2

  But work went on. The page proofs of the third edition of the textbook came in, and I was busy indexing.

  On June 21, I received a letter from the University of Maryland medical school. They wanted me to lecture there the next February 8, and they offered me, as payment, one hundred dollars plus expenses.

  That was an awesome fee. It was the first time I had ever been offered a fee in three figures just to talk for an hour. I accepted at once.

  3

  A young man named Robert Rubin passed his Ph.D. examination on June 25. Rubin was the only doctoral student I ever had working under me.

  On that same day, I got a fan letter from television actress Polly Bergen. She had read The End of Eternity and loved it. I was delighted. Not only was it flattering to have among my readers someone so beautiful and prominent, but also I had always been taken with her when I saw her on television. She was beautiful and intelligent.

  4

  It was time to go to another Midwescon. I went to New York on the twenty-sixth, and early in the morning the next day, Marty Greenberg picked me up and drove me to Cincinnati. We got there at 11 p.m. after sixteen hours of fairly solid driving. The last fifteen miles was through the tail end of a hurricane that had penetrated far inland, and the rain was torrential.

  The 2½ days of the convention were pleasant and rather low-key. I met Robert Silverberg there for the first time. He had not been writing science fiction long, but he was establishing a record of prolificity that put even me in the shade. He was a young man with dark, Satanic eyes, and a generally lowering expression. He was one of the brightest people I have ever met, but somehow an unhappy one. With him was his wife, Barbara, very good-looking, intelligent, and lighthearted.

  I was home in West Newton on the evening of July 1.

  5

  My science-fiction stories kept appearing. The June 1957 Infinity had my short story “Blank!,”46 which had been written in Larry Shaw’s office on a dare, from the title only. Two other writers, Randall Garrett and Harlan Ellison, also wrote stories with the same title, and all three appeared in that issue.

  “Does a Bee Care?”47 appeared in the June 1957 If, and “A Woman’s Heart” appeared in the June 1957 Satellite. This last one was so entirely trivial that I never included it in any of my collections.

  The July 1957 Astounding included “Profession”48 as the cover and also my article “The Sea-Urchin and We.”49 It was particularly gratifying to me to see “Profession” in print, and to have it well received after Horace’s savage rejection.

  The August 1957 F & SF published my five-hundred-word “A Loint of Paw,”50 which, of all my gag stories, pleased me the most. The end point was a Spoonerism: “A niche in time saves Stein.”

  I wrote additional stories, too. On July 17, I began a new computer story, “All the Troubles in the World,” describing the sad lot of a computer that had too many of humanity’s problems loaded on its shoulders.

  And on July 30, I began a short story called “The Feeling of Power,” which dealt with a world in which computers were so ubiquitous that people had forgotten the techniques of pen-and-ink computation.

  That story had its origin in the fact that Bill Boyd dared me to think up the plot of a science-fiction story on the spot. Since be had a desk calculator on his desk (one of the old mechanical ones), I used that as the basis. He liked the plot and I said, magnanimously, “You can have it.”

  Driving home that evening, however, the story so developed itself in my mind that I couldn’t bear to let him have it after all. I called Bill the instant I got home, took back the story, and wrote it as quickly as I could.

  And meanwhile, on July 8, I mailed off the index to the third edition of Biochemistry and Human Metabolism. The galleys of the index arrived on July 29; I checked them and mailed them back on July 30, 1957. After six years, my work on that ill-fated and useless venture was over forever.

  6

  Stanley called on the morning of July 17, 1957, to tell me he was a father. Ruth had borne a son, who was named Eric. That meant I had two nephews. In fact, I had three, for Stanley eventually adopted Ruth’s son, Danny, too. And a week later, Stanley turned twenty-eight. My kid brother was no kid anymore.

  7

  On July 22, 1957, Catherine de Camp was at MIT with her two sons. She was checking out colleges for her son Rusty (it was over twelve years since we had baby-sat with him as a preschool youngster). I hadn’t seen her for five years and she was forty-nine now, and I felt I would be distressed at seeing her beauty fade.

  How wrong I was! I saw her coming down the long corridor at MIT and she looked almost as though it were still 1941, when I had first met her. I took her and the children to lunch and then drove them past our house. Since David was down with a throat infection, I didn’t want them coming in and subjecting her children to the contagion. The rest of us congregated in the driveway, and David waved from the window.

  8

  I was on television for the first time on July 23, 1957. I shared the program (a talk show on Boston’s educational channel) with Norbert Wiener, who took me to MIT afterward and told me, in some detail, of a novel he was writing.

  9

  On August 3, 1957, I drove to Washington from Boston, covering 450 miles in 9½ hours. While there, I gave a series of lectures on biochemical subjects to a summer class for high-school teachers of science.

  On my way home, I stopped in New York for a couple of days and picked up an advance copy of Lucky Starr and the Moons of Jupiter.

