John Varley - The Golden Globe

So the situation is like this, for those of you who thought getting into Luna for a criminal type like myself would be a big hairy deal: it ain't. Not at first, anyway. There are plenty of wanted folks in those freeholds I mentioned a moment ago, and if they stay put and don't try to enter the mainstream of civilization, they can stay there for a million years as far as the Lunar federal government is concerned. No one will come looking for them.

It's the next step that's tough.

Did I say the spherical "border" around Luna is really a laughable fiction? I did, and it is. Did I imply that means one can then just walk the main thoroughfares of King City? I did not. That border is tighter than a tick's tush. That border makes the old "Iron Curtain" seem like a vague, unpatrolled line in the sand and a few desultory formalities. Because the border between the surface of Luna and the cities of Luna is nothing less than the line between life and death. Between vacuum and air. Every entrance into the main corridors of Luna is, of necessity, a fortress designed to keep air inside and the Breathsucker out . If a molecule of oxygen has no chance of passing through without the proper authorization, how much chance does several trillion molecules of actor have of entering without a visa?

Well, anything can be done, if you know your way around. The easiest way is through your friends, but you have to have the right sort of friends. The sort who do this sort of thing every day.

I chose to go through the Heinleiners.

Before the Big Glitch, not long ago, nobody knew anything about the Heinleiners. In fact, they didn't even have that name; it was given to them later by media reports after the pivotal part they played, involuntarily, in the Glitch itself. Now everybody thinks they know everything about Heinleiners, but the truth is, most of it is wrong.

First, and most basic, it's pretty silly to refer to them as a group. They're not group-type people. Nobody elects officers, no meetings are held. You "join" by being invited to one of several secret locations by a friend. What you actually do, however, is to opt out of the aboveground society. You can do it totally, choosing to live in one of the secret enclaves, or partially, maintaining a life and an identity while moving back and forth between the two realms.

When the Lunar Central Computer, the CC, had the nervous breakdown we've all come to call the Big Glitch, the Heinleiners were one of its main targets. There's been endless speculation as to why. The short answer so far is, We don't know. The popular theory, and one I think makes sense, is the CC was deeply offended by a high-tech group living beyond its reach, and possessing technology not available to the CC. Accordingly, the CC organized and trained, in secret, a cadre of extra-legal police that you might as well call an army. This bunch invaded the main Heinleiner compound, intending to wipe it out, and got a big surprise: these people fought back. The takeover failed, the CC retreated into a semicatatonic state from which it is only now being coaxed, and Lunar life was turned topsy-turvy.

Intimately tied up in all this, again involuntarily, was one Hildy Johnson, ace reporter for the News Nipple . Yes, that Hildy Johnson.

She has told some of her story publicly. She's told more of it to me. There is much she still has to tell, which she'll get to when she thinks it wise. And this presents me with a problem. As a sort of "member" of the group, I am constrained in what I can reveal about it. Luckily, much of it is superfluous to the story I'm telling. Here is what I can reveal:

1) The group got its name from a space vessel called the Robert A. Heinlein , named for a twentieth-century writer and radical political philosopher. The ship is very large, even by today's standards, and quite old. It was originally intended as an Orion-type starship, that is, a ship powered by large numbers of nuclear bombs exploding against a massive pusher plate. You can find the plans for one in any public library. Long ago the original builders went broke, and the shell of the ship ended up derelict on the edge of a vast junkyard. The Heinleiners took it over, and the junkyard as well. Today the ship, or parts of it, serve as the public face of the Heinleiners, the place reporters and politicians go when they want to talk to one. (Good luck! They don't do a lot of talking.)

2) These people do share some of Mr. Heinlein's political philosophy, the part that can be summed up as "Leave me alone!" They are not anarchists, but they brook little interference from the government. They are happiest where there is no government, and you'll find many of them, or their sympathizers, in the more remote regions of the system. But a lot of folks can't take that kind of isolation (me, for instance), and so live well concealed (if they are doing illegal things) or openly (where they work for a quasi-libertarian form of government). They don't plan to overthrow any governments; that would be entirely too much trouble and, as even the most doctrinaire of them will admit, the yoke of present-day governments is not intolerably onerous, when viewed historically. Things could be worse, and would likely get worse if there was a lot of radical political agitation to suppress. Don't look for Heinleiners to be publishing any manifestos, nailing any lists of demands to courthouse doors, storming any Bastilles. But they do have one secret, jealously guarded, in whose pursuit they are implacable:

3) They're going to the stars.

Hah ! you say. Secret ! you say. Tell me another one.

Very well. The fact that they intend to travel to the stars is very well known, and almost universally dismissed. Any number of Eminent Scientists will explain to you in great detail why the project is impossible. The Heinleiners think this is just fine. The fewer people take them seriously, the fewer there will be trying to discover the real secret, which is how they intend to do it.

Trust me. They're going to do it.

I am the least-qualified person in the system to look at a stardrive and say, "Aha! That will work!" You could spend a year showing it to me, explaining it to me, drawing nice pretty pictures and reading the manual (if there was such a thing) out loud, and at the end I would still be in a state of perfect ignorance concerning stardrives.

But others, people who know, tell me I can count on it. In a year, two years—however long it takes to patch it up—that magnificent hulk sitting out there on the surface is going to leap up and violate the virgin sky. How fast will it go? No one will say. But no one will raise a family during the journey, and you won't return to find all your friends a hundred years older than you.

Swamp gas, you say. How many "starships" have been sold to how many suckers in the last century? Hyperspace is to our age as lost treasure maps and gold mines and oil wells and Florida real estate were to a previous generation of confidence men. I should know; I've sold enough starships in my time.

Yes, and the way to sell them is not to hide out by a garbage dump and not tell anyone about it. You can invest, and this may be your last chance before the stock goes intergalactic. Check out the prospectus. It claims nothing, promises nothing. Believe me, this is not how you sell pirate gold. Call your broker at once. You'll thank me later.

And that is the secret, you see. Not that they are going, but how they're going to get there. The inventors and investors in this new space drive do not intend to turn it over to a grateful government, or have it confiscated by storm troopers. They don't intend to patent it, either. Patent examiners can be bribed, information can leak. If the Heinleiners have a religion, it is Free Enterprise. They intend to sell this new technology, and they intend to become dirty, rotten, filthy, stinking rich from it.