Heinlein, Robert A – Friday

“Ah so. Tyrannical old bastard.”

We started for the refectory. “Friday . .

“Yes, Goldie?”

“You are finding the Master grumpy and sometimes difficult.”

“Correction. He is always difficult.”

“Mmm, yes. But what you may not know is that he is in constant pain.” She added, “He can no longer take drugs to control it.”

We walked in silence while I chewed and swallowed that one. “Goldie? What is wrong with him?”

“Nothing, really. I would say that he is in good health. . . for his age.

“How old is he?”

“I don’t know. From things I have heard I know that he is over a hundred. How much over I can’t guess.”

“Oh, no! Goldie, when I went to work for him, he could not have been more than seventy. Oh, he used canes but he was very spry. He moved as fast then as anyone.”

“Well . . . it’s not important. But you might remember that he hurts. If he is rude to you, it is pain talking. He thinks highly of you.”

“What makes you think so?”

“Ah … I’ve talked too much about my patient. Let’s eat.”

In studying the Shipstone corporate complex I did not attempt to study Shipstones. The wayÄthe only wayÄto study Shipstones would be to go back to school, get a Ph.D. in physics,-add on some intense postdoctoral study in both solid state and plasma, get a job with one of the Shipstone companies and so impress them with your loyalty and your brilliance that you are at long last part of the inner circle controlling fabrication and quality.

Since that involves about twenty years that I should have started back in my teens, I assumed that Boss did not intend me to take that route.

So let me quote from the official or propaganda history:

Prometheus, a Brief Biography and Short Account of the Unparalleled Discoveries of Daniel Thomas Shipstone, &S., MA., Ph.D., LL.D., L.H.D., and of the Benevolent System He Founded.

Äthus young Daniel Shipstone saw at once that the problem was not a shortage of energy but lay in the transporting of energy. Energy is everywhereÄin sunlight, in wind, in mountain streams, in temperature gradients of all sorts wherever found, in coal, in fossil oil, in radioactive ores, in green growing things. Especially in ocean depths and in outer space energy is free for the taking in amounts lavish beyond all human comprehension.

Those who spoke of “energy scarcity” and of “conserving energy” simply did not understand the situation. The sky was “raining soup”; what was needed was a bucket in which to carry it.

With the encouragement of his devoted wife Muriel (n‚e Greentree), who went back to work to keep food on the table, young Shipstone resigned from General Atomics and became the most American of myth-heroes, the basement inventor. Seven frustrating and weary years later he had fabricated the first Shipstone by hand. He had foundÄ What he had found was a way to pack more kilowatt-hours into a

smaller space and a smaller mass than any other engineer had ever dreamed of. To call it an “improved storage battery” (as some early accounts did) is like calling an H-bomb an “improved firecracker.” What he had achieved was the utter destruction of the biggest industry (aside from organized religion) of the western world.

For what happened next I must draw from the muckraking history and from other independent sources as I just don’t believe the sweetness and light of the company version. Fictionalized speech attributed to Muriel Shipstone:

“Danny Boy, you are not going to patent the gadget. What would it get you? Seventeen years at the most. . . and no years at all in threefourths of the world. If you did patent or try to, Edison, and P. G. and E., and Standard would tie you up with injunctions and law suits and claimed infringements and I don’t know what all. But you said yourself that you could put one of your gadgets in a room with the best research team G.A. has to offer and the best they could do would be to melt it down and the worst would be that they would blow themselves up. You said that. Did you mean it?”