2. Someone read a paper which listed the criteria of creativity in scientists. Criterion after criterion began “The scientist expects his wife to be . . .” or “The scientist chooses a wife who . . .”

  Finally I could stand it no more and broke in and said, “The scientist might choose a husband, you know.”

  There was a sharp intake of breath all around the table, and as I stared in surprise from one to another, I realized that they thought I was implying homosexuality.

  Well, even if I were, so what! But I wasn’t! I said, irritably, “For God’s sake, the scientist could be a woman, couldn’t she?”

  And everyone exhaled in relief. What amused and irritated me was that two of the scientists sitting around the table were women, and they had been just as shocked at the thought of scientists choosing a husband as the men were.

  It was 1963, and I was still alone in my feminism. Women’s Liberation had not yet arisen to join me.

  21

  We didn’t send David back to Camp Annisquam in 1963. The two summers, we decided, were enough .Though he didn’t complain, our own investigation was enough to show us that he had not really participated in the activities. He was a loner and that was all there was to it.

  We decided therefore to send both David and Robyn to a day camp. It wasn’t quite as easy on us, but it was easier on David to be with us evenings and nights, and to have Robyn along with him at the camp. That was the summer, in fact, that they both learned to swim.

  20

  Hugo and History

  1

  In mid-1963, Keefer was no longer active director of the medical center. So tenuous had my connection with the med school become that I was unaware of the exact day when his term of office had come to an end.

  On June 27, I had lunch with Lewis Rohrbaugh, who was his successor and a perfect sweetheart. Had he succeeded Faulkner, my life would have taken a different turn, though perhaps not a better one.

  Lew and his wife were both Quakers. This was referred to in a newspaper article one day, and the more formal term, without capitalization, was used. The newspaper statement was that “Dr. and Mrs. Rohrbaugh are friends.” I encircled the passage and mailed it to Lew with the written comment, “A good beginning. Keep plugging.”

  Only once did the slightest wrinkle ever interrupt the smooth and friendly tenor of our relationship. I received a routine request to contribute money to the school. It touched the one point that never stopped being sore. I replied stiffly, in writing, that in 1957 Keefer had said that “the school could not afford to pay a science writer” and that now it was my turn to say that “the science writer could not afford to pay the school.”

  Dr. Rohrbaugh called me in and asked me not to hold a grudge against the school for the actions of a single individual. I said I did not in any other way. Indeed, since 1958, I had co-operated with the school in every possible way and had made every effort to let what favorable publicity I received overflow onto the school.

  That one statement, however, I could not make myself forget, and while I would contribute time and effort, I would not contribute money.

  Rohrbaugh accepted the inevitable. Indeed, he finally formally admitted my claim to tenure. I have in my possession now a blue card that says, “This will identify Isaac Asimov as a member of the Boston University Medical Center.” It is signed by Lewis H. Rohrbaugh. There is a little line under it that says, “Expiration Date,” and above that line is the typed word “Indefinite.”

  2

  On July 15, 1963, I brought my third collection of F & SF essays to Tim Seldes. I called this one Adding a Dimension, and this time Tim had no objections and introduced no delays.

  With this collection, I had brought my essays up to date. Of the sixty essays I had thus far written, virtually all that I wanted to collect had been collected. From this point on I simply waited till I had done seventeen more after the previous collection, and then handed them in with an Introduction and with any corrections or updatings that were necessary, and Doubleday would then publish a new collection. Publication became automatic; and I never again omitted an article.

  I had also begun a new series of articles for Eric Berger; eight essays on different worlds in the solar system that might offer, in one way or another, environments in which human beings might survive. The first essay dealt with the Moon, and the whole was eventually called Environments Out There.

  3

  Occasionally, I took the children to a Saturday morning matinee and then sat with them. I didn’t mind watching bad pictures once in a while. It brought back nostalgic memories of my childhood.

  On July 20, I saw Flipper, which at least had a dolphin in it. There was an added feature called The Slave, though, set in the time of Julius Caesar, which contained some feckless sex-and-sadism, more silly than offensive.

  It offended Robyn, though. She might be only 8½ but she had a strong moral sense. She turned to me and said, “Daddy, this is not a picture children should see.”

  “You’re right, Robyn,” I said, a little ashamed, and rose to go—but David would have none of that. He wanted to see the rest of the picture, so Robyn and I stayed and spent the time whispering to each other about how bad the picture was.

  4

  I spent much of the summer of 1963 looking forward to the Labor Day weekend, when I would be attending another World Science Fiction convention.

  The nineteenth convention, in 1961, had been held in Seattle, Washington, and the twentieth, in 1962, had been in Chicago. Neither had been in the realm of possibility for me. The twenty-first convention, however, was to be held in Washington, D.C., and that city I could reach. It would be my first World convention in three years.

  And it was not just a matter of attending it. I had a notion about the Washington convention which I was keeping strictly to myself. There might be a Hugo involved.

