We stayed overnight with him and most of the next day. In the evening, he took us to the Yonkers races. It was the first and only time I’ve been at a racetrack and watched the horses run. It was pleasant as a spectacle, but I refused to bet, which I think rather spoiled Svirsky’s fun. (He bet, and lost.)

  There is no question but that he treated us well, and even royally. As a person, he was kind and delightful. In fact, when The Search for the Elements was finally published, I dedicated it to “Ruth and Leon Svirsky and October in Westchester.”

  As an editor, however, he was a complete failure—at least as far as I was concerned. I could not work with him on books, and no amount of personal kindness could alter that fact, though it did raise the level of my guilt feelings.

  23

  I drove from New York to West Newton on October 30, and in the course of that trip I had (for the first time in ten years and some seventy thousand miles of driving) the dubious pleasure of having a flat tire on the highway. The trouble was that while I knew in theory what to do to change a tire, I had no practical experience whatever and, what with my general ineptness, I dared not try.

  I was on the Belt Parkway on the northeastern border of Queens and I had to make my way over desolate fields to find a telephone on which I could call the AAA. Having done so, I found I had no way of describing the location of my car. I did my best and eventually a repair truck found me after a delay caused by the necessity of having to scour a five-mile stretch of the highway in search of me. It all cost me three hours in time spent in fretting and humiliation.

  Have I learned my lesson? No! To this day, I can’t change a tire.

  24

  The next day, matters reversed themselves.

  The Living River, which had been the occasion of bringing to a head the issue of the “disgrace” that my science writing was bringing on the school, proved to be not a disgrace at all.

  It won the Blakeslee Award given out by the American Heart Association, having been judged the best book in that subject area in the year of its publication. On October 31, 1960, I received a plaque to that effect and a check for five hundred dollars.

  I managed to let various people at the med school know of this and was quite certain it would get to the ears of Keefer and Lemon.

  Despite this vindication, I did not in the least desire to go on to what I had originally planned to be the second book on the subject, the one on cardiovascular research that the Heart Institute people had originally had in mind. To have done so would have meant applying for another grant, or for the renewal and extension of the first, and I wasn’t going to. I had definitely decided never to accept grant money again. Nor did I ever again hear from the Heart Institute people about it—so that was that.

  25

  On November 1, 1960, I received my fourteen-volume set of the McGraw-Hill Encyclopedia of Science and Technology, which I had ordered on approval. I had the option of sending it back if I didn’t like it, but a quick glance told me it would be invaluable in my work, so I kept it.

  I also had the option of paying for it in innumerable monthly payments, but I had no intention of giving myself the task of making out a check every month.

  So I simply looked at the total, made out the check, and sent it off.

  It wasn’t till some days later that I realized I had performed one of my special miracles of nonintelligence. The total payment I had paid included all the carrying charges that would have been added if I had paid in monthly installments. The total for payment all at once, recorded elsewhere in the pamphlet, was something like fifteen dollars less.

  Well, why should McGraw-Hill have my fifteen dollars? I sent a letter of explanation and after a long delay I got back a letter that seemed to leave the matter in the air. I sighed and decided to take up the matter personally the next time I was in New York. I made a note of the name attached to the letter. I don’t remember what it was, but it was long and humorous. Let’s call it, “Mitschermatscherlinklich.”

  And, indeed, my next time in New York, I called McGraw-Hill, asked for Mitschermatscherlinklich, and was rewarded with a burst of laughter from the person at the phone. I was eventually shifted to some particular department, asked again, and got another burst of laughter. He passed me to someone else, who also guffawed.

  I got the idea I was being made fun of, which is something I rarely appreciate. When I got my fourth person, I said, speaking very slowly and distinctly, “Now, I don’t want you to laugh. I am trying to reach someone to discuss an overpayment. The person I must reach has a silly name but I didn’t invent it. It is right here on the letter and I shall come over in person and raise hell if you laugh at it because I’m in no laughing mood.”

  The person on the phone, a woman, said gravely, “What is the name, sir?”

  “Just don’t laugh! It is Mitschermatscherlinklich.”

  There was no laugh. No laugh at all. The woman said, “I am the person you want to speak to. What is your complaint?”

  “You are Mitschermatscherlinklich?”

  “Yes, I am. What is your complaint?”

  I couldn’t let it go at that. I had to make some sort of lighthearted sally in order to keep it from ending on this grim note. I said, “Well, a charming young woman like yourself won’t remain single for long, and when you are married, you will have a beautiful name.”

  And she said, in rather awful tones, “I am Mrs. Mitschermatscherlinklich. Now can we please get on with it?”

  So we did and I eventually got my fifteen dollars back, but all the fun of it was gone.

  14

  A Book for Each Year

  1

  It was time to buy a new car. My experience with the second Plymouth, with its Hy-Drive, which had required careful and stubborn babying to keep it in action, had, at least temporarily, cured me of Plymouths. This time it was going to be a Ford.

