Bob Hope was the chief item on the entertainment agenda, and since Ferris introduced us I had to shake hands with him—which put me in the position of shaking hands with a man who shook hands with Nixon.

  Ferris is a round-faced fellow, always smiling, never serious, and extremely lovable. He passed me in the hall one time and said, “Can’t stop, Isaac. I’m on my way to see a real writer.”

  I said, “Send Larry and let him see a real editor.”

  You can’t fool around that way if you don’t like a guy.

  4

  Our time with Satan was coming to an end. We had had him for fourteen happy weeks, but Robyn couldn’t stand his absence any longer and we had to give him up. David, apparently, would have to endure his allergies.

  On May 11, I drove to Boston with Satan. I had him in a carrying case for the first hundred miles and he wailed all the way. I finally had to stop and let him out. I knew that being in a moving car might panic him and cause him to scratch me, but I steeled myself against that possibility. After letting him out, I allowed him to inspect the car thoroughly, and then began to drive along the highway, slowly accelerating to full speed.

  Satan was indeed terribly frightened. He placed himself on the top of the front seat immediately behind my head and leaned against my neck with his full weight in order to make as much contact as possible. He kept one paw on the window ledge to steady himself and kept his horrified eyes on the road. We drove that way for a hundred miles while I did my best never to change either direction or speed too rapidly.

  This time I drove to the house. Gertrude was there but remained inside. Robyn came out to take Satan and drool over him while I drooled over her.

  The next day I visited the med school for the first time in ten months, and before going home on May 13, I took both David and Robyn out to dinner.

  5

  My speaking schedule took me to Ohio toward the end of May. On the twenty seventh, I talked to Cuyahoga Community College, near Cleveland, and we were driven through the suburb of Parma where (our driver told us) all houses were built with pink flamingos on the lawn, and it took an additional payment of a hundred dollars to have the flamingo omitted.

  On the twenty-eighth, we drove to Newark, Ohio. Janet had been rather glum about the Ohio trip till she read in the guide books that the state contained Indian mounds. That brightened her, for Indians were another passion of hers.

  There were some particularly good mounds in Newark, and we drove around the town trying to find them. Unfortunately, the town was riddled with construction, half the streets were closed to traffic, and we only succeeded in getting lost.

  We gave up eventually and went to our motel in disappointment. There, Janet opened the blinds to see what the view from our room was like and found herself staring at the Indian mounds just across the way. A golf course had been built on the site and the mounds served as hazards.

  On May 29, we stopped off at the rose gardens in Hershey, Pennsylvania. It was a little too early in the season for roses, to be sure, but the whole town smelled of chocolate and for me at least that was better than roses.

  The next day we were home.

  6

  I did a Dick Cavett segment on June 3. It was my fourth time with him. This time I was publicizing The Sensuous Dirty Old Man, so I came out with a bra over my eyes, since that was the way in which I was pictured on the book cover.

  That bra-covered photograph was a device to hide my identity. The book came out as having been written by “Dr. A.,” since The Sensuous Woman was by “J.,” and The Sensuous Man was by “M.” There was no real secret intended, though. The Walkers announced my real name even before the book was published, and on the Cavett show I took off the bra as soon as I could.

  It was the silliest thing I ever did on television and I was sorry I had agreed to do it even as I stepped out onto the stage.

  7

  On June 10, we drove to Troy, New York, where I was slated to give a commencement address at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute the next day. That night we had dinner with administrators and trustees, and the “Trojan ladies” (as we called them between ourselves) didn’t know quite how to introduce Janet or how to describe her relationship to me.

  Thereafter, I introduced her firmly as my fiancée. Nor was it a lie, since by then it was perfectly understood between us that we would marry as soon as we could.

  The commencement went well, and I got a second honorary degree, again a Doctor of Science.

  8

  Action on the divorce was very slow and nothing could be done to speed the “law’s delay.” On June 17, I was in Boston again. My Massachusetts lawyer, George Michaels, and I sat with Monroe Inker and the judge who would be hearing the case, and nothing much was agreed upon except a further delay. However, Inker agreed to lift the freeze of my Houghton Mifflin income.

  I had dinner with Robyn that night and the next day had lunch at Locke-Ober’s with Mary K. for the first time in a year. I also visited Elizabeth Moyer at the med school.

  9

  My nephew, Larry Repanes (Marcia’s older son, and a tall, handsome lad), graduated from high school on June 24, and I was driven out there to give a commencement address. Marcia had volunteered me.

  10

  On June 28, I did Electricity and Man for the AEC, as I had promised, and sent it off the next day.

  With that done, I had lunch on June 30 with Peter Lacy of Reader’s Digest Books. They were doing a large and elaborate book on the men and women of the Bible, and I agreed to write some articles for it.

  11

  Larry Ashmead’s birthday falls on July 4, and every year he throws a huge birthday party at his summer place far out near the eastern end of Long Island. We were invited to the 1971 celebration, and on July 3 (the anniversary’ of my return to New York) we drove there. It was a peculiar feeling to drive for three hours and still be on Long Island.

