An antihistamine fixed him up, but we now knew, sadly, that it would be difficult for us to own a cat—as long as David was in the house.

  5

  Work continued at the usual hectic pace. I was finishing the first draft of The Double Planet (a book on the Earth and the Moon) and starting the first draft of The Wellsprings of Life, both for Abelard-Schuman. I was working on the galleys of Realm of Numbers for Houghton Mifflin—and f even lectured at the med school.

  Even though I was no longer getting a regular salary from the med school, I intended to do whatever was needed to justify my title. That meant I would give an occasional lecture, if asked to do so and if the subject were to my liking—and if I were paid.

  My price was one hundred dollars per lecture. Sinex said that the usual fee for a guest lecture was twenty-five dollars. And I said sternly (not willing to give an inch), “Name your guest and I’ll show you I’m four times as good.”

  On April 13, 1959, I lectured to the class on nucleic acids, for instance, then gave a second lecture on April 16.

  Not all my lectures were successes, however. On the eve of April 16, I made a trip to the Brighton branch of the Boston Public Library to talk to a group of what they told me would be high-school students.

  It wasn’t; I was deceived, perhaps unwittingly. I found myself with an audience of eight-to-twelve-year-olds. I was unprepared psychologically and annoyed, so the talk was a dismal failure.

  One thing I do remember was the questioning of one of those youngsters after the talk. Up went his hand and he said, “What is the second closest star, Dr. Asimov?”

  I smiled inwardly. Everyone knew that the closest star was Alpha Centauri, but not many knew the name of the second closest. I did, however, and I was glad to be able to answer without hesitation.

  I said, “Barnard’s Star, young man, is the second closest star. It is a little over six light-years away.”

  The kid just looked puzzled and said, “Then what’s the closest star, Dr. Asimov?”

  “Alpha Centauri,” I said, surprised that he should be surprised, “which is 4.3 light-years away.”

  “That’s funny,” said the little rat, “I thought the closest star was the sun, which is 8 light-minutes away.”

  The audience set up a fearful cacophony of high-pitched laughter. It was probably the pet conundrum at the junior high schools that year, and I had fallen for it.

  6

  Our living room was in the last stages of being decorated, rather more than three years after we had moved into the house. The wallpaper had to be put up several times because our first choice cracked every time it went up, and we had to abandon it at last for the second choice.

  On April 25, 1959, the wall-to-wall carpeting was put down in the living-room, dining-room combination. Then came a large sofa and three chairs, together with drapes on the twenty-seventh. It all looked very good, and our investment in the decorating came to just about four thousand dollars.

  That, however, was nothing to cry about. Even with that, and with our mortgage entirely paid off, and my school income cut off, we now had nearly fifty thousand dollars in the bank. We had more money in reserve, in fact, than we had had before we had bought the house.

  7

  On April 16, I had had a pleasant lunch at the Ritz with Abe Burack of The Writer and with Ben Benson. I was in a particularly good mood because I had been invited to attend the thirteenth annual Mystery Writers’ Association’s award dinner, on May 1, 1959, and Abe and Ben were going, too. I welcomed their company. I wasn’t sure that, as a science-fiction writer, I would be socially acceptable to the members of the MWA, and my recent mystery The Death Dealers was not much of an entree for me. It seemed well, therefore, that I would be sure of at least two personal friends there.

  On April 30, I went to New York and gave the completed manuscript of The Double Planet to Bernice Frankel, who was now my editor at Abelard-Schuman, and perhaps the nicest in the series. Her letters to me always began, “Dear Handsome Hero,” and I always admire good taste in women.

  I went with her to have dinner with Hal Cantor (her immediate superior) at his apartment in Stuyvesant Town—always good for a twinge of nostalgia in itself. (It had been ten years since I had moved away.) Cantor had promised me steak and potato pancakes and said his wife made the best potato pancakes in the world. He may have been right, because I didn’t particularly like potato pancakes till then, and I loved them afterward.

  There was only one catch to the meal, though. Just before we began, he said to me in quite a conversational tone, “Do you know Ben Benson?”

  “Yes, sir,” I said, “I sure do.”

  “Dropped dead yesterday,” he said.

  It took them quite a while to pacify me after that, and dinner was delayed for half an hour before I was able to eat. Ben had had a bad heart, as I knew, and he was, as I heard it, shopping in New York, and just clutched at his chest and died in the street.

  8

  I wasn’t certain what to do. All the light had gone out of the MWA dinner for me. I even considered skipping the whole thing and going home.

  On May 1, I visited Bob Mills, but found no satisfaction there. He was looking for a new job, for he felt that there was just no way of earning enough at F & SF, and he was as glum as I. He was supposed to go to the MWA dinner, too—and he wasn’t sure if he would. We sat there, grunting at each other, until Judy Merril walked in.

  She, at least, was cheerful, and jollied us along until we were both in good humor.

  This was a great thing for which I will be forever grateful to her, for the Mystery Writers’ Association dinner was an important one for me to attend.

