The Interplanetary Exploration Society (Boston branch) was still alive, as Alma Hill continued to be resolute in her refusal to allow it to die.

  On August 13, Hans Santesson was scheduled to speak to us, and I attended out of a feeling of loyalty. After all, he had introduced me to Janet Jeppson a year and a quarter ago, and that was a pleasant memory.

  It was fortunate that I did, for even counting myself the total audience was five, and Hans looked put out at this. He recovered, however, and treated us to a two-hour talk, which seemed excessive under the circumstances.

  10

  On the fifteenth, I had lunch with Austin (as usual, at Locke-Ober’s), and I explained that I would be doing adult nonfiction for Doubleday, and he had no objection at all. He may even have been relieved, since he felt I was perfectly capable of bringing in two books a month and was willing to have other houses share the load.

  And on August 18, I completed the index of The Intelligent Man’s Guide to Science so that it was all done, complete, from the first word of the first draft to the last word of the index in 10½ months.

  11

  August 20 was David’s ninth birthday, and I bought him a wristwatch (not a very expensive one, to be sure) as a present. The next day I drove Gertrude to Birchtoft, where we had stayed for two weeks in 1949.

  The idea was that she would have a three-day vacation by herself while I stayed home with the children. It was only fair. I had on several occasions gone to science-fiction conventions by myself (and was planning to do it again in a few weeks), and those were vacations for me. Why shouldn’t she have one?

  On Monday, the twenty-second, I took the children and two neighbor children to a place called “Pleasure Island,” a large child-centered amusement park in a distant suburb, and spent five hours there. The children loved it, and a sense of fatherly duty kept me alive—barely.

  The next day, the twenty-third, I took both children to see a movie called Thirteen Ghosts with three-dimensional effects. It was a terrible movie that packed almost as much survival difficulty into two hours as “Pleasure Island” had into five, but I managed to make it.

  I took them home and was outside in the driveway with them when the telephone rang inside the house. All this time, for a period of something like fifty-five hours, whenever the children were not actually sleeping or eating, I had been holding their hands, determined to allow nothing to happen to them while I was in charge.

  With the telephone ringing, however, I did not wish to run into the house dragging them behind me. Fixing them with a stern eye, I ordered them not to move a muscle for five minutes, and dashed to the phone.

  It was only a neighbor calling to ask how I was making out and did I need help—food, water, shelter, anything? I was just saying triumphantly that all was going without a hitch, when Robyn came in crying with her face bloody.

  In the few minutes that I had let go of her hand she had managed to trip and fall on her face in the driveway, knocking out the left front upper incisor, which she now held in her hand. I rushed her to the nearest dentist, who X-rayed her mouth and assured me that no damage was done. It was a baby tooth, of course, the root was more than half eroded away, and it would have fallen out soon anyway.97

  Despite the reassurance, I remained in a wild state, reproaching myself over and over for having let go of her hand. The neighbors across the street rallied round, helped me wash the kids and put them to bed, and labored to console the still-frightened five-year-old Robyn (she wasn’t as frightened as I had been, the rotten little kid).

  Then, over my feeble protests, they forced cake down my throat, and when that usually wide-spectrum specific didn’t cure me, they insisted I swallow a jigger of whiskey neat. That did, indeed, seem to lift some of the woes of the world from my shoulders and gave me an insight into why people drink. By the time Gertrude made her usual call to see if all was well, I could say, convincingly, that all was well.

  The next day, of course, the cat would be out of the bag, for I was driving up to bring her home again. I couldn’t very well leave Robyn behind, and I dismissed as impractical my ordering her not to smile or open her mouth.

  Fortunately, Gertrude had had a very good time and she took the tale of the misadventure (during which I stressed the dentist’s certainty that all was well) with concern, but without needlessly scolding me.

  12

  I was planning to go to the eighteenth World Science Fiction convention, which was to be held at Pittsburgh, and I intended to go by train. There was a train strike, however, and I drove instead.

