10

  The growing up of the children was introducing concerns. David drove Gertrude’s car solo on November 29, and I could see that he would be wanting to do so with increasing frequency—and that in a few years, Robyn would be making her demands.

  As it was, Robyn was having occasion to use the phone more and more, and between her and Gertrude, it was becoming difficult for me to receive my business calls. It seemed logical to arrange for two phones in the house, and on December 9 it was carried through. We became a two-phone family as well as a two-car one, and I had one phone all to myself.

  11

  On December 12, I was slated to give a talk at the Masonic Temple in downtown Boston. I had never been inside and I was amazed at its rococo interior. I decided it would be pleasant to speak in what seemed to be a Hollywood notion of Cleopatra’s palace, but I was taken down into the basement, where everyone sat on planks thrown over wooden trestles before long wooden tables in a room with whitewashed walls and hissing radiators.

  I sat there uncomfortably for an interminable period, and the organizer of the occasion said to me after a while, “Dinner is delayed.”

  “Why?” I said.

  “We’re having a Chinese meal being delivered from Woburn, and I suppose it is being delayed in traffic.”

  That struck me as astonishing. We were at the very edge of Boston’s Chinatown, one of the best in the country. Why send out to Woburn?

  He went on to say, “Will you speak now, please?”

  “Before the meal?”

  “Yes.”

  “But I’ll have a hungry audience and the meal will arrive in the middle of the talk and it will be impossible.”

  “Can’t help it,” he said, got up, and introduced me.

  It was exactly as I said. I had a hungry, unresponsive audience, and halfway through, the dinner arrived and the clanking of cutlery distracted everyone. I had to bring my talk to a halt as soon as possible.

  And what of the Chinese meal that had been sent for from Woburn and that had been the cause of the delay? It was about the worst I had ever eaten. One of the dishes had been heated in distinctly rancid fat, and the remainder, if not actually rancid, was completely undistinguished.

  12

  Tom Sloane wanted an updating of Asimov’s Biographical Encyclopedia of Science and Technology. I did not. I wanted a complete overhaul. Now that it had done so much better than expected, I wanted to improve it in several ways that would require a complete resetting, and I held out for it.

  Tom gave in, and on December 13 I received two copies of the book, which I then proceeded to cannibalize. I added material to almost every biography, added two hundred additional biographies, and, in particular, made the whole thing chronological without exception. (In the first edition, I had listed some biographies as footnotes to other biographies, something I later decided was a thoroughly bad idea.)

  13

  We finally found a private school for David, on the Connecticut shore some twenty miles east of New Haven. We visited it on December 18, and decided it would be perfect. There was an enormous tuition, of course, but we expected that.

  14

  I spent the last week of the year in New York attending a meeting of the Modern Languages Association. That would not have been the sort of thing I would do ordinarily, but science fiction was being taken up by academe, and there was a panel of science-fiction writers scheduled, one that included myself and Fred Pohl, plus some others.

  The Silverbergs and del Reys were present, as were Judy-Lynn Benjamin and Phil Klass (the latter writing excellent science-fiction humor and satire under the pseudonym of William Tenn).

  I made the comment in the course of the session that I didn’t think I had ever made any successful prediction in my science-fiction stories. From the floor, Phil said that, on the contrary, in my story “Trends,” I had, in 1939, predicted popular opposition to space exploration, an opposition that no one else had foreseen and that had actually developed.

  After that, I frequently gave that as an example of one of my successful predictions and, in fact, have a talk I entitle “The Science-fiction Writer as Prophet,” which virtually always gets a standing ovation from college-student audiences.

  15

  I had eight books published in 1968:

  87. Asimov’s Mysteries (Doubleday)

  88. Science, Numbers, and I (Doubleday)

  89. Stars (Follett)

  90. Galaxies (Follett)

  91. The Near East (Houghton Mifflin)

  92. The Dark Ages (Houghton Mifflin)

  93. Asimov’s Guide to the Bible: The Old Testament (Doubleday)

  94. Words from History (Houghton Mifflin)

  16

  On January 2, 1969, I turned forty-nine years old, and for the second time, I was caught unawares by a surprise party. (The first time had been on my 35th, fourteen years before.)

  This time it was at the home of a friend, and it was Gertrude who stalled me by pretending to have a bad backache. Then, just as I thought we couldn’t go at all, it cleared up in time for us to be the last ones there. When I walked in, simply expecting some dinner and conversation, everyone yelled “Surprise!” and a birthday cake appeared out of nowhere.

  17

  In the course of the Modern Languages meeting in December, Judy-Lynn and I had spent a couple of hours at some bar and she had introduced me to a drink called the “grasshopper.” It was green, pepperminty, very delicious, and just as effective in getting me high as was any other form of drink—more effective, since I liked it so much I was always tempted to dare Fate by ordering another.

  On that occasion she had suggested I write a robot story about a female robot. I said that my robots had no sex.

  She said, “You can write around that, Asimov.” (She had a mock-gruff way of speaking that reminded me very much of Tim Seldes.)

