For that reason I said, concerning Goldwater, in my diary notation for July 13, “It is very important that he be smashed, not merely defeated, in November.”

  The most important personal effect of the 1964 presidential campaign was that it rather disenchanted me with Mensa.

  I already had some trouble with it, since though I met a great many fascinating and interesting people at the Mensa meetings, I also met a great many irritating ones as well.

  In a way, I was a marked man at the meetings. A certain percentage of the members, especially the younger and newer ones, seemed to feel that the way to establish their credentials was to take me on in a battle of wits and shoot me down.

  I didn’t feel the same endless necessity to take on new competitors, and I was in no mood to be an old gun-fighter forever compelled to shoot it out with any challenger who could say, “All right, Ringo. Reach!”

  I began to be rather sullen and withdrawn at meetings and then discovered the last straw when it seemed to me that the percentage of Mensa people who were pro-Goldwater was just as high as the percentage of non-Mensa people who were pro-Goldwater.

  It struck me that I did not particularly want to associate with people on the sole ground that they were like me in whatever quality it is that makes one do well on an intelligence test. I wanted people who more or less shared my common assumptions and universe outlook so that there could be a reasonable dialog.

  So though I stuck it out at Mensa for a year and more, my attendance at the meetings became sporadic and eventually I didn’t pay my dues and I let my membership lapse.

  8

  In New York on July 16, I brought with me my fourth batch of F & SF essays for Doubleday publication. I called it Of Time and Space and Other Things.

  That evening I attended a showing of Othello in Central Park. This had become a steady thing with me. There is a great deal of excitement to going to the theater in the open—to sitting down in the dying sunshine and watching it grow dark as the play progresses—to being able to see the Moon and stars change position as the play progresses—to note the scurrying of the clouds and hear the rustling of the trees and estimate the chances of rain—even having the planes drown out the dialog at times adds piquancy.

  And, of course, I rarely miss the chance to see Shakespeare.

  9

  Each month brought me closer to the time when the World Book Year Book people would hold their meeting in Bermuda. I had to practice refusing.

  Roy Fisher asked me to come to Chicago again, for some trivial reason, and this time I was not going to allow any consideration of money to deflect me. I sent off an air-mail, special-delivery letter on July 25, refusing flatly, and leaving no room for any hope that I would change my mind. They let the matter drop, and that was a good sign.

  10

  On August 2, 1964, I finished A Short History of Astronomy and the next day I took it in to the Boston office of Educational Services, a Doubleday division. It had taken me only five weeks to write it and I didn’t give the matter of editorial decision any thought. I took it for granted it would be published.

  I was wrong. There was a serious problem. I had begun, traditionally, with the Greeks, but not long before, my astronomical friend Gerald Hawkins (now with Boston University) had published a book Stonehenge Decoded, in which he depicted Stonehenge as a prehistoric (1500 b.c.) astronomical observatory of considerable sophistication. It seemed therefore that I ought to have had at least a chapter on pre-Greek astronomy.

  Since I had started on the wrong foot, I did not please the editor in the rest of the book either, and by September 12 it was back on my hands with a flat rejection!

  It was by no means an unprecedented situation. There had been the case of The Death Dealers in 1958, of course. In addition, I had, in 1959, written a book called Only a Light-Year, a series of miscellaneous essays on astronomy written for Abelard-Schuman as an effort to follow Only a Trillion.

  Only a Trillion, however, had not done well enough to make Abelard-Schuman eager to publish a second in the series, and some of my offhand speculations on astronomical subjects were felt to be shaky, so I got Only a Light-Tear back with a request for revision. I put it aside because I was busily working on The Wellsprings of Life and I never got back to it. The book remained unpublished.

  That did not mean that Only a Light-Tear was of no use to me. Even unpublished, it had value, for I knew I would be able to cannibalize material from it for other books. Little by little, much of the material in Only a Light-Tear appeared in my various F & SF essays.

  In the same way, I put A Short History of Astronomy away and waited, in a philosophic mood, for a chance to cannibalize it.

  Meanwhile, I had plenty of other things to do. The third volume of Understanding Physics was proceeding at a rapid pace, for instance.

  Then, too, Austin Olney had accepted The Greeks (with just a little cutting because it, too, was overlong), and that meant I had a whole series of history books in the works. This was so different from anything else I had done that it raised me to a high pitch of excitement.

  To be sure, Austin had by now come to know me so well that when he told me he was going to do The Greeks, he said to me, cautiously, “But Isaac, please do me a favor and don’t bring in a book on the Romans till we see how this one does. All right?”

  “I promise,” I said.

  I try always to keep my promises, so I was determined not to bring in a book on the Romans till Austin gave me the go-ahead signal. I had not, however, promised not to write a book on the Romans. On August 5, therefore, I began to write such a book. I didn’t work very hard or steadily on it since I had to wait for The Greeks to be published and to be in the bookstores long enough to show results, and that meant I would not be able to take it to Austin for over a year—but I started.

