I was slated to give a talk at the University of Bridgeport on November 3, in a ceremony in honor of John Dalton, the English chemist who had worked out the atomic theory of matter in 1803. Also invited was a local physicist of advanced years named Dennis Gabor.

  On November 2, the winner of the 1971 Nobel Prize in physics was announced and it was Gabor, for his development of holography. I called up the University of Bridgeport at once to ask if Gabor would still show up. They said, yes, he had promised to. I asked if they wouldn’t rather have him make the major presentation under the circumstances, but they wanted matters to continue as had been planned.

  Of course, they couldn’t continue exactly as planned. It was to have been a quiet ceremony with no outside interest but, at a day’s notice, it became a rip-roaring affair with television cameras all over the place.

  I had not planned to do anything special. I was going to deliver an off-the-cuff, easygoing talk as I always did. Now, though, I found the cameras trained on me and had to try to talk as though they weren’t there.

  It wasn’t easy, but Gabor helped a great deal by being completely pleasant and at ease. He did not seem to mind sitting back and playing second fiddle to me in the ceremonies.

  4

  More Words of Science had been delayed by my work on The Gods Themselves, but on November 10 I finished it, nearly a year and a half after I had begun it.

  5

  On November 15, I visited the offices of the American Schizophrenia Association (they were pushing to have me attend a convention), and in the elevator I encountered a gray-haired fellow. I looked at him curiously and gave in to the irresistible impulse I have of spotting similarities and announcing them.

  I said, “Did anyone ever tell you, sir, that you resemble Norman Mailer in appearance?”

  “Yes,” said the stranger, calmly. “I get told that now and then.”

  Over lunch, I announced this curious similarity, and the ASA people promptly told me that Mailer maintained an office in the building and that I had undoubtedly met the man himself.

  Well, that explained the resemblance.

  6

  Fred Pohl and I participated in a late-night talk show with Long John Nebel on November 12. After it was over, a phone call came through for me at the station. It was Danny Metta from the old Decatur Street days, thirty-five years before, the one who had married Mazie, who had given me my first instruction in touch typing.

  They came to visit me at the Cromwell on November 17. I hadn’t seen them since the days at Windsor Place before Pearl Harbor, but Danny, despite his baldness, was quite recognizable. Not so Mazie, who was plump and four times a grandfather. I dare say I did not bring back any memories to them either, with my long, graying hair and with my bushy, whitening sideburns.

  7

  On November 16 I received the January 1972 EQMM and discovered, for the first time, that Fred Dannay was announcing “The Acquisitive Chuckle” as a series.

  I had to come through. I even suspended work on The Shaping of France, which was in the home stretch, to write “Ph as in Phoney.”210 It, too, involved the Black Widowers, and I added one additional character, based on Trap Door Spider fellow member Don Bensen, who, nine years before, had anthologized my story “Author! Author!” Again I had a mystery that only Henry, at the end, could unravel. The Black Widowers series, and the tales of their banquets, had come into being.

  Fred Dannay took the story at once and it appeared in the July 1972 EQMM. Dannay changed the title to “The Phoney Ph.D.” in order to avoid a conflict with Lawrence Treat, who wrote a series of stories with titles on the order of “X as in Xylophone,” but I changed the title back when I placed the story in my collection.

  8

  Again, Janet and I had a magnificent Thanksgiving feast at Chaucy’s on November 25. It was a repeat of that of the year before, but this time Bill Boggs was not there. He and Leslie had split up.

  9

  Although Janet and I were becoming closer and closer and although she was beginning to participate fully in my social life, she also had a world of her own.

  As a psychiatrist (and psychoanalyst) she was an important figure at the William Alanson White Institute, and she had a social life involving the institute. On December 4, 1971, I went, as her escort, to a Chinese dinner given by one of her colleagues and, for the first time, I met her friends and associates. It was the final outside-world link between us.

  10

  I finished The Shaping of France on December 15, and went on at once to the fourth of my ABC books for Walker. This time it was ABC’s of Ecology. I managed that between December 17 and 19, but was determined to do no more. They were simply not pleasant to do, far too artificial in structure, and each did less well than the one before.

  11

  Janet, being a physician, was constantly nervous about the state of my health, and kept urging general checkups. I, having been brought up to believe that you saw a doctor only as a last resort, felt indignant at the notion of seeing one when I was demonstrably in good health.

  Janet had now, however, discovered an internist named Paul Esserman, through the recommendation of one of her friends, and was completely satisfied with his thoroughness and with his diagnostic knowhow. She insisted on my going to see him.

  I went through some kicking and screaming, but she kept up a rather relentless pressure, and on December 16, 1971, I showed up, more or less sullenly, at Esserman’s office. Janet came along to make sure I didn’t cut and run.

  Esserman was tall and pudgy, with a smiling, soft-featured face, and a very soft voice that would dissolve into a little laugh when he was pleased.

  He went over me in great detail, while I submitted scowlingly, and he finally said, “You are in great shape, Isaac.”

  “I could have told you that at the start,” I said.

  “Except for a thyroid nodule.”

  “What thyroid nodule?”

