Robert Heinlein - Waldo

‘Huh?

‘Well-' Grimes turned his sight inward, let his mind roam back over his long association, lifelong, for Waldo, with this particular patient. He remembered his subliminal mis­givings when he delivered the child. The infant had been sound enough, superficially, except for a slight blueness. But then lots of babies were somewhat cyanotic in the delivery room. Nevertheless, he had felt a slight reluctance to give it the tunk on the bottom, the slap which would shock it into taking its first lungful of air

But he had squelched his own feelings, performed the neces­sary ‘laying on of hands', and the freshly born human had de­clared its independence with a satisfactory squall. There was nothing else he could have done; he was a young GP then, who took his Hippocratic oath seriously. He still took it seri­ously, he supposed, even though he sometimes referred to it as the ‘hypocritical' oath. Still, he had been right in his feelings; there had been something rotten about that child, something that was not entirely myasthenia gravis. He had felt sorry for the child at first, as well as having an irrational feeling of responsibility for its condition. Pathologi­cal muscular weakness is an almost totally crippling condi­tion, since the patient has no unaffected limbs to retrain into substitutes. There the victim must lie, all organs, limbs, and functions present, yet so pitifully, completely weak as to be unable to perform any normal action. He must spend his life in a condition of exhausted collapse, such as you or I might reach at the finish line of a gruelling cross-country run. No help for him, and no relief

During Waldo's childhood he had hoped constantly that the child would die, since he was so obviously destined for tragic uselessness, while simultaneously, as a physician, doing every­thing within his own skill and the skills of numberless consult­ing specialists to keep the child alive and cure it

Naturally, Waldo could not attend school; Grimes ferreted out sympathetic tutors. He could indulge in no normal play; Grimes invented sickbed games which would not only stimu­late Waldo's imagination but encourage him to use his flabby muscles to the full, weak extent of which he was capable

Grimes had been afraid that the handicapped child, since it was not subjected to the usual maturing stresses of growing up, would remain infantile. He knew now, had known for a long time, that he need not have worried. Young Waldo grasped at what little life was offered him, learned thirstily, tried with a sweating tenseness of will to force his undisciplined muscles to serve him

He was clever in thinking of dodges whereby to circum­vent his muscular weakness. At seven he devised a method of controlling a spoon with two hands, which permitted him, painfully, to feed himself. His first mechanical invention was made at ten

It was a gadget which held a book for him, at any angle, controlled lighting for the book, and turned its pages. The gadget responded to fingertip pressure on a simple control panel. Naturally, Waldo could not build it himself, but he could conceive it, and explain it; the Farthingwaite-Joneses could well afford the services of a designing engineer to build the child's conception

Grimes was inclined to consider this incident, in which the child Waldo acted in a role of intellectual domination over a trained mature adult neither blood relation nor servant, as a landmark in the psychological process whereby Waldo even­tually came to regard the entire human race as his servants, his hands, present or potential

‘What's eating you, Doc?

‘Eh? Sorry, I was daydreaming. See here, son - you mustn't be too harsh on Waldo. I don't like him myself. But you must take him as a whole.

‘You take him.

‘Shush. You spoke of needing his genius. He wouldn't have been a genius if he had not been crippled. You didn't know his parents. They were good stock, fine, intelligent people, but nothing spectacular. Waldo's potentialities weren't any greater than theirs, but he had to do more with them to accomplish anything. He had to do everything the hard way. He had to be clever

‘Sure. Sure, but why should he be so utterly poisonous? Most big men aren't.

‘Use your head. To get anywhere in his condition he had to develop a will, a driving one-track mind, with a total disre­gard for any other considerations. What would you expect him to be but stinking selfish?

‘I'd- Well, never mind. We need him and that's that.

‘Why?

Stevens explained. It may plausibly be urged that the shape of a culture, its mores, evaluations, family organization, eating habits, living patterns, pedagogical methods, institutions, forms of govern­ment, and so forth, arise from the economic necessities of its technology. Even though the thesis be too broad and much oversimplified, it is nonetheless true that much which charac­terized the long peace which followed the constitutional estab­lishrnent of the United Nations grew out of the technologies which were hot-house-forced by the needs of the belligerents in the war of the forties. Up to that time broadcast and beam-cast were used only for commercial radio, with rare excep­tions. Even telephony was done almost entirely by actual metallic connexion from one instrument to another. If a man in Monterey wished to speak to his wife or partner in Boston, a physical, copper neuron stretched bodily across the continent from one to the other

Radiant power was then a hop dream, found in Sunday sup­plements and comic books

A concatenation, no, a meshwork of new developments was necessary before the web of copper covering the continent could be dispensed with. Power could not be broadcast econ­omically; it was necessary to wait for the co-axial beam, a direct result of the imperative military shortages of the Great War. Radio telephony could not replace wired telephony until ultra micro-wave techniques made room in the ether, so to speak, for the traffic load. Even then it was necessary to invent a tuning device which could be used by a nontechnical person, a ten-year-old child, let us say ,as easily as the dial selector which was characteristic of the commercial wired telephone of the era then terminating

Bell Laboratories cracked that problem; the solution led directly to the radiant power receptor, domestic type, keyed, sealed, and metered. The way was open for commercial radio power transmission, except in one respect: efficiency. Avia­tion waited on the development of the Otto-cycle engine; the Industrial Revolution waited on the steam engine; radiant power waited on a really cheap, plentiful power source. Since radiation of power is inherently wasteful, it was necessary to have power cheap and plentiful enough to waste

The same war brought atomic energy. The physicists work­ing for the United States Army, the United States of North America had its own army then, produced a superexplosive; the notebooks recording their tests contained, when properly correlated, everything necessary to produce almost any other sort of nuclear reaction, even the so-called Solar Phoenix, the hydrogen-helium cycle, which is the source of the sun's power. The reaction whereby copper is broken down into phospho­rus, silicon 29, and helium 8, plus degenerating chain reactions, was one of the several cheap and convenient means developed for producing unlimited and practically free power

Radiant power became economically feasible, and inevit­able

Of course Stevens included none of this in his explanation to Grimes. Grimes was absent-mindedly aware of the whole dy­namic process; he had seen radiant power grow up, just as his grandfather had seen the development of aviation. He had seen the great transmission lines removed from the sky -‘mined' for their copper; he had seen the heavy cables being torn from the dug-up streets of Manhattan. He might even re­call his first independent-unit radiotelephone with its some­what disconcerting double dial. He had gotten a lawyer in Buenos Aires on itwhen attempting to reach his neighbour­hood delicatessen. For two weeks he made all his local calls by having them relayed back from South America before he dis­covered that it made a difference which dial he used first