  11

  And again, Basic Books asked me to do a complete revision and updating of The Intelligent Man’s Guide to Science.

  For this I had to take certain precautions. I asked at Basic Books who my editor would be on this one and I was told it would be Richard DeHaan, who was newly with the firm.

  “Not Leon Svirsky?” I said, in surprise.

  “Leon has retired,” I was told.

  “Good. And is it understood that there will be no changes in what I write without my seeing those changes before the book is put into galleys?”

  “Absolutely.”

  “In that case,” I said, “I will do the book.”

  Basic Books sent me two copies of the first edition, and I gradually took it apart, removing one page at a time, pasting each on a sheet of typing paper, and making corrections and additions in the margin, exactly as I had done on two different occasions with Biochemistry and Human Metabolism.

  Since I had carefully kept my library copy of the first edition up to date with references in its margin (something I had also done with Biochemistry and Human Metabolism), the revision, which I began on August 18, went quickly.

  12

  On August 20, 1964 (David’s thirteenth birthday), I got a call from Merrill Panitt of TV Guide. Apparently, the television season that was to start the next month would have a new program called “My Living Doll” in which Julie Newmar was to play a perfectly stunning robot who looked exactly like the superwomanish Julie Newmar.

  Merrill wanted me to watch a couple of programs and then write a humorous commentary on it.

  I watched the program (slavering over Julie Newmar and wishing I had a robot like that), wrote the article on October 13, and sold it to TV Guide. It eventually appeared in the January 16, 1965, issue.

  My title was “How Not to Build a Robot,”133 but I discovered that TV Guide almost never used my titles. In fact, for some strange reason, TV Guide almost always used two titles, one on the contents page and one in the body of the piece, neither one of them being mine. On the contents page of the January 16, 1965, issue, the article was called “On Robots and ‘My Living Doll.’ ” In the body of the magazine the title was “Why I Wouldn’t Have Done It This Way.”

  “How Not to Build a Robot” was my first attempt at humor for the general public (as opposed to my in-jokes in the Introductions to The Hugo Winners and to my F & SF essays). It succeeded; I had finally learned to be a humorist.

  Certainly, the editors of TV Guide thought I had, and in years to come they periodically asked me for more humor pieces and, eventually, for serious pieces as well.

  Then, too, I tapped a really mass market for the first time and reached millions of people who had never heard of me before and who were not really my readers. TV Guide forwarded at least some of the mail they received from their readers concerning my article, and I had to harden myself to a completely new level of commentary.

  The humor of the article consisted in my pretense of being appalled, as a “robotics expert,” at anyone having designed a robot in the inefficient shape of Julie Newmar. Some readers actually wrote to express their contempt for my inability to see the point of the program, while others seemed really upset that I should prefer a cylindrical metal body to that of Julie Newmar (as though I would yield to anyone in my scholarly admiration for the various good points and surface attractions of that fine woman).

  13

  We were off to Birchtoft again on August 23, but things were changing. The resorts of the Northeast were having a devil of a time as increasing affluence and the coming of jet travel made it easier and easier to visit the Caribbean or the Mediterranean. Fewer and fewer people were satisfied with the traditional “mountains,” and resorts had to find new ways of attracting people. Annisquam had become a boys’ camp, and Birchtoft was becoming a camping station. When we arrived, we found that we were nearly the only ones who attended in the traditional fashion.

  Both children were with us this time, and it wasn’t too bad. We had the beach, and the newly installed swimming pool, largely to ourselves.

  14

  Avram Davidson’s stint as editor of F & SF was coming to an end. I was not entirely displeased, since he and I did not get along quite as well as Bob Mills and I had.

  For several months, Joe Ferman had been searching for a new editor and he asked me for my recommendation. He said he wanted someone who would live in New York and be on the spot.

  I said, rather desperately (for I feared he might be angling for me), “What about your son? He strikes me as an intelligent young man. He’s been interested in the magazine quite a while and working on it, so he won’t be an amateur.”

  I think I was the first to raise Ed Ferman’s name in connection with the editorship. Joe looked thoughtful and said, “Well, I’ll think about it.”

  The thinking was fruitful, for Ed Ferman became editor of the magazine with the December 1964 issue. My essay in that issue (my seventy-fourth in the series) was “A Galaxy at a Time.”134

  It quickly developed that Ed and I got along like a house afire and I have always thought it very intelligent of me to put that particular bee into Joe Ferman’s bonnet. He might have selected Ed for the editorship without my suggestion—but who knows?

  15

  On September 14, 1964, David entered junior high school (which was located just a block and a half from our house). Once again, I passed a milestone that reminded me of the remorseless accumulation of age. I had a child in junior high school!

  Actually, the situation was worse than it seemed. Our children had come relatively late in life, and when we attended PTA meetings, we found that the other parents were all younger than we were. It made us feel superannuated and we did not willingly attend such meetings.

  16

  Also on the fourteenth, I received a letter from Linus Pauling with reference to my article “First and Rearmost”135 in the October 1964 F & SF. He himself, said Pauling, had frequently been caught in one mistake or another, but never in his entire career had he made a mistake of twenty-three orders of magnitude, as I had in this article. That’s all he said; he didn’t say where the mistake was.

