“Screw them,” said Ciardi. “Pay the bastards no attention, and do as you please.” Then, with a sudden note of caution, “But stay away from Dante.”

  I finished Asimov’s Annotated Don Juan two days later, and took it in to Doubleday on January 12. With that out of the way, I was ready to begin another revision of my Guide to Science.

  6

  On January 15, 1971, I attended my first Trap Door Spiders meeting as a member. It was a stag organization, so I could not take Janet, but there were other kinds of meetings. . . .

  There was, for instance, a local science-fiction convention in New York not long after, one that had been set up by some eager young fans, and I persuaded Janet to come to it with me.

  Janet was quite nervous and camera-shy, so she had extensive practice in dodging, for there were numerous young people with cameras who seemed to find me as irresistibly photogenic as the Taj Mahal. On the other hand, it gave her a chance to socialize with a number of the science-fiction writers whom she had read but had never met.

  In particular she met Harlan Ellison, for the first time, and found him as charming and as charismatic as Gertrude had found him in Cleveland four years before.

  Janet and I, Judy-Lynn, Lester, the Silverbergs, Harlan, and a few others all had dinner at a Greek restaurant on the evening of January 23. Harlan sat at the head of the table, and Janet sat at his right hand. He wore a black leather jacket, which suited his little tough-guy image perfectly, but as the temperature rose, he decided to remove it. Underneath was his shirt adorned with little Mickey Mouse figures. Janet (a psychiatrist, after all) saw at once that what I said was true—that if you could survive long enough to get past Harlan’s prickly porcupiny exterior, you would find that inside he was a soft-as-mush pussycat.

  Earlier in the day, Lester del Rey and Bob Silverberg had carried on a dialog on the stage, discussing the ins and outs of science fiction. Bob maintained, with a certain amount of justice, that the human aspects of science fiction had to outweigh the science. At one point, he asked why anyone should be overly concerned with some trivial matter concerning—here he groped for an example and seized upon the first thing that occurred to him—concerning plutonium-186, he said.

  In the audience, I laughed, for, of course, there is no such thing as plutonium-186 and there can’t be.

  After the dialog was over, I said to Bob, “There can’t be any plutonium-186.”

  Bob, who knew that very well, shrugged it off as unimportant.

  I said, “But just to show you what a real science-fiction writer can do, I’ll write a story about plutonium-186.”

  “Go ahead,” said Bob, coolly. “I’m putting together an anthology of original short stories, and if you write one that meets my minimum standard of literacy, I’ll publish it.”

  And there it was. I hadn’t really been serious about writing a story concerning plutonium-186, but Bob had inadvertently converted it into a dare and I was forced to give the matter thought.

  Meanwhile, I had done a third book in the ABC series for Walker. This one was ABC’s of the Earth, and I finished it on January 26.

  7

  David had finally completed his stay at the private school. He had been there just two years and graduated with his high-school diploma at last. It was clear, though, that no purpose would be served in trying to send him to college, and he himself had no urge to go.

  I drove to his school on January 29, picked him up, and drove him back to West Newton. Well, not quite.

  Mary Silver (whose husband, Rollo, had obtained The Historians’ History of the World for me) had long since divorced him and married a thin, self-possessed, superarticulate fellow named Jack Patrick. She was now Mary Patrick and they had been close friends of mine in my last years in West Newton.

  Afraid to face Gertrude, I didn’t quite dare to take David home. I took him to the Patricks instead, therefore, and Jack took him home, while I scooted back to New York without stopping. It had been my first venture back into Massachusetts since I had left seven months before.

  8

  Once David was home, more or less permanently, there was a question as to what to do with Satan. On the one hand, it was very difficult to subject David to the permanent danger of allergic difficulties; and on the other, it seemed difficult to get rid of a cat that everyone loved.

  The solution seemed to be to give him to me, at least temporarily. Indeed, I had planned to pick up Satan when I delivered David but I hadn’t dared do that. Instead, Jack Patrick promised to deliver Satan when he next went to New York.

  On February 9, Jack appeared, with Satan and with various appurtenances such as cans of cat food and a litter box. I was delighted to see Satan but he, of course, did not remember me. It had been seven months. He wandered about my Cromwell apartment for hours, vainly seeking Robyn, and once when the voice of some woman sounded in the hall, he ran to the door in wild expectation and was, of course, disappointed.

  Eventually, I took him to Janet’s apartment since Janet, fortunately, loved all living things. She took as good care of him as Robyn would have.

  Janet had also a beloved hamster, Cheeky, with whom she played every evening in order to give it exercise. When she did that, Satan had to be securely shut away in another room, since his interest in Cheeky was purely nutritional.

  On the other hand, Cheeky was the perfect cat-sitter. If we put the hamster cage on the top shelf of a closet and left the closet door open, Satan would sit below, never taking his eye from the cage, while his tail twitched in endless patience.

  9

  I took the train to Philadelphia on February 12 to do a local television talk show there and Janet, who did not come with me, told me to be sure to take her young cousin, Leslie, who was living in that city, out to lunch.

