Gertrude and the children didn’t mind. They had lit a number of candles and were playing cards, and the fact that they didn’t mind simply increased my own irritation.

  Then I had a brilliant idea. I went down to the garage, started the car, and turned on the radio.

  For some reason I had trouble finding a station. There was nothing but feeble static. I searched the bands in growing mystification and finally got a very weak voice that spoke of the electricity being off in all New England and New York.

  I was horrified, and could imagine only one cause. I turned off the radio and the car engine, walked upstairs, and calmly blew out every candle but one.

  I then called Gertrude to one side and said in a low voice, “The electricity is out all over New England and New York and I don’t know where else. This may be a nuclear attack. There’s nothing to do but wait for instructions.”

  So we waited all through the first part of the night of the Great Blackout of 1965, fearing that at any moment soldiers might come through ordering us to evacuate or that the glow of a mushroom cloud might appear on the horizon.

  But, of course, it was just a failure of the power grid, and at 12:45 a.m. the power returned, having been off for 7½ hours. In New York City, the power did not return till dawn (though the Blugermans had no loss of power at all in their section of the city).

  The next day, when everyone swapped stories, Gertrude and the children were furious with me. It seemed that everyone else had had a wonderful and exciting time, having fun in the darkened city—and only we had cowered under the threat of nuclear devastation.

  “Who told you to be a science-fiction writer?” demanded David.

  10

  On November 15, Gertrude called me from the high school where she was taking a class. In leaving the parking lot, she had gotten tangled with a cigarette she had dropped, and before she had Caught the wheel, she had made mild contact with a parked car, enough to dent it. It was a brand-new car, too.

  I drove out quickly in my car and told Gertrude to get into my car and drive home in it, while I stayed behind and took the blame. Gertrude wouldn’t; the fault was hers and she wasn’t going to shirk it.

  We waited nearly an hour on a cold night before the woman showed up who owned the car. We told her what had happened, and Gertrude was so visibly upset that the woman actually spent time consoling her. We, of course, said we would pay all repair bills and, in the end, when the bill arrived, we had our insurance company pay every cent at once.

  I mention the incident only because I have earlier told in detail the story of my ferocious fight against someone who had hit us in a parking lot, and I wouldn’t want anyone to think that we ourselves were never to blame for accidents. However, when it was our fault, we admitted it and took our lumps, financial and otherwise.

  11

  I was in New York on November 23 and had lunch with Tom Sloane, who was still indecisive over It’s Mentioned in the Bible. I was exasperated.

  I was also exasperated over the situation with Fantastic Voyage. Otto Klement was being difficult over the matter of fixing some definite share in the hard-cover royalties for me. I had no hold over him and I felt like a fool for ever having agreed to a novelization.

  At least there was a new project. Judy Dikty, an editor at Follett Publishing Company, a Chicago-based firm, wrote a letter in which she asked for a book on the basis of personal friendship. She was the wife of Ted Dikty, a well-known science-fiction fan who had been co-editor of The Best Science Fiction Stories: 1949. This had anthologized my story “No Connection.” It was only the third time I had had a story anthologized, and I remembered it well.

  I complied. You can’t let a pal down, even if it’s only the wife of a rather tangential pal. Besides, the request was not a difficult one.

  Judy wanted me to write a book on the Moon, one that was aimed at the eight-year-old level, and she said thirteen hundred words would be enough. It was just a few words on each page, along with a sketch that they would take care of. She sent me an outline of the topics to be covered.

  It only took me part of two days to do the book, even though it ended being twenty-five hundred words long. In that time I was able to prepare and include rough figures indicating what I thought the sketches ought to be like and to divide the writing into appropriate sections. I was done on December 12 and mailed it off the next day.

  12

  I had still another session with Tom Sloane on December 16, and it was even more unsatisfactory than the one before. Still he had come to no decision on It’s Mentioned in the Bible. Instead he began, very enthusiastically, to try to talk me into doing a book on modern engineering triumphs, such as the large and graceful arch that had recently been built in St. Louis.

  To me the suggestion was absolutely untenable on two grounds. First, it would require travel. I could scarcely write about the St. Louis arch without going to St. Louis to look at it and inquire about it—and I simply wouldn’t do that.

  Second, and even worse, it was perfectly clear to me that Tom wanted me on another project so I would abandon the Bible book, and I wasn’t going to do that, either. I said “No” quite firmly, and that was it. I went off quite depressed.

  The next day, though, I visited Bantam Books, and Marcia Nassiter came up with news that absolutely flabbergasted me. Otto Klement had indeed managed to find a first serialization for Fantastic Voyage. The Saturday Evening Post, no less, was going to run it as a two-part serial.

  I was abashed. To be sure, The Saturday Evening Post wasn’t the giant it had been in the 1930s, but it still paid far better rates than F & SF would, and I had been captious indeed about turning down the latter. It made me feel that the Hollywood people had a great deal more practical sense than I had, and I didn’t particularly enjoy that feeling.

