The power went on at 9:20 a.m. on September 5.

  On September 11, however, a second storm, Hurricane Edna, hit. There was less wind this time, but more rain, and at 4:15 p.m., off went the power again. Gertrude was just putting spareribs in the oven when it went dead.

  It was much harder to take this time (like being reinducted into the Army), and we spent a sixth night with candles. The next morning, even the phone went dead, and in absolute despair, we packed up our spareribs, took them over to the Boyds (who had a gas stove), and cooked them there. They turned out to be the best spareribs I ever ate.

  When we came back we found the power on again. It had been off only twenty hours this time. The phone stayed off for two more days, however.

  14

  On September 27, 1954, I received a check for $332.50 from Campbell in payment for “Risk,” and the importance of that was that it brought my year’s writing earnings to past the $10,000 mark. It was unprecedented. It was awesome. I was thunderstruck.

  However, I did not think I was very likely ever to do it again. I wrote in my diary, “I just said to Gertrude that 1954 will probably be my peak year of all time. The s.f. bust is bound to catch up with me next year.”

  By the “s.f. bust” I meant that the proliferation of science-fiction magazines that had begun in 1949 was petering out, with many failures. It would clearly become harder to sell stories, and payment rates might decline.

  But at present things were going well. In fact, I had just received a signal honor. The thirteenth annual World Science Fiction convention was to be held in Cleveland over the Labor Day weekend in 1955, and on October 2, 1954, I received a bid to be the guest of honor there.

  It was the highest accolade in science fiction, and I accepted. I believe I was the youngest guest of honor up to that point (one last gasp of child-prodigyism).

  Two days later, advance copies of The Chemicals of Life arrived. It was the first of my nonfiction books for the general public, and after three years of trying, I finally had my popular biochemistry book in my hand.

  And on October 8, Tony Boucher bought “A Hundred Million Dreams at Once.”

  15

  I maintained my friendship with Bill Boyd’s assistant, Bernie Pitt, even after he was fired, of course, and one day at his place, he put a record on just as I was supposed to go home, and I listened in puzzlement as someone sang something called “Fight Fiercely, Harvard.” It began:

  Fight fiercely, Harvard, fight, fight, fight,

  Demonstrate to them our skill.

  Albeit they possess the might,

  Nonetheless, we have the will.

  Halfway through I gathered that it was not meant seriously and I begged Bernie to start all over. He did and I listened to the whole record, both sides, and got home an hour late.

  The singer was the clever satirist Tom Lehrer, and I have been an ardent Lehrer fan ever since.

  On October 9, 1954, I took the Boyds to a nightclub in Boston where Tom Lehrer was performing and I saw him in real life, toothy, wavy-haired, and very charming. He sang all the songs I knew and a number I didn’t yet know, including two that I have never heard at any other time but that one occasion.

  In one, he sang very cleverly about Jim getting it from Louise and Sally from Jim; and after a while you gathered the “it” to be venereal disease. Suddenly, as the combinations grew more grotesque, you realized he was satirizing every perversion known to mankind without using a single naughty phrase. It was clearly unsingable (in those days) outside a nightclub.

  The other one was useless for general distribution because it dealt with the Boston subway system. He made use of the subway stations leading into town from Harvard. They were Harvard, Central Square, Kendall, Charles, Park Street, and Washington. The song, heard only that once, burned itself into my mind, and here it is, to the tune of the famous Mother’s Day song.

  H is for my alma mater, Harvard.

  C is Central, next stop on the line,

  K is for the cozy Kendall Station, and

  C is Charles that overlooks the brine.

  P is Park Street, busy Boston center,

  W is Washington, you see.

  Put them all together, they spell HCKC-PW

  Which is just about what Boston means to me.

  And what killed me was that when he came to HCKC-PW, he pronounced it quite well enough by clearing his throat and pretending to spit.

  I haven’t gone to nightclubs often, but of all the times I have gone, it was on this occasion that I had by far the best time.

  16

  On October 22, I drove to New York to attend a local convention. I met Tony Boucher for the first time, round-faced and with sharp, dark eyes. I also attended a Mystery Writers of America cocktail party and felt at home. After all, The Caves of Steel was a real mystery even if it was science fiction.

  17

  On November 2, I voted in the congressional elections; straight Democratic, of course. I discovered that one could watch even a computerized election night on television with pleasure—provided your own side won. The Democrats took over both houses of Congress.

  18

  I was learning that to a writer, all is useful raw material. I had gone through a student-nurse textbook of chemistry, and two editions of a medical-student textbook of biochemistry, and was working desultorily on a third edition of the latter. The experience, looking back on it, had been a dreary one, but it had its comic parts, and it could be made interesting to a science-fiction audience. I began an article for Campbell, therefore, that I called “The Sound of Panting.” (That was the sound that resulted from trying to keep up with the literature.)

  Meanwhile, the January 1955 issue of F & SF arrived with “The Singing Bell”3 in it, and I received a paperback edition of The Stars, Like Dust—, published by Ace.

