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:
“Trial. A formal inquiry designed to prove and put upon record the blameless characters of judges, advocates and jurors.”
—Ambrose Bierce (1842–1914)
“Hemingway was a prisoner of his style. No one can talk like the characters in Hemingway except the characters in Hemingway. His style in the wildest sense finally killed him.”
—William Burroughs (b. 1914)
“My characters never die screaming in rage. They attempt to pull themselves back together and go on. And that’s basically a conservative view of life.”
—Jane Smiley (b. 1949)