I had lunch that day at the Faculty Club with William McElroy and Al Nason. McElroy had been the biochemist who, back in 1948, had hired Nason and had turned me down. McElroy had never heard of me then, but the thirteen-year interval had educated him with respect to me, I was glad to see.

  I am not immune to small-mindedness, so I’m afraid I felt an inner triumph that there was no way in which McElroy could hire me for anything, for he could not pay me enough. In fact, for this year anyway (the unique year of 1961), I was quite certain I was making more than he was—and Johns Hopkins paid me two hundred dollars for the talk, too.

  17

  It was now that I first heard of “Mensa.” This was an organization that began in England and was supposed to include the top 2 per cent of the world’s intellectuals (or that fraction of them who applied for entrance), as judged by their passing an IQ test with a sufficiently high figure.

  I was invited to attend a meeting of Mensans by a woman named Gloria Saltzberg, in Waltham, who was hosting it. On December 15, I drove to her house and found, a little to my shock, that she was confined to a wheelchair.

  She had been a victim of the 1955 polio epidemic, six years before, the one that had come just before the Salk vaccine was put on the market and, therefore, the one that might well be considered the last one. Yet despite this horrible misadventure, which might well have left her with an everlasting grudge against the universe, Gloria was cheerful and sweet.

  We have been good friends ever since, and I never heard her repine against her fate even once. She busied herself about the house, with her handsome husband, Bill, and with three attractive daughters, and managed a full social life as well. I was mightily impressed by her. She spoke with a Boston accent as thick as my Brooklyn one, so that a Midwesterner would probably have found the sounds of our conversation amusing indeed.

  To my surprise, Dr. Lewis, our children’s pediatrician, walked in. (He was a good pediatrician, always quiet and calm, which, more than any medicine, is an appropriate antidote for panicky parents.)

  “It’s my pediatrician,” I said, in blank surprise.

  “Really?” said Gloria.

  “Of course,” I said, “I’ll prove it. Dr. Lewis, say, ‘There’s a virus going around’ for these nice people.”

  Dr. Lewis smiled patiently. He was used to my eccentric teasing and knew that, except when the children were at their worst and I was at my most anxious, I could always be counted on to make virus jokes.

  18

  On December 18, 1961, according to the New York Times obituary column, Professor John Lyon, of my undergraduate and graduate classes in literature, died at the age of eighty-three. I remembered his kindness to me and was sorry that in the quarter century that had passed I had never thought to write and tell him so.

  It didn’t help. I continue to allow people to die without my having told them what their lives have meant to mine.

  19

  On December 22, 1961, I sent $501 to Marty Greenberg as a final payment in settlement of our agreement, and I was through with him, literarily, forever. I saw him once or twice after that, more or less unexpectedly and by accident, and was always friendly, but our twelve-year relationship was over.

  20

  On December 29, we visited the Elliot Strausses (he had been a boon companion of John Blugerman in his bachelor days), and I remember one incident very clearly. I was in one room, doing something or other, and Gertrude was in the other room where, as I learned afterward, she had taken an extreme dislike to a foolish, nasal woman who had put on a world-weary pose and apparently got away with it.

  Eventually I wandered into Gertrude’s room and, feeling bored and irritable, I sat down in the chair next to the foolish girl, a chair that was empty precisely because no one would sit there.

  Whereupon she promptly turned to me and said, “Well, here’s a new one. Suppose you justify your existence to me.”

  And because she had caught me out of sorts, I turned upon her and said, “As the more intelligent of the two of us, I prefer to have you justify yours to me, if you can do so without boring me too badly.”

  Everyone laughed and she tried, rather gamely, to recover, but I was annoyed and wouldn’t let her, forcing her to appeal to her husband, who smiled and said (perhaps in secret delight), “You’re out of your league, honey.”

  What made it memorable, then, was that Gertrude approached me and hissed fiercely in my ear, “I love you.” Gertrude was not a demonstrative woman and she didn’t often tell me such things of her own volition.

  21

  I celebrated the end of the year by taking David and Robyn to some local ice-skating rink.

  When young I had learned to roller-skate (with some difficulty) but had never had the occasion to ice-skate. Nor had I longed for the experience either, and as I grew older, my lust for new athletic experiences, never very great, had diminished to a clear zero.

  I was always willing to have the children try it, however, and David was eager.

  I therefore rented ice skates for both of them and helped put them on (or, more accurately, helped get someone to help put them on, for I hadn’t the faintest idea myself of how to go about it).

  I then helped David out onto the ice while I remained off the rink myself. He shuffled along, holding onto the railing, and I told him to keep it up and he would get the idea and hoped earnestly that some stranger would volunteer some elementary instruction.

  I then turned to find Robyn and see if I could get her to take a few tentative slides. For a moment I couldn’t find her and became panicky, and then I spied her out in the middle of the rink, skating. She was doing it very amateurishly, of course, but she was on her feet and quite obviously enjoying herself.

  Eventually, we saw to it that Robyn had skating lessons, and she loved them.

