Heinlein, Robert A – Expanded Universe

to your hats!

I shot an error into the air.

It’s still going.. . everywhere.

LLong

THE HAPPY DAYS AHEAD

“It does not pay a prophet to be too specific.”

Page 210

-L. Sprague de Camp

“You never get rich peddling gloom.”

-William Lindsay Gresham

The late Bill Gresham was, before consumption forced him into fiction

writing, a carnie mentalist of great skill. He could give a cold reading that would

scare the pants off a marble statue. In six words he summarized the secret of

success as a fortuneteller. Always tell the mark what he wants to hear. He will love

you for it, happily pay you, then forgive and forget when your cheerful prediction

fails to come true-and always come back for more.

Stockbrokers stay in business this way; their tips are no better than

guesses but they are not peddling dividends; they are peddling happiness. Millions

of priests and preachers have used this formula, promising eternal bliss in exchange

for following, or at least giving lip service to, some short and tolerable rules,

plus a variable cash fee not too steep for the customer’s purse .. . and have

continued to make this formula work without ever in all the years producing even one

client who had actually received the promised prize.

Then how do churches stay in business? Because, in talking about “Pie in the

Sky, By and By,” they offer happiness and peace of mind right here on Earth. When

Karl Marx said, “Religion is the opium of the people,” he was not being cynical or

sarcastic; he was being correctly descriptive. In the middle nineteenth century

opium was the only relief from intolerable pain; Karl Marx was stating that faith in

a happy religion made the lives of the people of the abyss tolerable.

Sprague de Camp is Grand Master of practically everything and probably the

most learned of all living practitioners of science fiction and fantasy. I heard

those words of wisdom from him before I wrote the 1950 version of PANDORA’S BOX. So

why didn’t Illsten? Three reasons: 1) money; 2) money; and 3) I thought I could get

away with it during my lifetime for predictions attributed to 2000 A.D. I never

expected to live that long; I had strong reasons to expect to die young. But I seem

to have more lives than a cat; it may be necessary to kill me by driving a steak

through my heart (sirloin by choice), then bury me at a crossroads.

Still, I could have gotten away with it if I had stuck to predictions that

could not mature before 2000 A.D. Take the two where I really flopped, #5 and #16.

In both cases I named a specific year short of 2000 A.D. Had I not ignored Mr. de

Camp’s warning, I could look bland and murmur, “Wait and see. Don’t be impatient,”

on all in which the prediction does not look as promising in 1980 as it did in 1950.

Had I heeded a wise man on 2 out of 191 could today, by sheer brass, claim

to be batting a thousand.

I have made some successful predictions. One is

“The Crazy Years.” (Take a look out your window. Or at your morning paper.) Another

is the water bed. Some joker tried to patent the water bed to shut out competition,

and discovered that he could not because it was in the public domain, having been

described in detail in STRANGER IN A STRANGE LAND. It had been mentioned in stories

of mine as far back as 1941 and several times after that, but not until STRANGER

did the mechanics of a scene requirc describing how it worked.

It was not the first man to build water beds who tried to patent it. The

first man in the field knew where it came from; he sent me one, free and freight

prepaid, with a telegram naming his firm as the “Share-Water Bed Company.” Q.E.D.

Our house has no place to set up a water bed. None. So that bed is still in

storage a couple of hundred yards from our main house. I’ve owned a water bed from

the time they first came on market-but have never slept in one.