The first meeting was slated to be held at the Museum of Natural History on December 10, 1958, and Campbell rather put the pressure on me to attend. I was going to go into New York a week earlier, but Campbell did have a claim on me and I adjusted my schedule.

  On December 10, I went to New York by train and handed in the manuscript of The Kingdom of the Sun to Abelard-Schuman. I also met a new editor, Hal Cantor.

  In the evening I went to the museum. The meeting was held in a hall that had a capacity of 440, but only 52 people attended. I was deputed, on five minutes’ notice, to introduce Campbell, which I did. That meant I was stuck on the platform along with the elderly gentleman of Diners Club fame and, of course, Campbell himself.

  Campbell then gave the scientific talk of the evening. It was long and, with all my love for Campbell, I cannot say it was interesting. I listened gravely, however, as did everyone in the audience, except the elderly gentleman who, it seemed, was rather hard of hearing.

  He sat through some fifteen minutes of Campbell’s speech with an increasingly unhappy look on his lined face and then began making comments to me, who sat next to him, in what I imagined he felt to be a low and scarce-heard whisper. It wasn’t. His voice was louder than Campbell’s. He kept saying, “What’s all this? He’s killing the club. This isn’t what we’re here for.”

  I tried gently to shush him, but he wouldn’t have any of that. I got pinker and pinker and managed not to laugh. In fact, nobody laughed, and Campbell, pretending he heard nothing, continued his talk, flat-footedly, to the very end.

  As far as I know there was never a second meeting of the Interplanetary Exploration Society, at least not in New York, although a couple of issues of a periodical with that name managed to struggle into existence.

  A Boston branch continued for some time, and I dutifully attended meetings. Campbell maintained that the Boston branch remained alive because of the peculiarly academic nature of Boston, but that wasn’t it at all. It remained alive because of a very puzzling and peculiar woman named Alma Hill, who spoke perfect English words, but rarely put them together into a sentence I could understand. She insisted on running the society and singlehandedly kept it alive despite the torpor of everyone else.

  What I remember best about Alma Hill is that once when I pleaded the press of business as an excuse for not doing something she wanted done, she called me a “humbug.” Assuming that a “humbug” meant a phony, I allowed my feelings to be hurt and said so. Alma promptly wrote a long letter explaining exactly what she meant by “humbug,” and since I couldn’t make head or tail of what she said, I let it drop.

  25

  On that December 10 trip to New York, I picked up an advance copy of the Avon paperback edition of my mystery. They called it The Death Dealers, a totally inappropriate name. What’s more, there was on the cover a beautiful woman holding a gun—which was fine except that there was no beautiful woman in the story and no gun. I complained, but the Avon editor told me the cover was simply a device to label the book as a mystery and it didn’t necessarily have to have anything to do with the story.

  I read the book on the train on my way back to Boston and decided it was no good after all—and felt very depressed. (Nor did I feel compensated by the fact that the February 1959 Satellite arrived containing “‘Benefactor of Humanity,” which Margulies had retitled “A Statue for Father.”78)

  One important fact about The Death Dealers, however, I recognized only in retrospect—and only long after, too.

  My detective in the book was named Jack Doheny. He was lower-class in origins and in speech, and was terribly impressed and overawed by all the scientists among whom he found himself.

  He was polite, he asked elementary questions about chemistry, was abashed, apologized—and, in the end, he solved the crime and you realized that at no time had he really been abashed, or had he apologized for anything more than effect.

  I liked him, and I planned to use him in future stories, but the poor reception that The Death Dealers received, both in manuscript and in print, deterred me.

  Years later I realized that I could never use him again, for the television program “Colombo” had arrived, and Colombo was Jack Doheny to the life.

  I don’t for one minute suggest that anyone got the idea for Colombo from my book—the notion of a lower-class detective pitted against the upper crust is not so startling an idea that it can’t arise independently. Besides, “Colombo” does it much better and it was, in its time, just about my favorite noncomedy program.

  What I do regret is that if I were ever to try to use Jack Doheny again, everyone will be sure I am copying “Colombo,” even though I was there first by over a decade.

  26

  I ended 1958 with four books for the year:

  25. The World of Carbon (Abelard-Schuman)

  26. Lucky Starr and the Rings of Saturn (Doubleday)

  27. The World of Nitrogen (Abelard-Schuman)

  28. The Death Dealers (Avon)

  The Death Dealers was my first paperback original.

  As for my writing earnings, the year kept to the high level of the first six months. I ended up with a literary income of $31,100, counting the remainder of my $2,500 stipend for The Living River.

  If the last of my school earnings are included, my annual income was nearly $34,300. I felt fine.

  27

  January 2, 1959, was my “Jack Benny birthday,” my thirty-ninth, and the Soviets celebrated by sending up the first successful Moon probe. It skimmed around the Moon and took the first photographs of the far side that, till then, no human being had ever seen. And it was that which made nonsense of my story “Ideas Die Hard,” which I had written and published nearly two years before.

