He said, a little impatiently, “Come, come, Dr. Asimov, you know very well whose. Do you believe in the Western God, the God of the Judeo-Christian tradition?”

  Still playing for time, I said, “I haven’t given it much thought.”177

  Frost said, “I can’t believe that, Dr. Asimov.” He then nailed me to the wall by saying, “Surely a man of your diverse intellectual interests and wide-ranging curiosity must have tried to find God?”

  (Eureka! I had it! The very nails had given me my opening!) I said, smiling pleasantly, “God is much more intelligent than I am—let him try to find me.”

  The audience laughed its head off and, to my relief, Frost changed the subject.

  He essayed one more probe into mysticism by saying, “Do you consider it possible, Dr. Asimov, that there may be forces and energies in the universe we have not yet discovered?”

  “If so,” I answered, “we have not yet discovered them.”

  He also asked me whom I would like to see President of the United States after I had made my dissatisfaction with Nixon perfectly clear. I said I admired Senator McGovern—and eventually I received a thank-you note from the senator for that.

  I will admit, though, that I had an attack of superstition after the taping. I had often stated that I didn’t think that God, even if he existed, would be angry with an honest atheist who voted his convictions. Would he, however, tolerate a wiseguy atheist?

  Of course, no lightning bolt had struck me on the spot when I virtually dared him to find me, but the show was only a taping. What would happen when it was actually aired on September 5? I could only wait.

  17

  David’s eighteenth birthday came on August 20, 1969, while he was still in his Connecticut school. He came home on a visit on the twenty-second, however, and the next day, exactly on schedule, on the twenty-third, Gertrude and Robyn were back and the family was together again.

  Such was everyone’s relief at the reunion that any mention of divorce went by the board.

  The twenty-seventh World Science Fiction convention was coming up, however, and we were split up again almost at once. Not that I went. It was the second in a row I could not attend. The year before the convention had been in Oakland, California, and now it was slated for St. Louis, Missouri.

  David, however, who had been attending Boskones and NESFA meetings, was anxious to go, and I felt he needed some sort of glamorous vacation to balance Robyn’s having been to Europe. When Harry Stubbs said he was taking his kids and would be glad to keep an eye on David, that was it. David went off with the Stubbses to St. Louis by plane on August 28, and returned on September 2, having had a great time.

  18

  Even my writing was cause for depression in these unfortunate months; at least a particular piece of writing was.

  A few months earlier, Theodore Macri of Doubleday had phoned to ask if I would write a science-fiction story that could serve as the basis of a movie. I didn’t want to, because I don’t like to get tangled up with the visual media directly, but I hate to refuse Doubleday.

  The result was that I eventually had dinner, on June 25, 1969, with a representative of a particular studio, and he outlined his needs.

  He wanted the story set in the deep sea, and so far I was willing. He went on, however, to discuss the characters in the story and I realized, with a sinking heart, that I could not do that story. I couldn’t bring myself to say “No” outright to him, over a dinner he was paying for. All I could do was to write a story I felt like writing and to hope they would like it.

  For ten weeks, on and off, I brooded over the task, particularly at night, and finally, on September 2, I tore myself away from the Shakespeare book and got to work on a story I called “Waterclap.”

  It went slowly and painfully and it wasn’t till October 1 that I had completed the first draft. Nothing in the story was anything like what the studio representative had outlined for me, and I felt that the first draft would be sufficient for the studio to come to some decision. If, for some reason, they liked the story, I would do final copy and we’d be in business.

  I took it in to Doubleday on October 9. They had already signed the contract with the studio and a good-sized advance had been paid over. Doubleday would, in its turn, pay my share to me at next royalty time.

  I asked Ted Macri if Doubleday would return the advance if the story proved unacceptable.

  “We don’t have to,” said Ted. “The advance is unconditional. If they don’t like your story we still keep the advance.”

  I couldn’t allow that. I knew very well I had not tried to write an acceptable story on the studio’s terms, and to keep their money would be dishonest. I said, “Ted, I want the money returned if they reject the story, but you can take the Doubleday cut out of my royalties.”

  Well, Doubleday wasn’t going to do that. They never humored me in that respect. Ted agreed to pay the money back, if necessary, but absolutely refused to take anything out of my royalties.

  The studio did reject the story and Doubleday did send back the advance and I was overwhelmed with relief.

  19

  My kidney stone did not go away. The dull back-pain was always there, worse some times than others, and always with the threat of periods of no-warning acute agony hanging over me.

  September 5 was the day on which “The David Frost Show” with my let-God-try-to-find-me wisecrack was to be aired, and at 5:00 a.m. on that day I woke with the familiar agony.

  There followed a nine-hour period of unbearable pain, the worst and most prolonged I have ever experienced. At one point, I could only gasp, “All right, God, you found me! Now let go!”

  In the early afternoon, Gertrude finally forced me into her car and drove me to the hospital. I didn’t want to go because I was afraid I would miss “The David Frost Show,” which I knew was by all odds the best I had ever done on a national talk show—but I was in no position to resist effectively.

