Note: this will make a lot more sense if you read the first essay in this series, which sets out the premise that I'm exploring here. Caution, many spoilers below.

by Robert Heinlein, 1958, published by Charles Scribner's Sons.

Many people think that this is the best of the Heinlein Juveniles. Maybe it is, it's hard to say. It's also the last Heinlein novel published by Charles Scribner's Sons (we'll go into the reason it was the last in the next essay). Have Space Suit – Will Travel is a thinking kid's adventure novel. Sure, there are bug-eyed monsters and chases and space ships and all of the trappings, but there's also a good deal of science and engineering and philosophy. Philosophy? You betcha. Oh, and quoting from Shakespeare, we've got some of that going for us here, too. Here's how the novel opens:

You see, I had this space suit.
How it happened was this way:
"Dad," I said, "I want to go to the moon."
"Certainly," he answered and looked back at his book. It was Jerome K Jerome's Three Men in a Boat, which he must know by heart.
I said, "Dad, please! I'm serious."
This time he closed the book on a finger and said gently, "I said it was all right. Go ahead."
"Yes... but how?"
"eh?" He looked mildly surprised. "Why that's your problem, Clifford."

(I'll vouch for Three Men in a Boat, by the way, it's a very funny book.) Kip (as Clifford is known to his friends and family) is being deliberately raised in a small town. In today's parlance, his father would probably be called a retired think-tank professor. It's not made clear exactly who he worked for or what he did, just that it involved government policy and that he was tops in his field. After a prolonged exposure to Washington, DC, Kip's father married his best pupil and retired to a small town to raise their child.

Kip doesn't have nearly the money to buy a ticket to the moon, so he starts to think about ways he might get sent to the moon, such as going to MIT and getting a degree in an engineering discipline that is needed on the moon. Along the way, his father discovers that Kip isn't getting much of an education from their small-town high school. In a few paragraphs that sound like they could be written today, Heinlein dismisses 1950's educational methods:

I felt shocked. "Why, Dad, Center is a swell school." I remembered things they had told us in PTA Auxiliary. "It's run along the latest, most scientific lines, approved by psychologists, and —"
"— paying excellent salaries," he interrupted, "for a staff highly trained in modern pedagogy. Study projects emphasize practical human problems to orient the child in democratic social living, to fit him for the vital, meaningful tests of adult life in our complex modern culture. Excuse me, son; I've talked with Mr Hanley. Mr Hanley is sincere – and to achieve these noble purposes we are spending more per student than any other state save California and New York."
"Well... what's wrong with that?"
"What's a dangling participle?"
I didn't answer. He went on, "Why did Van Buren fail of re-election? How do you extract the cube root of eighty-seven?"
Van Buren had been a president; that was all I remembered. But I could answer the other one. "If you want a cube root, you look in a table in the back of the book."
Dad sighed. "Kip, do you think that table was brought down from on high by an archangel?" He shook his head sadly. "It's my fault, not yours. I should have looked into this years ago –I had assumed, simply because you liked to read and were quick at figures and clever with your hands, that you were getting an education."
"You think I'm not?"
"I know you are not. Son Centerville High is a delightful place, well equipped, smoothly administered, beautifully kept. Not a 'blackboard jungle,' oh, no! –I think you kids love the place. You should. But this" Dad slapped the curriculum chart down angrily. "Twaddle! Beetle tracking! Occupational therapy for morons!"

To remedy the problem, Kip's Dad starts him on an intense course of self study. Kip begins to learn Latin, solid geometry, trigonometry, calculus, physics and chemistry. He doesn't have a lab, but he has the use of the barn behind the house, so he does his own experiments. "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."

After three years or so, Kip is in his senior year. He's learned a lot more than he otherwise would have, but he's also had a lot of fun. It's then that he learns of a new sweepstakes: "Skyway Soap" is running a sweepstakes where you send in soap wrappers with a slogan on them. There are a thousand prizes, but the first prize is a trip to the moon. Kip want's to go so bad he can taste it and he decides he has to win the contest. He sets out to send in the most soap wrappers of any contestant. Eventually, he sends in 5,782 wrappers.

Unfortunately, that isn't enough to win the contest. Instead, he gets one of the other top prizes: a space suit. It's a retired suit that had seen action building one of the space stations. Kip decides he will spend the summer (while waiting to see which college, if any, he's been admitted to) refurbishing the space suit to make it like new.

