The really good ones could stay on as law clerks to our present female lawyers, who will be overworked for a while. But not for long. Can you imagine female judges (with no male judges to reverse them) permitting attorneys to take six weeks to pick a jury? Or allowing a trial to ramble along for months?

Women are more practical than men. Biology forces it on them.

Speaking of that, let's go whole hog. Until a female bears a child her socio - economic function is male no matter how orthodox her sexual preference. But a woman who is mother to a child knows she has a stake in the future. So let's limit the franchise and eligibility for office and the practice of law to mothers.

The phasing over should be made gentle. Let males serve out their terms but not succeed themselves. V.! ale lawyers might be given as long as four years to retire or find other jobs while not admitting any more males into law schools. I don't have a candidate for President but the events of the last fifty years prove that anybody can sit in the Oval Office; it's just that some are more impressive in appearance than others.

Brethren and Sisters, have you ever stopped to think that there has not been one rational decision out of the Oval Office for fifty years?

An all - female government could not possibly be worse than what we have been enduring. Let's try it!

"I have sworn upon the altar of God eternal hostility against every form of tyranny over the mind of man."

- Thomas Jefferson - 1800 A.D.

FOREWORD

After I got STARSHIP TROOPERS out of the way, I indulged in some stone masonry (my favorite recreation and reconditioning after writing when I was younger), installed a fountain in our lower irrigation pool and landscaped it - then got back to work on THE HERETIC aka STRANGER IN A STRANGE LAND, and finally finished it more than ten years after I had plotted it. I had been in no hurry to finish it, as that story could not be published commercially until the public mores changed. I could see them changing and it turned out that I had timed it right.

Many people have said that it is clear that STRANGER was written in two parts; the division point showed. But no two people have ever picked the same putative division point... and this is the first time I have ever admitted that it was not written in two chunks but in four.

No one ever will spot the actual starts and stops because STRANGER is one of the very few stories in which I plotted every detail before writing it, and then stuck precisely to that plot. What readers pick as places where I "must have" broken the writing are in fact division points planned for dramatic reasons.

Then I had to cut the damned thing; sticking to that complex and ponderous plot resulted in a MS more than twice as long as it should have been, either commercially or dramatically. Cutting it took more working time than writing it.

In the meantime my wife signed up for University of Colorado Extension classes in Russian. She has always believed that anything worth doing at all is worth overdoing; for two solid years she lived and breathed Russian. She never missed a class, was always thoroughly prepared, hired a private conversation tutor to supplement her classroom work, bought every brand of Russian language instruction records available then, kept them stacked on the record changer and played them all day long while she did other things - our home had a speaker in every room, and a large speaker for the garden.

(This did not bother my work; since I knew no Russian then, it was random noise to me.)

Two years of this and she could read Russian, write Russian, speak Russian, understand Russian - and think in Russian.

Then we went to the USSR.

Other countries, too, of course - Poland and Czechoslovakia won my undying sympathy, as well as the captive Baltic states. I should include the Turkistan countries, too, but they don't seem quite as oppressed - much farther from Moskva and off the beaten track. All in all we traveled about 10,000 miles inside USSR and saw about twenty cities. Ginny's hard work paid off; we saw and heard far, far more than we could have learned had we been dependent on a politically - cleared guide - we often ducked out without our guide. I picked up some pidgin Russian but never learned to speak it - I could give directions, ask directions, order a meal, pay a bill - and swear in Russian (essential!).

The article below I wrote in Hotel Torni, Helsinki, immediately after "escaping" (that's how it felt) from the Soviet Union. The lighter article following "PRAVDA" I wrote a couple of weeks later in Stockholm. By then my nerves had relaxed in the free air of Scandinavia and I could see humor in things that had not seemed at all funny at the time.

"PRAVDA" Means "TRUTH"

"Pravda" means "truth."

That's what it says, right here in my English - Russian dictionary: Pravda - Truth. Surely one may depend on the dictionary.

In Al Smith's bleak, skeptical words: "Let's take a look at the record."

On May Day, 1960, a United States U - 2 reconnaissance plane made some type of unplanned landing in the Soviet Union. This much is both "truth" and "Pravda." Beyond this bare fact, "truth" and "Pravda" diverge widely.

TRUTH: On May 1 this U - 2 plane grounded near Sverdlovsk in the heartland of the Soviet Union about 1,500 miles from the border it crossed. The plane was wrecked but the pilot was not killed. Much of the equipment in the plane, such as radio gear, was undamaged. The pilot's survival and the condition of the wreckage, plus the undamaged equipment, suggest a forced landing in rough country, such as would result from engine failure.

The U - 2 is extremely fast and it cruises at very high altitude, 60 - 70,000 feet. The kinetic energy stored in a moving object varies as the square of its velocity (E = 1/2MV2). A staggering amount of kinetic energy is stored in a U - 2. If such a plane is hit by anti - aircraft rocket fire what happens in the next split second would make a head - on collision between two hot - rodders seem like a mother's loving pat. The anti - aircraft damage merely triggers the disaster; the major violence comes from the plane's great speed - it explodes! Suddenly the sky is filled with junk.

The chance of the pilot's surviving is small. He may escape if the plane's ejection capsule is not damaged when the plane is hit. But there is only the tiniest chance that radios and other relatively fragile pieces of equipment would reach the ground undamaged. Nevertheless, such items were "recovered" from the "shot - down" U-2. A crate of eggs, uncracked, would be equally convincing.

We may never know the exact truth of what happened to that U-2. Only Soviet officials talked to unlucky pilot Powers before his trial.

But the nervous nellies among us should stop beating their breasts over the shame of it all. Photo reconnaissance is not the same thing as a bombing run. An over flight by an unarmed plane is not in the same league with what Khrushchev did to Budapest. What we are dealing with here is the security of the United States and-very possibly-the survival, and certainly the freedom, of the entire human race.

Espionage is not illegal under International Law. Neither is it immoral. The penalty for getting caught at it is very high. It usually means the spy's neck. It is not illegal under U.S. laws for us to attempt to spy on the U.S.S.R., nor is it illegal under Soviet law for them to attempt to spy on us. Nor, in either case, is it an act of war. Throughout history every country has striven to learn the military secrets of any potential enemy, and to protect its own. Spying is wise and necessary insurance against utter military disaster.