Stanley was thirty-seven years old now. He had risen to the post of assistant managing editor at Newsday, and was soon to join the faculty of the Columbia School of Journalism on a part-time basis. We found ourselves to be completely compatible, each understanding the other’s sense of humor, and each at complete ease with the other.

  4

  Harlan Ellison was editing a giant anthology of original science fiction for Doubleday, one he was calling Dangerous Visions. In it he was deliberately seeking ground-breaking material, consciously trying to shatter the mold set by John Campbell and his school (including myself) almost thirty years before.

  Over and over he asked me to contribute something to the volume and each time I refused. My excuse was that I lacked the time, and that was true enough. My real reason, however, was that I couldn’t face trying to write a story that would pass muster in the 1960s, when such talent as I had suited only the 1950s.

  I felt that I didn’t measure up any longer and I didn’t want to prove it.

  I offered, instead, to write an Introduction, and Harlan, rather than not have my name in the volume at all, agreed. I wrote the Introduction on February 4, 1967. In fact, I wrote two. The first dealt with my notion of how science fiction had changed in the 1960s. The second, entitled “Harlan and I,” recounted the first meeting between us, fifteen years before. (Harlan later added a footnote insisting I was exaggerating, but I was not. My description of the meeting is completely accurate. )

  Writing the Introductions did not really soothe me. In every other respect I had bounded forward in the 1960s. I had moved ahead in quantity, quality, and variety. In science fiction, however, I was convinced I was a has-been.

  I had witnessed the phenomenon before. There had been great and prestigious science-fiction writers in the 1930s, writers I had revered and loved. When the 1940s (and Campbell) came, however, the writers of the 1930s moved out and a new group (including myself) moved in. I recall wasting precious little sympathy on them. They were the dinosaurs and we were the mammals and that was it.

  Now it was I who was one of the dinosaurs, and there was a New Wave of mammals, whom I scarcely knew and who wrote in ways I could scarcely understand.

  The more I thought of it, the less I dared to compete, and I might well have retired from the field permanently and might never have written one word of science fiction after “Billiard Ball” but for one remark.

  I was attending a small science-fiction event in Newark on March 5, and was sitting in a bar with the del Reys, the Pohls, and the Silverbergs.

  Evelyn del Rey said to me, “Why don’t you write science fiction these days, Isaac?”

  I squirmed a bit and said, sadly, “Evelyn, you know as well as I do that the field has moved beyond me.”

  And she said, “Isaac, you’re crazy. When you write, you are the field.”

  I could make no coherent answer. Never, since my early days with John Campbell, had I received such encouragement when it was so badly needed.

  To be sure, I didn’t go on to turn out a massive output of science fiction—but never again thereafter was I afraid to write science fiction. If I had to, or if I felt like it, I wrote it, and if there were even the slightest danger of my feeling self-doubtful, I would mutter to myself, “Isaac, when you write, you are the field.”

  5

  The previous fall, TV Guide had asked me to do an article reviewing the new science-fiction programs that had sprouted on television. I produced a humorous article entitled “What Are a Few Galaxies Among Friends?,” and it had appeared in the November 26, 1966, issue of the magazine.

  I made fun of the scientific illiteracy in silly programs such as “Lost in Space,” “It’s About Time,” and “The Time Tunnel.” I made some mention of “Star Trek,” too. I said of it that it “seems to have the best technical assistance of the current crop,” but I did wax a little jovial over one particular blooper.

  That was when I ran into the “Star Trek” phenomenon. The viewers of the other shows didn’t mind my comments (it may be they didn’t know how to read), but the “Trekkies” were heard from at once. Even Janet Jeppson wrote me an angry letter.

  Surprised, I watched the program and could see that it had its points. It was certainly the most intelligent science fiction I had seen yet on any of the visual media.

  I began to feel that I had worked to harm something I should have labored to save, and for the first time I approached TV Guide and asked to do an article. They agreed, and on February 15 I turned out “Mr. Spock Is Dreamy,” in which I was funny, but in which I managed to say a lot of nice things about “Star Trek.”

  It was published in the April 29, 1967, TV Guide, and Janet sent me a mollified letter. It also established my friendship with Gene Roddenberry, the producer of the show, and I felt enormously better.

  It was in that article, incidentally, that I first referred to Robyn as “my beautiful, blue-eyed, blond-haired daughter.” I have been doing that periodically ever since.

  6

  Occasionally someone wanted to work for me as a graduate student, but, of course, I was doing no research and took no graduate students. It was more difficult to explain why I would not serve as an adviser on some project or other, but usually I managed.

  But then two young women from Radcliffe called me and said they wanted to do a term paper on science fiction and their professor had agreed provided they got an adequate adviser. They had suggested me, they said, and their professor had said that would be fine. I promptly said that it might be fine for them and their professor, but it wouldn’t be fine for me because I wouldn’t do it.

  They asked to come see me and I said, “Very well, you can come see me, but I won’t serve as adviser.”

  On February 16, they came to see me, and it was clear they knew my weakness. Each was a beautiful girl. I don’t mean attractive; I mean beautiful. They simpered and dimpled at me and somehow I agreed to be their adviser. For the remainder of the semester, they would come over occasionally to ask questions and show me what they were writing. I looked forward to it.