Heinlein spends a whole chapter on the theory of space suits, and how they work. How they cool or heat their occupant, how the use redundancy for critical systems and so on. It's pretty detailed and, after fifty years, pretty much still stands up. By Labor Day weekend, Kip has the suit back to its original specs. He can wear it, clumsily, on Earth, but there's not much chance he'll ever be able to wear it in space. Things aren't looking too good on the college front and there's not much money. He decides to take it for one last walk before selling it back to the soap company for a premium.

Then, while he's out walking in it in his back yard (pretending to be on the moon), a space ship comes whooshing in and almost lands on him. Out from the ship pops a bug-eyed monster. Then, a second ship lands and two men in space suits shoot the occupants of the first ship. Kip is captured during the melee and brought aboard one of the ships. In the space of three pages, Kip has gone from a walk in his back yard to a space ship bound for the moon.

It's easy to be critical of such outrageous coincidence, but it's pretty common in literature from Shakespeare to Tom Clancy. The author just has to be skillful enough to pull the reader along past the coincidence so quickly that they never stop to think about it. In Star Wars, Princess Leia accidentally falls in love with her estranged twin brother who was raised on another planet – about as unlikely a coincidence as you will ever encounter– but Spielberg keeps our attention on other things.

Awakening in a detention cell, Kip meets Peewee (Patricia Wynant Reisfeld), a ten year-old girl who happens to be the genius daughter of a famous professor at the Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton. Quickly, Heinlein sets the stage: horrible looking creatures (whose facial cilia the size of angle worms earns him the nickname Wormface from Kip) have come to scout the Earth as a possible new colony. They're very advanced, so advanced they don't consider humans to be higher life forms. To them, humans are just food animals. Another alien, from a species noted for its empathy with alien life forms, has been patrolling the area that includes earth; acting as a sort of cosmic beat cop. She is just as alien as the Wormface people, but her soft fur and deep empathy causes Kip and Peewee to refer to her as the Mother Thing. While parlaying with the Wormfaces, the Mother Thing was captured and is being held in another part of the ship. Peewee was captured with an intent on the part of the Wormface people to hostage her for her more learned father.

Yikes, that's a lot going on, isn't it? Yet Heinlein covers it in less than a dozen pages. The ship reaches the moon, lands and the Wormface people leave the ship to confer with their group. Kip and Peewee manage to escape from their cell, find their space suits (Gee! It's a good think Kip was wearing his when he was picked up!) and try to make a run for it thirty five miles to the nearest human outpost, Tombaugh Station. The Mother Thing is small, she rides Kip piggy-back inside his suit.

Again, we get considerable education about using a space suit in one-sixth gee. Heinlein especially details the shortcomings of the design: limited angle of view, the difficulty in seeing your own feet, lack of rear-veiw mirror, and so on. After a harrowing trek of some thirty miles, with a searing sun and dearth of oxygen, they arrive within sight of Tombaugh Station –only to be captured again.

This time, the Wormfaces decide to take their captives where they will have no possibility of escape: their advance base on Pluto. Drugged and padded, Kip, Peewee and the Mother Thing are boosted at eight gravities for five days to reach Pluto (in real life those would have to be some really good drugs – even five hours at 8 G's would likely kill you). Kip is thrown in a cell by himself. To pass the time, he works out how long it would take to get back, if he could steal a ship and boost it at one gee (the answer turns out to be fifteen days – Heinlein actually walks us through the math).

The Mother Thing is resourceful, however, and she manages to build and set off a bomb that kills many of the Wormface people. She also builds a beacon to call her own people. The only problem: it's cold outside there on Pluto and her body freezes before she can set off the beacon. Kip has to take the beacon, walk it far enough from the building, and turn it on. He manages to do so (see the picture from The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction), but he gets a terrible frostbite on the way back.

Luckily, the Mother Thing's people have faster than light travel and communications, it's only a matter of an hour or two before they're picked up and taken to her planet, around the star Vega. Kip is put into an ultra high-tech hospital and his body is encouraged to re-grow his frozen limbs. While bedridden, a professor is assigned to him to learn everything Kip knows about Earth: its history, societies, science and technology. Kip does his best (good thing his education was opened up by his father, else he wouldn't have had nearly as much to say).

