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"Life-Line" is a 6000-word short story by Robert A. Heinlein, about a machine that can predict when a person will die. The story was first published in the August, 1939 issue of Astounding Science Fiction, and was Heinlein's first published piece of fiction.

Spoiler Warning: Plot details and/or information about the ending follow. If you wish to enjoy the work first, stop reading here and return at another time.

Plot

In 1939, Dr. Pinero invents a machine which, he claims, examines a person’s life-line, and accurately gives out the time of the person’s birth and death. He tries to present the machine to an academy of scientists, but they are too skeptical to even give him an audience. He peddles the machine to the public, as a business, and has many satisfied customers.

But this might mean financial ruin for the life insurance industry, so the major insurance companies try to get an injunction against his business. The insurance companies have their skeptical scientists on the witness list, but Dr. Pinero argues that they don’t even know how the machine works (and he won’t tell them), so how can they say it can’t work? The only answer, Pinero convinces them, is to do an empirical test. Pinero will test each member of the academy of sciences, and put the date of that person’s death in a sealed envelope. Those envelopes will be opened later, as members of the academy start to die off, and this will prove or refute Pinero’s claims.

Pinero is disturbed when a young couple comes to him for a reading, because his machine indicates they will both die that day; they are hit by a car as they leave his building. Later, an angry mob bursts in on Dr Pinero, killing him and destroying his machine. When news reaches the academy of scientists, they open Pinero’s envelope, and find that he had predicted the time of his own death exactly. They all reach for their own envelopes, to see when they will die, but then they think better of it, and burn the envelopes instead.

Additional publications

• Heinlein updated the story in 1951, for book publication, and changed the year the story took place in from 1939 to 1951.

• This story has been reprinted in, among other places, Isaac Asimov Presents The Great SF Stories 1 (1939). It also is the first story in the author’s Future History collection, The Past Through Tomorrow.