although I had suspected that it was a publicity gag rigged by the insurance company and that they had ducked out the back door under assumed names. Or if his ambition was to make a trip to Mars and he thought that clipping one generation out of his personal movie film would enable him to buy a ticket, I supposed that was logical toothere had been a news story about a café-society couple who got married and went right straight from city hall to the sleep sanctuary of Western World Insurance Company with an announcement that they had left instructions not to be called until they could spend their honeymoon on an interplanetary liner. If a man had an incurable disease and expected to die anyhow but thought the doctors a generation later might be able to cure himand he could afford to pay for suspended animation while medical science caught up with what was wrong with himthen cold sleep was a logical bet. On 3 December, 1970, I was looking for it too. īut he never gave up his search for the Door into Summer. Then he would stay indoors until hydraulic pressure utterly forced him outside. Each time this meant that I had to go around with him to each of eleven doors, hold it open while he satisfied himself that it was winter out that way, too, then go on to the next door, while his criticisms of my mismanagement grew more bitter with each disappointment. He had a fixed conviction that at least one of them must lead into summer weather. Connecticut winters are good only for Christmas cards regularly that winter Pete would check his own door, refuse to go out it because of that unpleasant white stuff beyond it (he was no fool), then badger me to open a people door.

But he held me especially responsible for weather. I was in charge of quarters, rations, and weather he was in charge of everything else. While still a kitten, all fluff and buzzes, Pete had worked out a simple philosophy. But he would not use his door when there was snow on the ground.

Pete usually used his own door except when he could bully me into opening a people door for him, which he preferred. I have spent too much of my life opening doors for catsI once calculated that, since the dawn of civilization, nine hundred and seventy-eight man-centuries have been used up that way. The drawback was that the place had eleven doors to the outside. The lack of plumbing made the rent low and what had been the dining room had a good north light for my drafting board. One winter shortly before the Six Weeks War my tomcat, Petronius the Arbiter, and I lived in an old farmhouse in Connecticut. Q&N: The Door into Summer (Heinlein) from

The door into summer robert a heinlein