The door to summer
The door in the summer : (Alternative title door to the future , original title The Door into Summer is a) science fiction - novel by Robert A. Heinlein from 1956. In it, the story of Daniel Boone Davis is told, a brilliant inventor who is hibernated into the future by his deceitful fiancée , but takes revenge through time travel.
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Daniel Boone Davis lives in the USA in an alternative version of the year 1970, in which communism was destroyed after the USA repulsed an attack on the Soviet Union by soldiers who were hidden in Alaska. Hibernation is now being offered commercially by insurance companies, allowing people to be sedated and “stored” for years without aging. After the six-week war devastated the northeastern United States, Denver became the capital.
Davis is an inventor who runs a home automation company with his partner Miles Gentry, who is responsible for legal affairs.
Davis, a technical genius, previously worked as a nuclear weapons specialist, using military technology that could not be patented to create unique robotic assistance. Together with Gentry, he hires Belle Darkin as a secretary. After he got engaged to Darkin and gave her shares in the Dienstboten AG founded by him and Gentry, Darkin and Gentry surprisingly turn against him at a board meeting. They want Dienstboten AG to merge into a global corporation, but Davis is extremely upset and threatens legal action.
Darkin surprisingly injects him with a drug known as a ghost drug that leaves Davis completely numb. He reveals to his two fraudulent partners that he had kept a commercially available hibernation option open for himself and his beloved cat Petronius, but no longer wants to use it. Darkin forces him, who is under the influence of the will-destroying drug, to visit the hibernation institute and to be sedated until the year 2000. Petronius is chased into the streets by Gentry and Darkin and is likely to starve to death while Davis lies in cold sleep.
When he woke up in 2000, the doctor Dr. Albrecht is cared for in a hospital that is slowly preparing him for all the changes that have occurred in recent decades: Ricky, Miles’s daughter who fell in love with Daniel, has disappeared and cannot be found, Petronius has died and Davis is once a carefully managed block of shares destroyed in the course of a snowball fraud. Almost penniless, he has to work on a scrap press in which vehicles that are produced by a senseless planned economy are immediately destroyed again.
The Dienstboten AG founded by Davis and Gentry has since been bought up and merged into Aladin AG . When Davis introduces himself here, he is being reinstated as part of a PR campaign. While doing research, he finds that many devices have been made that look like he could have designed them if he hadn't slept. Some of these designs existed only in his imagination and were never put on paper. When Davis checks the relevant patents, he learns that they have been filed by a DB Davis. - But already after he went into cold sleep.
Confused, he talks to his work colleague and friend Chuck Freudenberg about this paradox and while they both enjoy beer they talk about time travel. The drunk Freudenberg accidentally reveals that years ago he worked on a top-secret time travel project for the military. It was only when Davis explained to him that he was a veteran of the nuclear war in the 1960s and had an extremely high security clearance that Freudenberg was ready to explain more to him: Dr. Hubert Twitchell is the inventor of a time machine that can move entire divisions through time. But even if you can set how far you want to travel, it depends entirely on chance whether the journey is in the future or in the past. Since the journey devours extreme energies, the project was discontinued and only a prototype gathered dust in the inventor's laboratory.
Davis is looking for Dr. Twitchell, therefore, provokes and annoys him with the accusation that the machine is mere fraud, until this inventor - known to be very quick-tempered - angrily bumps him onto the platform and sends him on a journey through time, in order to teach him better. Davis is happy to discover that he actually arrived in 1970.
Here he meets the friendly nudists John and Jenny Sutton, who take him in and to whom he gradually reveals that he comes from the future. Because gold is so cheap in 2000, Davis carries a belt of gold that John sells for him, so that he has enough cash to start a development office where he designs the inventions that he gave him that year Looked so familiar in 2000.
When the time comes for the Davis of the past to be betrayed by Gentry and Darkin, Davis sneaks to the house, rescues Petronius, and steals the prototype of his household robot, so that the Maids Corporation goes bankrupt and Darkin is ruined while Gentry dies of grief.
Davis then goes to the summer camp of 11-year-old Ricky, who is in love with him, and tells her to go to sleep when she turns 21 and wait until the year 2000. He himself can be frozen together with Petronius and marries Ricky, who is now only ten years younger than him biologically. They then live happily together, and Davis greatly enjoys completing his plan of revenge.
Dramatis personæ
- Daniel Boone Davis, the protagonist, a technical genius
- Miles Gentry, Daniel's business partner
- Belle S. Darkin, Daniel and Miles' secretary. First engaged to Daniels, she betrays him and sends him into the future under drugs
- Frederica Virginia "Ricky" Heinicke, the 11-year-old daughter of Miles, who Daniel later marries
- Petronius "Pete", Dan's cat who loves to drink ginger ale
- Chuck Freudenberg, Dan's friend in the future
- Dr. Hubert Twitchell, the inventor of the time machine
Others
- The book Warday by Whitley Strieber describes the consequences of a nuclear war in which the very cities are destroyed, the destruction of which is also mentioned in The Door in the Summer .
expenditure
The translation into German by Tony Westermayr has appeared in several editions:
- Door to the future . Goldmann, Munich 1963 (German first edition).
- Door to the future . Goldmann, Munich, 1st edition January 1967, ISBN 3-442-23075-6 .
- The door to summer . Bastei-Lübbe, Bergisch Gladbach 1993, ISBN 3-404-24176-2 .
- The door to summer . Heyne, 2016, ISBN 978-3-4533-1739-0 .