I said, with a strained smile, “Of what importance is your work, Carl, compared to my manuscript?”

  Carl looked at me thoughtfully and said, “You’re joking, Isaac—except that you’re not really joking, are you?”

  There was no point in trying to fool Carl, so I wiped the smile off my face and said, “No, Carl, I guess I’m not joking.”

  Within ten days he had the manuscript back in my hands with some very useful pinpointings of error; none, thank goodness, major. He was also quite lavish with his praise of the book, which I dedicated to him and to Fred Whipple.

  26

  March 21, 1966, was the official publication date of Fantastic Voyage, and the entire first printing of seventy-five hundred copies was gone. I had to wait for a second printing before I could get my author’s copies over and above the one advance copy I received.

  27

  The Ginn & Company people were continuing to lay siege to me with reference to the science series for grade schools. They explained it all very carefully to me over dinner on March 30. A successful school text, they said, was equivalent to an annuity; it could make a great deal of money over the indefinite future with periodic revisions.

  In fact, figures in the millions of dollars were freely discussed, and it was pointed out that I could leave a continuing estate that would take care of my children after I had moved on to the big typewriter in the sky. Though I didn’t want to do the series—in fact, I desperately didn’t want to do it—I found it a lot harder to resist the prospect of becoming a millionaire than I would have thought.

  For myself, even millions lacked attraction at the price of working on such a project. After all, what would I do with a million dollars? I already had a couple of typewriters and all the typewriter paper I needed, together with pens, reference books, and so on. I must admit, though, that the thought of leaving my family well taken care of was an appealing thought.

  And while thinking, I did a second book in the Follett series of astronomy books for eight-year-olds. This one was Mars.

  28

  On April 4, I attended a seder at the house of Essie and Bernie Fonoroff. It wasn’t a very profound seder from the religious standpoint but it was the first that David and Robyn ever attended. David read the traditional “four questions” as the oldest boy there, but he read them in English, of course. And the food was good, as it always is at a seder.

  I couldn’t help but think it was the first seder I had attended since the one in Hawaii, and that one was twenty years before!

  Where the devil did the time go?

  29

  I was giving numerous small talks at this time, usually involving not much travel, generally taking me no farther afield than Connecticut or New Hampshire. On April 23, 1966, I talked at the University of New Hampshire, and it turned out to be the first warm day of the season.

  The dean took us on a tour of the campus, and the young coeds greeted the warm Sun (after a New Hampshire winter) in an explosion of bikinis. Since it was Saturday and a largely classless day, the bikinis were spread out on the lawn with insignificant fractions of the young women’s bodies inside them.

  The dean took no notice of it. In fact, no one seemed to, except, of course, me. I surveyed the scene with the greatest satisfaction and paid little attention to what the dean was saying. No one seemed to notice my behavior either, except Robyn, who indignantly reached up to put her hand over my eyes.

  At another talk, in Westminster, Massachusetts, on the twenty-fifth, I met Burnham Walker for the first time in eight years. He was sixty-five now, white-haired and wrinkled, but as sharp and as dryly humorous as ever.

  And on April 30, I was part of a panel at Boston College. We were ushered about by a young, good-natured priest, who at one point herded us all into an elevator. I was last and hung back, motioning him to enter the elevator ahead of me. For a while, we did the Alphonse-and-Gaston routine, but the young priest was responsible for getting us everywhere on time and dared not delay, so he finally got on the elevator first, saying to me, “All right, you win the struggle for humility this time.”

  He then said, “There’s an old joke about the priest who said, ‘I’m the most humble person in this room and I’m proud of it.’ ”

  30

  On May 2, 1966, one of Ginn & Company’s executives invited Gertrude and me to their Beacon Street home, and then to a marvelous French meal at a nearby restaurant.

  It was the first time we had ever been in one of the old aristocratic homes of Boston and, according to my diary, “it was fascinating in a horrifying sort of way.”

  I was not proof against this sort of treatment. These upper-class attentions had their effect on my candy-store soul, and by the time the evening was over I knew I was going to be involved in the project.

  All I could do was to hope there really were millions of dollars in it. Anything less would not pay me back for the trouble I was getting into. I knew that much even as I said, resignedly, “All right. I’ll do it.”

  31

  May 8 was the day of the annual MIT science-fiction society picnic. As always, I picked the day, and for the first time my choice lacked magic. It rained.

  The picnic was held indoors at MIT with impossible mountains of food, which I dutifully tried to make inroads upon, but without the true fervor of the ancient days, since I was determined never to let my weight get more than a couple of pounds over the 180 mark.

  It had one interesting side effect, however. I was able to examine the society’s science-fiction library, which had a complete collection of the various magazines. I found the August 1929 issue of Amazing, which, I remember, had been the first science-fiction magazine I had ever read (thirty-seven years before) and which had inspired me to use the fortunate word “science” in Science Wonder to win my father’s approval. I even cast my eye over the first few paragraphs of Harl Vincent’s “Barton’s Island,” the first science-fiction story I ever remember reading—but that magic was gone too.