  After all, everyone knew I didn’t fly, so that everyone also knew that the twenty-first convention in Washington would be the first one I would attend after the publication of The Hugo Winners, in which I had made it amply plain that I had never received a Hugo.

  Surely, then, the fans running the Washington convention would see to it that I got one for something. George Scithers, who was in charge of the convention (he had been on the train with me coming back from Detroit four years before), had called me long before to make sure that I would be willing to sign up for a panel discussion.

  I agreed at once and then said, casually, “Do you want me as master of ceremonies?”

  “No,” said George, just as casually. “Ted Sturgeon is going to be master of ceremonies.”

  That was a dead giveaway. The master of ceremonies handed out the Hugo awards at the banquet, and when I was at a convention, I was almost always master of ceremonies. The only reason I could possibly be at a convention without being master of ceremonies (it seemed to me) was if I were going to get a Hugo. I couldn’t very well give one to myself, so naturally they would need someone else—and George had gone to considerable lengths to make sure that I would be at the convention, using the panel as a pretext.

  I was in high good humor over this. The business about never having gotten a Hugo had started off as a joke, of course, but in the process of joking, it had ceased to be one. I really wanted a Hugo.

  But then, just a few days before the convention, George called again. “Isaac,” he said, “Ted can’t make it after all because of family complications. I know this is short notice, but can you be master of ceremonies after all?”

  I agreed, of course, but my heart sank. No Hugo after all!

  I went to the convention at the end of August in a rather depressed state. In that state, I was suddenly aware of the passage of time and the on-creeping of age. My friends, whom I saw at conventions at intervals of some years, were getting visibly old.

  One of the first people I saw in Washington, for instance, was Ruth Kyle, the girl who, as Ruth Landis, had been the very image of Grace Kelly and who had so enlivened the 1955 convention for a number of us. Eight years had passed and she was now a plump matron.

  I escaped from these evidences of mortality and from my own Hugoless state by getting away to do some sight-seeing—the Smithsonian Institution, the Washington Monument. I even took a tour through the White House.

  But then on September 1, 1963, came the award luncheon and it was up to me to hand out the Hugos. I did what I could to trade on my own annoyance and I handed out each Hugo with a carefully graded increase in my level of hostility.

  When Fred Pohl, that friend of my childhood, approached to pick up a Hugo on behalf of a winner, I cried out as he came bounding up, “Break a leg, friend of my childhood!”—but he didn’t.

  Finally, there was only one Hugo left to be awarded, and it was labeled “Dramatic Award.” I didn’t think anyone would be interested in that since it would go to some movie or TV show with no one involved who was personally known to anybody, so I let the audience wait while I launched into a short speech of not-so-mock annoyance.

  “You know why I’ve never had a Hugo?” I finally said in peroration, waving my fist in the air. “It’s because I’m Jewish, that’s why. It’s because of anti-Semitic prejudice in high places. It’s because you’re all a bunch of Nazis.” Naturally, this got a big laugh, and I opened the envelope and found that the “Dramatic Award” typed on it had Just been put there as a blind.

  The final Hugo was, of course, for me. I started reading, “For putting the science in science fiction, Is ———” and stopped cold.

  I was getting a special Hugo for my F & SF essays.

  There wasn’t any question that I was surprised. The day never existed when I could fake that look of stunned astonishment on my face. The audience roared; it roared for ten minutes. When everyone died down and I caught my breath, George handed me the Hugo and I said, “You’ve ruined my shtick, damn it.” (I tried to feign indignation, but I was smiling all over. I was delighted.)

  Apparently, Ted Sturgeon had been chosen master of ceremonies because they were planning to give me a Hugo, and apparently he had been kept away by family difficulties.

  I said, “Then why did you ask me to be master of ceremonies, George? There were plenty of other choices.”

  “Oh well,” said George, “we thought it would be funnier that way, but I have to admit no one ever dreamed you would lead up to it so beautifully.”

  I said, “Didn’t you think it would look peculiar to have me give a Hugo to myself?”

  “Sure,” said George, “but the committee decided you were the only writer in science fiction who could give himself a Hugo without being embarrassed.”

  “Wiseguy,” I said—but he was probably right.

  5

  On September 5, 1963, my mother’s sixty-eighth birthday, I finished the first volume of Understanding Physics, and within a few days I got to work on a new juvenile math book for Houghton Mifflin. This one was Quick and Easy Math.

  The idea came to me when I tried to read a book that purported to outline methods for arithmetical calculations without pen and paper. It was quite obvious that the methods that were offered required so much memorization of partial results that no one in his right mind was going to get the answer without first being driven into his wrong mind.

  What were really needed were methods for performing very simple computations in the head. I had watched people laboring over the addition of 19 and 27, over the subtraction of 19 from 51, over the multiplication of 18 and 8, and so on. Explain that 19+27=20+26=46; that 51−19=52−20=32; that 18×8=36×4=72×2=144, and other such calculations, and you’ll have explained 90 per cent of all the calculations that the ordinary person has to do.