  I also called Abelard-Schuman to get the latest news on my books. I wasn’t entirely happy with Abelard-Schuman. In the first place, Lillian McClintock’s husband, who copy edited my books, copy edited them heavily, leaving scarcely a sentence untouched, and I hated that. For another, publications were often delayed, I was charged for diagrams, and so on. I felt restive and was ready to move on to another publisher if one offered itself.

  10

  I finally got home on August 8, and at 4 p.m. I said to Gertrude, “Where’s Robyn?”

  “Out playing,” said Gertrude, who was busy preparing dinner.

  I went out to call her. She didn’t answer. No one had seen her. She was only 2½. I ordered David to find her but he failed and I felt he should have been watching her and told him so angrily. The poor kid was only 6; how responsible could he be?

  I took out the car and drove slowly about the neighborhood calling for Robyn. There was no answer. At our wits’ end, we called the police.

  It was the first time we had ever lost a child. David had a perfect sense of direction and never got lost. He always knew exactly where he was and how to get home.

  Now there was nothing to do but wait for the police, and this we did with mounting terror. Finally, a police car came driving slowly down the street and we waved to it frantically, out of our minds with eagerness to tell the story and get them looking.

  We didn’t have to. They had Robyn with them.

  “Is this the child?” they asked.

  “Yes,” I said, seizing her and holding her so tightly I nearly collapsed her rib cage. “How did you find her?”

  “Well,” one of them said, “after we got your call, we got another call from a woman two blocks away saying there was a lost child wandering about, and we thought there wouldn’t be two children lost in this neighborhood, so we went there first.”

  They drove off after refusing the five-dollar bill I tried to press upon them.

  11

  Williams & Wilkins put out a small in-house periodical called Kalends. Since we were Williams & Wilkins authors we got copies. I always found them of surpassing dullness to anyone outside the shop and would dump them without reading them.

  In one issue, however, a puzzle was introduced, and some sort of minor prize was offered the first to solve it. The editor of the periodical said he didn’t know the answer himself, but the contributor had assured him there was one. (It was rather foolish not to know the answer before publishing.)

  The puzzle went as follows:

  To five and five and fifty-five

  The first of letters add.

  It was a thing that pleased a king

  And made a wise man sad.

  I had thrown away my copy without opening it, but one of Boyd’s assistants arrived with it. With touching faith in my cleverness she said, “Please solve it for me, Dr. Asimov, so I can send it in and win the prize.”

  I looked at it and immediately I thought of Bathsheba. She had pleased King David, who took her from her husband and arranged to have the inconvenient gentleman killed in battle. That wicked deed saddened the wise prophet Nathan.

  Well, then, “five and five and fifty-five” expressed in Roman numerals was V and V and LV, and if we add “the first of letters” or A, we get WLVA, and, remembering that in Latin, inscriptions V and U are identical, we get the answer “vulva,” which is the female genital organ—and certainly that pleased David and saddened Nathan.

  I said to the girl, “I don’t think you want to send this in,” and explained the reason. She agreed that I should write a letter and I did, gently telling the editor he was an ass for buying a pig in a poke.

  It turned out that my analysis was correct, of course, and in a future issue of Kalends the editor begged off from announcing the solution and listed some of those in the firm who had solved the puzzle. My name was not listed, nor was my letter answered. The editor, apparently, felt his asshood should not have been mentioned.

  12

  The October 1957 Galaxy contained “Ideas Die Hard.” It was the first time I had had anything in Galaxy since “The Caves of Steel” almost four years before. “Ideas Die Hard,” with its gag suggestion that the Moon was only a false front, became foolish once the Soviets photographed the far side of the Moon. The idea of the story became too silly for me to tolerate, in fact. It was anthologized a few times, but I never put it into one of my collections.

  13

  On August 13, the whole family, children included, went to Moodus, Connecticut, to spend a vacation at “Holiday House.” It was the first time we had ever taken the children with us.

  On the whole, it was not a success. They had a kind of nursery school at which the children could stay, but we were never at ease with that arrangement. Furthermore, David could not bring himself to eat the resort-hotel food, breakfast in particular.51 His breakfast those days consisted invariably of toast broken up into two soft-boiled eggs and the whole mixed together. I had to come down every morning and prepare that for him.

  What’s more, all four of us, one at a time, got “red throat,” which was, apparently, endemic in the hotel. Nothing serious; it just meant that each one of us was out of things a day or so and, in the course of the week, no one day saw all of us out and about.

  I spent part of my time working on a robot story for Infinity, one I called “What’s the Use?” It was about a robot that had accidentally come off the assembly line as the equivalent of a human idiot and the problem of finding a use for it. I had brought my manual typewriter and it was my first idea to work indoors.

  Gertrude, however, urged me to take advantage of the beautiful weather and work outdoors. I saw her point and went outdoors.

  It had its disadvantages. In the first place, it was sufficiently windy so that I had to use stones to keep my paper in place. In the second place, people kept coming up curiously to see what I was typing and, after they had watched a while, they would say, “What are you doing?”

  “Typing a story,” I would say.

  “What for?” they would want to know.

  “So I can sell it. I’m a writer.”