  “I’ll think about it,” I said.

  This was usually my way of getting rid of a subject, but in this case, I really did think about it, and on January 10, 1969, I started “Feminine Intuition.”169 It was a positronic robot story with Susan Calvin herself as heroine, the first story in which she appeared since I had written “Galley Slave” over eleven years before.

  As it happened, Ed Ferman had asked me quite some time before to write a story for the forthcoming twentieth-anniversary issue of F & SF, and I had promised to do so. This seemed just the thing. I sent the story to Ed and it eventually appeared in the October 1969 F & SF as the lead novelette.

  The trouble was that it never occurred to me that in suggesting the gimmick, Judy-Lynn had a lien on it for Galaxy or If. I never thought of her as an editor, only as a friend, and I honestly accepted her remark as a friendly suggestion and nothing more.

  Consequently when, a few months later, she said, “Ever do anything with that female-robot idea, Asimov?” I was very pleased to be able to say that I had.

  “Yes, indeed,” I said, innocently. “I wrote a Susan Calvin story based on the idea, and Ed Ferman took it for the twentieth-anniversary issue of F & SF.”

  Judy-Lynn opened her eyes wide. She may be very short, but her temper is easily seven feet high, and she has a vocabulary to match. “You mean you gave Ed Ferman my idea.”

  “Did you want it, Judy-Lynn?” I said, weakly.

  “Of course I wanted it, dummy. Do you think I’m going to waste good ideas on you so other people can get it?” At least that was the gist of her remarks, which went on and on. I just shriveled.

  Don’t think she ever forgot, either. She may have forgiven me because she has a soft heart and she knows I’m not very bright, but she never forgot.

  From then on, she made it her business to play practical jokes on me.

  She would send me fake advance copies of magazine covers of issues in which a story of mine was to appear. On those covers my name would be misspelled, and panicky calls would come from me at once.

  She would send me reviews of products of my pen, which she would get Lester del Rey to write, and which she would arrange to have set up in print as though it had appeared in a newspaper. Lester would design the reviews so as to puncture every single one of my little weaknesses, and when I received them I would call up in rage to find out what paper it had appeared in and who had written it.

  She would write letters under the pseudonym of Fritzi Vogelgesang and announce that Judy-Lynn had been fired and that she, Fritzi, was the replacement, so that I would send puzzled letters asking why Judy-Lynn had been fired and, of course, being very pleasant to Fritzi, who sounded like a nice girl.

  To cap it all off, she arranged to have me informed, indirectly, that she and Larry Ashmead had just had a secret wedding and were off on their honeymoon. I spent the rest of the day calling up everyone who might have some chance of confirming or denying the news, but everyone was under instructions to give me ambiguous information.

  On every one of these occasions people who knew what Judy-Lynn was doing would say, “Asimov will never fall for that.”

  Judy-Lynn would always say, “Sure he will. That dummy will fall for anything.” She would then bet a dinner that I would fall for it.

  I never failed her. She collected free dinners for as long as she could find a sucker to bet on my intelligence.

  18

  At a meeting of NESFA on January 12, 1969, all of us were greatly excited over the prospect of an actual manned landing on the Moon that year. The Apollo program had been aiming at that, and astronauts had been successfully skimming its surface and then returning.

  We reminisced over the many stories that had been written about first landings on the Moon, and I said, “This is the year in which there ought to be an anthology of such stories.”

  There was an outcry to the effect that I ought to edit one, but I demurred and said, “No, Harry Stubbs ought to edit it, since he has never done an anthology, but I’ll be glad to write an Introduction to it.”

  It worked out that way. I suggested the anthology to Larry Ashmead and he agreed. The anthology, First Flights to the Moon, edited by Hal Clement, was published in 1970. I did write the Introduction and, what’s more, two of my stories, “Trends” and “Ideas Die Hard,” appeared in it.

  19

  Early in the year, I had gotten a letter from Beth Walker, of Walker & Company, suggesting a new book. That was nothing new, but this time it was one that she swore I could write in one day so that I need not try to fend her off by pretending I was buried in work.

  Her idea was that I write an ABC book; an “A is for Apple pie” book, except that every letter stand for some word that had to do with space. There would be two words for each letter, in fact, one for the capital letter, so to speak, and one for the small one. There would thus be fifty-two words, each one explained in a sentence or two for very young readers (or their parents), and Walker & Company would take care of the necessary illustrations. It was to be called ABC’s of Space and it would be published in the year when it looked very much as though we would reach the moon.

  It seemed like a novel idea, and I’m easily trapped by anything new. I agreed to do it. I did it all in one day, as Beth had said I would, on January 15.

  I knew very well that there would be requests for other ABC books, following, but even in the process of doing the first I lost much of my enthusiasm. Having two words for each letter is artificial and wrong. “S” is such a common opening letter that though I chose “satellite” and “splashdown,” I had to leave out “space,” “Saturn,” “star,” and so on. On the other hand, “Y” is an almost impossible letter to find words for, and I had to use “yaw” and “year.” Any system that, in a discussion of space, includes “yaw” and omits “star,” has to be bad.

