My willingness to do the book was further increased when Ed, who had nursed along my Understanding Physics volumes at NAL, told me that Walker & Company would do the hard-cover.

  The exhilaration produced by this piece of news induced me, finally, to begin The Genetic Effects of Radiation for the AEC. It had been nearly four months since my lunch with Dobzhansky, and I couldn’t delay it much longer.

  26

  At noon on September 5, 1965, my father called from New York.

  “Hello, Pappa,” I said. “Why are you call—oh boy!”

  I felt a little sick. I had meant to call, but I had gotten tangled with my typewriter, and once I’m typing, time has no meaning. It just slips away.

  My father said, “How is it you didn’t call Mamma today?”

  It was my mother’s seventieth birthday.

  “Pappa, I was busy typing. I meant to call, but I had to finish something . . .”

  It didn’t help. First he discussed the matter for a long time, and then my mother got on the phone (clearly, she had been crying) and she discussed the matter for an even longer time. I was thoroughly informed on the subject by the time they were through.

  Later that day I called David and Robyn to me and told them that in later life I didn’t want them ever to feel they had to call me on my birthday, or on any other special day. They could call me just when they needed money or something; I felt that would induce a sufficient number of calls.

  27

  At lunch with Austin on September 7, I discovered that F & SF had agreed to run a cut version of Fantastic Voyage as a serial. I was delighted. It would mean my longest fictional appearance in a science-fiction magazine since The Naked Sun, nine years before.

  My pleasure was short-lived. It was not I who had the power to give approval to the sale, and not Houghton Mifflin either. It was the Hollywood people. Actually, it was a gentleman named Otto Klement, but he was only a name to me. I never met him.

  Apparently, Klement (along with Jerome Bixby, who had once been editor of Planet) had written the treatment that became the screenplay. Who else was involved I don’t know, but it was Klement who apparently controlled the rights, and it was Klement who vetoed the F & SF sale. There wasn’t enough money in it.

  I was furious. F & SF had offered the kind of money one expected of a science-fiction magazine and couldn’t pay anything more. But who else did Klement think would buy the story for serialization?

  My hands, however, were tied, and I just had to resign myself to no first serialization at all. But then, it wasn’t fatal; it wasn’t even unprecedented. There had been no first serialization for Pebble in the Sky or for The End of Eternity, after all.

  23

  Fantastic Voyage II

  1

  Boston was an active center for science-fiction fans. In addition to the MIT science-fiction group with whom I shared an annual picnic on the first or second Sunday of each May, there was the New England Science Fiction Association (NESFA), which had its monthly meetings. I attended these whenever I could, and Harry Stubbs, Ben Bova, and I were the professional “stars” of the organization.

  In September 1965, NESFA decided to host a regional convention, which it called Boskone (and which was to become an annual and, at times semi-annual affair). Boskone was a word familiar to those who had read E. E. Smith’s classic Galactic Patrol and one that was close to the more usual Boscon, for Boston convention.

  I was chagrined because the Boskone overlapped the Atlantic City convention of the ACS, where I had to give my talk on spomes, but I managed a little of Boskone, anyway. On September 11, I took the whole family to the convention. We lunched with Ben Bova, Harry Stubbs, and Forry Ackerman, and then we dined with Fred Pohl and Lester del Rey.

  And the next day I had to leave for Atlantic City and was distressed about it. I hated to abandon the warm womb of science fiction for the cold impersonality of a convention of meaningless, faceless individuals.

  I was wrong!

  During my stay at Atlantic City, I found that my nameplate made me as readily recognizable on the boardwalk as in the halls of a science-fiction convention. It was rather a revelation to me; I was as well known outside science fiction as within it. It was the last time I ever feared going unrecognized at any large gathering of people with any pretensions to intellect or professionalism.

  2

  On Monday, September 13, I attended the symposium “Atmospheres in Space Cabins and Enclosed Environments.” At least I was there for the half that was given after lunch.

  The auditorium seated about three hundred, but only some sixty people were present and there was a constant movement of individuals going out as they lost interest and other individuals coming in on the forlorn chance of finding interest. (This is a common situation in all scientific conferences I have ever attended and, as nearly as I can tell, speakers are used to it, take it for granted, and, being nonprofessional, are too uncomfortable to begin with to be any the worse for the constant shuffling of feet.)

  I, however, watched with painful interest, for I was the last speaker on the Schedule and it seemed to me that there were more drifting out than in and that the audience was slowly and inexorably growing smaller. I kept extrapolating, and decided that by the time I rose to speak it would be to face an empty hall, and was that what I had left Boskone and come to Atlantic City for?

  But then, in the course of the talk of the speaker who preceded me, the trend reversed itself. More people drifted in than drifted out, and this tendency became more pronounced. Soon no one at all was leaving, and the incoming people formed a thick and steady stream. By the time the speaker sat down and my name was announced, the room was full.

  That made up to me my embarrassing experience at Tufts Medical School eight months before. There I had someone else’s audience; here I clearly had my own, an audience that differentiated between me and the other speakers at the symposium.

