Looking back on it, I realize I might have said haughtily, “Unhand me, woman, I do not wish paid caresses.”

  Or I might have said, “My dear young woman, let us not stay here in this filthy doorway where, at any moment, I will be mugged. I have an expensive room not half a block away with two clean double beds in it. There I will scrub you down with plenty of soap and warm water and then we shall see what is best to do.”

  In actual fact, I did neither. Sudden illumination broke in on me and I gibbered. Literally! I just went “Buh-buh-buh-buh-buh” and started trying to pull away.

  I must have looked so terrified that the girl’s gentle heart smote her and she didn’t even try to collect anything for the feel of her abdomen, but let me go. I dashed out, made it to Howard Johnson’s at a dead ran, and threw myself on one of the beds, panting.

  It had been a very frightening experience.

  Why was I frightened? How should I know? I’m only reporting the facts.

  12

  Over the weekend, the New York regional convention, the Lunacon, was being held, and I seized the opportunity to attend.

  It was on this occasion that I met Judy-Lynn Benjamin, who worked for Galaxy and If under Fred Pohl. She’s a very short girl and a little heavy, and has the most enormous brain of any woman I’ve known. Quick, articulate, quite merciless in her opinions, she soon gave me the irresistible impression that she was the real heart and muscle of Galaxy.

  At least, on a later occasion, I said just that jokingly from the platform when Fred Pohl was in the audience, and he threw something at me. He didn’t look as though he were joking, from which I deduced that my attempt at fun had struck a nerve.

  13

  Tony Boucher died on April 29, 1968, of cancer. He was fifty-seven years old. He died in California, so there was no question of my attending the memorial service or the funeral.

  I was distressed, for on those occasions when we had met, notably at the Cleveland convention, thirteen years before, which he had toastmastered, we had gotten along like bosom buddies, and because, thanks to our wide separation and my own dislike for travel, I had only met him three or four times altogether.

  I had, as always, my own method for insulating myself against the miseries of life. I worked along, more or less madly, on various sections for the Ginn science series, and when I felt my spirit fraying over that particular unloved task, I would move on to various sections of the Shakespeare book and take a soothing vacation.

  14

  On May 4, Gertrude and I, along with another couple, went to Brandeis to see a magnificent collection of old Bibles. Having spent so much time on Asimov’s Guide to the Bible, I felt I had to see it.

  At one point we were looking at a Jewish Bible published in Spain before the expulsion of the Jews. It was open to the seventh chapter of Isaiah, and was in Spanish, except for one word that was in Hebrew and stood out like a sore thumb amid the rest.

  My friend said to me, “Why do they have one word in Hebrew?”

  Having spent some time on that very point in my Bible book, I said, “That’s the verse that, in the King James, goes, ‘Behold a virgin shall conceive, and bear a son.’ The only trouble is that the Hebrew word is almah, which does not mean ‘virgin’ but ‘young woman.’ If the Jewish publishers were to translate the word correctly they would seem to be denying the divinity of Jesus and they would be in serious trouble with the Inquisition. Rather than do that, or translate it incorrectly, they leave that word in Hebrew.”

  I said all this in my usual speaking voice and in very much the manner in which I would have delivered a lecture at school. While I was talking (at somewhat greater length than I report it here), the nearest security guard approached and listened curiously.

  I didn’t notice that, but my friend did, and (like most of my friends) he overestimated the importance of my name. He therefore said to the guard with reference to me as I passed on to the next exhibit, “Do you know who he is?”

  And the guard said, “God?”

  My friend needn’t have laughed that hard.

  15

  My father had truly retired some years before and had spent his time rather dully at home. Without work to do, without close friends or ties to the community, he returned to religion; not out of conviction, but because it was something he knew, something to do, some way of meeting other people with whom he had something in common.

  He found an Orthodox synagogue that he could reach (he knew nothing about any other variety of Judaism and would have scorned them anyway, if he did) and spent much of his time there. He couldn’t help but turn back to the dietary laws and to various other tedious points of ritual, which made life hard for my mother.

  On those rare occasions when I saw him in these last few years, I found it difficult to keep from berating him for this. It had been his free-thinking that had made it possible for me to live without a religious prison, and I hated to see him move back into the cage again. But I knew his motivation, and even the synagogue was better than an utterly empty life.

  It was getting more difficult for my parents, though, to endure the New York winters and the problems of running the apartment house. For a number of years before Henry’s death, he and Mary had spent each winter in Florida, and that seemed attractive to my parents—but why just the winter? Why not sell all the apartment houses and take what money they realized and spend it on retirement in Florida? Surely their money would last the few remaining years of their lives.164

  In 1968, with the time approaching when they would be leaving for Florida, my parents wanted one last gathering. They didn’t know the exact date of their marriage any more than they knew the exact date of my birth, but 1968 was the Golden Wedding year, so they just picked a convenient day.