  I set out on Thursday, September 1, got to Reading, Pennsylvania, where I put up at a motel and then the next day got to Pittsburgh.

  Almost the first thing that happened when I got there was that I found that Janet Jeppson was attending, too. I was delighted to see her, except that when I did see her she was with Theodore Cogswell. Ted is an English teacher as well as a science-fiction writer; has deep-set eyes, a slow way of talking, a fey sense of humor, and always appears to be intensely attractive to women.

  I decided I didn’t approve of Janet’s being with Ted; I felt she wasn’t safe. When I finally pried her loose, I managed to hang about her fairly constantly and saw to it that she was secure from all the predators; I don’t honestly know that she wanted to be secure from predation, but it didn’t occur to me to ask her, and she was too polite to send me away.

  Early on, too, I met Gordie Dickson, whom I greeted with loud outcries of joy.

  “Gordie,” I said, “where’s Djinn?” Naturally, I wanted to see that spectacular creature again even if she and Gordie were married.

  But Gordie said, morosely, “How the hell should I know?”

  It turned out that they had remained married only two months and were long divorced. Djinn was not at that convention, and I have never seen her again.

  Judy Merril was there—radiant—with a new flame named Dan Sugrue, an oddly morose young man (whom Judy later married and divorced).

  I remember one late-night session at the convention, when someone brought his sixteen-year-old daughter and left her there in our midst, apparently unaware that he was abandoning her to the mercies of some of the raunchiest characters in the world.

  She was a sweet-faced girl, more beautiful than any sixteen-year-old girl I had ever seen, and who seemed much older than her age (though that might only have been my wishful thinking). She was a considerable damper on the conversation, though, except for Dan Sugrue’s attempt to tell a joke fit for her virginal ears, which, however, quickly turned out to be something capable of embarrassing even Randall Garrett and myself—which Dan nevertheless was unable to turn off.

  Judy Merril looked at the sixteen-year-old girl and said, sentimentally, “Four years ago, my daughter was sixteen years old.”

  “Really?” I said. “No one looking at you would guess you were young enough for that.”

  So she hit me, but not really hard. I managed to get to my feet again with hardly any assistance.

  On Saturday, September 3, I helped auction off some authors and I was bought myself (for an hour) by three kids and an older person who was acting as their sitter.

  I was toastmaster at the Sunday awards-giving banquet and that meant I handed out the Hugos. Generally, I did so without excessive enthusiasm, because I was only too aware that the coming of the Hugos and the ending of my science-fiction phase had very nearly coincided so that I had never had the chance of having my most famous stories compete for the award.

  The Hugo-winning novelette this time, however, was Flowers for Algernon by Daniel Keyes, and about this one I could not help but be enthusiastic. It was, in actual fact, a wonderful story.98 I enlarged on its merits as I called out its name as prize-winner and waited for Keyes to show up.

  “How did he do it?” I demanded of the Muses. “How did he do it?”

  I then looked up at a level about nine or ten feet from the floor in order to encounter the face of the giant whom I had never, until that moment, met.

  A hand plucked at my elbow and I brought my eyes down to ordinary man-height. And from the round and gentle face of Daniel Keyes, as he reached for his Hugo, emerged the immortal words: “Listen, when you find out how I did it, let me know, will you? I want to do it again.”

  I took off early on the morning of Monday, September 5 (my mother’s sixty-fifth birthday), and managed to miss the turnoff to the Pennsylvania Turnpike. That was even worse than missing the Route 2 turnoff on Route 128. I had to find my way back to the turnpike by alternate roads, but I eventually did.

  13

  I had started the book I was to do for Doubleday shortly before I had left for the convention, and I continued it after I came back. Eventually I named it Life and Energy, and when it came time to dedicate it, I named “Richard K. Winslow and Tim Seldes, gentlemen, scholars, and bon vivants.” The bon vivants bit was, of course, in memory of the excellent lunch, complete with drinks, at which I gained the chance to do the book.