  I was completely satisfied and gave an energetic and enthusiastic talk139 without ever referring to the manuscript that lay before me. When it was over (there were no speakers following, which was a wise bit of organization) members of the audience crowded around me for my autograph, precisely as though I had never left Boskone.

  While I was talking and signing I became aware of a woman waiting patiently on the outskirts. I assumed she, too, was waiting for an autograph and, unwilling to make her wait forever, I beckoned to her to come closer.

  She did and said, “Do you remember me, Isaac?”

  I stared at her for a moment. There was nothing about her that stirred the vaguest flicker of memory, not her face, not her voice, nothing—but it occurred to me that only one person would expect me to remember her. It was my puppy-love date of college days.

  I said, “Good heavens! Irene!”

  It was! There she was, a forty-seven-year-old grandmother with nothing at all left of the girl I had last seen twenty-three years before—but I was delighted to see her just the same for the sake of the memory.

  I met her husband, who was tall and who had middle-aged attractively, and could see at once that she had done far better for herself than she could have with me.

  I insisted on having them join me for dinner, and we had lobster at a fancy restaurant with myself joyfully picking up the check. (I had come a long way from the time, over a quarter century before, when Irene had introduced me to my first restaurant and I had reluctantly spent eighty cents.)

  We walked back along the boardwalk, and the tail end of a hurricane converted itself from a light drizzle into a steady rain. We were all soaked, and when I got back to the hotel I found Harry Schwartz, my old Boys High fellow student (and now a well-known writer for the New York Times), waiting for me.

  I took him up to my room, where I stripped to my shorts and distributed the remainder of my clothes in order to let them dry. Then I sat on the bed, while Harry sat in the one chair and we talked. The only trouble was that I couldn’t light the floor lamp. I fiddled with it and tapped it and tried to switch bulbs with a bathroom fixture, but nothing helped—so I called maintenance.

  In the middle of our talk, a maintenance man arrived, looked at the lamp, picked up the loose cord, and plugged it into a socket. The light went on at once.

  Harry collapsed in hilarity. “The great interpreter of science, Isaac Asimov,” he kept gasping, “has been stumped by an electrical appliance that wasn’t plugged in.”

  I pointed out, rather pettishly, that it had been well within his competency to solve that problem too, and he hadn’t, but he ignored that elementary fact. I gathered he intended to spread the news the next day, and he probably did.

  I said, as I looked ruefully at the state of my dishabille, “Anyway, it’s lucky that the maintenance man came in and found you here instead of a woman, or what would he have thought?”

  Harry said, imperturbably, “I think the situation makes a worse appearance this way.”

  But this was before Gay Liberation and I didn’t understand the statement until some time later, when extensive puzzling over his remark finally elicited the explanation.

  The next day I stumbled on Charles Dawson, my Ph.D. professor, in the early morning, and had breakfast with him. In the evening, I attended a banquet at which I gave a short after-dinner talk, spent some more time with Irene and her husband again afterward, and it was all over. On the fifteenth, I left.

  I was rather satisfied. For a quarter of a century I had been nursing a wistful dream, and now it had come to a quiet end. There is no cure for a golden girl of the past that is better than being brought face to face with the alchemy of the decades. And yet age doesn’t alter everything. Irene was as sweet, gentle, and charming as ever.

  3

  On September 18 I finished The Genetic Effects of Radiation and sent it off to Dobzhansky, who approved it without trouble, and on the twenty-second, I received an advance copy of the revision of The Intelligent Man’s Guide to Science. The title of the latter was changed, rather inevitably, to The New Intelligent Man’s Guide to Science. The new title and the extensive nature of the work done on the revision kept my conscience quite tranquil when I added it to my list as a new book.

  The revision was about 20 per cent longer than the first edition (for I had restored much of what Svirsky had hacked out) and it was in a single volume, and a very good-looking one at that. I exulted over the fact that the Svirsky disgrace had finally been eliminated, but not everything was satisfactory.

  I studied the index that DeHaan had not let me do, but had given to an “expert.”

  It was dreadful; simply dreadful. It left out a great variety of things that should have been put in. It was the slapdash job of someone working for money instead of for his own book, and never again was I fooled by any talk of expertise in indexing.

  When I later discovered that I had been charged five hundred dollars against royalties for the privilege of having that rotten index made, I was ready to choke DeHaan. I felt as though a small part of the Svirsky mantle had fallen upon him.

  4

  I was making excellent progress on It’s Mentioned in the Bible, and the completion of The Genetic Effects of Radiation touched off the need to start another book. There was the book on quasars I had promised Ed Burlingame. In order to explain quasars, I felt I had to explain the red shift. In order to explain that, I had to explain spectroscopy, and thus, going back and back, I found myself beginning with the Assyrian Empire.

  In fact, I had to explain so much that there was no way in which I could call the book Quasars. Instead, I called it è when I began it on September 27. Into it went large cannibalized portions of my rejected earlier book A Short History of Astronomy. (Nothing is wasted.)