  So I sat down to write the book, and had nothing but fun with it.

  6

  On September 13, I received a valuable insight into female psychology.

  Robyn complained that she was tired of my scolding her. I said, “If you have kids someday—are you going to scold them?”

  And she reversed direction at once without any noticeable difficulty and said, “Of course. I wouldn’t want them to be spoiled.”

  7

  It was clear that the children were old enough to accompany us on trips without being too troublesome, so on September 19 we took off on a two-day jaunt to the White Mountains in New Hampshire, a region we had never before visited.

  The trip was delightful and by the next day we were at Mount Washington, the highest mountain in New England. We went up a cog railroad to the top, and then down again. The round trip took three hours and I must admit that I was not pleased with the angle of either ascent or descent, but I concentrated hard on the scenery.

  When we came down it was nearly dark and it was quite obvious that it was time to find a motel and settle down for the night.

  Gertrude said, “We passed some motels some miles back.” Unfortunately, it was time for one of my abysmal stupidities.

  I said, “We don’t want to go back.”

  Why should we not want to go back? It was simply my notion that one went forward, just as though there were no such thing as a strategic retreat.

  I didn’t bother arguing the point. I just piled everyone into the car, got behind the wheel, and drove south through gathering darkness and then through deep night. The trouble was that (although I didn’t known it then) I was heading into a state forest where for twenty miles there was no habitation and certainly no motel—just wilderness, and twenty miles of the most beautiful scenery in the world, which we never saw.

  Gertrude was distressed over the scenery we were missing, and the children were afraid we would never find a motel. Only I knew the real danger, and I dared not say a word lest I frighten everyone.

  Suppose we had a flat, or some other kind of breakdown, alone in that wilderness at night?

  We didn’t, but I drove twenty miles with that apprehension gnawing at me and yet stubbornly unwilling to turn around and head north again.

  We finally found a motel—one of the crummiest I have ever inhabited—but by then we were beggars all, and in no mood to be choosers.

  Once daylight came, however, I made up for my mistake. I carefully chose scenic highways, and drove slowly through an unbelievably riotous forest. The leaves had turned three weeks early that year and we had managed to catch the turning at its peak.

  We got home at 5 p.m. on the twenty-first, quite satisfied with ourselves. Even the night ride, in retrospect (only in retrospect), seemed like an adventure.

  8

  In New York, on September 27, I visited Mac Talley at New American Library and received the excellent news that he approved of my book on physics and urged me to proceed with the second part with all deliberate speed. I was only too glad to oblige.

  The first part was Understanding Physics: Motion, Sound, and Heat, and the second part I at once decided would be Understanding Physics: Light, Magnetism, and Electricity. The third part, when I got to it, would be on subatomic physics.

  I celebrated by taking a tour through the United Nations the next day.

  9

  I took in the completed Quick and Easy Math on October 11, and was so pleased with it that I had the impulse to do a mathematical essay for my F & SF series. I was further egged on to do it by an old, old text in arithmetic that I had obtained from Sinex.

  It dated back to 1790 and it included instruction on “compound addition”—that is, on the addition of numbers to bases other than 10. Examples would be the addition of yards, feet, and inches, or of pounds, shillings, and pence. There were also “compound subtraction,” “compound multiplication,” and “compound division.”

  There were, in addition, tables of enormously strange units for dry measure, wet measure, cloth measure, and an indefinite number of other measures; and other tables for the conversion of one kind of state money to another kind, and all to the new federal money of dollars and cents that had just been established (to say nothing of British, French, and Spanish money).

  It seemed to me that most of that nonsense we had gotten rid of with no damage to anyone but, instead, to our great benefit. It further seemed to me that it would do us further good if we could get rid of much remaining nonsense of the same sort.

  The essay I wrote, “Forget It!,” was the sixty-fifth in the series, and eventually appeared in the March 1964 F & SF.130

  I was so pleased with this essay that on October 11, when with the Fonoroffs and the Saltzbergs, I read the manuscript aloud. The reaction seemed even more favorable than I had expected, whereupon I made another decision:

  The previous spring, you see, I had been asked by the New York branch of Mensa to attend one of their meetings and give a talk. They offered to let me pick any date I chose, any date, and they would have their meeting then.

  Between my own membership in Mensa and their eager desire to adjust themselves to my needs, I could not refuse, so I bent over the 1963 calendar and chose a date in the autumn.

  I had not chosen a topic, however, feeling that that could easily be left for much later, even for the last minutes. On October 11, however, I decided that “Forget It!” would be perfect as a talk to self-conscious intellectuals, and as it would not yet have been published at the time I had chosen to give the talk, it would be new to all of them.

  I began looking forward to the talk with eagerness. It was coming up the next month, for when I had studied the calendar, the date I chose out of the whole year as ideal for the talk was the evening of November 22, 1963. It was only a little over six weeks in the future.