“That’s too much,” I said.

  The silence that greeted that remark was deafening.

  “But I’ll take it,” I said, trying to recover.

  And, when the time came, I did take it.

  On September 12, I took the train to Boston and was home the next day, with Gertrude and the kids waiting for me at the station even though the train was an hour and ten minutes late.

  2

  A middle-aged woman named Helen Phillips was my copy editor on The Human Body and, on several occasions, I dropped in at Houghton Mifflin to work with her on the book. She was tall, thin, angular, single, and almost a stereotype of the prissy New Englander, but she had a sense of humor under her starch and she was a crackerjack copy editor—never letting me get away with anything.

  On September 18, for instance, we went over the index together. It was the first time anyone had ever paid any attention to my indexes but myself.

  My clearest memory of her, however, is our session over the illustrations—where to place them, what captions to use, and so on. Some of the illustrations were complex enough to require having various parts labeled—and among them were the illustrations for the male genitalia and the female genitalia.

  This represented a problem because Ravielli’s illustrations, though superb, were done in a style that made it difficult to draw lines from object to label without getting them lost in the general array of delicate lines that made up the drawing.

  We were working in a room that was not truly closed off but had walls that did not reach to the ceiling and that had a gap where the door should be. That meant that the full office noise of the rest of the floor reached us, but it didn’t bother me. I’m a strainer; I strain out what I don’t want to pay attention to. Apparently Helen could, too, so we worked on, oblivious to the noise.

  Finally, when we hit the cross section of the male genitalia, I thought about it and said, “I tell you what, Helen, let’s tackle this little by little starting with the easy parts. For instance, let’s place the penis right here.” (I was referring to the label.)

  I spoke, as I always do, in my ordinary speaking voice, which does tend to rattle distant windows, and I had no sooner delivered that line when every bit of noise on the floor stopped. It was as though it were all some giant television set that had been turned off with a snap. In that sudden enormous silence, I sat, puzzled and waiting.

  Finally, very slowly, as though dreading what there might be to see, a head began to appear at one side of the door, more and more and more, until an eye could be seen—and it was Austin.

  “Wouldn’t you know? It’s Isaac,” he shouted, and everyone rushed in.

  “It was business,” I yelled. “It was strictly business. We were labeling diagrams. I tell you it was perfectly innocent.”

  But everyone pretended that they had interrupted an act of fornication and I grew scarlet with frustration. Helen, I noticed, wasn’t in the least put out. She smiled demurely and was completely in control.

  3

  On September 22, 1962, the World Book Year Book raised its head again. Once again, they were encouraging their salespeople, but this time on a local basis, and I was invited to attend the festivities at a Boston hotel. I attended and was (my diary says) “for four hours immersed in a world of babbitry and boosterism.”

  The end was painful. Someone from the organization arose to give a talk. He had had at least one drink too many and was, I think, unable to exercise judgment. His talk slid into the telling of jokes.

  He was not a particularly good jokester in the first place, but he knew a great many, and he told them all at as rapid a rate as he could. What’s more, they were dialect jokes, a very difficult art to master, and he was not master of it. What was still more, a number of his jokes were told in Jewish dialect, and he was not Jewish, and much of the audience was.

  Now, there is nothing a Jewish audience likes better than Jewish jokes told in an authentic Jewish dialect by someone who is Jewish. There is nothing that same Jewish audience dislikes worse than those same Jewish jokes told in a phony Jewish dialect by a Gentile.

  The polite laughter that greeted his first efforts choked off and froze and for something like twenty minutes (or possibly twenty hours) he told joke after joke in an atmosphere of mounting embarrassment and hostility, without even one giggle from anyone at any time, and would not stop. I think he could not stop.

  How much damage he did the World Book cause I do not know. I would have fled the scene at the first opportunity but I was at the head table about three removed from the man and could do nothing. I couldn’t even tug at his trousers, as I had once seen Mrs. Amory do to her husband.

  4

  Then, on September 27, the Year Book let me know that they wanted a color photograph of me. For the 1962 Year Book they had used a rather impressionistic drawing, but that wasn’t good enough for them. I was perfectly willing to oblige, but they insisted on a laboratory setting, since I was doing the “Science Review of the Year.”

  I said that I did not work in a laboratory and had not done so in over four years and that such a photograph would be phony—but that word has no terrors for publicity people. I could do nothing but go into the med school lab, set up a fake experiment with what glassware and tubing happened to be at hand, and let myself be photographed.

  It appeared in the 1963 Year Book in glory, but I never valued that photograph. Aside from the fakery of the background, which bothered me even if it bothered no one else, it caught me very nearly at the peak of my weight, and I did not admire my fat face.

  5

  Donald Menzel of Harvard was a deadly foe of the flying-saucer idiocy. Lyle Boyd was working with him on a book concerning the various more notorious flying-saucer hoaxes, frauds, and mistakes, but they were having trouble placing it with a publisher.

