I decided I would turn the pages and read a few paragraphs on every page. I don’t know if I would really have lasted the distance, but on page 118, I came across the entry, “Asimov, Isaac.” It was totally unexpected, and the effect was a lot like tripping on a step you didn’t know was there.

  My first thought was that I was there only because I was a Columbia graduate. I looked up other Columbia graduates who, I thought, might well be in the encyclopedia, and they weren’t, so it was legitimate. For the first time, I was embedded in encyclopedish amber.

  Naturally, I gave the volume a good review. Fortunately, it was worth it. If it had been a rotten job, I would have been in a real quandary.

  24

  Hofstra College, out on Long Island, asked me for permission to reprint something and it suddenly occurred to me that Hofstra had been the college that Irene (of graduate-school days) had attended. I told them that if they obtained Irene’s present address for me they could reprint without charge; if they did not, they could not reprint at all.

  They got busily to work and on February 15, 1964, I got the address. I sent off a polite letter at once, recalling myself to her memory, reminding her that she had planned to have five children, and asking how life had treated her.

  She answered by return mail. Of course, she remembered me, she said. When mention of me appeared in the papers, she would tell people (including her children) that she knew me in school. She actually did have five children, four girls and a boy, and she, her husband, and her children were all doing well.

  It had been twenty-two years since I had heard from her, and I was gratified. I replied in order to bring her up to date on my personal life, and after one or two more exchanges of letters, there was nothing more to say, and we stopped.

  25

  Robyn was nine years old on February 19, 1964, but it was somehow I who got the birthday present. The World Book Year Book had insisted on handing out another bonus, and I was ordered to buy something up to a hundred dollars and bill them. At first, I thought there was absolutely nothing I wanted badly enough to be willing to bill them for, but then I thought of a globe—an elaborate globe.

  I got one that was sixteen inches in diameter and lit up inside. It was a beauty and I was very pleased.

  I was able to express my pleasure directly to Roy Fisher when he arrived in Boston soon after. I had lunch with him on February 26, and he discussed a new year book being planned, one to be devoted to scientific advances and to be called Science Year. I thought it was a good idea, of course, and said so. Neither of us mentioned the forthcoming Bermuda junket. I suppose he took it for granted I would come. I certainly took it for granted I would not.

  Fisher wanted to eat at the Harvard Faculty Club, where horse steak was a traditional item on the menu. Fisher wanted to try it, so I ordered it also. I couldn’t tell it from a poor cut of beefsteak and finished it with no more trouble than a lot of chewing. Fisher, however, could only down about a third of it. He was clearly unable to continue eating horse.

  26

  On February 29, 1964, I finally finished the second volume of Understanding Physics, and that night I celebrated by attending a Mensa meeting.

  Tom Lehrer, the song satirist, attended too, and the host of the meeting turned to me for help. Lehrer had come with the express warning that he must not be asked to perform, and the host was afraid that some of the Mensa people would be unable to resist badgering the man unless there were some definite item of entertainment scheduled—so would I give a speech?

  I wasn’t in the least enthusiastic about putting myself up as a substitute for Lehrer, but needs must. Since it was Leap Day, I improvised a talk on the development of the calendar, dealing with the lunar year versus the solar year and the Julian year versus the Gregorian year. It went over quite well, and Lehrer was left to himself.

  Nor was it a loss. Ten days later I turned my talk into an F & SF essay, which I entitled “The Days of Our Years,”132 my seventieth essay in the series. It appeared in the August 1964 F & SF.

  27

  Meanwhile, I was planning to put together another collection. I, Robot had contained nine of my positronic robot stories, but there were two I had omitted: “Robot AL-76 Goes Astray” and “Victory Unintentional.” Furthermore, in the thirteen years since I, Robot had been published, I had done six more robot short stories.

  Together, my unincluded robot short stories came to some sixty thousand words, a little skimpy, but it was my idea that my two robot novels be also included. With The Caves of Steel and The Naked Sun, I would have a large, two-hundred-thousand-word book containing all the robot material that was not in I, Robot. In fact, I planned to call it The Rest of the Robots.

  For the first time, I was collecting stories not because they were, in themselves, worth collecting, but simply because they were there. I felt that I had reached the point where my stories, all of them, were of interest to readers as possessing historical interest if no other kind. This was rather a matter of vanity in me, I suppose, but Tim Seldes agreed.

  I therefore had Gertrude type up the early stories for which I did not have satisfactory manuscripts available, and on March 5, I took in the collection to Doubleday. I also took in the second volume of Understanding Physics to Mac Talley.

  (Virile in New York, I attended, on the evening of March 6, a meeting of the Trap Door Spiders for a second time. I enjoyed myself as much as I had five years before, and again Sprague urged me to join, and again I felt it was not a good idea.)

  28

  Meanwhile, the news arrived that Stanley was in the hospital. He had a slipped disc and was in traction. The problem was tennis. Stanley and Ruth were both confirmed tennis maniacs, and Stanley, at least, had a variety of physical problems as a result but counted it all a reasonable price to pay for the pleasure of hitting a ball with a racket.