  Janet Jeppson was attending. She was the young psychiatrist who had stood in line to get her book signed by me at the New York convention 2½ years before and who had felt insulted by my scowling face and suggestive remark (not knowing I was in a state of kidney-stone agony).

  She had heard nothing but good things about me from her brother, who had been in my class in that last teaching semester and who had heard me give my great speech on abnormal hemoglobins. Therefore, hearing from a mystery-writer friend of hers, Veronica Parker Johns, that I was to be one of the people attending the banquet, she decided to come along as a guest and meet me again—for she still admired my books.

  It was a near squeak, though, for Eric Fromm was giving a lecture that night and she had to choose whether to listen to Fromm or to meet me and perhaps be insulted again. And I had to choose whether to go home in despair over Ben, or go to the dinner and be cast down over his absence.

  We both decided to go to the dinner.

  I realized at once that I had made the right choice. The dinner was full of people I knew. I never realized before how much the mystery world and the science-fiction world overlapped.

  The Ballantines were there, for instance, all apologetic because they had been one of the firms who had rejected The Death Dealers and a little regretful that perhaps I no longer felt friendly with them.

  I stared at Betty as though she were crazy. “What has a rejection got to do with friendship?” I asked, hugging and kissing her. She kissed me back.

  Bob Mills was there, too, looking much more cheerful than he had in the office, and Hans Santesson was there, and many more. By the time the call went out that we were to sit down to dinner, I felt that I was at a science-fiction convention.

  I looked at my card to see the number of the table to which I had been assigned. It was Table 3, and as I looked about, trying to locate it, Hans Santesson came over and said, “This way, Isaac. There’s a young lady here waiting to meet you.”

  There, with the biggest possible smile on her face, was Janet Jeppson, whom I now saw (as far as my memory goes) for the first time in my life. Filled with the euphoria of having found myself, unexpectedly, at a pleasant convention of so many living friends to make up for the one who had died, I greeted her with just as big a smile and took my seat next to her. Also at the table were Bob Mills and Hans Santesson—and others whom I knew less well.

  Eleanor Roosevelt was the chief speaker, and this was the only time I was ever in the same room with her. She spoke of F.D.R. and of his love for mysteries. Since I idolized both Franklin and Eleanor, it was a great occasion for me.

  And meanwhile, during the dinner, Janet and I carried on an animated conversation. I thought she was charming and intelligent, and she thought I was charming and intelligent. She didn’t tell me she had met me at the New York convention and how I had acted.82

  While Eleanor Roosevelt spoke I even held Janet’s hand, and she didn’t stop me.

  Robert Mills, on finding out that she was a science-fiction fan, asked if she read Fantasy and Science Fiction, and when she said she did, he asked her if she had read the just-published “Unto the Fourth Generation.”

  She said, “Yes.”

  “What did you think of it?”

  I ought to have interrupted at once to say that I was the author, in order to prevent the mouse-trapping, but I must admit I wanted to hear what she would say, in case she had forgotten I had written it.

  She had forgotten. “It had a serious flaw,” she said. “The protagonist went through the experience and then, in the end, it was as though nothing had happened. He had in no way been changed by it.”

  And then Bob said I was the author, and Janet, embarrassed, tried to apologize.

  “No,” I said, “you’re perfectly right. That is a flaw. I’ll change it when I put it in one of my story collections.” (And I did, too.)

  After Eleanor Roosevelt’s speech, there came the time for the awards, and when the award for the best novel of the year was awarded, I muttered (thinking of The Death Dealers), “I’m afraid I qualify as author of the worst novel of the year.”

  Apparently I said it with such sincerity that Janet’s soft heart bled for me, and never after did she believe my sedulously cultivated put-on that I was a monster of vanity and arrogance.

  An award for the best mystery movie of the year was handed out, too, and a Hollywood starlet arose to accept it and deliver a vacuous little speech. As one might expect of a Hollywood starlet, she was mostly breasts, and Janet (who was leastly breasts) said in a low voice, “Oh, I wish I looked like that.” And my soft heart bled for her.

  So we were each of us impressed with the other’s sincerity, in addition to all our other virtues.

  When the dinner was over, I said to Janet, “There’s no need to end the evening, I hope.”

  She said, “Wouldn’t you rather stay with your friends here?”

  “At the moment,” I said, “you’re my only friend.”

  She said, “I was just going home.”

  I hesitated. “Are you married?”

  “No.”

  “Steady boyfriend?”

  “Not right now.”

  “May I come along?”

  It was her turn to hesitate. “Just to talk?”

  “Just to talk.”

  So I came along and I stayed till after midnight and we just talked, and then I left and the next day I went back to Boston.

  We exchanged letters afterward and corresponded on a fairly regular basis. Her letters were invariably longer and far more interesting than mine. She was, in fact, a fascinating letter-writer and always described the places she saw and the things she did, as I was incapable of doing.

  She had always wanted to be a writer and she did manage to sell a short story to Saint under a pseudonym, and that was a great day for her. Her profession, however (she was a psychiatrist, remember), kept her busy and she didn’t have the chance to just write story after story as I had done till the sheer weight of practice and persistence began to break down the walls.