  Ace had changed the title of The Stars, Like Dust— to The Rebellious Stars, which I felt was sharp practice. I couldn’t help but think it was an attempt to lure readers into buying it under the impression they had not read it before. That struck me as doubly bad, since not only would the reader be cheated, but I felt that his resentment would be aimed not at the publisher but at the author. I therefore began reading it in a bad humor.4

  My bad humor quickly intensified. There were places where I simply didn’t follow my own novel! I checked with the hard-cover and found, to my annoyance, that whole paragraphs had been omitted here and there. I knew what had happened. At the last minute they found the novel was too long and they cut it. Only instead of cutting it carefully by words and sentences, they hastily amputated chunks.

  Well, you can’t do that to my stories. Whatever faults my novels may have, they are not spongy. Every paragraph contributes to the plot, and if you cut out any, you reduce the story to gibberish.

  Worse yet, the cover said, “Complete and Unabridged,” so that readers would think the gibberish was my fault.

  I called Brad in high dudgeon, complained about the title change and the idiot amputation. I asked Brad to face the Ace people with this and to be less ready to give them reprint rights. Brad did complain to them and in no uncertain terms, and for many years Ace was last on the list in the bidding.5

  In those days, Don Wollheim was science-fiction editor for Ace, and I finally got a letter of apology from him. Well, it was not exactly a letter of apology, for Don didn’t apologize. It was more a letter of complaint. He said rather bitterly that it was the first case he had ever heard of where an author read his own novels in paperback reprint.

  I suppose he meant that it showed an unlovely conceit on my part, a rather disgusting self-absorption. I replied that if more authors read their Ace reprints, Ace might go out of business.

  19

  On December 12, I drove to New York and spent the next day passing out manuscripts. I handed The End of Eternity to Brad and to Horace; “The Sound of Panting” to Campbell; and Chemistry and Human Health to McGraw-Hill.

  Trouble started at once with The End of Eternity. It turned out that even if Gold approved and didn’t throw my schedule into an uproar by demanding revisions, he couldn’t publish for a year. The pages in Galaxy had been cut from 160 to 144, and that meant his story backlog filled that many more issues. Brad didn’t want to delay publication of the novel version that long, and neither did I. Since it turned out that Campbell was overstocked on novels as well, we had to face the possibility of publishing The End of Eternity without prior serialization.

  It meant the loss of a couple of thousand dollars, not something to take with a light laugh, but I consoled myself with the thought that the book version might sell more if it weren’t already familiar through serialization.

  20

  On December 14, I drove back to Boston, although the weather bureau was sounding notes of doom. It would have been sensible to wait another day, but I had a luncheon appointment with a number of faculty members, including Lemon and Walker, for that day, and I felt I had to make it.

  So I got up at 4:45 a.m. and left at 5:45 a.m. It was dark and it was raining hard, the highways were crowded even at that hour, and the weather bureau kept interrupting the programs on the car radio to warn sepulchrally of death and destruction.

  By the time I got into Connecticut, the rain was very cold; and by the time I got into Massachusetts, it was an ice storm. My windshield wipers froze and wouldn’t work; I had to move along slowly and carefully, and forty miles from home I was held up for half an hour by someone else’s accident.

  I had planned to get home early enough to wash, shave, change clothes, and arrive at school in fine fettle. After all, there were three people from the main campus due to be there, and, on top of that, Dr. Chester Keefer from the Department of Medicine.

  I had seen Keefer now and then but had never spoken to him. He had a close-cropped mass of curly gray hair, a round, unsmiling countenance, and a soft voice. He was considered the med school’s most distinguished faculty member.

  Boyd disliked him. According to Bill, Keefer was overbearing, tyrannical, and sadistic. Also according to Bill, Walker didn’t like him either, but Walker was not much of a talker, and he never went into detail.

  What with the ice storm and the delays, I didn’t get home till 11:30 a.m., and after the sketchiest of preparations, I dashed right off to school. I didn’t even stop to shave.

  I didn’t manage to get to the luncheon conference in time, but I was only fifteen minutes late, after an enormously difficult trip from New York. I didn’t feel particularly disgraced.

  Everyone else was there when I burst in. It was either bore everyone with explanations or carry it off with a flair. I decided to attempt the latter.

  “All right, everyone,” I said, “you can begin now. I’m here.”

  I was grinning and unshaven, and it didn’t go over at all. There was a dead silence, and I caught Keefer’s eye. He looked icy. That may have been his first clear impression of me. If so, it was a rotten one.

  21

  The Winter 1955 issue of Thrilling Wonder reached me on December 20, 1954, and it contained “The Portable Star.”

  I reread it, and now that my initial enthusiasm of writing had died down, I was forced, with chagrin, to agree with Fred Pohl’s unfavorable assessment of the story. I thought it was awful.

  I am frequently asked which is my favorite story, but no one ever asks me which is my least favorite story. If you stop to think of it, you might suppose it was “Black Friar of the Flame” or some other one of my very early stories. Well, that’s not so, I may have turned out some stinkers to begin with, but that doesn’t bother me—they were the best I could do.