  5

  Two days later, on the 29th, I had lunch, for the first time, with people from still another new publisher—Ginn & Company, a large, Boston-based textbook firm.

  It was their plan to do a series of science texts for children at the grade-school level, a separate text for each grade from the first to the eighth. They wanted me to work on the five books representing the fourth through the eighth grades, as part of a large team.

  I shuddered at the thought. The two textbooks I had done at the med school had put me off such things forever; nor was I anxious to work with a team, either. I took refuge behind the cowardly evasion of “Well, let me think about it.”

  It wouldn’t be so bad if the evasion worked, but it so rarely did. Usually it just meant that whoever was after me, stayed after me. Certainly the Ginn & Company people did.

  6

  On October 7, 1965, I had lunch with Tom Sloane and Larry Ashmead in New York, and was able to show samples of the Bible book. I was taken aback by Tom’s unenthusiastic reception of the book, and I guess the sudden fall in my spirits was quite noticeable.

  After lunch, Larry told me, when we were by ourselves, that if Tom did not want to do the Bible book, Anchor Books (a Doubleday division) might be willing to do it and that he would speak on its behalf. I brightened up at once.

  The next day I went to Newark to tape a talk show with David Susskind. It was my first nationally televised talk show since “The Last Word” with Bergen Evans six years before.

  This one was devoted to science fiction, and along with me were Lester del Rey and Ray Bradbury. It was the first time I had ever met Ray Bradbury, though of course we knew each other well enough from our writings to be on a first-name basis at once. Neither he nor I would fly in airplanes, so since I lived in Newton and he in Los Angeles it was clear we couldn’t meet often.

  The session was not successful. Lester was in one of his talkative moods and gave neither Ray nor myself much chance to do anything but stare at the ceiling, and Susskind had a list of questions, silly in themselves, from which he lacked the wit to depart. It meant that all the interesting starts that any of us made were muffled and killed when he asked the next silly question.

  7

  For a while I had still another column going; this one with Cavalier. Cavalier had a section in which different people spent a few hundred words expressing some abrasive opinion of theirs, and I had a lot of abrasive opinions. They wanted me, therefore, to air one of them every once in a while.

  My first article for them was written on October 11, 1965, and dealt with long hair, something that was already becoming the mark of rebellious youth. I pointed out that the conservatives objected to long hair on a young man because, among other things, it made him look like a young woman. Nevertheless, one clear distinction between the faces of the sexes was the beard, which the male could grow and the female could not. Yet the conservatives objected to beards, too.

  What it amounted to was that conservatives wanted the male to shave his face so that he would remove the natural distinction between himself and the female, and then to cut the hair on his head to set up a nonnatural distinction.

  My second article supported the anti-Vietnam War stand with sardonic sarcasm against the double-talk of the prowar multitude.

  I looked forward to many months of making fun of knee-jerk conservative attitudes, but, alas, Cavalier changed owners and policies, and I only managed to get four or five articles into it before they went off somewhere else.

  8

  November 5, 1965, was the publication date of The New Intelligent Man’s Guide to Science, and Arthur Rosenthal of Basic Books hosted a cocktail party for me in honor of the occasion. In the movies, writers always have cocktail parties on publication day, but that did not happen to me until my sixty-fifth book.

  This is not a complaint. I don’t like cocktail parties, even when they’re in my honor; especially when they’re in my honor. I don’t drink, and when I am being honored I have to spend all my time being gracious and smiling and can’t get off in a corner and eat hors d’oeuvres.

  Nevertheless, the party was a success. The entire family was there on both sides, except for Mary Blugerman. My friends in publishing and writing were all there, and even some friends from the past, such as Sidney Cohen.

  The Rosenthals and we had a quiet Japanese dinner afterward, and I had sashimi (raw fish) for the first time.

  Earlier that day I had presented Tom Sloane with my final version of the first chapter of It’s Mentioned in the Bible, a longish chapter dealing with Genesis. It was my intention to get him to commit himself to a contract, or to reject it outright so that I could seek another home for it.

  9

  We were home late on the night of November 7, and at 5:21 p.m. on the evening of November 9 the electricity blanked out in our house. Gertrude had just finished cooking dinner (I’ve always had dinner early, a holdover from the Navy Yard days when work was finished at 4:30 p.m.), and she was in fact going to the table with plates of food when it happened.

  We had candles in the house, thank goodness, thanks to the big hurricanes of a decade before, and we ate by candlelight in the gathering dusk as I waited for the lights to go on.

  I quickly grew annoyed. There was no storm; it was a beautiful night with a full Moon rising; yet night fell completely and the lights did not turn on. It was clearly not our house alone, for the street lights were not on and the other houses in the neighborhood were dark as well.

  I called the electric company, with no luck. The line was busy, and it stayed busy.

  I thought a sizable section of the city might be out and I was certain that if I could only listen to the radio I’d find out what was happening, but the radios we had all ran on house current, which was out, and we had no battery radios.