I guess Bob had taken to thinking about his own mortality, or at least about his no longer qualifying as a spring chicken, whatever that is. I know the feeling. Methuselah's children are a group of extraordinarily long lived humans whose socially awkward longevity has brought them all together as a secretive subgroup inhabiting the fringes of human society. They're not a secret society in that they don't, as a group, have any particular collective influence on anything, and - unusually for golden age science-fiction - neither are they anything so obvious as homo superior or the coming race. They're simply people who live longer than the rest of us for reasons no-one quite understands. Anyway, fearing discovery and the possibility of dissection in order to glean the secret of longevity when even they have no idea what that secret could be, they band together and flee the planet, going off in search of a world where they can all live their lives without having to forge a new birth certificate every seventy years or so.
Whether by accident or design, Stephen Baxter would eventually revisit a few of these ideas in the Destiny's Children books, because they're worth revisiting, and Heinlein threw out some weird and fascinating ideas in this one. The problem is that we're two thirds of the way through the novel before anything interesting happens. I can barely remember what occurred during the first hundred pages. There seemed to be a lot of yacking, page after page of dialogue and not much else, and most of it the sort of snappy content-free repartee which made Stranger in a Strange Land such a fucking chore; so it's a relief when they steal the spaceship and flee the solar system because things happen, and Bob gets to play with science and relativity and the rest, which is where he excels. I also enjoyed the fact of this final third of the novel having the almost haphazard cadence of Simak or even A.E. van Vogt, eschewing the usual brilliant minds with elaborate scientific plans and the need to explain them at length. The long lived hundred or so thousand just sort of sneak onto the conveniently unoccupied New Frontiers - as the galaxy spanning craft is named - assuming there will be something to eat, places to sleep and so on; and one of the gang has conveniently come up with a revolutionary new star drive.
'It looks to me, son, about time to try out your gadget.' He poked a thumb at Libby's uncouth-looking space drive. 'You say that all you have to do is to hook up that one connection?'
'That is what is intended. Attach that one lead to any portion of the mass to be affected. Of course, I don't really know that it will work,' Libby admitted. 'There is no way to test it.'
'Suppose it doesn't?'
Luckily it works, and we're off. The two extraterrestrial civilisation they eventually encounter are both friendly but very odd, and the crew of the New Frontiers decide to head back to Earth after all, because this isn't one of those novels about seeking out new life, new civilisations, or boldly going anywhere in particular. It's mostly about mortality, specifically that of the author.
'I propose to hang onto this life as long as I can and learn as much as I can. Maybe wisdom and understanding are reserved for a later existence and maybe they aren't for us at all, ever. Either way, I'm satisfied to be living and enjoying it.'
I've had trouble reading later Heinlein, and you can tell the preoccupations which informed his less agreeable works were creeping in here, but he's still making the effort, still mostly at the top of his game, and still delivering much more than is promised by the summary on the back cover.
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