  “You mean you’re working?” they would say, horrified. The fact that I was working spread throughout the camp and created some ill will. It was un-American, apparently, to want to work and to prefer work to vacation.

  I finished the story, however, and mailed it off to Larry Shaw from Moodus, at the same time I was buying penicillin for the red throat. Larry took it at once.

  We got back on August 20, just in time to celebrate David’s sixth birthday.

  14

  On August 21, I did my second television appearance, again on the educational channel. This time it was with David O. Woodbury and John Hansen, two science writers. We were to discuss the art of writing on scientific and technical matters for the public, and in a preliminary lunch with them at the MIT faculty club, I got the impression they would ask me to write a science-fiction story right there on the air.

  So, just in case they did, I quietly invented a very short one. On the air, sure enough, the task was sprung on me, as a challenge, and I agreed. With the lights blazing and the camera rolling, I wrote away, answering questions that the others put to me as a deliberate distraction.

  I managed to finish (the story was only 350 words) and read it out before the half-hour program was over.

  Once I got home, I typed it up, entitled it “Insert Knob A in Hole B,” and sent it off to F & SF, with an explanation as to how it came to be. Tony Boucher accepted it at once.

  That month, the Abelard-Schuman book Building Blocks of the Universe finally came, as well as my Doubleday collection of short stories, Earth Is Room Enough.

  Some of my science-fiction stories appeared at about this time, too. The November 1957 Venture arrived with “I’m in Marsport Without Hilda.”52 The December 1957 Super-Science had “The Gentle Vultures,”53 and the October 1957 Astounding had my science article “Overflowing the Periodic Table.”54

  15

  On September 4, 1957, I got a phone call from Dr. Yeager of the National Heart Institute concerning my request for a year’s extension of the grant without additional funds.

  I was glad to be able to explain to him that The Living River was finally under way but that I wouldn’t be able to finish it till the second year of the grant.

  “However,” I said, “I haven’t drawn the twenty-five hundred dollars assigned me in the grant. I won’t touch a penny of that until the book is finished.”

  “No, no,” said Yeager, sounding quite alarmed. “You mustn’t do that. You will upset our bookkeeping. That money must be drawn before the expiration of the grant year.”

  “I’m sorry,” I said, “I didn’t know. I’ll draw it at once—but I’ll pay it back if I don’t finish the book. And don’t worry, I will finish it.”

  After I got off the phone, I went down to the school office and asked them to set the wheels in motion to make out a check for twenty-five hundred dollars against my grant.

  16

  On September 6, 1957, we decided we no longer needed diapers for Robyn and cut our relations with the diaper supply company. After six solid years, we no longer saved old diapers to give back and receive clean diapers in their place. It was better than paying off the mortgage.

  And on September 9, David entered the first grade. It wasn’t a cut-and-dried affair. The school wasn’t at all sure he was ready for it, emotionally, and we weren’t either. However, we had a talk with the principal, a Miss Caldwell, and we decided to chance it.

  17

  Sinex was now at school regularly, using Walker’s old office, and I was slowly becoming accustomed to his loud voice and abrupt manner. He continued to seem amiable.

  I was having a little trouble with that twenty-five-hundred-dollar stipend, however, and that I found irritating. I had thought that since the grant was mine (I was the “principal investigator”) I had only to ask for a check to be made out and it would be made out. I found, though, after a few days had passed and I had inquired about the matter, that it was necessary for me to get Keefer’s signature.

  When I registered instant indignation, they assured me it was only a formality and I trundled down the hall to Keefer’s office, in a bad mood, and handed over my application to his secretary.

  7

  Keefer

  1

  On September 18, 1957, I was called into Keefer’s office.

  “Well, Asimov,” he said with a catlike smile, “what’s all this about you wanting twenty-five hundred dollars from the school?”

  I said, “I don’t want a penny from the school, sir. I want twenty-five hundred dollars from my grant, money that was assigned to me.” “No,” he said, “the grant is to the school, and it rests entirely with us as to whether you get that money.”

  “It does not,” I said hotly. “That money has been assigned to me. The school took its overhead and that’s all it gets. My money I get.”

  “We’ll see about that,” he said. “You know we object to your writing books on school time, and your case will have to be reviewed at the end of the year.”

  “Go ahead and review it all you want,” I said, “but meanwhile I want my money and I mean to get it.”

  And I stalked out of his office. Actually, I didn’t want the twenty-five hundred dollars at all. It could go to hell, for all I cared, but I wasn’t going to let him have it.

  I went straight to Sinex and told him what had happened and demanded to know where he stood. Sinex seemed disturbed, not so much at the confrontation but at its having taken place so soon. He said he would back me up, but with such a lack of enthusiasm that I recognized at once that here was an ally I had better do without.

  I therefore said, “I intend to get that twenty-five hundred dollars as a matter of principle, Dr. Sinex, but I don’t need any help from you. You’ve just come here and you may find yourself in trouble if you engage in a controversy on my side. So stay out of it and I’ll handle this myself.”