Heinlein framed all his concerns about intellectually-soggy American youth in a story about a space-struck boy accidentally prepared to take advantage of the slings and arrows fate threw at him amid the game shows and jingle contests that made up American television in the 1950s—and let the boy stand up as a proud representative of humanity in a kangaroo court of aliens. He titled his book Have Space Suit—Will Travel. The title had plot significance, of course—in fact, that was the plot for the first several chapters.
Heinlein did his usual careful research and preparation—sizes of various galaxies, surface temperatures on planets, calculating travel times to Pluto and beyond. At one point, he needed to know the volume of air an empty space suit would contain, and did the calculations. But the answer didn’t seem right to him, so he took his worksheets to Ginny. She did a completely independent calculation that came closer to what he thought it should be. It didn’t seem to be the arithmetic that was at fault: Comparing their worksheets, they traced the difference to a single critical figure. He had used the figure in Marks’ Standard Handbook for Mechanical Engineers, the handbook he had learned engineering with at the Naval Academy and had used ever since. Ginny had taken hers from the Chemical & Rubber Company Handbook, the chemist’s traditional sourcebook. The CRC clearly had the right figure: Robert penciled the correction into his Marks’ and wrote them a letter (and found the figure corrected in the next edition). After that he would not rely on a single source for critical figures.
Ginny also helped out by composing a musical “speech” for the Mother Thing, a music-speaking “beat cop,” with Robert looking over her shoulder and with a veto: He didn’t want it to sound like anything human. Together they got the effect he was after. The whole book was a pleasure for both of them—“… pure fun all the way through.” Heinlein finished Have Space Suit—Will Travel on August 30, 1957, just as the first installment of Citizen of the Galaxy began to run in Astounding.
Robert A. Heinlein: In Dialogue with His Century, Volume 2: The Man Who Learned Better (1948-1988) by William H. Patterson Jr.
