It is unlikely that anyone here tonight will be alive eighty years from

now; it approaches mathematical certainty that we will all be dead a hundred years

from now as even the youngest plebe here would be 118 years old then-if still alive.

Some men do live that long but the percentage is so microscopic as not to

matter. Recent advances in biology suggest that human life may be extended to a

century and a quarter, even a century and a half-but this will create more problems