Characters
Daniel Boone Davis is a typical Heinlein hero, reflecting much of the author's own character. An engineer and inventor, he is a fierce individualist. The only friends he has in the world are his cat Pete and young Ricky, wise beyond her years.
Miles Gentry is Dan's former Army buddy and business partner, handling the financial and legal side.
Belle S. Darkin presents herself to Miles and Dan when they most need help with the company. She is apparently a brilliant secretary, bookkeeper and office manager who is willing to work for a pittance. In reality she is an accomplished fraud artist with an extensive criminal record, several aliases, and a number of previous marriages which were never dissolved. She seduces first Dan, then Miles.
Frederica Virginia "Ricky" Heinicke is physically an 11-year-old girl but emotionally almost adult. Like all Heinlein's heroines from this period, she is an intelligent redhead, and clearly modeled on Virginia Heinlein, even having a version of her name and her childhood nickname, Rikki-Tikki-Tavi.
Petronius the Arbiter or Pete, Dan's cat. Highly vocal with a wide range of expressive sounds, he acts as a sounding board for Dan's ruminations and fulminations. He goes everywhere with Dan, carried around in an overnight bag, emerging when Dan orders him a ginger ale in a bar, or buys him food at drive-in restaurants.
Chuck Freudenberg is Dan's "beer buddy" and best friend at Geary Manufacturing.
Dr. Hubert Twitchell is a brilliant physicist at the University of Colorado at Boulder, who invents time travel while studying antigravity, only to see his work declared top secret by an armchair colonel looking for promotion to General, robbing Twitchell of a Nobel Prize.
Read more about this topic: The Door Into Summer
Famous quotes containing the word characters:
“Socialist writers are made of sterner stuff than those who only let their characters steeplechase through trouble in order to come out first in the happy ending of moral uplift.”
—Christina Stead (1902–1983)
“The naturalistic literature of this country has reached such a state that no family of characters is considered true to life which does not include at least two hypochondriacs, one sadist, and one old man who spills food down the front of his vest.”
—Robert Benchley (1889–1945)
“I make it a kind of pious rule to go to every funeral to which I am invited, both as I wish to pay a proper respect to the dead, unless their characters have been bad, and as I would wish to have the funeral of my own near relations or of myself well attended.”
—James Boswell (1740–1795)