“I saw it,” she said, indifferently. “Some of the women here showed it to me.”

  “Well, what did you think?” I asked, rather pleased that she had lived to see me confer immortality on her.

  But she said, indignantly, “I’m pretty mad. They made it sound like a joke. It was a true story!”

  “Of course it was, Mamma,” I said. “What do stupid magazines know?”

  22

  My duties at Breadloaf were by no means a sinecure. Not only did I have to give talks, I also had to read material submitted to me and to discuss it intelligently and helpfully both with the students in private and with the class in public.

  The weather was miserable, too. The first two days were summery, but after that there came a stretch of cold, blustery, rainy weather. On August 23, John Clark (my science-fiction buddy and fellow Trap Door Spider) arrived, for he attended Breadloaf every year. He came dressed in sport shirt and short pants, got out of his car, and turned blue. That was the last I saw of him in summer costume.

  Every member of the faculty took his turn in delivering an evening speech to the entire student body. My turn came on August 28.

  I had noted with some discomfort that each faculty member read from his works at some point in his speech.

  I had not brought any works to read from, but I had done the article on Ruth. I therefore gave my talk on the Book of Ruth as a commentary on intolerance, went on to the parable of the Good Samaritan, and ended with my own discussion of love overcoming the barriers of difference in “The Ugly Little Boy.”

  Of all the talks I had ever given, that one was the best.

  I do not look at an audience, as it happens, I always focus in midair; but I listen to them. From the rustling, the coughing, the laughing, the murmuring, I have my way of judging the effect of what I am saying, and I adjust to suit. None of it is conscious; it is an unconscious and unspoken dialog between myself and my audience and, when it is working well, it guides me and I cannot miss.

  But if you were to ask what I listen for that tells me that I am exactly right; I would answer, “Silence!”

  There are rare times when an audience falls entirely silent, when there is not a laugh, not a cough, not a rustle, when nothing exists but a sea of ears—and then I know I have reached speaker’s heaven.

  I haven’t achieved this more than four or five times in all my life, but the one time I remember most clearly of all was that August 28, 1971, when I talked on the subject of intolerance at Breadloaf. And when I finished by quoting (from memory) the final climax to “The Ugly Little Boy,” the silence was finally broken, for I heard sobbing.

  I got the first standing ovation (I was told) that Breadloaf had ever seen.

  The whole thing was summed up afterward when one of the students came to me and, with absolutely no sign of sarcasm at all, said, “Thank you for a wonderful sermon, Reverend.”

  I eventually wrote a version of the talk as my 161st F & SF essay, “Lost in Non-Translation,”207 which appeared in the March 1972 F & SF.

  We left for home on August 31.

  23

  The two weeks at Breadloaf were so successful that the twenty-ninth World Science Fiction conference that followed almost immediately in Boston was almost an anticlimax.

  It was the most smoothly run convention I ever attended, thanks to the hard work of Sue and Tony Lewis, who ran it, and who were my friends from the old NESFA days.

  Janet didn’t come with me, reluctant to interfere with the reunion I was bound to have with my children, and the del Reys promised her they would take care of me. And so they did; they scarcely ever let me out of their sight. They even arranged to have the room next to mine, and we had breakfast together in their room every morning.

  The Hugo awards banquet on September 5 (my mother’s seventy-sixth birthday) was the high point of the convention. I sat at the dais, for I was going to hand out the Hugos, and Bob Silverberg was the toastmaster (and an excellent one—no one is better that he at sardonic humor).

  Robyn, radiantly beautiful, was at my side, knitting calmly. Good old Cliff Simak, now sixty-seven, was guest of honor and, in the course of his talk, he introduced his children, who were in the audience. Robyn whispered to me, “You’re not going to introduce me, are you, Dad?”

  I whispered back, “Not if you don’t want me to, Robyn.”

  “I don’t.” She knitted a while, then said, “Of course, if you want to refer casually to your beautiful, blue-eyed, blond-haired daughter, you may do that.” So I did.

  Bob Silverberg made frequent references to the argument that had taken place in St. Louis in 1968 when Harlan Ellison had taken up a collection to pay for some damage inadvertently done to hotel property and, on collecting more than the required sum, had calmly assigned the excess to his own pet project, a science-fiction class at Clarion College.

  Bob therefore made frequent mock announcements of various objects that would be “donated to Clarion” and got a laugh each time.

  When it was my turn to stand up and give out the awards, I couldn’t resist invading Bob’s turf by singing a limerick I had hastily constructed while listening to the toastmastering. It went:

  There was a young woman named Marion

  Who did bump and did grind and did carry on.

  The result of her joy

  Was a fine bastard boy

  Which she promptly donated to Clarion.

  The audience saw where it was going halfway through the last line and the roar of laughter drowned out the final three words.

  In the course of the banquet, Lester presented a moving encomium on John Campbell. He is excellent at that sort of thing and constantly threatens to deliver one on me if it becomes necessary; and that does provide me with a marvelous incentive to outlive him if I can.