  22

  And so 1961 came to an end and I found it had been a disappointing literary year in one respect. I had published only two books:

  41. Words from the Myths (Houghton Mifflin)

  42. Realm of Algebra (Houghton Mifflin)

  Not since 1953 had I published so few books in one year. It was the first year in eight that I had no books with Abelard-Schuman, but that didn’t bother me. I did not particularly expect more books with that publisher.

  It was also the second year in a row in which I had no Doubleday books, and that, too, didn’t bother me, for Life and Energy was due for publication in a matter of weeks and I had two other books in press with them.

  Besides, the question of how many books were published was completely buried under the amazing record of my 1961 income.

  For 1961, I had achieved the completely unbelievable total writing income of just over sixty-nine thousand dollars. I had known ever since midyear that 1961 was my year for going over the top, but not till the Basic Books royalty check had come in did I realize how far over the top I would go.

  My income was twice what I had made in my previous record year of 1958 and was well over ten times my top salary at the med school. I enjoyed it even though I was certain I would never approach this figure again.

  17

  A Multiplicity of Books

  1

  I turned 42 on January 2, 1962, and scarcely even noticed the fact as I continued to work on my science biographies and as, each week, it seemed to me that I was .going to exceed my allotted number of 250 biographies and my allotted wordage of 150,000 by a greater and greater amount.

  I had a bad cold at this time, the worst in at least ten years, and it made me irritable.

  Bob Mills had sent me a letter suggesting terms for the anthology of Hugo winners (which I intended to call The Hugo Winners) in his new capacity as literary agent, and I thought they were outrageous.

  I visited him in his office on January 5, snuffling with my cold and too miserable to pay any attention to the fact that he had someone (whom I didn’t know) in the office with him.

  I said, “Bob, I’m not well, and I’m in no condition to argue. So let’s put it this way.” And I held up his letter, tore it into four parts, threw it in the waste basket, and got up to leave.

  He stopped me and asked what I wanted. I said, balefully, “The standard Doubleday contract. I get half, the authors get half, prorated for each according to length of story, and you get 10 per cent agent’s fee of my half.”

  That’s the way it was, too.

  The final terms, however, were not so favorable after all. The Hugo Winners turned out to be a perennial seller. Twice a year I’ve got to isolate its earnings from my Doubleday statement, do the necessary prorating, and send checks to authors and agents.

  That is the usual task of the anthologist and I shouldn’t complain, but I’m not primarily an anthologist and I have better ways of spending my time. Fortunately, Doubleday agrees with me in this and in all future anthologies I have edited, I always made sure that only my own share of the money comes directly to me and that someone else does the necessary calculations and mailings for the other people concerned.

  2

  With the contract for The Hugo Winners settled, I began, on January 11, to write the Introduction. For that, I cannibalized the article that had been rejected by the New York Times Sunday Magazine, making it funnier and more personal.

  What I wrote, in fact, represented a complete break with any of the Introductions I had seen in any previous science-fiction anthology. Previous Introductions had been scholarly and dignified, as though the anthologists were nervously trying to justify the existence of science fiction. Mine read more as though I were clowning about at a science-fiction convention.

  I had started doing this sort of thing with the humorous autobiographical Introductions to my F & SF essays, but this carried matters a step farther. I was not certain I could get it past Tim Seldes, but I intended to try.

  3

  I was slated to speak at Philadelphia on January 25 to a branch of the American Chemical Society, and it was to be formal. I was going to need a tuxedo.

  I have never been known as a natty dresser and I knew nothing about tuxedos. Such was my ignorance, in fact, that once when I was invited to speak at some function and the invitation had said “black tie” I had innocently put on a black bow tie and let it go at that.

  After the talk was over, Gertrude, who had been with me, asked me, curiously, “Did you notice that you were the only person at the head table who wasn’t in a tuxedo?”

  “No,” I said, blankly. “Were they wearing tuxedos?”

  “I thought so,” said Gertrude.

  Talking at Philadelphia, however, was like showing off before the hometown boys. I had never forgotten my essential failure at the Navy Yard, and J. Hartley Bowen, my old grandboss, was going to be there. I gathered that by now he was very proud of having been my old grandboss, and I wanted to give him further reasons for pride—so I arranged, on January 11, to rent a tuxedo.

  4

  My copies of Life and Energy finally arrived on January 15, 1962, and I greeted them with great jubilation. It was just three years and five days since my last Doubleday book, Nine Tomorrows, and in the interval I had published thirteen non-Doubleday books.

  What a relief it was! Doubleday had been the first to publish one of my books and, with all possible respect to my other publishers (particularly Houghton Mifflin), I always thought of Doubleday as my prime publisher, and I was glad to be back with them.120

  5

  I took the complete manuscript of The Hugo Winners—the tear sheets of all nine stories and all the Introductions—to Doubleday on January 24.

  “Glad to see you’ve got the stuff, Asimov,” said Tim, mock-gruffly, and held out his hand for the material.

  “Wait a while, Tim. I want to explain about the Introduction.”