  I was beginning to have trouble with dedications.

  The first few were simple. Pebble in the Sky was to my father, who, after all, had allowed me to read my first science-fiction magazine and who had bought me my first typewriter. The second book, I, Robot, was dedicated to John Campbell, who had discussed each of the robot stories with me and who had helped me put the Three Laws of Robotics into words. The third book was dedicated to Gertrude, the fourth to my mother. There were other family members and then friends—Brad, Fred Pohl, Sprague de Camp, Horace Gold, Charles Dawson, who had befriended and helped me. The time even came when I could, alas, memorialize dead friends. Lucky Starr and the Rings of Saturn was dedicated to the memory of Henry Kuttner and Cyril Kornbluth.

  Still, as the number of books increased, I had to make a numbered list of dedications, which I had to study more and more closely to see if some deserving person had been omitted, or whether enough time had elapsed for a repeat.

  It is questionable, of course, as to whether a dedication is necessarily to be considered an honor. Consider the case of nineteenth-century English wit Douglas W. Jerrold. He was told that a friend of his, a prolific but third-rate writer, was dedicating the next of his numerous books to him. Jerrold sighed, shook his head, and said, “Ah, that’s a fearful weapon that man has.”

  14

  I attended another meeting of the Interplanetary Exploration Society on September 10, and drove Alma Hill there at her request. I chafed a bit about it because the meeting was in the Hotel Touraine, which was in downtown Boston. There were never parking places there and I was going to have to drop off Alma at the hotel and then either park two miles away or make use of some overcrowded parking lot. In either case, it was going to be a tedious and sweaty chore.

  Alma, with that obliviousness to difficulties of which she was particularly capable, said to my mutterings, “Oh, there’ll be a parking place right there.”

  And there was! When I drove up to the hotel, an empty place existed right in front of the main entrance. I was speechless, but Alma walked calmly into the hotel as though nothing had happened. Never again has anything like this taken place, but, of course, I’ve never again had Alma with me, and that may account for it.

  Part of the entertainment on this occasion was my reading of “Thiotimoline and the Space Age,” which had just appeared in Astounding/Analog. I was luckier than Santesson had been. I had an enormous crowd of twelve people hanging on my words, which were well received.

  15

  Later that week, Robyn entered kindergarten, and there I was—an aging prodigy, too old to have preschool children.

  16

  On September 18, 1960, Gertrude and I traveled to Arlington, a northern suburb, and visited Ben Bova and his wife, Rosa. Ben was an ex-newspaperman who had taken a job at Avco Research and who was writing very good science books, some of which I had read in connection with my Hornbook column, and had enjoyed.

  Ben, whom I now met for the first time, was twenty-seven years old, about my height, had very close-cropped hair, and was enormously intelligent and witty. I took an instant liking to him, a liking that has never faltered and has only intensified.

  I can even pin down the exact moment when I “fell in like” with him. I had all my life heard people describe promising children as “a regular Einstein” until the phrase, from overuse, grated unbearably on me. Bova (of South Italian extraction, although he has blue eyes), in speaking of a promising lad, used the phrase “a regular Galileo” and instantly won his way into my heart.

  Rosa, also of Italian extraction,99 was a plump girl, good-natured and much given to laughing and to talking rapidly in a rather shrill voice. We had a very good time and readily added them to our roster of friends.

  17

  Svirsky was after me to do a book on Mendeleev and his discovery of the periodic table of the elements. It was Mendeleev’s ability to point out gaps in the table and to predict the existence of undiscovered elements, together with their exact properties, that ensured general acceptance of the table. Svirsky wanted me to call it The Case of the Missing Elements in order to make it fit into a series of detective-story-like science juveniles that Basic Books was doing.