  28

  On January 10, I received copies of my short-story collection Nine Tomorrows (the best short-story collection, in my opinion, I have ever published). It was my fifteenth Doubleday book and now, for the first time in nine years, I did not have a single book in press with Doubleday.

  It was not that I lacked for publishers. My remaining books were distributed among five other publishers, and I had two in press with still another one, Houghton Mifflin. And yet another one, Random House, showed up on January 30, when Janet Finney of that publishing house first asked me to do a children’s book on rockets and I agreed. Nevertheless, none of them did, or could ever, replace Doubleday.

  29

  On January 29, Marcia had a second son, named Richard. I now had four nephews; Larry and Richard through Marcia and Nick; and Danny and Eric through Ruth and Stanley. Ruth was pregnant at this time and eventually gave birth to Nanette, my first niece, and that ended child-bearing for all three of us. My parents ended with seven grandchildren: five boys and two girls.

  30

  On February 5, 1959, one of David’s milk teeth fell out; it was the first to do so. I followed the American cliché. I told him that if he put it under his pillow, the tooth fairy would leave a dime in its place. And so she did.

  I followed the practice for both children in years to come, and if they learned, eventually (or guessed) that the tooth fairy was in reality a stout, middle-aged male, they didn’t let on, for they didn’t want to spoil a good thing.

  I remember once, after this had been going on for a few years, we were having dinner at a restaurant when Robyn remarked that one of her teeth was about to come out.

  “Fine,” I said. “The tooth fairy will surely leave a dime.”

  “What?” said the waitress. “Does your tooth fairy still leave dimes? Ours leaves a quarter.”

  “Really?” I said, indignantly. “Well, wait and see what the tip fairy leaves you.”

  She scurried away, but I left her the usual tip anyway. I didn’t have the heart to punish her.

  31

  The March 1959 issue of Amazing arrived, with the reprint of “Marooned off Vesta,” followed by the new story, “Anniversary.”79 It did occur to me that I had laid myself open to any number of letters that would go, “Well, Asimov, I read the two stories and you’ve surely gone downhill a great deal in twenty years.” It seemed the obvious thing to do even if the writer didn’t believe it.

  Fortunately, no such letters arrived. I guess the fans didn’t want to spoil the anniversary.

  An anniversary of another sort, Robyn’s fourth birthday, came at almost the same time, on February 19, 1959. We had the usual little party.

  32

  On March 7, 1959, I became aware of the new financial situation I found myself in. A gentleman arrived from an aerospace firm in Los Angeles and offered me a job at a salary of fifteen thousand dollars, and I turned it down out of hand. I couldn’t afford to take it since my income as a full-time writer was twice as high.

  I had, it appeared to me, priced myself out of the job market. Thus, when well-meaning friends would tell me that if I played my cards right, Keefer would relent and the medical school would put me back on salary, I would have to say, “I don’t want Keefer to relent and don’t want to be back on a salary.”

  I couldn’t exactly tell them my earnings, which were higher than any professorial salary at the school, lest I seemed to be vaunting myself. And on their own, they didn’t seem to guess, but just thought me obdurate and foolish. Apparently, it didn’t occur to them that writing something as trivial as science fiction and nonfiction books for young people could bring in such an income.

  33

  After Bob Mills had rejected “Rain, Rain, Go Away,” it was rejected in turn by Scholastic, by Amazing, and even by Satellite. Rejections of this sort were becoming terribly embarrassing. I had reached the point where my name alone made it worth buying a science-fiction story; so to have it rejected under such conditions meant that the story was very bad indeed.

  Fortunately, Hans Santesson took it for Fantastic Universe on March 19, and I was saved the ultimate shame of having an unpublishable piece of science fiction on my hands.

  The April 1959 F & SF came out with that much better story “Unto the Fourth Generation.”80

  10

  One More Battle

  1

  I went to New York on March 23, 1959, and, during the next day, made my rounds. Doubleday and I, for one thing, agreed to cancel the contract for The Bounds of Infinity, and I felt an enormous relief. For the first time I realized, consciously, that I was drifting away from science fiction.

  I saw Mac Talley of NAL the same day and he wanted an adult nonfiction book on nucleic acids, viruses, and, in general, the basic components of living tissue. He even had a title for it: The Wellsprings of Life.

  That was an excellent suggestion. When I wrote The Chemicals of Life five years before, I had never even mentioned nucleic acids. At the time I was writing it, the importance of nucleic acids had just been made plain by James Watson and Francis Crick with their double helix theory, but it had passed me by.

  If I now wrote The Wellsprings of Life, however, I could include the nucleic acids and give them the importance they deserved. What’s more, it would be for adults and I wanted that, too, if only as a change in pace. What I did not want, however, was a soft-cover original, as had been the case with The Death Dealers. It seemed to me that through that route lay oblivion. I wanted a hard-cover.

  Mac was agreeable. “Sure,” he said, “do a hard-cover with Abelard-Schuman and we’ll buy the soft-cover rights.”

