The Long Watch

"The Long Watch" is a science fiction short story by Robert A. Heinlein. It appears in Heinlein's short story collections, "The Green Hills of Earth" and "The Past Through Tomorrow". While it is included in collections of Heinlein's Future History, it does not appear to share continuity with it. Instead, though, it seems to share continuity with "Space Cadet" published a year earlier, and the story seems to have grown out of a brief episode in the book.

The story was originally written for the American Legion and published under the name "Rebellion on the Moon" [http://www.nitrosyncretic.com/rah/rahpubs.html] , and deals with an officer who faces a coup by a would-be dictator bent on nuclear extortion.

Plot summary

The story is set in 1999, almost a half century after its writing, and deals with John Ezra Dahlquist, an officer in the Space Patrol, an international organization set up to have custody of nuclear weapons, and if need be, use them.

Dahlquist, a bomb officer at the lunar base, has a degree in physics, and is somewhat proprietary about the bombs he maintains. He is apolitical, and deeply in love with his wife and young daughter.

Dahlquist is called to the office of his commanding officer, Colonel Towers, who explains the incipient plot. Dahlquist has been deemed "reliable"—officers who are not reliable have been imprisoned or killed. The blackmail will include demonstration destruction of "an unimportant town or two", so Earth takes them seriously. Dahlquist appears to go along with what Towers wants, but he is in turmoil within.

Dahlquist decides to interrupt the coup by denying the weapons to the plotters, not wanting his wife and daughter to live in a world run by Colonel Towers. Dahlquist gets out onto the Lunar surface and into the guarded bomb storage room. (The story notes how all the other bombs on ships orbiting the Earth have been disabled; hence, control of the bombs on the Moon is all that matters). He barricades himself in the bunker and proceeds via radio to negotiate with Towers and the other conspirators, pretending to be still as naïve as he was a few days before, and later rigs one of the bombs to be detonated by hand, threatening to blow up himself, the bombs, and anybody who happens to be within several hundred yards. His initial intent is to give the government time to react, surmising that time will not be on the plotters' side.

However, when he realizes that he is growing tired and may not be able to keep awake much longer, and that if he falls asleep the conspirators may regain control, Dahlquist reluctantly comes to the conclusion that he must disable the bombs beyond Towers' ability to put them back together, and that the only way to do that is to open them up and break the smooth half-globes of plutonium at the core of each bomb. He does so, but in the process incurs so much radiation exposure that death is inevitable.

Dahlquist, who originally planned to surrender once the bombs were disabled, decides not to give Towers the satisfaction. The dying Dahlquist seems to be surrounded by the shades of past heroes of whom he is not aware, but he feels he can see his wife Edith and know that she was not angry with him for abandoning her and their daughter. In his last moments he busies himself rolling and smoking cigarettes from butts and the butts of butts, and he dies "very happy."

The coup collapses and Towers shoots himself. Dahlquist's thoroughly radioactive body is gingerly recovered by handling equipment and placed in a lead coffin. The robot ship bearing his radioactive coffin to Earth carrying the insignia of an admiral and being afterwards "thrown away into space, never to be used for a lesser purpose", and the entire world going into mourning for him with all commercial broadcasts stopped and nothing but dirges broadcast on all channels for a whole week. His body is entombed in a marble monument, with an honor guard beyond the limit of safe approach.

Connection with "Space Cadet"

The last Heinlein's readers hear of Dahlquist is in "Space Cadet". "Ezra Dahlquist" is one of "Those who helped create the Tradition of the Patrol". A display about his deed, "the day shameful and glorious in the history of the Patrol", is available to new recruits, accompanied by the Valhalla theme from Wagner's Der Ring des Nibelungen. At each roll-call of the Patrol anywhere, his name is mustered together with those of three others in addition to those actually being mustered. The protagonists of "Space Cadet", though, are not familiar with his name—except one (who will prove to be an antagonist) who states that Dahlquist died due to his own carelessness, having disobeyed his commanding officer—and that if things had gone the other way, Dahlquist would have been held up as a villain.

External links

* [http://www.heinleinsociety.org/readersgroup/AIM_05-27-2000.html Heinlein Reader's Discussion Group on 'The Long Watch' and 'Gentlemen, Be Seated']
* [http://www.panshin.com/critics/Dimension/hd03-2.html Alexei Panshin's review of this and other Heinlein stories]
* [http://www.depauw.edu/sfs/backissues/9/berger9art.htm The Triumph of Prophecy: Science Fiction and Nuclear Power in the Post-Hiroshima Period by Albert L. Berger]