  On the way home, we stopped off at Long Beach and had lunch with my mother. She was getting along well at the hotel but was visibly more feeble than she had been when she arrived. She was a little unhappy about having to associate with old people and told me a circumstantial tale of talking to a woman who was nearly ninety years old and who, even as they were talking, collapsed and died.

  My mother said, self-pityingly, “Everything happens to your mother.”

  I said, perhaps insufficiently sympathetic, “Come on, Mamma, something happened to the poor old lady, too.”

  12

  By July 6, 1971, I had completed the second part of The Gods Themselves. It was thirty thousand words long and was the most unusual story (it was complete in itself, actually) I had ever written. Certainly Dua, the heroine, who, in physical nature, was apparently semigaseous, was the most interesting and sympathetic character (in my opinion) I had ever created.

  I took it in to Larry on the eighth, took time out to do Comets and Meteors in the Follett astronomy series, and then got to work on the third part of The Gods Themselves at once.

  13

  On and off, people at the New York Times were trying to get me to do periodic articles for them on science. The rock we split on, however, was that I wanted a completely free hand, and no matter how much they promised I would have one, it was clear that what they really wanted were articles tightly tied to the news.

  For instance, there was a botulism scare at the time, and so they asked me to do an article on botulism. I wrote it promptly and mailed it in on July 9, then called the editor at the Times in order to tell him it was in the mail and to bask in his approval at my speed.

  Not at all. He said, indignantly, “What do you mean, you put it in the mail? I want it now. Bring in the carbon.”

  And I did, by taxi. That kind of newspaper life, however, is not for me.

  14

  On July 11,1971, Janet and I drove to Philadelphia, where I was to tape a segment of “The Mike Douglas Show.”

  At 7:30 p.m. (as I discovered later), while we were standing under the awning of the Bellevue-Stratford Hotel, waiting for Bill Boggs (Leslie’s husband) to get us and take us to a play, John Campbell died in his home.

  Campbell had badly hardened arteries, not in the least helped by the fact that he had been a chain smoker all his adult life. He was watching television when his abdominal aorta gave way and he died peacefully. In fact, when Peg entered the room, she didn’t know he was dead until he failed to answer her or in any way respond to her.

  He was sixty-one years old and I had known him, and had been infinitely beholden to him, for thirty-three years.

  When I learned about Campbell’s death after I returned home on the twelfth (Judy-Lynn called me), the shock was second only to that I had experienced on learning of my father’s death, two years before.

  And rightly so, for Campbell had been my literary father. I can’t imagine what might have become of my life without him, and though for fifteen years (ever since the dianetics business) my relations with him had been somewhat distant, I never for a moment forgot what I owed him.

  As it turned out, “The Greatest Asset” was the fifty-sixth and last item I had sold him, and our session at the Lunacon three months before was the last time I had ever seen him.

  I wrote an obituary for him for the fan magazine Luna, but Lester del Rey, who also wrote one, thought of the perfect title. It was “Farewell to the Master,” which had also been the title of a great story by Harry Bates in the October 1940 Astounding.

  On July 14, I picked up Lester and Judy-Lynn, along with Gordon Dickson and Harry Harrison, and drove them all out to Westfield, New Jersey, for the memorial service. (Campbell had been cremated the day before.)

  There was no religious observance. Each of us had a role fixed for us, and mine came closest to religion when I read the Twenty-third Psalm. We then all went back to Campbell’s house, where Peg insisted that there be no sorrow and no moping.

  We left at 3:30 p.m. I took the del Reys home and as we went east on Seventy-second Street, Lester directed me to turn right on Broadway. That was an illegal right and I was stopped by a policeman and ticketed even before I had completed the turn. A crestfallen Lester offered to pay the fifteen dollars, but I jubilantly told him it was well-worth fifteen dollars to me to be able to tell the story far and wide of how know-it-all Lester had directed me into a traffic trap.

  15

  It had been a rough day, and I looked forward to going to Janet’s for a steak dinner and then attending a showing of Timon of Athens in Central Park. Quite late in the day, however, some people from the Health Physics Association called to remind me that I was going to talk, to them that night.

  “Tonight?” I said, energetically. “You mean tomorrow night.”

  No, it was tonight. In two separate letters, the date had been set as July 15, but it was July 14, just the same. The letter writer had made a mistake.

  I called Janet, who was just about to put the steak in the broiler. Back it went into the refrigerator, and a hurry-up call to the Shakespeare-in-the-Park people postponed our tickets till the next night. I washed, dressed, and hastened out to the Manhattan hotel where the talk was to be given. I had copies of the letters with me to show them what they had done, and they were properly contrite.

  I managed to give a very good speech, but they surely didn’t deserve it.

  16

  I was in Washington to give a talk on July 21 to a group of public-relations people. Formal dress was required, and since it was deep summer, I had to buy a dinner jacket and a blue dress-shirt to go with it. It looked good and Janet was in predictable ecstasies but I was distressed at the step-by-step manner in which I was retreating into fussy formality.