  I had no desire to work for Svirsky after his hacking of The Intelligent Man’s Guide to Science. I did, however, want to do a book on the discovery of the elements. My feeling was that I would simply do it my way regardless of Svirsky’s instructions and then if he didn’t want it, someone else would.

  I drove in to New York on September 22, therefore, to sign the contract at Basic Books. My own name for the book was The Search for the Elements.

  On the same trip I signed a contract with Mac Talley for The Human Body and The Human Brain and finally signed the Doubleday contract for Life and Energy.

  18

  I was, of course, among the millions who listened to the Kennedy–Nixon debates. I was as tense as a freshly wound mainspring, fearful that Kennedy would make some mistake or that Nixon would not.

  To be sure, Nixon, in an unfortunate attempt at makeup, had made himself look impossibly ugly—which is supposed by many to have decided the election then and there—but I didn’t notice that. He always looked impossibly ugly in my eyes.

  I could not see that either had the advantage. My comment in my diary on the morning of September 27, with the first debate having taken place the night before, was, “I thought Kennedy did the better of the two, but then I am prejudiced.”

  19

  The Search for the Elements was not a hard job. I was thoroughly at home with the subject, and it raced along. It was another one of those books that took me two weeks to do, and on October 14 I mailed it to Svirsky.

  Svirsky decided quickly that it wouldn’t fit the series he had in mind. I hadn’t concentrated on the mystery aspect of it, nor had I lingered over the periodic table sufficiently. What’s more, it was too long and too complex.

  None of this bothered me; I had foreseen it. I waited for him to give it back to me so that I could pass it on to Houghton Mifflin (for whom I was writing another in my “realm” series on mathematics; this one Realm of Algebra).

  Svirsky fooled me, however. He said he wanted to hold on to the manuscript and consider it as an item for a somewhat older age level. Well, I had signed a contract and accepted an advance. I couldn’t prevent him from doing that—but I was chagrined.

  20

  I did my best to introduce the children to those accomplishments I had missed. I tried to get them to learn how to swim at the YMCA, for instance. Neither proved instantly enthusiastic about it, but in the end both learned how to swim.

  And on October 14, I enrolled David in a bowling tournament at the YMCA; duckpins rather than full-scale tenpins. It was a father-and-son affair and I joined him in rolling the bowling ball. He showed no real aptitude for it (and neither did I), but we continued to bowl periodically for some years and even managed to extract pleasure from it. The very occasional strike on either side was always ecstasy for both.

  21

  On October 21, 1960, I went to MIT to hear a lecture by Hugo Gernsback, the grandfather of magazine science fiction. It had been 34½ years before that he had put out the first issue of Amazing and had made my career possible. I had never met him before, and I felt it rather an honor to be slated to introduce him now.

  He handed out sheets of paper to the audience before he started to speak and, knowing Gernsback’s penchant for self-publicizing,100 I assumed it was a long vita.

  It wasn’t. It was an essay he had written. I had a chance to read mine all the way through as I sat there on the platform while waiting for the papers to be distributed. Finally, when he began to talk, darned if that essay didn’t turn out to be his speech. He repeated what I had just read, word for word, and pinned as I was on the platform I had to seem to be listening with devouring absorption.

  Fortunately, the talk only lasted half an hour, and the hour-long question-and-answer period that followed was more interesting.

  22

  I drove the family to New York on October 27, and the next morning I was at Basic Books, for it was publication time for The Intelligent Man’s Guide to Science. I finally got my hands on a finished copy, complete as a two-volume boxed set (very impressive, I must say) less than thirteen months after I had put down the first word.

  To celebrate, Svirsky had me interviewed by Newsweek reporters, complete with a picture-taking session at the Newsweek building, then drove me up to his home in Ossining in Westchester County.

  I had dinner with him and with his wife and then we drove down to Manhattan again, for he had tickets to the musical Fiorello. Gertrude met us at the theater and we enjoyed the play. After that, we went to a nightclub, and then went back to his place.