  On November 5, 1960, I placed my order for a Ford Galaxie, and on November 23, I got it. I did not trade in the Plymouth, however. It was in satisfactory working shape, and Gertrude might as well have a car of her own. We became a two-car family for the first time and had a chance, at least, to use both halves of our two-car garage.

  There were lots of advantages. It meant that when one of us was using the car, the other wasn’t immobilized. And when one car was out of order, we weren’t altogether immobilized.

  It had its disadvantages, too. It meant that during a snowstorm I could no longer make do with shoveling out only one half the driveway—the whole thing would have to be cleared.

  2

  For the first time in two years, I received a science-fiction challenge I couldn’t resist. It came about thusly:

  The magazine Playboy in a recent issue had decided to have a little fun with science fiction. They published an article entitled “Girls for the Slime God” in which they pretended, good-naturedly, that all science fiction was sex and sadism.

  To maintain this fiction, Playboy illustrated the article with fictitious funny-sexy covers of fictitious magazines. They also used quotations that they drew from a single source, a magazine called Marvel, which published nine issues between 1938 and 1941. It had tried (and failed) in those nine issues to make a go by introducing the sex motif. The stories dealt very heavily with the hot passion of alien monsters for Earthwomen. Clothes were always getting ripped off and breasts were described in a variety of elliptical phrases—and these were the events and phrases quoted in the Playboy article.

  Cele Goldsmith, then editor of Amazing, read the article and called me at once. She suggested I write a story entitled “Playboy and the Slime God” satirizing the satire. I was strongly tempted to do so for several reasons:

  1. Cele was a beautiful woman and I happen to be aesthetically affected by beautiful women.

  2. I take science fiction seriously, and I was annoyed at the satire.

  3. I just happened to think up a plot.

  So I wrote “Playboy and the Slime God,” using some of the same quotes that Playboy had used and trying to show what an encounter between sex-interested aliens and an Earthwoman might really be like.

  I was a bit afraid that, not having written science fiction for two years, not since “Rain, Rain, Go Away,” I might have forgotten how—but one doesn’t forget. I began the story on November 4, and by the ninth it had been submitted and accepted.101

  At almost the same time, incidentally, I updated my book Inside the Atom so that a revised edition might appear in 1961.

  3

  November 8, 1960, was Election Day. I voted in the morning, for Kennedy, of course, and that night I stayed up very late. By 10:35 p.m. I was satisfied that Kennedy was elected, but the popular margin was thin and kept getting thinner. It wasn’t till well into the next morning that Nixon conceded.

  It was a great relief to me. He had been Vice President for eight years and senator before that and representative before that and what I most wanted out of politics now was not to have to look at his face or hear his voice ever again. To use a phrase invented two years later by Nixon himself in a typically mawkish whine of self-pity, I longed not to have Nixon to kick around anymore.

  4

  On November 10, I went to MIT to listen to a talk by Louis P. Hammett. I wasn’t the least interested in the subject of the talk, but he had been my professor in graduate physical chemistry, the course that I had to pass with a B in order to become a full-fledged graduate student back in 1939, and he had given me an A. Naturally, I remembered him with warmth.

  At the end of the lecture, I felt warm enough to go up and introduce myself. I had been a teacher myself long enough to know that students who come up and say “I was in your class of so-and-so” can very rarely expect to be remembered—but I had to.

  I said, “It’s a pleasure to see you again, Dr. Hammett. You taught me physical chemistry twenty-one years ago. My name is Isaac Asimov.”

  He looked uncomfortable until I pronounced my name and then he was suddenly galvanized into interest. “Delighted to see you, Asimov. How can I get a copy of The Death Dealers?”

  “I can send you one,” I said, astonished, “but I’m surprised you’ve heard of it.”

  “It’s a best seller at Columbia,” he said.

  And a great light dawned. When I wrote the book, I was very anxious not to have anyone think I was satirizing the medical school, so I kept my mind firmly fixed on Columbia University, its physical plant, its faculty, even some of the graduate students I had known. It never occurred to me that anyone at Columbia would recognize the descriptions, but of course they did. It became a game there, trying to guess who the various characters were, and everyone wanted a copy.

  I sent one to Hammett, as promised, and eventually he sent me a note to say he had enjoyed it. I was a little uneasy, though; I didn’t want some of the characters recognized.

  5

  On November 17, I attended a meeting of the Boston Authors’ Club for the first time, as guest of one of its members, Marjorie Carleton, and was inside Boston’s famed Parker House for the first time in my life.

  The Boston Authors’ Club (like the Brooklyn Authors’ Club of nineteen years before), consisted of elderly people of minor importance in the world of literature. They were lovable people, though, and I was always delighted to be with them. I joined the club and attended a number of meetings over the next few years, always with pleasure.

  6

  The December 5, 1960, issue of Newsweek reached the stands on November 30, with a laudatory half column on me and The Intelligent Man’s Guide to Science. It had a picture of me that looked rather thoughtful and spiritual, if you can imagine such a thing. (I find it rather difficult to do so myself.) It was the first time there had been an item on me in a national magazine.