  I was examined and the doctor filled a hypodermic with what I knew was morphine but, as he approached, the pain ebbed away. Whatever it was the kidney stone was doing, it stopped doing it.

  I said, vigorously, “No, don’t. Don’t use the hypodermic. The pain has stopped. It’s really stopped.” I must have seemed like a faker afraid of the needle, but no one with an acute kidney-stone attack can sit up in bed and smile. The pain had to have left. (Try it yourself and see.) The doctor had no choice but to let me go home, and I managed to catch “The David Frost Show.”

  20

  There was a memorable fallout from that show.

  I was with a group of people about a week later, and one of them said, “I saw you on ‘The David Frost Show.”

  I assumed a modesty I did not feel, and simpered.

  A young man of nineteen was part of the group and he said, with genial insolence, “And what did you do, Dr. Asimov? Read commercials?”

  With a haughty determination to squelch the young cockerel at once by a thrust too outrageous to parry, I said, “Not at all! I was demonstrating sexual techniques.”

  “Oh,” he said, smiling sweetly, “you remembered?”

  I was wiped out completely.

  21

  September 5 was also my mother’s seventy-fourth birthday. She was no longer in Florida. Recovering from the shock of my father’s death, she had been discharged from the hospital, and Stanley had brought her home with him to Long Island.

  He found a hotel in Long Beach that specialized in housing elderly people, and made sure it was a respectable and decent place and that she had a good and comfortable room, with a staff that would take care of it and her. It was only six miles from his home and from Newsday and he could be there in ten minutes in case of emergency.

  On September 6, I drove the entire family to Long Island and we visited the hotel, which we could see, with our own eyes, was a satisfactory place. My mother was there waiting for me. It was the first time I had seen her since the golden wedding anniversary celebration a year and a half before. She looked haggard and was, of course, in a teary, hand-wringing mood, but we took her to a fancy restaurant and made much of her and she cheered up marvelously.

  Then we went back to the nearby motel at which we were staying that night. I unloaded the baggage from the car, but, as was usual with me, I spent time checking and rechecking whether the trunk door was locked, whether the car lights were out, and so on. By the time I picked up the baggage, the rest of the family had gone on ahead and were through the door.

  It was difficult for me to open the door, laden down as I was, so I thought I might just as well go around it through the opening next to it.

  Except that it wasn’t an opening, but a clear pane of unmarked glass, and I went right through it.

  God still had his finger on me, apparently, but not with malice. Just as the kidney-stone attack had lifted in time for me to watch the show, so the pieces of glass that shattered all around me, almost miraculously avoided me and left me only with some minor cuts on the back of the left hand and on my left knee.

  By that time, Gertrude had returned to see what was keeping me and, in horror, ran to the registration desk for help. A policeman was there with a police ambulance. He whisked me quickly to the ambulance, cleaned my wounds, made sure there was no glass in them, added disinfectant, and bandaged them.

  I said, “It’s a good thing, officer, the motel maintains an ambulance.”

  “It doesn’t maintain an ambulance,” he said, as he finished binding me. “I was here on another call, and I was just about to leave when you staggered to the desk.”

  How’s that for luck?

  I went back to the desk, in order to clear up one thing. “That was an unmarked pane of glass,” I said, “but I’m not going to sue you. However, if you try to charge me for damages, I will sue you till your eyeballs bubble. Is that clear?”

  There was no charge for damages.

  I sent off a letter of commendation to the Nassau Police Department, praising the policeman who had treated me, and I trust that was entered on his record.

  The next day we drove home, and on September 8, David went back to his school and I gave my annual “first lecture” at the medical school.

  22

  On September 13, I gave a talk at a book fair sponsored by the Boston Globe, and with my usual indifference to such matters, I didn’t realize it was Rosh Hashanah. It wouldn’t have mattered at all except that a couple of days later I received a phone call from a young man, who was a stranger to me but who had apparently seen a notice in the Globe that I had spoken at the book fair and who felt he had a right to ask me why I had spoken on Rosh Hashanah.

  I explained politely that I hadn’t known it was Rosh Hashanah, but that if I had, I would still have spoken, because I was a non-observing Jew. The young man, himself Jewish, flung himself into a self-righteous lecture in which he told me my duties as a Jew, observant or not, and ended by accusing me of trying to conceal my Jewishness.

  I felt annoyed. I thought I had caught his name when he started the conversation, but wasn’t sure. I had caught enough, however, to feel confident of my next move. I said, “You have the advantage of me, sir. You know my name. I didn’t get yours. To whom am I speaking?”

  He said, “My name is Jackson Davenport.”178

  “Really? Well, my name, as you know, is Isaac Asimov, and if I were really trying to conceal my Jewishness as you claim I am trying to do, my very first move would be to change my name to Jackson Davenport.”

  That ended the conversation with a crash.

  23

  There was a total eclipse of the sun coming up the next spring, and the path of totality would cross parts of the American East Coast in Maine, North Carolina, and so on.