  20

  On January 20, 1969, Richard Nixon became the thirty-seventh President of the United States, and I did not watch the Inauguration on television. In fact, for years to come, I never watched television when Nixon spoke. I found I could not endure either looking at his shifty face or listening to his unctuous voice.

  21

  On January 31, 1969, David completed the first semester of his junior year in high school, and that was his last day in the public-school system of Newton, which he had been attending for 12½ years.

  On that day, we drove him down to the private school in Connecticut and left him there. Of course, we expected to see him in the summer and during vacations but, by and large, he would be away from home the year and a half, and possibly two, that it would take him to complete high school.

  Now that he had been with us for 17½ years, we found it difficult to contemplate so prolonged a separation. It wasn’t, however, quite as bad as we had thought it would be. We called him regularly, and vacations came oftener than we had expected. On February 14, only two weeks after he had left, he was home for a weekend.

  And on February 19, Robyn was fourteen years old.

  In one respect, Robyn took over David’s tasks, and that was with respect to the snow. It was a very bad winter. December had seen bad rainstorm after bad rainstorm (five inches on one flooded day), and then January had seen the snow—the worst collection of snow since the March we had moved into the house thirteen years before.

  It was Robyn who bore the burden. She handled the snow shovel with skill and ordered me off the grounds officiously. “You’re nearly fifty. Dad!” (Who asked her?)

  It helped that she was beautiful, too.

  The city would send snow plows to clear the street, and once you had cleared your own driveway, the city plows would come along and carefully push the snow from the piles existing on either side into your driveway. The edge of the driveway would then be filled with hard and heavy lumps of ice that broke backs and hearts in the removal. This routinely happened two or even three times, and you knew that the midget brains and rusted hearts of the men at the plows rejoiced.

  But when Robyn had cleared off the driveway and stood there with her yellow hair framing her pink and beautiful face on which there would appear a sweet and helpless look—why, the cretins lifted their plows clear of the ground and not a piece of ice littered the driveway.

  22

  I drove to New York on March 13 and took in about half of the Shakespeare book in final copy; then on to Philadelphia, where I was on “The Mike Douglas Show”; then back to New York on the fifteenth, where I attended the Nebula awards dinner, with Judy-Lynn as my date.

  Anne McCaffrey was in charge of the awards, and that placed her in a dilemma, for she was getting one of the Nebulas and she didn’t like to award it to herself. (I couldn’t understand why. I had awarded myself a Hugo in Washington six years before, and it hadn’t hurt in the least. In fact, I enjoyed it.)

  In any case, she asked if I could come up and award it to her, and I agreed on condition that I give a short five-minute talk.

  She said, “Certainly!”

  After all, she and I got along famously. Anne is a large, buxom, Junoesque woman with a beautiful shock of prematurely Irish-white hair, a flashing wit, and a spectacular soprano singing voice. It had become traditional at any convention that we attended together for us to do community singing together at a piano, ending with “When Irish Eyes are Smiling” and holding the final note.

  I always lost. She could hold that note louder, and longer, and more beautifully than I—or, I should think, than anyone who wasn’t a professional singer.

  Anyway, here was my chance to sing alone. I said that everyone’s name had a pattern of syllables and stresses that fit into some popular song, and my little Nebula talk that evening consisted of giving examples.

  I fit “Isaac Asimov” and “Little Buttercup” and sang, “For I’m Isaac Asimov/Dear Isaac Asimov/Sweet Isaac Asimov, I.”

  Then I fit “Judy-Lynn Benjamin” and “Lullaby and Good Night” and sang, “Judy-Lynn/Benjamin/Come to bed/It’s no si-in.”

  Then, having set up my little game, I fit “Anne McCaffrey” and “San Francisco” and belted out,

  “Anne McCaffrey/Open your golden gate/I can no longer wait/ Frustratedly, dear.”

  Before I could quite finish she came storming up to snatch the Nebula from me, shouting, “You can’t trust a tenor! You can’t trust a tenor!”

  I followed her back to her seat, shouting, “I’m a baritone, too.” The dignity of the occasion was effectively ruined.

  23

  Alexei Panshin had won the Nebula for his novel Rite of Passage and, as it happened, he and his fiancée needed a ride to Boston. I said I could take them but I wanted to stop off in Connecticut to visit David and they were willing to accept the delay.

  I picked them up the next day and it made for a very pleasant trip. Even the stop to visit David was unexpectedly pleasant since it turned out that he had read, and liked, Rite of Passage. Alexei could but beam and give him two more books.

  David came to West Newton for a two-week visit on March 21. He was in time for Boskone and I drove him in to several sessions of the convention. On one occasion, I let him drive me home.

  24

  World Publishing wanted me to do a children’s science-fiction book for them, and it came to me that I had written just such a thing, seven years before. It was The Best New Thing, which I had written for Collier Books. They had accepted it, contracted for it, paid me an advance—and then times had gotten hard for them and they had never published it.