  I didn’t have to be asked twice. Taking a beautiful young woman to lunch is precisely the thing for which I had been designed by the gods. After lunch, I caught the train back.

  There was one disconcerting moment, though. As I walked Leslie from her apartment to the restaurant, a young man in a passing automobile leaned out the window and shouted “Hello, Dr. Asimov.” I was beginning to be recognized in the street, something that has been happening with greater frequency ever since.

  I chafed a little. I said to Leslie, “This is perfectly legitimate. You’re Janet’s cousin and she asked me to take you to lunch. Suppose, though, you were some beautiful girl I was taking to some nefarious rendezvous. I don’t want to be recognized on the street.”

  But Leslie said, “Never mind, Isaac. It will keep you virtuous.”198

  10

  On February 6, I had started the science-fiction short story I was planning on plutonium-186 and that I eventually called “The Gods Themselves.” That was from the Friedrich Schiller quotation: “Against stupidity, the gods themselves contend in vain,” which, as it happened, was the theme of the story.

  I was counting on a five-thousand-word length, but it got away from me. This was unusual since I had been writing to order for so many years now that I could count on myself automatically delivering five thousand words when five thousand words was requested. And I don’t mean fifty-one hundred words, either.

  By February 14, however, I had done ten thousand words and was still going. On the other hand, it was the first time since “The Ugly Little Boy,” thirteen years before, that I felt the true thrill of writing science fiction. I didn’t want to stop, and I decided I wasn’t going to. Let it go on to its natural length.

  11

  I had to go to Boston for a session with Gertrude’s legal representatives. It was purely routine but it was dreadfully worrying. Any brush with the law has to be.

  I went to Boston by train on February 18 and visited Houghton Mifflin for the first time in nearly eight months, to the excitement of all. I had dinner with Austin.

  The next day I was interviewed by the lawyers, and survived. What bothered me, though, was that it was February 19, 1971, and, therefore, Robyn’s sixteenth birthday, and I was unable to see her. I spoke to her on the phone at South Station while waiting for the train that would take me back home. It was the best I could do.

  12

  On February 21, Satan managed to get out the kitchen window of Janet’s apartment and we found him meowing on the ledge, with a sheer drop of twenty-three stories two inches behind him. We fixed his attention on some food, while Janet reached out very carefully and, with a rattler-quick lunge, seized his collar in a death grip. We lugged him in by main force, and closed the window tightly.

  Then we both collapsed. What would have happened if we had had to report to Robyn that her cat had dropped to its death, neither of us cared to visualize. It was the only occasion on which Satan was in any danger all the while he was with us.

  13

  Rae Jeppson came to town on February 23, and Janet and I took her to dinner. Then we took her to my apartment at the Cromwell, and showed her my books. (By now my books filled two good-sized bookcases in their various English-language hard-cover editions, and I had been forced to affix small numbered cards at the bottom of the spines of each one so that I could find any particular one that I needed, without too much trouble.)

  I think Rae was very relieved to find that I did indeed have an apartment of my own.

  14

  On February 26, I helped host a Trap Door Spiders dinner for the first time. George Scithers was co-host. There were always two hosts, to share the increasingly horrendous cost of restaurant meals. The total restaurant-bill came to $250 that day, and it kept rising steadily with time.

  15

  I finished “The Gods Themselves” on February 28, and found it was twenty thousand words long, just four times as long as it was supposed to be.

  Since Bob Silverberg’s anthology was being done by Doubleday, it occurred to me to show it to Larry Ashmead. It was not inconceivable that, if he liked the story, he might allow Bob to make the anthology fifteen thousand words longer than had been planned so that “The Gods Themselves” might be included without having to eliminate any of the other stories that would otherwise be bought.

  Larry read the story at once and there was no question that he liked it. He phoned me and told me that anthologization was out. He wanted the story expanded into a novel.

  I didn’t want to expand it into a novel, however. “The Gods Themselves” fit the twenty thousand words perfectly and if I tried to pump it up to three or four times its length, I would ruin it by making it incredibly spongy.

  I thought very rapidly and said, “Look, Larry, the story involves an energy source that depends on communication between ourselves and another universe, and it ends downbeat. What I can do is retell the story from the standpoint of the other universe and still leave it downbeat. Then I can take it up a third time in still a third setting and this time make it upbeat.”

  “Are you sure you can do this?” said Larry.

  Well, I wasn’t. I had just made that all up on the spur of the moment, but it wouldn’t have done to say so.

  “Absolutely positive,” I said (well, if I couldn’t, I wasn’t Isaac Asimov), so on March 8, 1971, I dropped in at Doubleday and signed a contract to do the novel.

  16

  Meanwhile, a couple of weeks earlier, I had received a letter from Eleanor Sullivan, managing editor of Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine, asking me if I wouldn’t write another story for them.

  I had written “As Chemist to Chemist” for EQMM a year and a half before and had never tried them again. After all, I had achieved the goal of selling to them, and I wasn’t writing much fiction of any kind.