  I was back home on September 7, and the next day I finally finished all of The Gods Themselves. It had taken me seven months, and it was ninety-three thousand words long.

  24

  My poor mother was going downhill. She was beginning to suffer from congestive heart failure and had to be hospitalized periodically. I visited her at the hospital on September 8, and my heart smote me at her feebleness and helplessness.

  25

  Of course, the completion of The Gods Themselves meant the beginning of other projects. There was another Follett astronomy book, The Sun, but that took next to no time. I needed something else.

  A British publishing house had asked if I had some early stories that had never been collected, which they could reprint. I wrote a letter to them to the effect that such early stories did indeed exist but that they were not good enough to reprint.

  Then I thought better of it. It seemed to me that though the stories were poor compared to the work I did later, they were not as poor as all that. Besides, they had a certain historical interest,208 and if they were published in strict chronological order, without any revising, they should show an interesting progression of proficiency that might be of use to beginners. Finally, if I surrounded them with autobiographical detail, there could be added interest.

  I consulted Larry, who agreed wholeheartedly with me and instantly arranged for a contract for what we both felt should be called The Early Asimov. I began it on September 10, 1971, and for the first time I turned to my early diaries to check on events.

  26

  Lew Schwartz of Abelard-Schuman died on September 12, 1971. He and I had not been really close, but we had never quarreled. After he had inherited my book The Chemicals of Life when he bought out Henry Schuman seventeen years before, he had gone on to publish thirteen more of my books, and had been the first of my nonfiction publishers.

  27

  A planetarium in the Midwest had conceived the notion of doing a version of my story “The Last Question.” The whole thing was to be narrated, word for word, from my story, with the dialog being recited by different people. This was to be accompanied by appropriate special effects on the planetarium dome.

  On September 15, I was taken to Yonkers, New York, by a representative of the planetarium, and there my reading of the story was recorded. I pointed out that my thick Brooklyn accent would not sound well in midwestern ears, but they brushed that aside as nonsense. They must have changed their minds, however, for they never used my narration, but chose a person whose pronunciation was General American.

  In the end the planetarium version was shown not only at the Abrams Planetarium, which had had the original notion, but also at many other planetaria around the nation. It was, I believe, successful everywhere, and although the payments I requested from the planetaria were modest, “The Last Question” eventually earned more in its planetarium incarnation than it ever did in print.

  28

  Analog had remained without an editor for the ten weeks since Campbell had died. Between the backlog Campbell had built up and Katherine Tarrant’s handling, it continued smoothly, but a new editor had to be found, eventually. The publishers brooded over the possibilities and consulted a variety of people.

  They consulted me, for instance, and I told them I thought that of all living science-fiction personalities the one who most nearly resembled Campbell in ability and character was Lester del Rey. I think they tended to agree with me, but Lester was fifty-six years old now and they wanted a younger man.

  Ben Bova, who was only thirty-eight, was my second choice, and on September 29, Ben called me to tell me he was in New York being interviewed by Condé Nast. Janet and I spent the evening with Ben and, in the end, he got the job.

  That was delightful. It meant he stayed in New York at least part of the time, and there simply is no one I like more than I like Ben.

  29

  I finished The Early Asimov on October 4, 1971, only three weeks after I started. The book was two hundred thousand words long, but most of it consisted of my early stories, of course, and only the autobiographical passages, not more than 10 per cent of the length of the book, had to be written.

  The book covered the eleven years prior to the publication of Pebble in the Sky, the eleven years during which I wrote for science-fiction magazines exclusively. Of the sixty stories I had written in that interval, twenty-two had already appeared in collections I had published earlier. Twenty-seven stories appeared in The Early Asimov.

  That left eleven stories that I reported as lost and non-existent. Of these, one, “Big Game,” was discovered by a fan, Matthew B. Tepper, among the manuscripts I had given to Boston University, and I published it later. A second, “The Weapon,” had been published in Super Science Stories under a pseudonym and had been utterly forgotten by me until I did the research for this book and In Memory Yet Green. It is included there.

  The remaining nine are gone irretrievably.

  30

  The divorce proceedings were still hanging fire. Sixteen months had passed since I had left West Newton, and there had not even been a separation hearing.

  There had been six postponements of such a hearing for one reason or another, but finally one on October 13 seemed hard and fast.

  I drove to Boston on the twelfth and stayed with my lawyer, George Michaels. When we went into town the next day, however, we found that Gertrude’s lawyer had asked for a postponement once again. He had requested it and received it after I had started for Boston.

  It meant I would have to turn around and drive home again and then return to Boston the next week on the new hearing date. This was very depressing, for I had no way of knowing whether there might not be a repetition of what had just happened then.

  31

  The news that Ben Bova was to be the new editor of Analog made me want to write a story for him.