  We celebrated it at Stanley’s house on Long Island on May 19, 1968. We were all there, the entire family: Stanley and Ruth, Marcia and Nick, Gertrude and I, and all seven grandchildren, with my mother and my father presiding in full parental glory.

  And glory it was. They had come to the United States, some forty-five years before, without money or education, and had managed by nothing more than hard work and dogged determination to raise three children, see all three married and with children in their turn, see their two sons completely educated and each in a position full of honor and prestige.

  We sat around the table at a midday meal, and Stanley and I took turns in telling funny reminiscent stories about our parents. I remember I read selections from my F & SF essays that happened to mention my father, notably the one that was the prelude to my ninety-third F & SF essay, “Balancing the Books,”165 which had appeared in the July 1966 issue of the magazine.

  No shadow of unhappiness fell on that day, and when we pulled away to drive home to Newton, I waved joyfully at the two old folks and tried not to wonder if I would ever see them again.

  16

  On May 31, 1968, Gertrude and I drove down to Martha’s Vineyard. Things were completely different from the way they had been on our first disastrous try, three years before. In this case, we had new friends, Bert and Jean Rudnick, who had a summer house on the island and who had arranged to have us rent a cottage for the weekend. They came with us, moreover, and were ready to drive us around and take care of us.

  The cottage was comfortable, even luxurious, and under the Rudnicks’ guidance, everything went well. We even discovered that Harry Schwartz (whom I had last seen in Atlantic City three years before) was on the island, so we had another friend.

  We were home on June 2, with the memory of the early fiasco wiped out.166

  17

  In the larger world outside, disaster struck on June 5, when Robert Kennedy was assassinated by a Palestinian named Sirhan Sirhan. Suddenly, events about-faced.

  Although I liked Eugene McCarthy and had voted for him in the New York Democratic primary on April 30, 1968, I had no illusions that he could be nominated. I did think, however, that Bob Kennedy was sure of the nomination and of the subsequent victory, and that suited me.

  Once he was gone, I could see no one on the horizon who could make a successful run. That meant we had to face the possibility of a Republican President, and from nowhere had come that dreadful man whose political death and burial seemed to have taken place six years before. It seemed that Nixon would be the Republican nominee again, and with Robert Kennedy gone, he might be elected.

  But life must continue. My nephew Danny was graduated from MIT on June 6, and I finished The Shaping of England on the eighth. And David was taking driving lessons.

  18

  Another network talk show turned up on June 14. On that day I taped a show with Dick Cavett. Debbie Reynolds sat next to me, and we even danced a bit after the taping—the only time I’ve ever had a Hollywood star in my arms.

  The show itself was not aired till some weeks later, and at that time there was a special interruption because President Johnson was signing some bill with tedious formality. It wiped out half my stint and all of Debbie Reynolds’.

  19

  On June 28 we took Robyn to Cape Cod for another eight-week stay at a summer camp, not the same one as the year before. It was much easier for me this time, and Robyn, with the experience of the previous year behind her, was excited and pleased to be going.

  As for David, he was doing a short stint at Houghton Mifflin as a mail-delivery boy. It wasn’t much of a job, but it gave him his first practice in earning wages—at just the age at which I had had my own first practice in this direction at the Columbia Combining Corporation.

  What made Robyn’s leaving a little more bearable was that Larry Ashmead called that day to say that Doubleday had finally decided to issue a contract for what was to be called Asimov’s Guide to Shakespeare. It’s just as well they did, for I had been working hard on it ever since I had handed in my Richard II sample—not because I was so certain that Doubleday would agree to it, as that I simply couldn’t help it.

  Of all the books I have ever worked on, I think Asimov’s Guide to Shakespeare gave me the most pleasure, day in, day out. For months and months I lived and thought Shakespeare, and I don’t see how there can be any greater pleasure in the world—any pleasure, that is, that one can indulge in for as much as ten hours without pause, day after day indefinitely.

  It had occurred to me two months earlier that although I had no fewer than nine books on my list that contained collections of stories that had appeared originally in the magazines, from I, Robot to Asimov’s Mysteries, my most famous short story, “Nightfall,” now twenty-seven years old, did not appear in any one of them. It had appeared in eight anthologies that I was aware of, and had been translated into German and Italian, but I had never made use of it myself.

  I had therefore suggested to Larry that I put together a collection of stories that I had not previously collected and call it Nightfall and Other Stories. On the same day that Larry told me of the contract for Asimov’s Guide to Shakespeare, he told me that one for Nightfall and Other Stories would also be put through.

  It did not take me long to put the new collection into shape, and on July 10 I took it to Doubleday.

  20

  On July 19, 1968, Groff Conklin died at the age of sixty-four. It was he who had been the first to anthologize a story of mine in The Best of Science Fiction, twenty-three years before. I had collaborated with him on the anthology Fifty Short Science-fiction Tales, which had been published five years before. On the all-too-few occasions on which we had met, we had found ourselves compatible in all areas from science fiction to politics—with the one exception that he was a chain smoker.