  32

  Arthur Clarke was working with Stanley Kubrick to put out a motion picture called 2001: A Space Odyssey, and Kubrick, who was investing millions in what must have seemed a very dubious venture (for good science fiction might well be poison at the box office), was searching for ways to promote it properly.

  One way was to get a group of high-prestige individuals to make the movie respectable by having them submit to movie-camera interviews in which they would speak on such subjects as the possibility of extraterrestrial life.

  I was one of those approached, and I spent hours on May 18, 1966, doing the interview in one of the rooms in the Anatomy Department. Elizabeth Moyer watched sardonically, but I think she was impressed with my seriousness and aplomb. She had never seen me under any conditions when I wasn’t being more or less effervescent—even in the dark days of my fight with Keefer eight years before.

  Afterward, I heard that Carl Sagan had been approached and had refused to co-operate since no money was involved. It made me uneasily aware that I had given myself away for nothing and had exposed myself as valueless by the only measure Hollywood valued—money. But it was for Arthur Clarke, I told myself, and you can’t let a pal down.

  33

  In New York, on May 20, I had lunch with Janet Finney of Random House, for whom I had written Satellites in Outer Space seven years before.

  I came early (I always do) and waited calmly at the table till Miss Finney arrived, merely seven minutes late, which was really nothing. I was accustomed to much worse than that.

  She hastened to the table and called out to me as she came, “I’m sorry I kept you waiting, Isaac.”

  I called out in reply, “That’s all right, Janet. I kept myself from growing impatient by thinking of your lovely face and basking in the anticipated warmth of your arrival.” You know, just the thing any writer would say to his editor.

  And a waiter, who had been passing by, stopped as though he were poleaxed, looked at my cheerful, blue-eyed, Slavic countenance in puzzlement, and said to me, “Pardon me, are you Italian?”

  “Only with women,” I said.

  Janet Finney had a new suggestion for me—a book to be entitled Twentieth Century Discovery, which was to deal with scientific advances since 1900. It was rather like Svirsky’s original suggestion to me except that this new book was to be for teen-agers, was to be only fifty thousand words long, and was to deal with only five or six specific topics.

  I agreed readily.

  34

  My sense of having a teen-age son was growing stronger. We sent David on a visit to the Blugermans in New York, and he made the trip there and back by bus—alone.

  Then, on June 3, he and I went to a baseball game at Fenway Park. It wasn’t David’s first game at all (he had even gone to games entirely alone, rather than with other boys), but it was the first we had attended together. And it was my first since those days thirty years before when I lived and died according to whether the Giants were victorious or defeated.

  The game was between the Boston Red Sox and the New York Yankees and I rooted for the Yankees, since anything else would have been treasonable. David, on the other hand, rooted for the Red Sox. I had to force myself to remember that Boston was David’s hometown. It seemed unnatural somehow,

  35

  Not all my books were successful, of course, but that spring, I hit a new low.

  For some months I had been working on a book called Background to Modern Biology for the Educational Division of Houghton Mifflin. Those were the days when an attempt was being made to revolutionize the teaching of biology and to put it on a firmer biochemical and biophysical basis for the high-school level.

  The trouble was that the high-school biology teachers were having trouble teaching the new biology since they didn’t understand it themselves, and what I was supposed to do was to write a book that would teach the teachers. I readily agreed to it and in the process of working on it I had several lunches with Haven Spencer, who would be editing the book, and who was, in his own way, as delightful as Austin himself.

  But the book took on a life of its own, as my books always seem to, and when I showed Haven samples of first draft it was clear that wherever it was going, it wasn’t aimed at any destination that would serve to “teach the teachers.” By June 27, it was clear that there was no chance of saving it, and the project came to an end by mutual consent.

  All my more disastrous rejections, such as those for “Grow Old With Me,” The Death Dealers, and A Short History of Astronomy had come at least after the book was finished. In the case of Background to Modern Biology, I was rejected partway through first draft.

  It was embarrassing, but it was not the end of the world. I consoled myself by continuing busily and happily on my book on the Bible.

  24

  Second Hugo and Special Issue

  1

  We spent the first two weeks of July 1966 on a lake in Concord, Massachusetts, having agreed to rent the summer house of a casual friend for that period of time.

  It was a rather disastrous experiment. The house was not comfortable and the surroundings were not pleasant.

  In fact, I have blanked out most of that episode and remember only one incident out of those two weeks. One evening (I didn’t even record which one in my diary), Robyn came running to the house shouting, “Daddy, Daddy, a flying saucer! Come look!”

  I rushed out of the house to see. I was, and am, a firm disbeliever in flying saucers as extraterrestrial spaceships. I’m perfectly willing to believe in unexplained atmospheric phenomena, though, and I was curious to see what my eleven-year-old Robyn would consider to be a flying saucer.