  Just the same, once I was asked to write a story—and at a time when I was actually enjoying writing fiction—I decided to try.

  I had to think up a plot, and I remembered David Ford’s story, the one in which he felt he had had something stolen from him, but in the vast miscellany that was his apartment, couldn’t be sure what it was, or even whether anything was. The thought of hiring a detective to find not something that was missing, but whether something was missing, intrigued me.

  Then, too, it also occurred to me that, as an unusual background, I might use the Trap Door Spiders. I could have a similar organization, which I would call “The Black Widowers,” have similar members, and a similar routine. I would have my characters modeled on Sprague de Camp, Lester del Rey,199 and so on, and I would have a guest who would be grilled.

  Where I departed from reality was to have the guest come up with a mystery, something that never happened at any Trap Door Spiders meeting. I also invented a waiter, who solved the mystery. The waiter’s name was Henry and I did not consciously model him on my deceased father-in-law. Rather, he was an incarnation of Wodehouse’s immortal Jeeves.

  I called the story “The Chuckle,” and it was unusual in that it was the first really straight mystery I had ever written. Until then, all the mysteries I had written had been true science fiction like The Caves of Steel or “The Singing Bell,” or had at least had a strictly scientific background, like The Death Dealers or “As Chemist to Chemist.”

  “The Chuckle” was the first story I ever wrote (and published) of any length, in which the setting, the gimmick, and the resolution did not involve science in any way.

  I finished it on March 6 (it was only four thousand words long) and I took it in, personally, to the offices of EQMM, which I now visited for the first time. I also met Eleanor Sullivan for the first time. Constance DiRienzo also worked for the magazine, and I remembered her well from the days, a dozen years before, when she worked for Bob Mills at F & SF.

  Eleanor had blond hair and Connie dark hair, but both were coquettish and witty and I discovered quickly that, quite apart from selling stories, I would always have a good time talking to them and engaging in the delightful game of flirtatious double-entendres.

  Eleanor read the story at once and liked it. She sent it on to Fred Dannay (Ellery Queen) who also liked it, and came back quickly with the request that I emphasize and make more important the background machinery of the Black Widowers.

  I was delighted to do that, and it was then taken at once.

  It appeared, eventually, in the January 1972 EQMM under the changed title of “The Acquisitive Chuckle.”200 Dannay had a habit of changing titles. In this case, I liked the change and kept it.

  Dannay ran the story as the lead in the issue and his blurb began as follows: “The first of a brand-new series—about the Black Widowers and the piquant problems that challenged them monthly.” Above that was a heading that said, “The first of a NEW SERIES by Isaac Asimov.” (Capitalization is EQMM’s.)

  I had never thought of the story as the first of a series, and Dannay had never told me that he thought of it so. It simply appeared in that fashion in the magazine as a fait accompli. But that made it a challenge and I decided to try more of what I instantly began to think of as the “Black Widowers stories.”

  It wouldn’t be easy. Each story would have to be told during a banquet; each would have to be analyzed in armchair fashion, with the solution (always by Henry) sufficiently forceful to be accepted at once.

  I managed. In the end the Black Widowers stories grew to be more in number than those of any other series of stories I had ever written—and the most enjoyable for me.

  17

  I had lunch with Beth Walker on March 12, 1971. Present also was a new editor, the well-known science writer for the grade-school levels, Millicent Selsam.

  Millie was five years older than I was, which was wonderful, for I was beginning to find it embarrassingly difficult to find people older than I was. (A fine thing for a child prodigy to have to encounter.) She was very prim in appearance and would always laugh at my outrageous remarks only after the ten-to-fifteen-second delay it took her to get over her surprise at them.

  At this moment, though, being fresh at the job, she was being a new broom. She had gone over ABC’s of the Earth and had thrown out about a quarter of my definitions on one ground or another, something that effectively put me into a sour humor.

  The women ignored this and began to talk to each other animatedly concerning the amazing success of such how-to porn books as The Sensuous Woman and The Sensuous Man. I maintained an annoyed silence, still brooding over my mangled ABC’s of the Earth.

  Finally Beth turned to me and said, “Why don’t you write a dirty book, Isaac?”

  I said, rather loftily, “Because I don’t write trash.”

  Then I thought of my own particular shtick, which is the ardent flirtation with every woman in sight and said, “Besides, what do I know about sex? All I could write would be The Sensuous Dirty Old Man.”

  “Great!” said Beth, with enthusiasm. “Then you’ll do it.”

  “What do you mean, do it? That was a gag.”

  “Sure you’ll do it,” she said, and began to make plans.

  I ignored the whole thing because I couldn’t believe anyone would be serious about such a thing. In my notation in my diary for that day, I talked only about what had happened to ABC’s of the Earth. Not a word about The Sensuous Dirty Old Man.

  18

  At the convention back in January, one of the fans present had told me of a Gilbert and Sullivan Society that met at monthly intervals in New York. I found that attractive since I had been a G & S fan since childhood, and had seen every one of the plays except Utopia, Limited.