  “Well, bend your head back here at the mirror. You see?”

  I bent my head back and there, at the right side of my neck, was a clear bulge that was not present at the left side.

  “I never saw that before,” I said, startled. (Nor had I ever felt it when shaving, though after that day, I felt it every time and couldn’t understand how I had missed it before.)

  Paul said, “It’s probably been there for years, and it’s probably nothing important, but it will have to be investigated. Don’t worry, I’ll make all the arrangements.”

  We left in considerable depression. I knew very well what a nodule could be and that “probably nothing important” didn’t fool me a bit. It could also be cancer.

  As for Janet, she was now really upset that I had not routinely had medical checkups at frequent intervals. Surely one of them would have picked up the nodule at an earlier stage.

  But you can’t go back in time. We just had to follow up on it now.

  12

  What could I do? I threw myself into my work and even managed to have the happiest Christmas of my life.

  Janet and I went to Westchester for the Christmas feasts at her mother’s and at Chaucy’s, and I took with me the galleys for the new edition of the Guide to Science.211 With me also were several thousand index cards, and for many hours I sat in the room that had once been Janet’s father’s study working on the indexing, marking, paginating, and alphabetizing while everyone else went around on tiptoes to make sure the great man was not disturbed at his task.

  I enjoyed every minute of it because I knew it wouldn’t last. Eventually, when everyone was quite used to me, there would be no hesitation whatever in interrupting me at my giant labors in order to get me to collaborate in some trivial household task.

  13

  I was also involving myself in still another treatment of the biblical Book of Ruth. I had written about Ruth first for the Reader’s Digest Press book. I had then given my Breadloaf speech on the subject and had devoted an F & SF essay to it.

  I now wanted to do a whole book on it for young people, one in which I quoted the book, verse by verse, and, in effect, annotated it. As far back as September, I had talked to Larry about it and he had directed me to Tom Aylesworth of Doubleday’s juvenile section. Aylesworth agreed, and on December 28 I began The Story of Ruth.

  14

  We celebrated New Year’s Eve at the del Reys. The Silverbergs were there, too, but they were planning to sell their rambling mansion in the Bronx and move out to California. More and more, the science-fiction world was centering in California. With so much science fiction in the movies and in television and with the magazines seeming less important every year, there was a natural drift of writers westward.

  15

  I had nine books published in 1971:

  109. The Stars in Their Courses (Doubleday)

  110. Where Do We Go From Here? (Doubleday)

  111. What Makes the Sun Shine? (Atlantic Monthly Press)

  112. The Sensuous Dirty Old Man (Walker)

  113. The Best New Thing (World)

  114. Isaac Asimov’s Treasury of Humor (Houghton Mifflin)

  115. The Hugo Winners, Volume II (Doubleday)

  116. The Land of Canaan (Houghton Mifflin)

  117. ABC’s of the Earth (Walker)

  16

  I was fifty-two years old on January 2, 1972. With my thyroid nodule looming over me, I became uncomfortably aware that William Shakespeare had died on his fifty-second birthday.

  However, even at the worst of my charming immodesties, I couldn’t convince myself that Shakespeare represented a precedent for myself.

  17

  I had been attending the Dutch Treat Club luncheons more often than not ever since I had become a member, and was enjoying them tremendously. On January 4, 1972, I was even the entertainment, giving a half-hour talk that was well received. (It was a humorous talk about myself and my writing habits.)

  18

  Paul Esserman had made the necessary arrangements for investigating the thyroid nodule. On January 10, I went to the offices of Manfred Blum, an endocrinologist, who made quite certain that what I had was an enlarged thyroid and nothing else.

  A week later I underwent the crucial test in which I drank a solution containing radioactive iodine. The iodine is taken up promptly by the thyroid and will not appear in any quantity anywhere else in the body. My neck region was then scanned for radioactivity.

  If the nodule is “hot”—that is, if it takes up iodine—it would be a good sign, since active thyroid tissue might enlarge for many reasons other than cancer. If it is “cold” and does not take up iodine, it would be a bad sign, for a cancerous organ is quite likely to lose its specialized abilities.

  Blum explained this to me. He said, “If it’s cold, then there is a somewhat better chance that it might be—uh—that it could—”

  I said, dryly, “Doc, it’s permissible in this case to use the word ‘cancer.’ ” (After all, no circumlocution was going to fool me.)

  By January 24, I had the answer. The nodule was cold and Blum told me that statistically the chance of cancer was about one in twenty. It meant that I would have to be on thyroid pills the rest of my life, not so much to supply me with thyroid, but to supply sufficient outside thyroid to cause the body to suppress the gland itself. If the gland shrank on treatment, I might be able to avoid surgery.

  I accepted the pills, but I did not for one moment feel that I would have a chance of avoiding surgery. With a one in twenty chance of having cancer, no surgeon would resist the fun of going in and seeing.

  19

  I continued methodically on my various projects, just the same. I had finished the first draft of The Story of Ruth on January 14, and on that same day I began a book I had promised to do for Chaucy.