  7

  On February 18 I visited the home of people I didn’t know simply because they had a Soviet guest who wanted to meet me. I went with some misgivings, but the guest could speak English quite well enough to butter me up. He told me that in a recent poll in the Soviet Union, I had placed third in popularity as a science-fiction writer. A Soviet writer had finished in first place, and Ray Bradbury in second.

  I loved to hear it, for it’s nice to make good in the hometown. I have heard similar tales ever since. Eventually, a friend of mine, just returning from a visit to the Soviet Union, told me that he was told, quite seriously, that of all American writers, science-fiction or not, I was in second place only to Mark Twain. (If there’s any American writer I don’t mind being in second place to it’s Mark Twain.)

  8

  The next day was Robyn’s twelfth birthday and I returned her birthday present to me by taking her to a Chinese restaurant. It was just she and I. No one else was welcome.

  9

  On March 15, 1967, I finally finished the book on the Bible. I had been working on it for over a year and a half.

  I was sorry I was done, actually. It had been a great deal of fun from the first verse of Genesis to the last verse of Revelation, and my feeling was that now that I had done the work, I could do a really good job if, with the overall knowledge I had gained, I were to start over. I think that was the first time I ever felt the urge of revision that keeps so many authors working through so many drafts.

  I resisted the urge, however. I had too many other things to do.

  10

  The history books had become virtually an obsession with me. Having finished The Egyptians, I began, on March 22, another, on the other region of ancient civilization, the Tigris-Euphrates. This book I eventually called The Near East.

  The history books were chancy in a way. I was accepted as a science-fiction writer and no one could doubt my credentials as a scientist, but what made me a historian? I expected the reviews would reflect this.

  I had schooled myself to withstand bad reviews, after the time of Henry Bott. Eventually I even learned to dump bad ones directly into the wastebasket and to keep only the good reviews. (Since I never showed my reviews to anybody after my first try in 1950, is there any reason I have to keep them even-handed?)

  One review of The Roman Republic and The Roman Empire in the New York Times of May 7, 1967, did try my temper, though. The reviewer seemed surprised that I dealt so largely with war and politics instead of with economics and sociology. Apparently he objected to my writing an interesting book when I might so easily have written dull ones such as, presumably, he did.

  For days I tottered on the brink of writing him on the matter, and then decided it was useless to say anything. I should, instead, do something; and what I should do was exactly as I pleased regardless of reviews. What successful writer, after all, has not, on occasion, received bad reviews—and who remembers the names of the reviewers?

  (The same day I began The Near East, I also began another small book in the Follett series. This one was on light and I called it Light.)

  11

  The Boskone was held twice a year, and on April 1 I attended the vernal portion of the festivities. The next day I received the E. E. Smith Memorial Award (Doc Smith had died on August 31, 1965, at the age of seventy-five) or, as it was more popularly called, the “Skylark.”

  Awards in science fiction were beginning to proliferate. One could not write as much as I did, and attend as many conventions, without accumulating plaques, statuettes, and assorted testimonials. Some I put on walls, some were placed on shelves or in bookcases. As objects, they are troublesome and get in the way. As evidence, constantly before my eyes, of the affection and appreciation of my readers, they are priceless.

  12

  My first chance to put Evelyn del Rey’s dictum into action came now. A periodical called Abbottempo, put out by Abbot Laboratories, a respected pharmaceutical firm, for European distribution, asked me for a two-thousand-word science-fiction story. It was to be on a subject of medical interest and something that physicians would find at once interesting, amusing, and thought-provoking. I had almost replied with an automatic refusal when Evelyn’s remark occurred to me and, as it happened, I thought of a plot that would fit the prescription perfectly.

  On April 10, 1967, I wrote “Segregationist”150 at a sitting, and the editor took it without any trouble. The story dealt with heart transplants, and at the time it was written it was entirely science-fictional. Once again, however, as in the case of “Everest,” fourteen years before, science caught up with me. By the time the story appeared, in December 1967, heart-transplantation was an accomplished fact.

  Whereas “Everest,” however, meant nothing if the failure to climb the mountain were subtracted, “Segregationist” still had meaning even if the heart transplant were not taken into account.

  Once the story appeared, by the way, Abbottempo sent me a boxed collection of the magazine, with one copy in each of the eight languages in which it was published: English, French, Spanish, German, Italian, Japanese, Greek, and Turkish. It was the first time anything of mine had appeared (to my knowledge) in either Greek or Turkish.

  It was my first intention to keep that set intact as a valuable bit of Asimoviana, but I broke down. There was an article on some horrible disease in that issue, with some impossibly emetic photographs to go with it, and they were present in every language. I could not stand the photographs and, eventually, took out my story and destroyed the rest of the magazines very thankfully.

  I had had a similar problem some months before in doing an article on the juvenile hormone in insects, and the use it might have as a specific insecticide without harmful side effects on other forms of life.

  Writing it was simple, except that the articles I had to read to bone up on the subject were filled with stomach-turning insect photographs. I moaned to Gertrude that I might have to refuse to do the article and that I would lose an easy fifty cents a word.