  13

  Every once in a while, F & SF ran a special issue devoted to one particular writer. The September 1962 issue was for Theodore Sturgeon, and May 1963 had been for Ray Bradbury.

  Ed Ferman had been after me for quite a while to collaborate in a special Isaac Asimov issue, and he wanted it for the October 1966 issue, which would be the seventeenth anniversary issue of the magazine. The difficulty was that the author being honored would have to write an original story for the issue.

  I finally agreed and on December 19 began to write “The Key.” It was a Wendell Urth story, my first in ten years and my fourth altogether. I completed it on Christmas Eve.

  Meanwhile, I was also putting together a new anthology for Doubleday. The Juvenile Division wanted an anthology of science-fiction stories involving children, and they agreed to do all the scutwork of obtaining permissions and making payments, while I wrote all the Introductions and included my own “The Ugly Little Boy.” It was not a difficult job, and my part was done on December 22. We decided to call the book Tomorrow’s Children.

  Then, too, I put together seventeen more F & SF essays for my fifth collection—From Earth to Heaven.

  14

  December 31, 1965, marked another milestone-of-aging for me.

  According to the copyright laws, the copyright held good for twenty-eight years. At any time in the last year, the copyright could be renewed for another twenty-eight years by filling out an appropriate application and sending off a small check.

  My first published story, “Marooned off Vesta,” had been copyrighted on December 31, 1938, and December 31, 1965, was the twenty-seventh anniversary of that date. Between December 31, 1965, and December 31, 1966, that copyright could be renewed. If I failed to renew it by the latter date, the story went into public domain and anyone could thereafter publish it without payment to me.

  I didn’t wait, of course. I filed my copyright application on December 31, 1965. Then, using the proper reference books at the Boston Public Library, I looked up the registration dates of the next two stories, “The Weapon Too Dreadful to Use” and “Trends.” I knew, with a sigh of resignation, that for the rest of my life and with steadily increasing frequency, I would be applying for copyright renewals.

  15

  I published only five books in 1965:

  62. A Short History of Chemistry (Doubleday)

  63. The Greeks (Houghton Mifflin)

  64. Of Time and Space and Other Things (Doubleday)

  65. The New Intelligent Man’s Guide to Science (Basic Books)

  66. An Easy Introduction to the Slide Rule (Houghton Mifflin)

  I was not particularly downcast by the small number of published books in 1965. I had many books in press and was quite certain that I would do considerably better in 1966. Besides, though my income had remained at a fairly stationary level over the preceding four years (a satisfactorily high one, of course), it made another one of its surprising jumps in 1965. That year was the first in which my earnings surpassed the hundred-thousand mark—something I had difficulty believing even with the figures staring me in the face.

  16

  We spent New Year’s Eve in Worcester at the house of people Gertrude had met at Merriewoode, and we left the children at home alone. It was the first time we had ever done so on New Year’s Eve, knowing we’d be out most of the night, but we had grown quite confident. After all, David was fourteen and Robyn was nearly eleven.

  The New Year’s Eve party degenerated (or rose) into a marathon joke-telling session in which I starred, first because I had a copious supply and could tell them well, and second because I was the only sober person in the bunch. In fact, I remember that night chiefly because it was the time that I told the most spectacularly successful joke of my career. It was my short caveman joke, which goes as follows:

  A cavewoman came running to her husband in the greatest possible agitation.

  “Wog,” she called out, “something terrible has just happened. A saber-toothed tiger has gone into my mother’s cave and she’s in there. Do something! Do something!”

  Wog looked up from the mastodon drumstick at which he was gnawing and said, “Why should I do something? What the devil do I care what happens to a saber-toothed tiger?”

  Combine the fact that most husbands have less than kindly feelings toward their mothers-in-law with the fact that those particular husbands at the party were sloshed, and you can expect a big laugh—but I didn’t expect one that big. It went on and on, feeding on itself, and the joke session came to an end. No one could even start a joke without the laughter beginning again.

  17

  On January 2, 1966, I was forty-six years old, and I celebrated by preparing an elaborate bibliography of my published work for the special Isaac Asimov issue of F & SF. In addition, inspired by the somber thoughts with which my birthday, and the copyright renewal, had imbued me, I wrote a poem (well, a bit of comic doggerel) for the issue as well.

  After all, I was forty-six and I had been a published writer for twenty-seven years. If a person had started reading science fiction at the age of nine, as I had, he might be thirty-six years old and yet have been reading my stories for all his literate life. A person like that would have to feel I was a very aged man, and so I wrote the poem about someone who met me and expressed that belief. I called it “I’m Still in the Prime of Life, You Rotten Kid.” (When it appeared, Ed fitted it into the table of contents of the magazine by calling it merely “The Prime of Life”—something I always thought was a mistake.)

  18

  There are also advantages to aging. On January 8, 1966, I persuaded David to shovel the driveway after a snowfall of moderate depth, while I took the ease to which old age entitled me.

