122:"Joe" is a secret agent who is tasked with getting the microfilm containing the only documentation of the effect. Returning to Earth, he is captured and finds himself confined with a man who calls himself "Kettle Belly" Baldwin. Using only two packs of playing cards to encode words, they communicate while under observation and plot their escape. Afterward, Baldwin introduces Joe to his group of intellectually superior individuals and trains him in their advanced techniques of thought, even attempting telepathy. Baldwin reveals that he and his group work to keep dangerous science and technology out of the hands of normal humans. The nova effect was discovered by Baldwin and implemented by his own people as part of an attempt to prove it could not be done.
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control from Mrs. Keithley while Joe is charged with disabling the transmitter. The situation becomes desperate. Joe and Gail unexpectedly achieve telepathic rapport. Gail kills Mrs. Keithley, but is trapped with no escape route, while Joe is certain the transmitter is booby trapped. Knowing that they are both about to die, they telepathically recite their own private marriage vows.
175:. The issue was prompted by a letter from a reader (Richard A. Hoen of the University Club in Buffalo, New York) commenting on the stories in an issue, referring to the stories by author and title, and offering his respective praise and derision for those works. The magazine frequently received letters of this kind; however, in this case, the reader described an issue whose
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s protagonists Joe and Gail as examples of "honorable hatchet men.") While the earlier version of the character had strongly argued that smarter people are, and ought to be, separate from the human race in general, Boss appears to categorically deny this premise. However, he prohibits Friday, in his
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Joe meets Gail, another agent, with whom he falls in love. Baldwin receives a warning that the nova effect is set to be triggered on Earth, but the triggering device is on the Moon. Joe and Gail are sent to disable the trigger so the device on Earth can be neutralized. Gail has to get the remote
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The dialogue between the male and female leads, Joe and Gail, is reminiscent of the exchanges between the characters in
Heinlein's last five novels from 1980-1987. Gail is strongly evocative of the powerful, free-spirited female characters from these novels. Joe is quite similar to the more
197:. For the magazine, he decided that the gulf between man and superman would provide an adequate basis for the title. Since Heinlein was no longer using the MacDonald pseudonym by the time the story was published, it was published under his own name.
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Heinlein has written that he had a different idea for the story originally, but decided that it was too large for a novella and could not be written in the time he had available. The idea later became one of the inspirations for his novel
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Will, from receiving any inheritance from him if she chooses to emigrate to the planet "Olympia", which the novel informs us is where the "supermen" went, indicating
Baldwin broke from them at some point between the two stories.
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The "nova effect" can initiate a chain reaction that can consume an entire planet. Mrs. Keithley, one of the richest people in the Solar System, wants to use it to blackmail humanity, so she can rule from her home on the Moon.
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to explain the nature of thought and how people could be trained to think more rapidly and accurately. The material on human intelligence and self-guided evolution is intermixed with a more standard "
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printed the letter in the
November, 1948 issue, then set about making the predictions come true by arranging with the authors mentioned to write and submit stories with the given titles.
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taciturn male heroes such as
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band together, and keeping themselves genetically separate, create a new
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This story was written for the "time travel" or "prophecy" issue of
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Works originally published in Analog
Science Fiction and Fact
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was more than a year in the future, November, 1949. Editor
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264:Short stories by Robert A. Heinlein
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158:The Cat Who Walks Through Walls
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27:Novella by Robert A. Heinlein
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43:Robert A. Heinlein
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