  17

  I did a talk show for the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation on July 24, and met Abbie Hoffman, a counterculture hero, on that occasion. I was not impressed.

  In fact, I felt rather sorry for him and others like him. They had ridden a wave of emotion to its crest and when it broke and receded, it left them stranded in some no-man’s-land of the spirit from which (I suspected) they would never find their way back.

  18

  I went again to Central Park on July 28 to see Two Gentlemen of Verona and warned Janet that it was a very poor play.

  I frowned, though, when I looked at the Playbill and found that the cast of characters was not canonical. Then, as the play started, Thurio emerged and, in a high tenor, sang “Love in Bloom.” “Can it be the trees that fill the breeze with rare and magic perfume?” he warbled.

  I turned to Janet and said, censoriously, “That’s not Shakespeare.”

  Janet said, apprehensively, “They must have made changes. Don’t be angry.”

  I was angry, though, and it took me half an act to calm down sufficiently to realize that a bad play had been changed into a terrific rock musical; that I hadn’t been appreciating what I was hearing.

  I hopped to my feet and shouted, “Start over—from the beginning. ...”

  No one listened, but I loved it anyway. I never saw an audience leave a theater happier. (It had been opening night, you see; I hadn’t been warned what I would hear.)

  19

  The next day I was interviewed (by telephone) on a Dayton, Ohio, radio station. After the interview, the station accepted questions from the audience, questions I was to answer. A woman’s voice said, “Who, in your opinion, did most to improve science fiction?”

  I was about to answer, “Me,” and play for the laugh when, remembering what had happened the month before, I remorsefully stuck to the truth and said, “John Campbell.”

  “Good,” said the voice, firmly. “He was my father.”

  20

  My ninth collection of F & SF essays was ready for delivery to Doubleday on August 2. I called it The Left Hand of the Electron, from the title of one of the essays included.

  And I was working madly on the third portion of The Gods Themselves.

  21

  John Ciardi had talked us into going to the Breadloaf Conference. He had been its head for many years now and I was to go with full faculty status and was to give talks on how to write nonfiction and to get paid for doing so. Naturally I had told Ciardi I didn’t know how to write nonfiction, but he merely grunted at me.

  I was not quite finished with the third part of The Gods Themselves, and Janet argued me into putting as much of it into final copy as possible and then handing that in with an outline of what remained to be written so that it could be finished for me if “anything happened.”

  I protested that I didn’t know exactly how it was going to end, but Janet knew that I had the solution to the problem and told me to put that at least on paper. So I did—begging Larry not to read it unless he heard I were dead, and found the rumor confirmed.

  On August 18, 1971, Janet and I drove to Middlebury, Vermont, twenty-one years after my only previous attendance at Breadloaf.204 I remembered nothing of the physical plant or of the routine, but I quickly fitted myself in.

  John Ciardi held court before and after dinner and we all gathered around him for drinking, smoking, and talking. Since I neither drank nor smoked, I had to make up for it with the third item, and night after night, it became a matter of John and I one-upping each other.

  It was John who won, and at the very close, too. As I was leaving after the two-week session, I took his hand and said, “Farewell, O minor poet.”

  And without missing a beat, he said, “Farewell, O major pain-in-the-ass.” I was wiped out again. (I have never dared keep score of the number of wipeouts I have suffered.)

  We met one particularly pleasant couple there. Al Balk was the other lecturer on nonfiction. He had been with Saturday Review and I had sold him an article on communications in the future, “The Fourth Revolution,”205 which had appeared in the October 24, 1970, issue of the magazine.

  He was a tall, rather plump person, calm and pleasant. His wife, Phyllis, was gentle and shy, and countered my outrageous remarks with a soft, “Oh honestly.” Their two pretty daughters were with them, and all four occupied a cottage rather off the beaten path.

  I didn’t loaf while at Breadloaf. I did an article on the biblical heroine Ruth for Reader’s Digest Books, and also did an article for The Saturday Evening Post which, having died, had undergone a resurrection. In its new body, it was being published in Indianapolis and went in heavily for a nostalgic re-creation of the American mood before World War II.

  They had asked me to do an article on the metric system, and I did one that was strongly prometric called “How Many Inches in a Mile?”206 It eventually appeared in the Winter 1971 issue of the magazine.

  At one point, I put in a collect call to The Saturday Evening Post to discuss some matter in connection with the article, and at my mention of my name, the operator gasped out, “Oh sir—oh sir—oh sir—”

  I rather enjoyed her gasps, and she sounded young and beautiful.

  Another memory is of my picking up a copy of The Reader’s Digest someone had left behind in one of the bathrooms and leafing idly through the jokes. I suddenly found myself reading an anecdote about my mother taken from Isaac Asimov’s Treasury of Humor.

  It was the one about my mother’s encounter with the teacher at night school, when the teacher said, “No wonder you’re such a good writer,” and my mother had countered with, “You mean no wonder my son’s such a good writer.”

  I called my mother at Long Beach at my first opportunity to urge her to get a copy of the magazine.