  I started rereading the article in a fever of panic. If I couldn’t find the error, not only would I be humiliated, but also I would not be able to reprint the article in the collection Of Time and Space and Other Things.

  I found it. I had made use of Avogadro’s constant (the number of protons making up a gram—6.02×1023) and had multiplied by it once instead of twice (or possibly twice instead of once—I forget). I corrected the error for the collection, and didn’t know whether to be proud of Pauling’s confidence that I could find the error without help, or annoyed with him for not having helped anyway.

  17

  The next day, September 15, I traveled down to Philadelphia to give a talk to the executives of Smith, Kline & French, a pharmaceutical firm. I was a little more nervous than I usually was. When they had asked me to come speak, they had offered five hundred dollars. In a fit of insanity, I asked for twice that and they agreed! Now I had to come through and make it worth the money for them, and I wasn’t at all sure I could.

  I had decided to speak on the topic “Four Steps to Salvation,” which had appeared in the June 1961 F & SF as my thirty-second essay and which was one of the seven essays I had never reprinted. Fortunately, the talk went very well. I was received with enormous applause, and the fellow in charge turned over the thousand-dollar check with a broad smile on his face. (Just the same, it was a long time before I dared ask so large a speaking fee again.)

  The talk had been given to a small group, and it was recorded on videotape so that it could be replayed for others in the organization who had not attended the talk. The young man in charge of the TV cameras told me he would signal me when the time came to bring the talk to a halt because the film was running out. There would be signal cards telling me how much time remained, he told me.

  When I was done, he told me ebulliently, “I don’t know how you did it, Dr. Asimov. You never seemed the least bit concerned as the signal cards went up. You didn’t hurry, you weren’t rattled, and you finished in the most natural way with just twenty-two seconds to spare.”

  Once again, as on so many previous occasions in my life, I missed my chance to be suavely sophisticated. I should merely have smiled and murmured, “We old-timers have no trouble in this sort of thing.”

  Instead, I goggled at the young man and said, “What signal cards?”

  “Didn’t you see them?” he said, disbelievingly.

  I shook my head, “I forgot all about them.”

  He staggered away. People never realize how nonvisual I am.

  18

  I returned to New York and made my usual rounds. I had lunch with Dick DeHaan and his assistant, Patricia van Doren, from Basic Books, on September 17, and reported on the progress I was making with the revision of The Intelligent Man’s Guide to Science.

  Pat van Doren was a large, warmhearted woman, with a boisterous sense of humor, and I particularly enjoyed her company.

  I remember once, when I was walking into a restaurant with her, we met Robert Banker of Doubleday, who was walking out. I gave him a pleased greeting and introduced him and Pat to each other.

  Bob said, “Now, take good care of Isaac, Mrs. van Doren. He’s Doubleday’s favorite writer.”

  “Of course I will,” said Pat, warmly, “he happens to be Basic Books’ favorite writer, too.”

  Only once was I embarrassed in her presence. Dick DeHaan, commenting on my broad expertise, wondered why I had never been on any of the quiz shows. I promptly told him of my one invitation and of my turning it down.

  “Of course,” I said, “I’m not really afraid that I would have been lured into anything phony. I just can’t imagine myself being so foolish as to be trapped into the kind of mistake poor Charles v———”

  I was about to refer to Charles van Doren, who had been persuaded to go along with the fakery of those shows and who had had trouble as a result—and remembered, too late, that he was Pat van Doren’s brother-in-law.

  I broke down in the middle of his name and trailed off into a hot and embarrassed silence. Pat said, “Finish what you were about to say. You’re perfectly right.” And not more than two minutes later, her hearty friendliness had me out of the dumps.

  On the occasion of this September 17 luncheon, however, Dick and Pat gave me the publishing gossip of the day. New American Library was undergoing a great reorganization, and Mac Talley had left.

  My heart sank. This seemed to be my year for changes in editors. Leon Svirsky, Avram Davidson, and now Mac Talley. The loss of the first two had not concerned me unduly, but the loss of Mac was a bad blow. I had been working with him now for a dozen years. He had been the first to put out paperback versions of my science-fiction novels, and it was because of him that some of my books like The Wellsprings of Life, The Human Body, and The Genetic Code had been written.

  And there was the selfish concern that I was half done with the third volume of Understanding Physics, another Mac Talley project. What would happen to it now that he was leaving NAL?

  I visited Mac the next day. He assured me that Understanding Physics would not be affected by his departure from NAL and that Ed Burlingame would take care of me. He also assured me that he was in no trouble financially and that I need not be concerned about him.

  19

  The time was rapidly approaching when the World Book Year Book people would be gathering at Bermuda. I received my routine invitation and returned a quiet refusal.

  On September 30, 1964, I received a very angry air-mail special-delivery letter from Roy Fisher which, it seemed to me, threatened me with being fired if I did not accept the invitation.