  In any case, when I visited New York, I would usually call to say hello and, if she weren’t with a patient, we would talk a while (sometimes for quite a while).

  It was a very pleasant relationship and I was always very glad I had decided to go to that Mystery Writers’ Association dinner. Of course, I kept thinking that she would soon meet someone with whom she could have a more serious relationship than with me, that she would get married, and that the correspondence would then fade off—and I couldn’t help but feel sorry at the thought, though I always told myself that I should be happy on her account if that happened.

  On two different occasions, in fact, she told me she had met someone who seemed interesting, and on each occasion I thought surely the correspondence would fade off, and no matter how I tried to be happy for her, I was more conscious of being selfishly sorry. On each occasion, though, the thing blew over.

  9

  On May 3, 1959, I attended Ben Benson’s funeral and drove down to Sharon to be at the actual interment. It was the first funeral I had ever attended.

  10

  During the month of May, I received copies of The Clock We Live On and Words of Science.

  Words of Science was the first of my Houghton Mifflin books. It was a very well-made outsize book—6¾ inches by 10¼ inches—and a single copy cost $5.00 as opposed to $3.00 for The Clock We Live On and $3.50 for Nine Tomorrows. I was very pleased with Houghton Mifflin and I have never had grounds to complain about the appearance of their books. They do a good job.

  By now, too, my essay series in F & SF was a settled thing. The eighth one appeared in the June 1939 issue, and since the magazine was soon to celebrate its tenth anniversary, it seemed a permanent institution and I had the comfortable feeling that not one month would pass without something of mine appearing in a science-fiction magazine. If nothing else there would be my monthly essay in F & SF.

  This was important to me. I knew that I was writing very little science fiction now, but I didn’t want to give up the science-fiction world. Thanks to my F & SF essay, I never did.

  11

  On May 5, 1959, the whole issue of my standing in the school—which I thought was settled—broke out again.

  Sinex called me into his office and told me that Keefer felt I was using my title as a way of garnering personal publicity and that, therefore, I could not have the title. I was to be demoted to lecturer.

  “What personal publicity?” I asked, utterly confused.

  It was the April 6 article in the Herald-Traveler, which had pleased me so much at the time, and especially the headline identifying me as a “BU Professor.”

  I left, walked down to Soutter’s office to tell him that the battle was joined again, made some phone calls, thought it over that night, walked into Sinex’s office the next day, and here, in essence, is what I said. (Once again I made no notes and didn’t include anything in my diary except for the phrase “long conference,” but I remember it very well.)

  “Dr. Sinex” (I said), “the article in question was the result of an interview by a reporter; an interview that I was requested to make by the president of the American Chemical Society, which is my professional society. I have the letter he sent me in which he said that such an interview would be welcome publicity for the society, and my answer in which I said I would be glad to oblige the society. I called him yesterday and he is willing to bear witness for me in this and to hold me entirely guiltless of seeking the interview on my own behalf.

  “Second, you can read the article from beginning to end and tell me if you find a single sentence, a single word, that redounds to the dishonor of the university or that represents self-seeking publicity. As to the headline—I have no control over a headline writer. I decline responsibility for that.

  “Third, if I did want personal publicity at the expense of my Boston University affiliation, I have an easy way of gaining it. My brother is an editor of a large newspaper in the New York metropolitan area called the Long Island Newsday. You are welcome to look through its files to see whether I have ever once used it for personal publicity of any kind, with or without Boston University.”

  Sinex, having listened to me speaking at far greater length than I have here outlined, and with much greater passion than the mere words can display, said that there would be a vote at the nominating committee the next Monday—the eleventh.

  “Very well, then,” I said, “you tell Keefer that what I said before still stands. I will fight this in every possible way, through the civil courts if I have to, and I will never give up.”

  I was about to leave when I thought of something else. “One more thing, Dr. Sinex. If this blows over, and if it seems to Keefer that if he harasses me every few months I will resign, assure him that I won’t. Assure him also that he may think he will be remembered by posterity for some accomplishment or other in his medical career, but he won’t. He will be remembered for no more, and no less, than what I choose to say about him in my autobiography. And that goes for you, too, Dr. Sinex.” And then I left.

  There was now nothing to do but wait for the session on the following Monday. I was certain I would be demoted to lecturer, since I suspected the nominating committee was a kind of Supreme Soviet, called into session only to confirm the voice of the Leader. That meant I would have to find a lawyer and begin taking steps, perhaps against his advice. There is no way in which I can properly describe the feeling of being, at one and the same time, enormously determined and enormously reluctant.

  It wasn’t necessary. On the evening of May 11, 1959, I received a phone call from Professor Hegnauer of the Physiology Department. The nominating committee had voted Keefer down, and I was to remain an associate professor after all. In fact, the vote was unanimous, I was told. Keefer himself, to save face, had to abstain.

  And on the evening of the fifteenth, Dr. Soutter called to assure me that he was taking steps to make certain that Keefer did not continue the fight over me by taking the matter to Case.

  I had won the fourth round and that really ended it, after nearly two years of intermittent fighting.