  It is “The Portable Star” that I like the least and that I am even ashamed of. I wasn’t aware of what I was doing when I wrote it, but on reading it after it was published it seemed to me that I was’ deliberately trying to put sex into it to try to keep up with a new trend.

  In the August 1952 Startling, you see, Phil Farmer had published “The Lovers,” which overnight catapulted him into science-fiction stardom. It had treated sex more openly than was customary in science fiction, and everyone started getting into the act. In “The Portable Star,” I did, too, and I did it sleazily.

  For that reason, I have never put the story into any of my collections, and I never will. Nor have I ever allowed anyone to anthologize it. In fact, the only time it ever appeared, except in that issue of Thrilling Wonder, was when, ten years later, Standard Magazines, the publishers, exercised their right to reprint it, and did so in a one-shot magazine called A Treasury of Great Science Fiction Stories. Needless to say, they didn’t consult me or ask my permission.

  22

  The Christmas season was very active, with one excellent turkey dinner at the Whipples’ on the twenty-fourth, and a second elsewhere on the twenty-fifth.

  Add to that the fact that my father called on December 24 to tell us that Marcia was engaged to a man named Nicholas Repanes. My father was a little worried because Nick was not Jewish but was Greek Orthodox (though nonobservant). He suggested the possibility of forbidding the marriage.

  I was rarely disrespectful to my father, but I was this time. At least I was, if you consider an explosive, “Are you crazy, Pappa?” disrespectful.

  I said, “Marcia has a right to live her own life. Don’t you dare interfere.”

  So he didn’t, and thank goodness for that. Nick, a tall, rather slow-moving and soft-spoken person, turned out to be patient, gentle, affectionate, and exactly what Marcia needed.

  23

  On December 28, 1954, the affair of Bott and his review of The Caves of Steel suddenly sprang to life. I had totally forgotten my article in Peon. It had served its purpose in lancing the boil, and that was that as far as I was concerned.

  But Bill Hamling was now counterattacking. He sent me a copy of the editorial he was going to run in the March 1955 Imagination, in which he took me to task as a sorehead and as someone who was trying to limit Bott’s freedom of speech. Having raked me over the coals unmercifully, he wrote to ask me politely if I wanted to answer the editorial. He would give me the space for it.

  I was more furious than ever now, but heavy-hearted. I saw that I had foolishly stepped into a trap. It was clear to me now that Bott’s stupid reviews had been deliberately designed to elicit just such a response as I had made. I was all the more chagrined because I imagined Bott and Hamling must have gone over a list of authors to see which one would be stupid enough to take the bait. They must have decided on me, and I had not disappointed them. Now Hamling was pushing for a continuing feud that would titillate the fans and boost the sales of his magazine.

  It seemed therefore that the only thing I could do was to come back with a “No comment.” My rational article in a magazine with a circulation of one hundred was going to be answered by invective before an audience of fifty thousand, but I had no recourse. Anything I did would make it worse. I had to let it go.

  It took a while before I could make myself swallow the humiliation, and while I tried to nerve myself to the task I came across the February 1955 Imagination on December 30. I bought it out of sheer curiosity to see what Bott was doing now. To my utter astonishment the review that month was of Lucky Starr and the Oceans of Venus by Paul French.

  It was quite an amiable review. To be sure, Bott explained, French didn’t turn out juveniles as good as Heinlein’s, but it was quite good just the same. Considerably above average, one gathered.

  Apparently, Isaac Asimov might be neither a writer nor a storyteller, but Paul French was both—and thus the Lord delivered Bott and Hamling into my hands.

  I whipped off a letter at once, in which I apologized for my unkind thoughts concerning Bott. He was quite obviously a gentle soul who liked authors and was willing to help them. He might not like Asimov’s writing, but he did like French’s, and that showed his discrimination, for clearly one writer was bound to be better than another.

  I went on and on as long as I thought I could carry the game and then ended with the final comment that, by the way, Paul French was Isaac Asimov, and Bott liked Asimov stories after all if he didn’t know Asimov wrote them.

  It was absolutely devastating, and Hamling was forced to run it along with his editorial. He tried to say that Bott did know French and Asimov were the same but that space considerations had forced the excision of that sentence. That excuse was so lame that I’m sure it increased the laughter at Bott’s expense.

  In any case, the feud died at once and I got out of it with a whole skin and a learned lesson.

  24

  I had three books published in 1954.6 They were:

  11. The Caves of Steel (Doubleday)

  12. Lucky Starr and the Oceans of Venus (Doubleday)

  13. The Chemicals of Life (Abelard-Schuman)

  By all rights, I should have included the second edition of Biochemistry and Human Metabolism. It took more work and more time than The Chemicals of Life, for instance.

  In 1954, of course, I had, as yet, no inkling that the time was to come when what was most interesting about me as a writer was the number of books I had done. In later years, I kept that in mind and listed every book that I could honestly manage to. I didn’t list trifling revisions or updatings of this book or that. Nor did I list old books in which the only changes were a new book-jacket or a new title. However, whenever a revision was sufficiently thoroughgoing to compare in time and effort to the writing of a new book, I included it in the list.