The Door Into Summer by Robert A. Heinlein

He persuades Geary Manufacturing, which now owns Hired Girl, to take him on as a figurehead. He has lost Pete the cat, who fled Miles' house after Dan was drugged, and has no idea how to find a now middle-aged Ricky.ĭan begins rebuilding his life. What little money Belle let him keep went with the collapse of Mannix in 1987. Belle and Miles discover Dan's plans to go into cold sleep and have him committed, but to a different repository run by one of Belle's shady associates for the Mannix corporation.ĭan wakes up in the year 2000 with no money to his name and no idea how to find the people he once knew. Belle injects him with an illegal 'zombie' drug, reducing him to somnolent compliance.

Dan confronts Miles and finds Belle in Miles' home. First he mails his Hired Girl stock certificate to the one person he trusts, Miles' stepdaughter Frederica 'Ricky' Virginia Gentry.

He warns him to show up sober or not at all 24 hours later for the actual procedure.Īfter becoming sober, Dan decides instead to mount a counter-attack. The examining doctor at the cold sleep facility immediately sees that Dan has been drinking. Left with a large financial settlement, and his remaining Hired Girl stock, he elects to take 'cold sleep' (suspended animation), hoping to wake up thirty years later to a brighter future. Wishing to stay independent, Dan opposes the takeover, but is outvoted and then fired as Chief Engineer. manufactures robot vacuum cleaners, but Dan had been developing a new line of all-purpose household robots, Flexible Frank, when Miles announces his intention to sell the company (and Flexible Frank) to Mannix Enterprises in which Miles would become a vice-president. Dan's only friend in the world is his cat, 'Pete', a feisty tomcat who hates going outdoors in the snow. She had been Dan's fiancée, deceiving him into giving her enough voting stock to allow her and Miles to seize control. He has lost his company, Hired Girl, Inc., to his partner Miles Gentry and the company bookkeeper, Belle Darkin.

The novel opens in 1970 with Daniel Boone Davis, an engineer and inventor, well into a long drinking binge. The idea for the novel came from an incident outlined by Heinlein later:

The Door Into Summer by Robert A. Heinlein