  That evening I went to Park Avenue and Ninety-fourth Street and visited my old friend Sidney Cohen from the days of Seth Low Junior College. For the first time, I met his wife, Lea, an Israeli woman with a delightful accent (though her English was fluent) and with an equally delightful beauty. I also met Sidney’s three small children.

  We went out for dinner and discussed Israel and the Jewish heritage. As usual, I found myself in the odd position of not being a Zionist and of not particularly valuing my Jewish heritage.

  I like Jewish cooking, Jewish music, Jewish jokes—but I’m not serious about it. I also like other kinds of cooking, music, and jokes (in fact, we were eating at a Chinese restaurant). I don’t even mind being Jewish. I make no secret about being Jewish in this book, or elsewhere, and I’ve never tried to change my name.

  I just think it’s more important to be human and to have a human heritage; and I think it is wrong for anyone to feel that there is anything special about any one heritage of whatever kind. It is delightful to have the human heritage exist in a thousand varieties, for it makes for greater interest, but as soon as one variety is thought to be more important than another, the groundwork is laid for destroying them all.

  This is not something I can get people in general to believe. I certainly made no impression on Sidney and Lea, so I remain a minority within a minority, and am uneasily convinced that in the land of the blind, the one-eyed man is in deep trouble.

  2

  The American Chemical Society was meeting in Boston in April of 1959, and I was invited to give a talk. It wasn’t the usual presentation of a research paper, because I wasn’t doing research. They wanted a general talk for the Division of Chemical Education (presumably because I had written a number of papers for the Journal of Chemical Education.

  I chose to give a talk I entitled “Enzymes and Metaphor,” which dealt with the manner of making the concept of catalysis clear to students by the use of colorful analogies (something I was, in any case, doing in my science writing for the public).

  It was one of the few talks I’ve given for which I had to actually write the speech, because one of the conditions was that it be available for reprint. The written paper appeared, eventually, in the November 1959 Journal of Chemical Education.81

  I gave the talk on April 7, 1959, and did well, I think. I did not actually read the speech, though it lay before me. Afterward, in the question-and-answer session, a woman rose to ask me how I would metaphorically explain a coenzyme, the portion of the enzyme that does the actual work, but does it with far greater efficiency than it possibly could if the rest of the enzyme weren’t there.

  It was not a planted question and it was not something I had thought of. For a few moments, I flailed about uselessly within my mind—and since my face is the mirror of my emotions, everyone in the audience must have known I was flailing.

  Then, in sudden inspiration, I took off my identification badge, which was pinned to my lapel.

  “The printing on the badge,” I said, “is the coenzyme and the badge itself is the enzyme. The printing does the actual work of communicating a message, but it couldn’t do that work if the rest of the badge were not there to supply the surface on which the printing appears.”

  I got a round of applause more, I think, for the obvious relief on my face than for anything I said. And then I recognized the questioner as Ruth Pitt, Bernie’s wife.

  I had not seen Bernie very often in the past year or so, but he did call me up during the worst of my troubles at the school to say there was a rumor that I was being fired, and was that so? It was a clear case of misery loving company, for his voice sounded much more animated than it usually did.

  I had no objection to making him happy, so I told him the whole story, and he listened with, I think, delight. He may have been disappointed when Keefer gave in, for he would have enjoyed watching a protracted fight.

  On the day of the talk, I also met Al Cooper once more, my buddy of the old days as a graduate chemistry student at Columbia. He was looking for a job again, as we had both been doing at the ACS meetings of 1947, twelve years before. I took him out to dinner that night, thankfully aware that I myself was not looking for a job and that, barring catastrophe, would never be looking for a job again.

  3

  Prior to the talks at the American Chemical Society, I had received a letter from some society official asking if I would consent to be interviewed by a reporter from the Boston Herald-Traveler. The implication was that it would be welcome publicity for the society.

  I agreed, partly out of loyalty to my professional society and partly out of a perfect willingness to be interviewed by an important newspaper.

  The reporter duly arrived, and asked a number of questions—mostly about my science-fiction writing, since that is the most colorful thing about me as far as the general public is concerned. I replied, fully and frankly, as I try always to do, and I was pleasantly surprised when, on April 6, 1959, the day before my talk, the Herald-Traveler ran the interview on the first page of the second section.

  There was a picture of myself smiling fetchingly out of a plump face, and an eight-column headline that referred to me as a “BU Professor.” The story itself was entirely correct and did not contain a single misquotation or error that I could find, so I was pleased enough to buy a number of copies and spread it around a little bit.

  4

  On April 9 I noticed David stroking an alley cat outside our house with every indication of love and affection, and I beamed. We were a cat family, and I was delighted that David, without any encouragement from us, loved cats as Gertrude and I did.

  Alas, half an hour later, David walked into the house with a stuffed-up nose and puffy eyes, and it turned out to be a lucky stroke that I had seen him playing with the cat. Had that not been so, who knows what exotic ailment I would have thought he had? As it was, f recognized that although he was, voluntarily, an ailurophile, he was, involuntarily, an ailurophobe. He was allergic to cats, as Sprague was.