  “What’s to explain?”

  “It’s sort of personal.”

  “How do you mean personal?”

  I evaded the clutching fingers of both Tim and Wendy and said, “Let me read it to you,” and began:

  “Let me introduce this book my own way, please; by which I mean I will begin by introducing myself.

  “I am Isaac Asimov and I am an old-timer.

  “Not you understand that I am (ha, ha) really old. Quite the contrary. I am rather young, actually, being only mumblety-mumble years old, and looking even younger.”

  By this time, Wendy had caught her breath and said, “You’re making it up. You didn’t write that”

  I lifted my eyebrows. “Of course I wrote that. What’s wrong with it?”

  She looked over my shoulder and said, “He did write it, Tim.”

  Tim held out a magisterial hand and said, “Let me see that junk, Asimov.”

  I handed it over. He read the Introduction where, near the end, a passage went as follows:

  “The person qualifying as editor for such an anthology would naturally have to be someone who had not himself received a Hugo, so that he could approach the job with the proper detachment. At the same time, he would have to be a person of note, sane and rational, fearless and intrepid, witty and forceful, and, above all, devilishly handsome.

  “All this was pointed out to Mr. Timothy Seldes at Doubleday & Company, and that fine gentleman agreed in every particular. Once again, the stringent requirements for the post seemed to cut down the possibilities to a single individual and I accepted with that lovable modesty that suits me so well.

  “And so here I have my revenge. If those wiseguys, herein included among the authors, had not been so eager to grab at the Hugos, but had modestly held back the way I did, they might have edited this anthology.

  “I hope they have learned their lesson.”

  Tim read through the entire Introduction and said, “Asimov, this is all very well at a science-fiction convention, but what about the people in Dubuque?”

  “The people in Dubuque,” I said, assuming a confidence I was very far from feeling, “will love it. They will feel themselves inside the world of science fiction.”

  “I’ll think about it,” said Tim.

  He did and, fortunately, ended on my side. The book was eventually published exactly as I had prepared it, and the gamble paid off.

  I have lost count of the number of people who have written to tell me they enjoyed the Introductions as much as they did the stories (some said they enjoyed them more). Youngsters who were unborn when I wrote that Introduction will write letters to me that begin:

  “Since you are well known to be a person of note, sane and rational, fearless and intrepid, witty and forceful, and, above all, devilishly handsome, I wonder if you . . .”

  The Hugo Winners began my custom of intricate Introductions for all my story collections whether they were anthologizations of stories of others, or collections of stories of my own. Nine Tomorrows was the last collection I ever presented bare.

  It also made it possible for other authors to produce anthologies or collections with elaborate and/or autobiographical introductions. Often this habit is traced back to Harlan Ellison’s Dangerous Visions, and on at least one occasion some illiterate reviewer even spoke of me as following Harlan’s example.

  The fact is, however, that The Hugo Winners antedated Dangerous Visions by five years, and I refuse to give up my prior claim, not even to Harlan, whom I love dearly.

  6

  The next day, January 25, I went down to Philadelphia and gave my talk in my rented tuxedo, the first time I had ever worn one.

  In the course of the talk, I told the story of my preparation of the specification on seam-sealing compounds eighteen years before and of my deliberate attempt to make it impossibly complicated. Hartley Bowen was in the audience and he loved the story. Thereafter, whenever I gave a talk in the Philadelphia area and he knew he was going to attend, he would urge me to tell the story.

  Sprague and Catherine de Camp showed up for the talk and I spent some delightful hours with them afterward. Catherine seemed scarcely to have aged.

  7

  Mac Talley hired Anthony Ravielli to do the illustrations for The Human Body. I saw samples of his work and was delighted. He was expensive, to be sure, and part of the expense was to come out of my royalties, but he was clearly worth it. Ravielli’s excellent drawings, which were both anatomically correct and artistically attractive, set off the book admirably.

  In fact, I was so pleased at the news that, having received it on January 29, I got to work on The Human Brain on February 5.

  If I expected this book to be a repeat of the earlier one, as far as enjoyment was concerned, I was wrong. I began with the hormones, which I could manage well enough, but once into the nervous system itself, I found myself working very near my capacity to understand. The Human Brain proved to be one of the hardest books I’ve ever had to write.

  8

  Before starting The Human Brain, however, I did something else. For Collier Books, I wrote a small science-fiction story intended for the 6-to-7-year-old.

  For a brief period of time in the early 1960s, Collier Books was putting out large numbers of paperback editions, including some of my Abelard-Schuman books. I met Richard Cecil, who was in charge, and he was a tall, enthusiastic fellow who was convinced that a great deal could be done if a firm really put out paperbacks in quantity.

  One of his plans was to put out a series of little books of about two thousand to three thousand words in length for the beginning reader. It was to have a limited vocabulary and I was to do the science-fiction story as part of the series. I wrote it on February 1, 1962, and called it The Best New Thing. (I tested it by having Robyn, who was going to be seven that month, read it, and she seemed fascinated.)