  He was eventually operated on and put into good shape—at least sufficiently good shape to continue playing tennis and continue collecting tennis elbow and other things.

  Years later, when I berated him (as I periodically did) for this aberration of his, he told me of a friend of his who died on the tennis court and was buried in his tennis costume.

  I said, “You sound envious.”

  “It was a good way to go,” said Stanley.

  How idiotic!

  A good way to go is to go at the typewriter and collapse with your nose in the keys. That’s a good way to go.

  Tennis, forsooth!

  29

  On March 18, I heard that Norbert Wiener had died in Stockholm, Sweden, at the age of sixty-nine. I was distressed, of course. He was, for all his oddness, a great man. Yet I felt a touch of relief (of which I was ashamed) that there would now be no occasion for me ever to have to fend off arranging a series of conversations with him for publication.

  30

  The evidence of human mortality was piling up, and I was doing some heavy thinking on the subject. A number of things contributed to it:

  1. There was my father’s hospitalization and his pronounced aging.

  2. There was my brother’s hospitalization. Even my kid brother, whom I remembered as a baby, was showing signs of falling apart.

  3. I was now forty-four, two years older than my father had been when he discovered he was suffering from angina—and I was almost as fat as he was at the time. I was now 210 pounds in weight; I had never weighed as much in my life.

  4. Bernie Pitt, who was less than a year older than myself, had died of a heart attack, and British actor Peter Sellers, who was five years younger than I was, had survived a rather serious one.

  I was not proof against all these considerations.

  I decided on April 10, 1964, to lose a considerable amount of weight, and I quietly proceeded to cut down on my food intake.

  In two months, I lost 30 pounds and brought my weight down to 180, and kept it there. I never regained the lost weight, and I think it was a good thing to do. Had I not done it the chances are I would not be sitting here now writing my autobiography.

  I did not say anything to Gertrude about this, but after I had been at it for a couple of weeks, she studied me for a moment and said, “Say, are you losing weight, Isaac?”

  I couldn’t deny it.

  31

  On April 13, 1964, Gertrude and I went to the local movie house to see Seven Days in May. I found it difficult to react properly because I watched with a great deal of tension. That was the day when, for the first time, we left the children at home without a baby-sitter. David was 12½ and Robyn was 9.

  We had in the past left them with a baby-sitter who was no more than 12 herself, but thinking of that didn’t help. I was never so glad to see a movie end as I was that evening. We drove home quickly—and found the children peacefully asleep in bed.

  Part III

  –

  Endlessly Broadening

  21

  Changes of Editors

  1

  On April 21, 1964, I took the family for a second trip into Canada. We were only gone two days but the sensation of being in a foreign country was much stronger this time, for we visited Quebec. Francophone Canada was another thing altogether.

  David was particularly excited at the thought of hearing a foreign language spoken, but all the glamor vanished when he found that television made no sense to him in French.

  My clearest memory of the trip is that of my having carefully worked out in my mind the French for “Where is the ferry?” so that I could ask the question with casual sophistication and make my way across the St. Lawrence with presence and aplomb.

  I saw a likely young man, clearly intelligent, with a frank, open face, and said in my best French accent, “Pardonnez-moi, monsieur, mais ou est la traverse, s’il vous plaît?”

  But I found I was questioning a German tourist, who couldn’t understand a word I said (in either French or English) and who didn’t know where the ferry was in any case. I could speak German better than I could speak French, as it happens, but this rather broke my spirit and I found the traverse by myself.

  2

  New York City was having a World’s Fair again, as it had had in 1939, a quarter century before. I visited it on May 8, interrupting furious work on The Greeks, which I had finally begun on May 1. It was not entirely my own idea. I was doing it at the request of the New York Times, which wanted me to write an article on it.

  I stayed for eight hours and was most impressed by what was called “the Underground Home.” Since I have always liked enclosed spaces and envy small animals their snug underground dens and have celebrated enclosed societies in the Foundation series and in The Caves of Steel, I considered it a step in the right direction.

  That evening I attended a meeting of the Hydra Club for the first time in quite a while. Among those present was Cornell Woolrich, whose use of William Irish as a pseudonym had led to my own choice of Paul French. He was sixty-one years old at the time and looked older. It was the first time I had ever met him and I tried to tell him how much I enjoyed his books, but he shrugged it off.

  Before I left New York that visit, I arranged to have one more book done by Abelard-Schuman. They said they would be willing to publish my Scholastic series, Environments Out There. I was glad to be able to give them something, for I hadn’t done a new book for them since I finished The Double Planet six years before.

  3

  I was becoming internationally known. Foreign reporters occasionally interviewed me, and foreign editors visiting the country wanted to see me.

  On May 27, for instance, a Japanese reporter interviewed me by way of an interpreter who spoke English with charming hesitation. I did my best, using simple words and speaking slowly.

