Heinlein, Robert A – To Sail Beyond the Sunset
Heinlein, Robert A – To Sail Beyond the Sunset
TO SAIL BEYOND THE SUNSET
THE LIVES AND LOVES OF MAUREEN JOHNSON
(Being the Memoirs of a Somewhat Irregular Lady)
Robert A. Heinlein
To little girls and butterflies and kittens.
To Susan and Eleanor and Chris and (always) to Ginny.
With my Love,
R.A.H.
CONTENTS
1 The Committee for Aesthetic Deletions
2 The Garden of Eden
3 The Serpent in the Garden
4 The Worm in the Apple
5 Exit from Eden
6 ‘When Johnny Comes Marching Home…’
7 Ringing the Cash Register
8 Seacoast Bohemia
9 Dollars and Sense
10 Random Numbers
11 A Dude in a Derby
12 ‘Hang the Kaiser!’
13 ‘Over There!’
14 Black Tuesday
15 Torrid Twenties-Threadbare Thirties
16 The Frantic Forties
17 Starting Over
18 Bachelorhood
19 Cats and Children
20 Soothsayer
21 Serpent’s Tooth
22 The Better-Dead List
23 The Adventures of Prudence Penny
24 Decline and Fall
25 Rebirth in Boondock
26 Pixel to the Rescue
27 At the Coventry Cusp
28 Eternal Now
Appendix: People in this Memoir
Come, my friends,
Tis not too late to seek a newer world.
Push off, and sitting well in order smite
The sounding furrows; for my purpose holds
To sail beyond the sunset, and the baths
Of all the western stars, until I die.
Tennyson, Ulysses
Chapter 1 – The Committee for Aesthetic Deletions
I woke up in bed with a man and a cat. The man was a stranger; the cat was not.
I closed my eyes and tried to pull myself together – hook ‘now’ to mp memory of last
night.
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Heinlein, Robert A – To Sail Beyond the Sunset.txt
No good. There wasn’t any `last night’. My last dear memory was of being a passenger
in a Burroughs irrelevant bus, bound for New Liverpool, when there was a loud bang,
my head hit the seat in front of me, then a lady handed me a baby and we started
filing out of the starboard emergency exit, me with a cat in one arm and a baby in
the other, and I saw a man with his right arm off –
I gulped and opened my eyes. A stranger in my bed was better than a man bleeding to
death from a stump where his right forearm ought to be. Had it been a nightmare? I
fervently hoped so.
If it was not, then what had I done with the baby? And whose baby was it? Maureen,
this won’t do. Mislaying a baby is inexcusable. `Pixel, have you seen a baby?’ The
cat stood mute and a plea of not guilty was directed by the court.
My father once told me that I was the only one of his daughters capable of sitting
down in church and finding that I had sat on a hot lemon meringue pie… anyone else
would have looked. (I had looked, But my cousin Nelson – Oh, never mind.)
Regardless of lemon pies, bloody stumps, or missing babies, there was still this
stranger in my bed, his bony back toward me – husbandly rather than loverly. (But I
did not recall marrying him.)
I’ve shared beds with men before, and with women, and wet babies, and cats who
demand most of the bed, and (once) with a barbershop quartet. But I do like to know
with whom I am sleeping (just an old-fashioned girl, that’s me). So I said to the
cat, `Pixel, who is he? Do we know him?’
‘No-o-o-o.’
‘Well, let’s check: I put a hand on the man’s shoulder, intending to shake him awake
and then ask where we had met – or had we?
His shoulder was cold.
He was quite dead.
This is not a good way to start the day.
I grabbed Pixel and got out of bed by instantaneous translation; Pixel protested. I
said sharply, `Shut up, you! Mama has problems.’ I forced a thalamic pause of at
least a microsecond, maybe longer, and decided not to flee headlong outdoors, or out
into the hallway, as the case may be… but to slow down and attempt to assess the
situation, before screaming for help. Perhaps just as well, as I found that I was