escape route, while Joe is certain the transmitter is booby trapped. Knowing that they are both about to die, they telepathically recite their own private marriage vows. Characters One of the story's key characters, Gregory "Kettle Belly" Baldwin (also known as Doctor Hartley M. Baldwin), appears as a much older man in the later novel Friday, there known mostly as "Boss." (Boss briefly mentions Gulf'''s protagonists Joe and Gail as examples of "honorable hatchet men.") While the earlier version of the character had strongly argued that smarter people are, and ought to be, separate from the human race in general, Boss appears to categorically deny this premise. However, he prohibits Friday, in his Will, from receiving any inheritance from him if she chooses to emigrate to the planet "Olympia", which the novel informs us is where the "supermen" went, indicating Baldwin broke from them at some point between the two stories. The dialogue between the male and female leads, Joe and Gail, is reminiscent of the exchanges between the characters in Heinlein's last five novels from 1980-1987. Gail is strongly evocative of the powerful, free-spirited female characters from these novels. Joe is quite similar to the more taciturn male heroes such as Zebadiah Carter and Richard Ames from, respectively, The Number of the Beast and The Cat Who Walks Through Walls. Origins This story was written for the "time travel" or "prophecy" issue of Astounding Science Fiction. The issue was prompted by a letter from a reader (Richard A. Hoen of the University Club in Buffalo, New York) commenting on the stories in an issue, referring to the stories by author and title, and offering his respective praise and derision for those works. The magazine frequently received letters of this kind; however, in this case, the reader described an issue whose cover date was more than a year in the future, November, 1949. Editor John W. Campbell printed the letter in the November, 1948 issue, then set about making the predictions come true by arranging with the authors mentioned to write and submit stories with the given titles. Gulf, by Anson MacDonald (a Heinlein pseudonym), was one of the stories involved. Heinlein has written that he had a different idea for the story originally, but decided that it was too large for a novella and could not be written in the time he had available. The idea later became one