  They then offered to take me to dinner but said they wanted to go to a good restaurant that featured typically American food. I had a momentary impulse to take them to a cafeteria, but decided that the honor of the United States required more than that. I took them to Smith House in Cambridge, where the cuisine was good New England.

  The Japanese woman spoke to the interpreter, who then asked me to order the meal and to choose typically American dishes. I ordered New England clam chowder and a plate of scrod with french-fried potatoes and peas. I ordered it for myself, too, since I did not want them to think that I was trying any tricks on them.

  They ate it with every sign of pleasure and occasionally spoke quickly to each other, and it struck me that to them the food was exotic and thrilling.

  For dessert, I was going to order apple pie à la mode, but the English-speaking woman asked me if the Indian pudding on the menu was a traditional Indian dish.

  “Yes,” I said, “American Indian.”

  “Please let us have it.”

  “Certainly,” I said, groaning inwardly. Indian pudding is cornmeal mush and I had tried a mouthful of it once and decided that it was the Red Man’s Revenge.

  I ordered Indian pudding all around, showed them how to add the milk and then watched them eat that with little quiverings of delight. I ate mine like a good boy—but haven’t tasted it since.

  4

  On June 4, 1964, in New York, I finally picked up about three fifths of the galleys of Asimov’s Biographical Encyclopedia of Science and Technology. It was over 2½ years since I had started the book, and now I finally saw portions of it in print for the first time.

  The remainder of the galleys arrived on June 9, and on the twelfth I had completed the job of proofing. Fortunately, there was no need to prepare an index at this stage. My notion of keying the index items to the number of the biography rather than the page meant the job could be done in manuscript, and I had done it. Reading the galleys was therefore the end of my job. (I added 6 biographies in galleys, so that I ended with 1,007 biographies altogether.)

  I sent it all off by registered mail to Doubleday on June 13 and made a note in my diary that the postage came to $8.10, and that it was the most expensive single item I had ever mailed.

  Two days later, I was completely finished with The Greeks, and I took it in to Austin on the sixteenth.

  5

  The American Chemical Society hands out, at its annual meetings, a number of awards, medals, plaques, and other memorabilia for notable work in this or that branch of the field. Among the lesser items is the James T. Grady medal for science writing in the field of chemistry. It carried with it, at that time, a one-thousand-dollar award (tax-free), a gold medal, a bronze replica of the medal (for display while the real thing rested in the bank vault), and three hundred dollars travel expenses, since the lucky winner had to show up at the meeting to collect all this in person.

  Year after year I had been nominated (along with every other chemical-science writer in America, I think), and year after year I did not get the award. Sooner or later, though, if one is patient, the society is bound to run out of one’s competitors.

  At any rate, on June 15, 1964, I received a letter (stamped “Confidential”) telling me that the award was mine if I would come and get it. The ACS was meeting in Detroit the following April and I would have to be there.

  Since I’d been in Detroit five years before for the science-fiction convention, I knew I could make it. The award seemed to me to be worth the trouble of the trip, so I accepted the honor.

  6

  I couldn’t allow The Greeks to be over and done with without having started another project, and there was one immediately at hand. The third volume of Understanding Physics had to be done, and I began it on May 27.

  It was to deal with the world within the atom, and its subtitle was The Electron, Proton, and Neutron. I expected it to be the easiest and the most amusing of the three volumes, and so it was. In a sense, it was a rewrite of Inside the Atom on a deeper level and with a more detailed and extensive treatment.

  That, of course, is another factor that makes the writing of nonfiction so rewarding. You can take up the same subject at a variety of levels, from a variety of standpoints, and for a variety of audiences, getting a different pleasure out of it each time. I imagine the pleasure is similar to that which a musician gets from composing, or playing, something called “Variations on a Theme from So-and-so.”

  I also started a third series of articles for Scholastic. This one was rather like Breakthroughs in Science but was to feature the development of ideas rather than biographies. The title of the series was, in fact, to be The Great Ideas of Science.

  I also began A Short History of Astronomy on June 28. It was intended to be the third in my series of Short History books, following biology and chemistry.

  7

  It was a presidential election year again, and on July 13, the Republican nominating convention opened. Barry Goldwater was the sure nominee. It was quite certain that Lyndon Johnson (who, as Vice President, had automatically succeeded on Kennedy’s assassination) would be the Democratic nominee.

  I was quite certain whom I would vote for. I would favor almost any Democrat over almost any Republican, but in this case the gap was unusually wide.

  On the one hand, Johnson had handled Congress well (Kennedy had not) and was putting through a good deal of civil-rights legislation—of which I approved. Goldwater, on the other hand, was a hard-line conservative and, specifically, wanted to see us get deeper into the Vietnam fracas.

  I was furiously against Goldwater on this point. Vietnam seemed like a mousetrap to me and I wanted to see American soldiers out of there so that the United States would be free to fight more important battles (not necessarily military ones) in more important places.