  The Intelligent Man’s Guide to Science was getting rave reviews almost everywhere. It got a very good one in the December 16, 1960, issue of Science, for instance, from Derek J. De Solla Price. Although it may be a case of the old lady showing her medals, I cannot resist quoting the beginning:

  “Here, at last, is something new in popular science writing. For once an author has taken the whole of modern science as his oyster, and he has shown himself equal to the task without patronizing the reader, taking him for a babe-in-arms, or doing devilish damage to the contents by culling his material from third-hand sources. For at least one reviewer who started with a considerable allergy toward all popularized science, the world will never again be quite the same.”

  How I loved such critical approval, and yet that did not reconcile me to Svirsky’s heavy-handed editing. Nothing any critic would say could convince me that the book was not better as I had written it.

  7

  We got the first heavy snow of the season on December 12, and, in fact, the worst December blizzard in the history of the Boston Weather Bureau—and I got my first practice at shoveling out both halves of the driveway. I was beginning to remember that you’re not supposed to shovel snow if you’re over forty, and I remembered only too well what had happened to Cyril Kornbluth a dozen years before, but it wasn’t always possible to hire young men to do the job on the spot, and I was rarely patient enough to wait.

  Despite the blizzard, I went in to New York by bus, which I had just discovered as an alternative to train travel. At that time, the Trail-ways bus between Boston and New York was a rather pleasant transportation device. If you bought a ticket for one of the “deluxe” runs, you got a pretty stewardess, sandwiches, and coffee.

  I spent most of my time in New York with Doubleday and with Basic Books. Svirsky was now tempting me to do a one-man multivolume encyclopedia of science for youngsters. Despite my reluctance to work with Svirsky, I remembered the pleasant time he had showed us in October and the good reviews I was now getting, and grudgingly agreed to write a sample.

  8

  When we visited Bernie and Essie Fonoroff on December 18, 1960, one of the guests was Marvin Minsky, who worked on robots and artificial intelligence at MIT and who had read my science fiction with enthusiasm. He was a tall man, with a bald, domed head, a delicate way of talking, and an enormously quick comprehension. In later years, I used to say that I had met only two men I was willing to concede were more intelligent than I was. One of them was Marvin.

  I did not find myself drawn to Marvin’s robots, by the way. It was not that there was anything wrong with either Marvin or his robots; quite the contrary. It was that I seemed to withdraw from direct contact with “science-fictional” subjects of any kind. I never had the urge to see nuclear power stations either, for instance, or rocket-launching sites.

  I’m not sure why that is. Perhaps I dislike the invasion of real life into my science fiction. My robots belong to me, and I don’t want outsiders homing in—even if the outsiders are busy inventing real robots.

  Then, too, there may be a certain fear of knowing too much; a fear that that might hamper the unfettered play of my imagination and inhibit the story-making facility within me.

  Third, I am not a visual person. I have spent so many bounded years in my childhood that I have grown used to having books as my window on reality. I will read about Marvin’s robots avidly, but will be reluctant to look at one in action.

  9

  For the first time in seven years, we didn’t have a Christmas tree at Christmas. The children had outgrown it and I celebrated the day by writing “Heaven on Earth,” an article intended for my F & SF series. It eventually appeared in the May 1961 F & SF102 as my thirty-first essay in the series.

  Of all thirty-one, I thought it by far the most ingenious. In it I described a method for mapping the heavens on the Earth (in imagination) and thus illuminating a number of celestial phenomena and facts.

  Writing that particular essay helped activate a feeling I had had for quite some time—which was that my F & SF essays, or some of them at least, ought to appear in book form. I had already written thirty-one, and seventeen would be enough to make up a book of ordinary length.

  I made a collection of seventeen of what I thought were my more interesting essays, including “Heaven on Earth,” you can well imagine, and, on December 27, 1960, I took the collection (which I called Fact and Fancy) to Austin Olney. He seemed interested and I was pleased.

  10

  The next day I put Gertrude on a bus for a two-day visit to New York with her family, and the day after that, John McCarthy of MIT dropped around to talk about a TV panel show in which the two of us were soon going to participate.

  McCarthy worked along with Marvin Minsky on computers and artificial intelligence, and McCarthy, too, was a fearsomely intelligent person. Where Marvin was bald, however, McCarthy was very thickly bearded, and beards on young men were still rare in those days.

  John McCarthy was what some people might call absent-minded, but that wouldn’t be accurate. He just didn’t care about what went on outside the inside of his head.

  In this case, for instance, he visited me on a day of light snow, and he walked in without rubbers and without bothering to wipe his shoes on the mat. He just dragged in the snow to melt into dirty water on our nice new golden carpet. I was horrified, but could think of nothing to say. (After he left I did my best to clean it up.)

  While we were talking, Mary Blugerman called. Gertrude was out somewhere and Mary wanted to see if the children were well. Yes, they were, said I—when McCarthy, characteristically unconcerned with the fact that I was on the telephone, suddenly decided to continue the conversation from the living room.