Two Skycars

"At night, out above the ocean in my car, away from city glow, I'd look upward and be ripped apart by longing."

-Poul Anderson, "How To Be Ethnic In One Easy Lesson" IN Anderson, The Van Rijn Method (Riverdale, NY, December 2009), pp. 175-197 AT p. 178.

By rereading Heinlein's Orphans of the Sky from the beginning, I have found the passage that I was looking for:

"A fourteen-year-old child may safely be entrusted with a family skycar and be allowed to make thousand-mile jaunts overnight unaccompanied; it is much more probable that he will injure himself on the trip by overeating than by finding some way to mismanage or damage the vehicle."

-Orphans of the Sky, PART TWO, p. 86.

When I first read Orphans of the Sky in the 1960s, I did not know that it was the fifth and concluding volume of a future history series or indeed that there were such things as future history series. This detail about skycars was an odd datum from a high tech future Earth about which we are told nothing else in this volume.

Another detail about the two generation ships:

Heinlein's Vanguard was expected to take sixty years to reach "Far Centaurus" whereas Anderson's Pioneer was expected to take a hundred and twenty three years to reach Alpha Centauri. Dig the details.