  Look magazine was planning to capitalize on this with an article on total eclipses and asked Larry Ashmead if he could recommend someone to do the article. Larry always recommends me, of course, whatever the subject.

  On September 18, 1969, I was in New York to see several editors of Look on the subject. They did not know me and were uncertain as to my qualifications.

  They explained that they wanted an article that would tell their readers what to expect and what to watch for during totality. I nodded my head and said, “I can do that.”

  One of the editors said, “You understand that we want it scientifically accurate but written so that someone’s maiden aunt could understand it.”

  “That’s my specialty,” I said, calmly.

  They still seemed uncertain and finally one of them said, “How about telling us what a total eclipse of the sun is like?”

  I spent some fifteen minutes telling them, and did so with such effectiveness that there wasn’t a dry eye in the house.

  When I was through, they were thoroughly satisfied and said, “Good! Go home and write an article just like that.”

  I left with a great sense of relief, for I very much wanted to do the article. It would be my first article for a national picture magazine (a dying field, thanks to television), it would be a simple article to do, and they were paying seventy-five cents a word.

  What I had feared was a single question: Dr. Asimov, have you ever seen a total eclipse of the sun?

  Honesty would have compelled me to answer in the negative, and the whole thing would have been ruined. As it was I wrote the article, which I called “The Sun Vanishes,”179 and it was taken without question. In fact, the editor of Look called to thank me personally and to tell me how good the article was and how little editing it required. It appeared in the March 10, 1970, Look, just in time for the eclipse, which took place on March 7.

  24

  On Friday, September 26, Gertrude left for New York, and just as she was leaving, I felt the kidney-stone pains start again. It was the third and longest attack in this cycle, lasting twelve hours—though it was perhaps not as intense as the one on the fifth.

  This time, at least, Robyn was with me, and she was entirely comforting and helpful, though she later admitted she was scared to death.180

  Then on October 5, while I was in New York, I finally passed the kidney stone. It left me just eight weeks after the first attack, and while it was not as large as the first one had been, and while it had not lingered within me as long, it was certainly the most painful one I had ever had.

  25

  On October 7, 1969, I taped a “To Tell the Truth” program. I was the real Isaac Asimov, while two others joined me as fake ones. We all answered questions designed to elicit which was the real one. I had to answer truthfully (while yielding minimal information) while the fakes could lie to beat the band (while remaining plausible).

  Garry Moore was master of ceremonies, while the panelists were Bill Cullen, Orson Bean, Joan Rivers, and Joan Fontaine. Joan Fontaine was the only one who guessed correctly—on the grounds that I wore glasses, and anyone writing so many books would have to wear glasses.

  After the show was over, the contestants and the panelists mingled a bit and I got to kiss Joan Fontaine on the cheek.

  26

  When I got back home, I discovered that Western Publishing had changed their minds and did not wish to publish Where Do We Go From Here?, the anthology of science-fiction stories intended for science teaching.

  I was puzzled, since it had been their idea in the first place. I called them and asked what the objection was. I was told that there was some question as to how it might be promoted.

  “What’s the problem?” I said. “Just make sure that my name, correctly spelled, is on the book jacket in large, clear type.”

  They didn’t feel that would be sufficient, so I said, rather impatiently, “Very well, then send me a letter in which I am given all rights to the anthology and you can forget it.”

  I then sat down at once and wrote a letter to Larry, described the anthology, and asked if he would be interested. Of course, he was, and another book that started somewhere else ended with Doubleday—one more book that did well with Doubleday, too.

  30

  Two Books for Each Year

  1

  In the single month of October 1969, no less than five books of mine were published. The first was Nightfall and Other Stories. It was my ninety-eighth book, and since I was still forty-nine years old, it meant I had now published two books for each year I had lived.

  Then came Asimov’s Guide to the Bible: The New Testament. I thought rather sadly that my fears about my father’s reaction to it had been needless. He had not lived long enough to see it.

  And then, on October 16, 1969,181 my hundredth book, Opus 100, was published. It had taken me just thirteen years (early 1950 to early 1963) to publish my first fifty books, and not quite seven years (early 1963 to late 1969) to publish the next fifty.

  My father had not quite lived to see the day; he had only lived to see me publish ninety-seven books; but my mother was still alive. I continued sending her books as they were published, for she maintained the family library. She left much of it with my brother, but she took the later ones to her hotel room in Long Beach and she insisted on receiving the new ones as they came out.

  2

  On the evening of October r6, Houghton Mifflin threw a cocktail party in honor of Opus 100, one that was even more elaborate than that which Basic Books had given for The New Intelligent Man’s Guide to Science four years before.

  It was now the turn of all our Boston friends to attend, and all did—as well as some from New York. Hilarity was unconfined, and not the least delightful aspect of the evening was that Austin was able to announce that Opus 100 had sold four thousand copies as of publication date and had earned back its fifteen-hundred-dollar advance plus nine hundred dollars over—which wasn’t bad for a book that was not much more than snippets of this and that.