  “The Greatest Asset,” which I had sold to Campbell just eleven months before his death, had still not appeared. It did appear in the January 1972 Analog, one of the first under Ben’s editorship, but that was not the same thing.

  I therefore began a science-fiction story on October 14, which I called “Mirror Image.” It was a six-thousand-word mystery that involved Lije Baley and R. Daneel, my detective partners of The Caves of Steel and The Naked Sun. I took it to him over lunch on November 4 (his first official editor’s lunch with a writer).

  Ben bought it (my first sale to him) and it eventually appeared in the May 1972 Analog.209

  A much more important potential sale was that of The Gods Themselves.

  Unfortunately, in the crucial three months during which Analog was without an editor, that magazine could not buy the novel for serialization. At that time, moreover, Galaxy was going through a bimonthly phase and could not serialize, while F & SF was not large enough to publish a ninety-three-thousand-word novel without cutting it.

  It looked as though The Gods Themselves would have to do without serialization, when Judy-Lynn had a brilliant idea. Since the novel was divided into three parts, each one of which could stand on its own as a separate story, why did it have to appear in successive issues of a single magazine?

  Galaxy’s sister magazine, If, was also bimonthly but appeared in alternate months. The first part of The Gods Themselves could appear in Galaxy, the second in If, the third in Galaxy again. I was willing and that was how it was arranged.

  Before the agreement was made formal with Doubleday, however, Ben Bova took over as editor at Analog and was all set to make the purchase at a thousand dollars more than Galaxy could pay. I was chagrined for I would have enjoyed the additional money and Analog had the greater prestige—but I had given my word to Judy-Lynn, and having done so I was bound more tightly than by mere contract.

  So The Gods Themselves eventually appeared in the March 1972 Galaxy, the April 1972 If, and the May 1972 Galaxy. The issue of If with the second part (with the trisexed extraterrestrials) sold out completely, I was told.

  32

  Harry Walker, who had once served as my lecture agent in Boston thirteen years before, had transferred his home base to New York, and had his offices in the Empire State Building. Once again, he persuaded me to accept him as my agent by showing me that he would be able to get me fifteen hundred dollars for a talk.

  On October 16, for instance, I drove to Alfred, New York, to talk at Alfred University, a talk he had arranged. We drove back the next day over Route 17, through a succession of hills that were covered by the most magnificent autumn foliage I had ever seen. It was as though the entire Earth had been turned into a Persian polychrome rug designed by a mad weaver.

  34

  My Thyroid

  1

  I drove to Boston again on October 19,1971, to face the separation hearing. I was obviously in a highly nervous state for I managed to spill my breakfast of scrambled eggs and bacon right into my lap before I had had so much as a forkful. At 2 p.m., though, I was in the courtroom and ready.

  I saw Gertrude for the first time since I had left home—474 days—and didn’t recognize her at first. She had lost some weight and, as usual, looked very trim and attractive.

  Monroe Inker put me on the stand and kept me there for two hours and then for two hours more on the morning of the twentieth.

  It was a very uncomfortable experience, my first time as a witness under oath in a courtroom, and I remember very little of the details. I was asked if I ever kept a budget and I said, “No. We just spent the money for whatever we needed.”

  The judge intervened to say, “Whether you had the money or not?”

  And I forgot he was the judge, turned to him in outrage, and said, “I am not now, nor have I ever been, in debt by as much as a cent.”

  At another time, I was asked who I thought owned the money I had earned during marriage. I answered, “I always considered any money either of us earned during marriage to be the result of community endeavor and to belong to each of us equally.”

  Afterward, George Michaels said that admission would not help my case, but I shrugged and said, “It was true, George. I could say nothing else.” There was no answer to that.

  The hearing lasted till the twenty-sixth, but I was allowed to go home on the twenty-second.

  In the course of the hearing there were reporters from the Boston papers present. I kept wondering what the devil they could get out of the hearing. There were no allegations of immorality, cruelty, or scandal of any kind. The whole argument was over the size of the settlement.

  I found out, though. When I visited Austin on the evening of the twentieth, he said, “I heard over the radio this morning that you were making $205,000 a year.”

  I was stupefied. He had to be telling the truth because the figure was right—at least for 1970.

  What had happened was that at the trial my income-tax statements for the previous six years were placed in evidence, with no objection at all from myself or my lawyer since they were honest documents, and the news media had picked it up.

  The Boston Herald of October 20 had an eight-column headline (on an inside page) that read, “Science-fiction Writer Bares Income of $205,000.” (How incredible it seemed in cold print!)

  I came back to New York, rather shattered and well aware that it would now take additional months before any actual decision could be reached.

  2

  It seemed rather significant to my fevered spirit that Janet’s little hamster, Cheeky, died of old age on October 24. (Hamsters only live three years at most.) We buried him along the side of the Palisades Parkway on our way to Schenectady to give a talk at the Freedom Forum.

  3