Time For The Stars by Robert A. Heinlein
Time For The Stars by Robert A. Heinlein
1956
I THE LONG RANGE FOUNDATION
According to their biographies, Destiny’s favored children usually had their lives planned out from scratch. Napoleon was figuring on how to rule France when he was a barefoot boy in Corsica, Alexander the Great much the same, and Einstein was muttering equations in his cradle.
Maybe so. Me, I just muddled along.
In an old book that belonged to my great grandfather Lucas I once saw a cartoon of a man in evening clothes, going over a ski jump. With an expression of shocked unbelief he is saying: “How did I get up here?”
I know how he felt. How did I get way up here?
I was not even planned on. The untaxed quota for our family was three children, then my brother Pat and I came along in one giant economy package. We were a surprise to everyone, especially to my parents, my three sisters, and the tax adjusters. I don’t recall being surprised myself but my earliest recollection is a vague feeling of not being quite welcome, even though Dad and Mum, and Faith, Hope, and Charity treated us okay.
Maybe Dad did not handle the emergency right. Many families get an extra child quota on an exchange basis with another family, or something, especially when the tax-free limit has already been filled with all boys or all girls. But Dad was stubborn, maintaining that the law was unconstitutional, unjust, discriminatory, against public morals, and contrary to the will of God. He could reel off a list of important people who were youngest children of large families, from Benjamin Franklin to the first governor Of Pluto, then he would demand to know where the human race would have been without them?-after which Mother would speak soothingly.
Dad was probably accurate as he was a student of almost everything, even his trade, which was micromechanics-but especially of history. He wanted to name us for his two heroes in American history, whereas Mother wanted to name us for her favorite artists: This is how I ended up as Thomas Paine Leonardo da Vinci Bartlett and my twin became Patrick Henry Michelangelo Bartlett. Dad called us Tom and Pat and Mother called us Leo and Michel and our sisters called us Useless and Double-Useless. Dad won by being stubborn.
Dad was stubborn. He could have paid the annual head tax on us supernumeraries, applied for a seven-person flat, and relaxed to the inevitable. Then he could have asked for reclassification. Instead be claimed exemption for us twins each year, always ended by paying our head tax with his check stamped “Paid under Protest!” and we seven lived in a five-person flat. When Pat and I were little we slept in homemade cribs in the bathroom which could not have been convenient for anybody, then when we were bigger we slept on the living-room couch, which was inconvenient for everybody, especially our sisters, who found it cramping to their social life.
Dad could have solved all this by putting in for family emigration to Mars or Venus, or the Jovian moons, and he used to bring up the subject. But this was the one thing that would make Mum more stubborn than he was. I don’t know which part of making the High Jump scared her, because she would just settle her mouth and not answer. Dad would point out that big families got preferred treatment for emigration and that the head tax was earmarked to subsidize colonies off Earth and why shouldn’t we benefit by the money we were being robbed of? To say nothing of letting our children grow up with freedom and elbow room, out where there wasn’t a bureaucrat standing behind every productive worker dreaming up more rules and restrictions? Answer me that?
Mother never answered and we never emigrated,
We were always short of money. Two extra mouths, extra taxes, and no family assistance for the two extras make the stabilized family income law as poor a fit as the clothes Mum cut down for us from Dad’s old ones. It was darn’ seldom that we could afford to dial for dinner like other people and Dad even used to bring home any of his lunch that he didn’t eat. Mum went back to work as soon as we twins were in kindergarten, but the only household robot we had was an obsolete model “Morris Garage” Mother’s Helper which was always burning out valves and took almost as long to program as the job would have taken. Pat and I got acquainted with dish water and detergents-at least I did; Pat usually insisted on doing the sterilizing or had a sore thumb or something.