  21

  Each year, my connection with the Brandeis summer program was growing stronger. From an interested spectator, I came to give lectures of my own. In the summer of 1968, I agreed to give a “course,” five lectures on five successive mornings, beginning with July 29.

  I enjoyed it. I liked the temporary sensation of being faculty; I liked the elaborate cocktail parties (with hors d’oeuvres) and dinners. I even liked the lectures, in which I simply gave the five sections of my book Twentieth Century Discovery.

  During the second week of the summer program I gave one more lecture, in the evening, on August 4. On that evening Roy Machlowitz of Navy Yard days dropped around. I hadn’t seen him for some twenty years.

  Even while the summer program was on, I began a new book. I had carried the history of Rome past the barbarian occupation of the western provinces in The Dark Ages and The Shaping of England. Now I wanted to carry on through that same period in the eastern provinces in which the imperial tradition continued unbroken.

  In other words, I planned to write a history of the Byzantine Empire, and, on August 3, I started a book I called Constantinople.

  22

  On August 9, I received a royalty check from Doubleday that was nearly twenty thousand dollars. My Doubleday royalties were going up steadily, and although my 1961 check from Basic Books remained the record, I began to suspect for the first time that it would not stay a record indefinitely.

  23

  On August 16, I taped a show with Walter Cronkite, who was narrating a program on the future, one called “The Twenty-first Century.” I was rather excited about this, for I admired Cronkite extravagantly.

  I sat down in a chair across a low, round table from him, and while the technicians fiddled with the light, I wondered whether I could say, “My father will be very thrilled, Mr. Cronkite, when he finds out you’ve interviewed me.”

  It seemed so childish a remark that I didn’t dare make it. I was afraid Cronkite would call off the whole thing in disgust.

  My hesitation gave him the chance to speak first. He said, “Well, Dr. Asimov, my father will be very thrilled when he finds out I’ve interviewed you.”

  24

  I brought Robyn home from camp on August 19, and how delighted I was, though her separation from me was not as traumatic the second time.167

  The next day was David’s seventeenth birthday, and on it he took his driver’s test and passed. His driver’s license was surely a sufficient birthday present for him, but we celebrated in addition with a big dinner at a Chinese restaurant.

  David was having trouble at the high school, incidentally, and it was clear to us that he would need smaller classes and more individual attention. It meant private school, and we began investigating some. Finding one that was suitable did not promise to be either quick or easy.

  25

  On August 28, I drove the family to the airport. Gertrude and both children took the shuttle to New York, it being Robyn’s first flight. I stayed at home and worked on the last few plays for the first draft of Asimov’s Guide to Shakespeare, and on the interminable sections I had to do for the Ginn science series.

  Meanwhile, the Democrats held a nominating convention in Chicago, one that was marked by rioting and by police violence. They nominated Vice President Humphrey to run for President and Senator Muskie for Vice President against the Republican nominees, Richard Nixon and Spiro Agnew.

  I had long admired Humphrey as an outspoken liberal, but as Vice President he had loyally supported Johnson in every stage of his utterly wrongheaded approach to the Vietnam War. Humphrey had, moreover, failed to denounce the police actions on the streets of Chicago. With reference to the competing candidates I therefore said, gloomily, in my diary for August 29, “A plague on both their houses.”

  I couldn’t keep that up, though. There was no way I could ever bring myself to vote for the unspeakable Nixon, or even to abstain and cost him an opposition vote. I knew that I would have to vote for Humphrey.

  26

  My parents were now down in Florida. It had been their intention to go by train because, as my mother told me on the telephone, “Pappa says you don’t go on planes.”

  I spoke to my father rather firmly and told him that my neuroses were not something to be imitated. They went by plane, therefore, making their first trip of this sort.

  On September 5, 1968, my mother turned seventy-three, and I called them in Miami Beach, where they were now living, presumably permanently. We exchanged letters now and then, and I made it a practice to call them once a week.

  Stanley and Ruth went to visit them in Florida about this time, but I knew that I would never go, and that unless they came back to the New York area, at least on a visit, I would not be seeing them anymore. It was a queer feeling.

  27

  The med school was engaged in a huge building program that had begun while I was still an active member of the faculty. Now, nine years after I had ceased being active, Building A, which had housed the Biochemistry Department for decades, was losing its function. It had been twenty years earlier that I had first walked into the building and met Burnham Walker, and now the department was shifting to one of the new buildings.

  On September 9, I gave my usual first lecture of the year and did so in one of the new buildings for the first time.

  28

  Al Capp suddenly re-entered my life very briefly. Over the years we had seen each other only very occasionally. In 1964, I had seen him once or twice during the Johnson-Goldwater campaign when he, like I, had been ardently anti-Goldwater.

  A change had come over him, though. I don’t know what it was or how it happened. I met him at the Whipples’ a couple of years after the Goldwater campaign and it was as though someone new were inhabiting the body.