Editing Time Enough for Love (section)

==Plot==
The book covers several periods from the life of [[Lazarus Long]] (born Woodrow Wilson Smith), an early beneficiary of a breeding experiment designed to increase mankind's natural lifespan.  The experiment is known as the Howard Families, after the program's initiator.  Lazarus is the result of more a mutation than the breeding experiment, and he is the oldest living human at more than two thousand years old.

The first half of the book takes the form of several [[novella]]s connected by Lazarus's retrospective narrative.  In the [[framing story]], Lazarus has decided that life is no longer worth living, but, in what is described as a reverse ''[[Arabian Nights]]'' scenario, agrees not to end his life for as long as his companion and descendant, chief executive of the Howard Families Ira Weatheral, will listen to his stories.

==="The Tale of the Man Who Was Too Lazy to Fail"===
This story concerns a 20th-century [[United States Navy]] [[Seaman (rank)|seaman]], [[midshipman]], and [[Officer (armed forces)|officer]] David Lamb, who receives multiple promotions while minimizing any semblance of real work or combat by applying himself enthusiastically to the principle of "constructive laziness".

==="The Tale of the Twins Who Weren't"===
Lazarus tells of his visit as an interplanetary cargo trader to a planet, where he bought a pair of slaves, brother and sister, and immediately [[manumission|manumitted]] them. Because they had no knowledge of independent living or any education, Lazarus teaches them "how to be human" during the voyage.

The two were the result of an experiment in genetic recombination in which two parent cells were separated into complementary [[haploid]] [[gamete]]s and recombined into two embryos. The resulting [[zygote]]s were implanted in a woman and gestated by her, with the result that although both have the same surrogate mother and genetic parents, they are no more closely related genetically than any two people taken at random. They have been prevented from sexual relations by a [[chastity belt]]. However, having confirmed that there is no risk of genetic disease in their offspring (described as the only valid argument against [[incest]]), Lazarus solemnizes their marriage and later establishes them as the owners and operators of a thriving business. At the end of the story, he reveals that the twins looked the same age decades later and expresses his belief that they were his own descendants, from an earlier time that he had been a slave on the same planet.

==="The Tale of the Adopted Daughter"===
A short scene-setter introduces a planet on which Lazarus has led a group of pioneering colonists.

Lazarus, now working as a banker and shopkeeper on the frontier planet and keeping his true age secret, saves a young girl, Dora, from a burning house and becomes her guardian. When she becomes an adult, he leaves the area but returns as a younger man and marries her, and the two move away to start a new settlement, where Lazarus' long life is less likely to be noticed. They eventually manage to build a thriving community. Because Dora is not a descendant of the Howard Families, the source of his longevity, she eventually dies of old age, leaving Lazarus to mourn.

==="Boondock"===
At the beginning of this story, Lazarus has regained his enthusiasm for life, and the remainder of the book is told in a conventional linear manner. Accompanied by some of his descendants, Lazarus has now moved to a new planet and established a [[polyamorous]] family, with three men, three women, and a larger number of children, two of whom are female clones of Lazarus.

==="Da Capo"===
In the concluding tale, Lazarus attempts to travel backward in time to 1919 to experience it as an adult, but an error in calculation places Lazarus in 1916, on the eve of America's involvement in [[World War I]]. An unintentional result is that Lazarus falls in love with his own mother. To retain her esteem and that of his grandfather, Lazarus enlists in the army. Eventually, before Lazarus leaves for the war, he and his mother, Maureen, consummate their mutual attraction, as his mother is already pregnant and so accepts that there is no collateral risk.<ref group="nb">The [[blurb]] of some editions (such as [[Ace Books]] {{ISBN|978-0-441-81076-5}}) states that Lazarus "became his own ancestor", but that is contradicted by the book, since his mother was already pregnant at the time of their encounter, and in any case, his younger self had already been born. <p>Heinlein's later novel ''[[To Sail Beyond the Sunset]]'', the memoirs of Lazarus' mother, also describes the events.</p></ref>

In the trenches of the [[Western Front (World War I)|Western Front]] in France, he is mortally wounded, but is rescued at the last moment by his future companions from the framing story and returned to his own time.

===''The Notebooks of Lazarus Long''===
There are also two "Intermission" sections, each some six or eight pages long, taking the form of lists of provocative phrases and [[aphorisms]] not obviously related to the main narrative. They were later published independently, with illustrations, as ''[[The Notebooks of Lazarus Long]]''.