  I suggested Doubleday as a possible publisher on the ground that not only were they my publishers and very decent and honest but also that they were extremely hospitable to intelligent books.

  To be sure, Doubleday did take the book, and Lyle called with the news on October 2, and I was delighted. The book was eventually published and did modestly well.

  What I remember best about the book, however, is that I happened, inadvertently, to see a green sheet on which editorial sales, printings, and so on were estimated. At the bottom there was a line headed something like “How brought to Doubleday?” Scrawled in was “Recommended by Asimov. No finder’s fee necessary.”

  I pointed that out with great glee and the editor concerned said, defensively, “Oh, come, Isaac, you’re one of the family.”

  And so I am, and I would rather have that than a dozen finder’s fees.

  6

  I drove in to New York on October 3, 1962, and decided to take the West Side Highway for the first time and register at a motel on Ninth Avenue so that I could park my own car and have it always available. It was one of those trips, however, in which I was plagued by minor mishaps.

  I hit the Bronx just as an explosion killed a number of people and I found myself suddenly, and frighteningly, surrounded by taxis and ambulances.

  Then, too, I had asked a toll collector directions for reaching the West Side Highway and he had said, “Just follow the arrows to the George Washington Bridge.”

  I did, but followed one arrow too many and found myself on the George Washington Bridge. I had to penetrate New Jersey and then return.

  Eventually, I went out to New Jersey on purpose to give a talk at Hoffman-LaRoche, and managed to lock my trunk key in the trunk.

  The next day, it turned cool, and I had brought my topcoat with me—except that it was in the trunk, which I couldn’t open.

  On October 4, I met Edward L. Ferman for the first time. He was the son of Joe Ferman, publisher of F & SF. Ed was a shy youth and vitally interested in the magazine. The meeting was about the only bright point of that trip’s business rounds.

  7

  On October 20, I drove to Albany to give a talk at a medical school there, and then I drove down to New York. The trip from Albany to New York was made memorable for me by the fact that some gentleman of medium importance in the audience asked to hitch a ride to New York and I agreed—and then he smoked a cigar en route.

  At that time, I had still not reached the point where I sternly forbade all smoking in my home, office, or car (as I now do), and the only thing I could do was to shorten the ordeal by racing down the Thruway at eighty miles an hour.

  I compensated myself the next day, which was a Sunday, by taking a cruise around Manhattan. It was the first time I had ever done that, and I would have thought, on an a priori basis, that there could be nothing interesting in staring at Manhattan for a round trip of forty miles. I was quite wrong. Manhattan has an entirely different aspect from the sea, and the three-hour sea journey, which carried me down as far as the Statue of Liberty (closer than at any time since my visit there thirty-three years earlier), was an extraordinary thrill.

  For the first time I truly grasped, viscerally, that Manhattan was an island.

  The next day I was on my rounds, but the day was dominated by the fact that President Kennedy had announced a blockade of Cuba and laid down his ultimatum demanding that the Soviet Union dismantle the missile bases they had built there. That initiated a period of a couple of days during which the world held its breath waiting to see if the long-expected nuclear war would break out.

  The night of October 22, 1962, I slept, but fitfully, at the Skyline Motor Inn. I woke at hourly intervals and listened for the normal sound of normal traffic. It then occurred to me that if there were a nuclear war and if Manhattan were target zero for a nuclear bomb, I simply would not wake up—so I slept soundly for the second half of the night, and the next day drove back to Boston listening to news bulletins all the way.

  By the twenty-fifth, the Soviet Union backed down and Kennedy, and the United States, won the greatest victory of the Cold War.

  8

  The Cuban missile crisis, however, did very little to affect the congressional elections that took place on November 6. The situation in Congress remained largely unchanged.

  By far the best news of the day for me was that Richard Nixon had been roundly trounced in his bid for the governorship of California. That was widely regarded as removing him once and for all from politics. I so regarded it, certainly, and so did Nixon himself, for in a fit of cry-baby petulance unparalleled in American political history, he called a news conference and told the reporters “you won’t have Nixon to kick around anymore.”

  That should have killed him politically if the defeat had not, and it is to the everlasting shame and distress of the republic that it did not.

  9

  On November 7, 1962, Eleanor Roosevelt died, and I thought sadly of the only time I had ever been in the same room with her, 3½ years before.

  10

  I went back to school, after a fashion, on November 19. Driven by our possession of a piano, I finally decided to take an adult-education course in the reading of music. It was a rather pleasant change in routine, but actually I learned much the same thing I had learned in fourth-grade music appreciation and had not yet forgotten.

  The thing I remember best about the course, however, was the teacher, a tall, good-looking young man with a shy and engaging smile, who said to me once that he had written a concerto.

  “Was it successful?” I asked.

  “No,” he said, “I’ve never even heard it.”