  19

  I gave up trying to get Tom Sloane to give me a contract on It’s Mentioned in the Bible, and on January 17 I followed Larry’s suggestion and consulted Gene Eoyang, an editor at Anchor Books.

  Unfortunately, Eoyang turned out to be one of those fellows who talks volubly but not with the completest coherence. It was not with entire certainty that I gathered he would put through a contract on the Bible book.

  At least The New Intelligent Man’s Guide to Science was doing as well as its predecessor. It was already going into its third printing.

  20

  Otto Klement had, of his own accord, been willing to grant me half the payment from The Saturday Evening Post for their version of Fantastic Voyage. The contract did not require him to pay me a cent.

  That further cooled my suspicions of him, especially since I had to admit he had earned his half by refusing to sell it to F & SF and selling it for nearly six times as much to The Saturday Evening Post.

  The Saturday Evening Post warned me that it would cut the novel to half its length, so I did not dare read it when it appeared, nor have I ever dared read the first serial version at any time since.

  The first installment appeared in the February 26, 1966, issue of The Saturday Evening Post. It came out every other week now, not every week as in its golden days; and it cost twenty-five cents an issue, not five cents.

  The title of the story was on the cover: “New science-fiction serial, FANTASTIC VOYAGE, Inside the human brain”—but my name wasn’t. In the magazine were eight nonfiction pieces and two (only two) fiction pieces—a good indication of what was happening to fiction generally. The other fiction piece, “The Prodigal Fool,” was by Isaac Bashevis Singer. It was a special Isaac issue, apparently.140

  The second and final installment was in the March 12, 1966, issue. Again the story’s name was on the cover, but not mine. The price went up to thirty-five cents with that issue. I am quite certain that Fantastic Voyage had nothing to do with that.

  21

  My royalties from Doubleday were steadily increasing as the number of my books on their backlist increased. The royalty statement I got on January 28, 1966, included a check for nearly eleven thousand dollars, which was the largest check I had ever received, except, of course, for that monster Basic Books item in November 1961.

  22

  On February 3, 1966, the Soviets made the first soft landing on the Moon and obtained photographs of its surface from its surface. These were the first surface photographs of any world other than the Earth.

  I felt exhilarated enough to tackle the last bit of The Universe in a fury of work and finished it on the fifth. It was one hundred thousand words long and had taken a little over four months to do. I was very pleased with it, but although it had begun as a book on quasars, I didn’t get to quasars till the final section of the last chapter.141

  Walker & Company agreed with my optimistic estimate of The Universe. After they had a chance to read it, they voluntarily added a thousand dollars to my advance.

  As soon as I saw The Universe about done, I started The Roman Empire, of course.

  23

  On March 1, 1966, I received an advance copy of the hard-cover edition of Fantastic Voyage. I had done the writing so rapidly and the movie was worked on so slowly that even though the script was done and the movie was in progress when I first started the job, the book came out half a year before the movie was slated for release.

  This gave rise to the totally unjustified notion that the book came first and that the movie was made from it. I have corrected this as often as the mistake surfaces, but I can never seem to wipe out the notion altogether.

  Meanwhile Austin had succeeded in persuading Klement to let me have 25 per cent of the hard-cover royalties, which was fair enough, considering that the book was not really an original production but was modeled closely on someone else’s script. However, Klement had wanted to arrange to have the full royalty paid to him and that it would be left to him to pay me my 25 per cent.

  I didn’t want that. I did not want an unnecessary stop added to the payment route if I could avoid it. I wanted the 25 per cent direct from Houghton Mifflin and asked Austin to insist on that firmly, and Klement gave in. That was the last point of dispute over the book with Hollywood.

  On March 1, also, I finally got the contract for It’s Mentioned in the Bible from Eoyang. I had been grimly working on it for about seven months and was one third finished. It was a considerable investment of time and effort to make without a contract, but I didn’t mind taking the risk. I was enjoying the book too much to quit—still, I must admit that with the contract finally signed, I felt much better.

  24

  I had lunch with Austin on March 7 and he told me that Fantastic Voyage had already sold six thousand copies even though the official publication date was still two weeks in the future. I was all grins and relief.

  “Do you have any doubt that we’ll make the eight thousand I promised?” I asked.

  “None at all. In fact, I am quite certain we will sell far more than eight thousand.”142

  Austin seemed quite calm about it, since he apparently felt that if I said that that was the way it would be, that was the way it would be. I, on the other hand, less stanchly certain of my own wisdom, was nearly hysterical with relief.

  25

  I had dinner with Carl Sagan on March 19. With him was his fiancée, Linda Salzman, an extraordinarily attractive young artist, rather shy and soft-spoken, and quite obviously deeply in love with Carl. I took to her at once.

  Earlier I had left a carbon of The Universe with Carl for his expert reading. I felt he might pick up some errors that I could well do without. After dinner, we spent time at our house and I plucked up the courage to ask him about it.

  “I haven’t had time to look over it yet, Isaac,” he said. “I’ve been awfully busy.”