Heinlein, Robert A – Have Space Suit will Travel

Commercial arithmetic wasn’t silly but it was a waste of time. I read the book through the first week; after that I was bored.

Dad switched me to algebra, Spanish, general science, English grammar and composition; the only thing unchanged was gym. I didn’t have it too tough catching up; even those courses were watered down. Nevertheless, I started to learn, for Dad threw a lot of books at me and said, “Clifford, you would be studying these if you were not in overgrown kindergarten. If you soak up what is in them, you should be able to pass College Entrance Board Examinations. Possibly.”

After that he left me alone; he meant it when he said that it was my choice. I almost bogged down-those books were hard, not the predigested pap I got in school. Anybody who thinks that studying Latin by himself is a snap should try it.

I got discouraged and nearly quit-then I got mad and leaned into it. After a while I found that Latin was making Spanish easier and vice versa. When Miss Hernandez, my Spanish teacher, found out I was studying Latin, she began tutoring me. I not only worked my way through Virgil, I learned to speak Spanish like a Mexicano.

Algebra and plane geometry were all the math our school offered; I went ahead on my own with advanced algebra and solid geometry and trigonometry and might have stopped so far as College Boards were concerned-but math is worse than peanuts. Analytical geometry seems pure Greek until you see what they’re driving at-then, if you know algebra, it bursts on you and you race through the rest of the book. Glorious!

I had to sample calculus and when I got interested in electronics I needed vector analysis. General science was the only science course the school had and pretty general it was, too-about Sunday supplement level. But when you read about chemistry and physics you want to do it, too. The barn was mine and I had a chem lab and a darkroom and an electronics bench and, for a while, a ham station. Mother was perturbed when I blew out the windows and set fire to the barn-just a small fire-but Dad was not. He simply suggested that I not manufacture explosives in a frame building.

When I took the College Boards my senior year I passed them.

It was early March my senior year that I told Dad I wanted to go to the Moon. The idea had been made acute by the announcement of commercial flights but I had been “space happy” ever since the day they announced that the Federation Space Corps had established a lunar base. Or earlier. I told Dad about my decision because I felt that he would know the answer. You see. Dad always found ways to do anything he decided to do.

When I was little we lived lots of places-Washington, New York/Los Angeles, I don’t know where-usually in hotel apartments. Dad was always flying somewhere and when he was home there were visitors; I never saw him much. Then we moved to Centerville and he was always home, his nose in a book or working at his desk. When people wanted to see him they had to come to him. I remember once, when the money basket was empty, Dad told Mother that “a royalty was due.” I hung around that day because I had never seen a king (I was eight) and when a visitor showed up I was disappointed because he didn’t wear a crown. There was money in the basket the next day so I decided that he had been incognito (I was reading The Little Lame Prince) and had tossed Dad a purse of gold-it was at least a year before I found out that a “royalty” could be money from a patent or a book or business stock, and some of the glamour went out of life. But this visitor, though not king, thought he could make Dad do what he wanted rather than what Dad wanted:

“Dr. Russell, I concede that Washington has an atrocious climate. But you will have air-conditioned offices.”

“With clocks, no doubt. And secretaries. And soundproofing.”