  You can write a concerto, but in order to hear it you have to persuade musicians to learn it and practice it and then play it, and that costs money. I suppose you can play a version of it on the piano and hear the “tune,” but that’s not the same thing.

  It made me glad I was a writer. Even if I wrote something I could not publish, I could read the manuscript and there would be (questions of money and fame excluded) no difference to me.

  11

  I had agreed to tape a television show with Dave Garroway in New York on November 28. I had no real desire to do it, for my enjoyment in doing structured material on TV is nil, but along with me on the show was to be Nobel Laureate Edward Mills Purcell, and I did want to meet him. He was one of the men to be included in my science biographies, and I felt a proprietary interest in him, therefore.

  The show fulfilled all my worst apprehensions. I was at the studio by 10:30 a.m. and the delays started. We did not get finished till 5:00 p.m. and then they wanted it done over.

  I refused with unwontedly forceful language and stalked out. Purcell, I remember, was perfectly at ease. When we waited hours past the scheduled time, he stretched out on a couch and went to sleep. I think he would have been ready to repeat the show.

  There was good news from Doubleday, however.

  I had taken in my second collection of essays, View from a Height, seven months before, but Tim Seldes would not commit himself to it. He wanted to see how Fact and Fancy, the first book in the series, would do—and for months it moved very slowly.

  On the other hand, sales did not cease, either, and by the end of November they had crept up to the point where it was quite apparent that Doubleday would not lose money on the book. Tim said, on November 30, that he would do View from a Height.

  That was great, because it meant I could instantly put together a third collection of essays.

  12

  On December 3, 1962, I received the three-thousand-dollar payment for my article for the 1963 Year Book.

  When the check arrived, I realized, with some confusion, that even without any check nearly like that of the Basic Books monster of the year before, I was now within less than two thousand dollars of the total income of 1961, and that it was very unlikely that I would make less than that in the twenty-eight days remaining in the year.

  It was not an unpleasing thought, but it was a confusing one.

  Where did the money come from? And it was a guilty one. Was I properly earning the money?125

  13

  The Human Brain was almost done, thank goodness, and I had the dim feeling that I dared not let it end without having another project under way. On December 6, therefore, I began The Kite That Won the Revolution, and before the day was out had put an estimated one fifth of it into first draft.

  That was more or less my system. There must be no endings. Several balls must always be in the air.

  14

  Finally, finally, finally, The Genetic Code found a hard-cover home. I was told on December 8 that a firm called Orion Press would do it.

  I had never heard of Orion Press before and I have never heard of it in any other connection since. Still, they put out a handsome hardcover edition eventually, and for a number of years paid out faithful royalties until the hard-cover edition went out of print.

  I am grateful to them.

  15

  Fred Pohl was in town on December 14, and I had dinner with him at the Statler Hilton.

  For some years, Fred had been very close to Horace Gold, helping him run Galaxy. When Horace left both the job and the East Coast, and went to California, Fred took over as the editor.

  We reminisced during that meal about the days when we had first met, nearly a quarter of a century before, and Fred said at one point, “You know, Eye, I never really planned to be forty.”

  “I know,” I said, sadly, “but Cyril’s method of avoidance is really the only possible way.”

  16

  On December 15, 1962, I finally finished The Human Brain. It had taken me 10½ months, as compared with 6 months for The Human Body. I took it in to Austin Olney on the eighteenth, and three days later (my father’s sixty-sixth birthday) I took him The Kite That Won the Revolution.

  17

  That year the annual meeting of the AAAS was being held in Philadelphia over the Christmas-New Year week, and I decided to attend.

  While there, I listened to excellent talks on psychology, saw diverting science films, heard Loren Eiseley give one of the featured evening talks in an orotund manner, and met Bentley Class, an important biochemist who turned out to be a fan of mine.

  I also managed to get in a side visit to the Philadelphia aquarium, where I saw dolphins for the first time in my life.

  December 30 was the last day of the meetings, and it was cold. The temperature stood at 2° F, and I remember walking from one hotel to another, just a few blocks, with my ears slowly freezing. Fortunately, a fellow conventioneer, with woolly gloves and pity for my ears, walked behind me and kept the gloves over them.

  18

  The year 1962 came to an end with six books published in its course, second only to the eight-book mark of 1960. They were:

  43. Life and Energy (Doubleday)

  44. Words in Genesis (Houghton Mifflin)

  45. Fact and Fancy (Doubleday)

  46. Words on the Map (Houghton Mifflin)

  47. The Hugo Winners (Doubleday)

  48. The Search for the Elements (Basic Books)

  As for my annual income, that came out to a little over seventy-two thousand dollars, nearly three thousand dollars higher than what I had so confidently expected to be my Mount Everest peak of 1961.

  In a way this marks an important watershed in my life. Up to the end of 1962, the money I earned was of vital concern to me and dictated the direction of my life. Even my high earnings of 1961 seemed like a one-shot, and I had no certainty that the figure would not recede and would not, perhaps, recede badly.