  It was a cloudless twilight. The Sun had set and the sky was a uniform slate gray, still too light for any stars to be visible; and there, hanging in the sky, like an oversize Moon, was a perfect featureless metallic circle of something like aluminum.

  I was thunderstruck, and dashed back into the house for my glasses, moaning, “Oh no, this can’t happen to me. This can’t happen to me.” I couldn’t bear the thought that I would have to report something that really looked as though it might conceivably be an extraterrestrial spaceship.

  I came out with my glasses and it was still there; it was not the figment of the overheated imagination of an eleven-year-old girl and the myopic suggestibility of a doting middle-aged father. But now the shape was beginning to distort slightly.

  It was becoming slightly elliptical, then more so, then rather lopsidedly so, then black markings began to appear—it was turning broadside and it was a Goodyear blimp!

  I was incredibly relieved!

  2

  July 26, 1966, was our twenty-fourth wedding anniversary, and we celebrated it in rather a different fashion. A convention of some type of engineers was meeting at MIT and were to be shown a preview of the movie Fantastic Voyage. My family and I were invited.

  It wasn’t entirely appropriate since I had nothing whatever to do with the movie, but I was curious to see it and so, needless to say, were the children.

  It was a good picture. I was a little embarrassed when some of the engineers in the audience snickered at a few of the science-fiction touches, but then as the picture continued, they were caught up in it and the snickers stopped.

  As for myself, I got my first look at Raquel Welch. She was the heroine, and it was her first starring role. One of the inducements that had been used in trying to persuade me to do the novelization was an offer to fly me to Hollywood and introduce me to Miss Welch.

  I had never heard of her and all I knew was that I was not going to get into any airplane.

  “If you want me to do the novelization,” I had said, “then promise not to fly me to Hollywood.”

  Now, as I watched the motion picture, I wondered if I had been entirely wise. There are worse things than being in an airplane, I thought, and not meeting Raquel Welch was surely one of them.

  I was particularly impressed by the scene in which Raquel was attacked by antibodies. Those antibodies had to be stripped from her body before they killed her, and four pairs of male hands moved instantly to her breasts to begin the stripping—and there was room there (it appeared to my fevered vision) for all eight hands.

  When the movie ended, the spaceship had been left behind, inside the white cell, and Robyn turned to me and said at once, “Won’t the ship expand now and kill the man, Daddy?”

  “Yes, Robyn,” I explained, “but you see that because you’re smarter than the average Hollywood producer. After all, you’re eleven.”

  David, who never read my books ordinarily, insisted on a copy of the book version of Fantastic Voyage as soon as we got home. He read it, I think, without stopping to breathe and when he was through, I said, “How did you like it, David?”

  He said, indifferently, “It was just like the movie, but more stretched out.”

  My son, the critic!

  3

  That summer it was Robyn’s turn. It was she who was going to spend eight weeks at a camp, as David had done for two years running some six years before. Robyn was older now than David had been when he had had his experience—but Robyn was a girl and seemed more fragile. I hated the notion.

  We took her down to the camp, somewhere in Cape Cod, and left her there the very day after we saw Fantastic Voyage. Before the day was over I had written her a letter.

  The next day we called her and received the news that she didn’t like the food. We took that bit of news with equanimity, since what youngster ever likes the food at camp? We also got the news that she had already gone horseback-riding and that she loved it and that they had received instruction in how to jump clear in case the horse decided to lie down and roll over on them.

  I instantly gave her instructions to stay away from all horses, but she insisted that she loved them and she would jump clear.

  I was not consoled.

  The particular camp had been chosen for Robyn because of the glowing recommendation of some slight acquaintance whose own daughter, a friend of Robyn’s, was going. That daughter promptly got homesick and the slight acquaintance quickly brought home her precious darling at once, leaving Robyn behind with her morale shattered.

  Robyn called us and begged to be taken home also, but we were hardhearted and would not give in. “Make new friends, Robyn,” I said, firmly.

  We never spoke to that slight acquaintance again.

  4

  Brandeis University had been fairly close to our apartment in Waltham and it was not very far away from our house in West Newton. We had been using it more and more as a cultural center, regularly going to see plays being staged there, for instance. Gertrude took summer courses at Brandeis.

  On August 1, 1966, Gertrude and I, together with some of our friends, all visited Brandeis to hear a talk by Stanley Kauffman, the drama critic of the New York Times. It was a very good and enlightening talk and the women in our group were enthralled and clearly delighted with the speaker.

  Something in my memory stirred. It seemed to me Kauffman used to work for Ballantine Books once and I had met him. Incautiously, I said so, and all the women, including Gertrude, whispered excitedly that they wanted an introduction after the talk.

  “I’m not sure he’s the one. I’m not sure.”

  “Well,” said someone in the group, “what’s the difference? He’ll know you, anyway.”

  No, he wouldn’t. Why should he? But they wouldn’t listen.