  Gertrude said, matter-of-factly, “Don’t look at the pictures.”

  Now, why didn’t I think of that?

  I began the article without further trouble of any kind on January 31, 1967, and it appeared in the May-June 1967 issue of Think, the in-house magazine of International Business Machines Corporation. They ran it under the title “The Insecticide That Turns a Bug Against Itself.” I never included it in any of my collections but I cannibalized it eventually to form the first section of the book Twentieth Century Discovery that I was planning to write for Random House.

  13

  Gertrude was still driving the old pink-and-white Plymouth Hy-Drive I had bought in 1954. It had traveled seventy-six thousand miles and was a dreadful thirteen-year-old deathtrap that was well overdue for replacement. We bought a new Plymouth Barracuda in its place and it was delivered on April 11, 1967. For the first time in her life, Gertrude had a brand-new car all her own.

  My own Ford was not as old as the Hy-Drive, but it had seen its best days.

  On April 16, I took it (with the family inside) to Fairfield, Connecticut, to give a talk at Fairfield College, and then we headed south. Two days later I was traveling along the Skyline Drive, surrounded by the gorgeous scenery of the Shenandoah Valley in Virginia.

  On the morning of Wednesday, April 19th, I discovered I could not start the car. I called in reinforcements in the form of employees of the motel I was staying at, and after half an hour and united efforts, we got it started. I blamed the trouble on the thin air of the mountain heights and was not unduly disturbed.

  We went to the Luray caverns, which we enjoyed enormously (it was the first time any of us had been in a limestone cave), and then we went northward through Washington, where we spent a couple of days sight-seeing. By Friday we were out on Long Island, visiting Stanley and Ruth.

  Saturday morning, the twenty-second, I was all set to go home, and again I couldn’t start the car. It surely wasn’t the mountain heights this time, for there are no mountains on Long Island.

  In a complete dither, I did the only thing I could think of: I called Stanley. I had every faith in him. I was merely brilliant; he was level-headed, and that, in an emergency, is worth a great deal more.

  He came down in his car, without complaint, and asked me if I had gas. Of course I had gas, I assured him. I’ve never in my life not had gas, I added. Then he tried to start the car and failed.

  “What do we do?” I asked forlornly.

  “We call a gas station,” he said.

  “On a weekend?”

  “We try,” he said, firmly.

  We went to a phone booth and I fed him dimes and we got nowhere. Some stations were closed, others were not equipped with mechanics, others had mechanics who would not come to my car but demanded I bring it to them.

  Finally, Stanley leaned back in exasperation and said, “How is it, Isaac, that someone who is the genius you claim to be, isn’t bright enough to join the AAA?”

  At that, I said indignantly, “What do you mean, not bright enough. I’m a member of the AAA. Here’s my card.”

  He gave me a very strange look and didn’t even bother to ask me why I hadn’t told him that to begin with. He called the AAA and they had a tow truck out to my car in almost no time.

  For the first time in my seventeen years as an automobile driver, my car was towed away. Apparently my spark plugs were utterly used up. I had neglected to replace them at the last ten-thousand-mile checkup because I hadn’t had the checkup. The auto mechanic said he couldn’t understand how it had managed to start every time but two over the preceding six months.

  After that we headed for home, and on the Connecticut Turnpike the power steering conked out and I had to be towed again. No tow at all in seventeen years, and then two in one day for unconnected reasons.

  Once I finally got back to Boston, I took my car to my own repairman at the first opportunity and inveighed bitterly against the Fates. I was very eloquent indeed, but my repairman, a man with no poetry in his bosom, said, “Doc, you gotta understand this car is wore out. Don’t yell at it. It done its best.”

  I recognized the justice of the remark, and though I told him to overhaul the car and put it into tip-top condition, I began to look for another one.

  14

  While the car was being repaired, I went to school in a taxi. After all, I had promised my two beautiful Radcliffe students that I would be there on April 25 to look over their dissertations, and a promise is a promise.

  After I had gone over their papers, it occurred to me that I might as well make use of them for transportation. After all, I had been of considerable service to them, and they might as well make part of it up to me. So I asked them to drive me back to Newton.

  “We’d love to,” they said, “but our car only seats two.”

  I was surprised. “Don’t try to get out of it,” I said. “No car only seats two.”

  “Come look at it,” they said.

  Down I went with them and they were right! They had a tiny MG that was about the size of a baby buggy and there was no way of squeezing more than two people into its single tiny seat.

  While I stared in dismay, one of them said, “Of course, if you’re willing, I’ll drive, and Toni can sit on your lap.”

  “All right,” I said, cheering up at once. Crowding into that front seat with my two beauties struck me as an elegant way to travel.

  No sooner said than done, and off we went. Toni, who sat on my lap, was the taller and larger of the two, and I should judge she weighed a buxom 140 pounds. If a 140-pound sack of wheat had been draped over my knees, I’m sure my legs would have gone to sleep in ten seconds. As it was, my circulation continued unimpeded and I never felt the weight at all. It’s a curious physiological phenomenon I can’t explain.