After Kip is well, he and Peewee are taken to a trail on another planet, this time on a planet in the Lesser Magellanic Cloud, a galaxy near the Milky Way. It turns out that the Mother Thing works for an organization called the Three Galaxies, a sort of United Nations for three galaxy's worth of civilizations. Kip and Peewee think that Wormface is the one going on trial, but they're not quite right, at least not all the way. The Wormface people are tried and they are convicted of being a danger to other, more civilized races. As sentence is pronounced, their planet is destroyed without hesitation. The Three Galaxies is serious in its mission to protect civilization from rogue races.

But, it turns out, Human Beings are also one of these rogue races and Kip and Peewee find that all of humanity is on trial through them. Humans are recognized by the Three Galaxies as an upstart race that breeds quickly and mutates and might very easily be a danger to its neighbors within a short period of time. Kip gives an passionate defense of humanity (this is where Prospero's big speech comes in: "the cloud-capped towers, the gorgeous palaces, the solemn temples, the great globe itself... itself –yea– all which it inherit–shall dissolve").

The Three Galaxies decides that it's too soon to tell about human beings and decides that they will be judged again at a later time, "in a dozen half-deaths of radium". The court rules that Kip and Peewee be sent back to their own place and time. Before they know it, the Mother Thing is landing her (stealthy) ship near Peewee's house and they are back.

Peewee's father listens to their tale and examines the artifacts they've brought back. In particular, he is interested in a piece of metallic paper that is covered with mathematics the Mother Thing people have slipped humanity as a sort of cheat sheet to get us to the next level of technology. It also turns out that they have been literally returned to their own time, it's the same weekend that Kip was picked up, even though they've been gone weeks.

Peewee's father has some pull and arranges for Kip to get into MIT: "The lad goes to the Magellanic Clouds but he can't go to the school he wants." Kip is given a ride to his home and while on the way, his parents are called by Peewee's father and briefed on their trip. Kip comes home to a place just as he left it. His father clearly envies his son's journey, but he is also clearly proud of him. His mother is just glad to have her baby home. Kip returns to his job as a soda jerk while he waits for the semester to start.

I bothered with a detailed explanation, because it's important to the points the book makes. This book, like several other Heinlein Juveniles, is a paean to education. Heinlein shows time and again that Kip succeeds only because he has bothered to learn about the world around him. Even further, Heinlein advances the philosophical point that the education itself attracts the adventures that Kip has:

[early in the book, Kip's Dad talks to him about winning the soap sweepstakes]
"There is no such thing as luck; there is only adequate or inadequate preparation to cope with a statistical universe."

[afterwards, when Kip is talking to Peewee's father]
"'Luck' is a question-begging word," he answered. "You spoke of the 'amazing luck' that you were listening when my daughter called for help. That wasn't luck."
"Huh? I mean, Sir?"
"Why were you on that frequency? Because you were wearing a space suit. Why were you wearing it? Because you were determined to space. When a space ship called, you answered. If that is luck, then it is luck every time a batter hits a ball. Kip, 'good luck" follows careful preparation; 'bad luck' comes from sloppiness. You convinced a court older than Man himself that you and your kind were worth saving. What that mere chance?"
"Uh... fact is, I got mad and almost ruined things. I was tired of being pushed around."
"The best things in history are accomplished by people who get 'tired of being shoved around'".

The "don't let yourself be pushed around" theme is, of course, repeated in many of the juveniles. It's not limited to aliens, either. At various spots, Heinlein's characters resist being pushed around by lawyers, governments and corporations.

The novel originally appeared in The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, serialized over three months. I happen to have these issues and the pictures above come from their covers (it wasn't on the cover in its third installment). All of the art (both the book jacket and the magazine covers) was done by Ed Emshwiller, who eventually won five Hugo Awards for his covers and, later, a Ford Foundation grant.

This book is a wonder. The plot is complex and winding, but also clear and linear. It's not a typical coming of age juvenile novel. Kip actually comes of age (becomes prepared, that is) before the space ships appear. While the action takes him all over this part of the universe, he steps back into his job as a soda jerk the day after he gets back. Kip isn't unusually gifted, he's just the average smart kid. Heinlein was telling all of us: this could happen to you – if you are prepared for it when the time comes.

This is the last of the Charles Scribner's Sons juveniles, but there is one more book that should be studied when studying the Heinlein juveniles. One more very important, very controversial book. We'll tackle that one next and then wrap things up.