  The book was Jupiter. NASA was sending out Pioneer 10 to make a close pass at Jupiter, and it seemed to Chaucy and to me that it would be ideal to have a book on the planet published at the time of the pass.

  On that same day, I was co-host at a Trap Door Spiders Meeting with Al Balk as my guest. Adding to the festivities on that day was the fact that Sprague, having survived a prostatectomy, was present and clearly in fine shape.

  Then, over the next two days, I put all of The Story of Ruth into final copy (it was only twenty thousand words long) and brought it to Doubleday on January 17.

  20

  Elyse Pines, who a few years before had inveigled me into talking at Brooklyn Polytechnic, had come up with an interesting idea.

  Though “Star Trek” was no longer on television as a living program, reruns could still be seen on local stations, and interest in it seemed to be growing steadily. Elyse watched the reruns faithfully, and so did many of her friends (and so did Janet)—so why not organize a “Star Trek” convention?

  She and others got to work at it, and on the weekend of January 22–23, the convention was held at the Statler-Hilton. Elyse expected some four hundred to register. In actual fact, she got twenty-five hundred.

  I attended and met Gene Roddenberry again after a five-year hiatus. Janet came with me and we had dinner at the Americana with him and with his new wife.

  After dinner, Janet went home. She cannot endure the noise and crowding of large meetings as I can. Besides, most of my time under such conditions is spent autographing books, which I enjoy, but which is rather dull as a spectator sport.

  21

  Despite lectures, books, conventions, and even dinner at the house of Phil Gelber, an old Navy Yard buddy of thirty years before who now lived in Metuchen, New Jersey, the matter of my thyroid continued to haunt me.

  On February 4, Paul Esserman had made an appointment on my behalf with Carl A. Smith, a surgeon.212 Smith examined me, and came to the same conclusion that Esserman and Blum had. The nodule was probably benign, but the chance of cancer was high enough to warrant a look at it. The urgency was not high, however, the hospital beds were filled, and it might take some months before an operation could be scheduled.

  I said, rather dry-mouthed, that I was in no hurry.

  I might have been in no hurry, but Esserman was. He was influential and he used his influence. On Tuesday, February 8, I got the news. Shortage of beds or not, they had one for me, and I was to go into the hospital the following Saturday.

  I had four days to get my spirits into shape. I had never before, in my fifty-two years of life, faced an operation under general anesthesia, and the prospect was a frightening one. Suppose I was one of those very few who were unexpectedly sensitive to the anesthetic? Suppose I went under and never came out again? Suppose, in fact, that I only had four days to live?

  I called Stanley. He had undergone operations on his spine in connection with a slipped disc some years before, and that was a much more dangerous situation than a thyroidectomy, which was not, on the whole, a difficult operation. Had he been frightened? If so, how had he overcome it?

  Stanley listened to my fears sympathetically and said, “The trouble, Isaac, is that you’re feeling no symptoms. Your thyroid is giving you no pain so that there is no reason for you to want the operation. When I was waiting for my operation, I suffered excruciating back pains, and one of my legs was numb. I looked forward to the operation as a deliverance, but you don’t have that advantage.”

  I had to work it out some other way. I kept myself busy. At that time I was working on Asimov’s Biographical Encyclopedia of War and Battle, a book I had talked Larry into letting me do; a book that was to be along the lines of the earlier, Asimov’s Biographical Encyclopedia of Science and Technology. It was, in essence, to be a military history by way of biographies of military leaders. That kept my mind engaged during the day.

  The nights were more difficult, and on the night of February 11, I finally worked it out. It wasn’t that I feared the process of dying—dying under anesthesia was the easiest way to go. Nor did I fear the consequences of dying. I wasn’t afraid of going to hell. The imminence of death woke no sudden twinges of either religion or superstition within me.

  The trouble was, it seemed to me, that I was only fifty-two and that I would be scorned as having died prematurely. I would suffer posthumous embarrassment, dying at so young an age. Everyone would say, “He didn’t get to finish his life work because he was too much of a weakling to live out a normal life.”

  And I thought: What the heck, I’d published 117 books and had over a dozen more in press. That was more than almost anyone could do in a full lifetime of a hundred years. And I did it all from scratch, by myself, without inherited wealth or family connections. What more was I supposed to do? If I died, I died, but no one could possibly scorn me for what I had done with life.

  And with that, a great calm descended on me, for I had made my peace with death (with a quiet death, not unduly prolonged or agonizing, at least) for all time. I went into the hospital on February 12, 1972, quite cheerfully.

  I took a portable mechanical typewriter with me, and on February 13 and 14 I wrote my third Black Widowers story, “Truth to Tell.”213

  Larry Ashmead visited me on the afternoon of February 14, and I gave him the manuscript of “Truth to Tell” and asked him to see that it got out to EQMM. I also asked him to explain that I was in the hospital for an operation as an explanation of why I did not take it in personally. (I didn’t want Eleanor and Connie to think I would lightly miss a chance to go in and flirt with them).

  “Truth to Tell” was accepted at once. In fact, a very concerned Eleanor called me while I was still in the hospital to tell me of the sale and to ask after my health. It appeared in the October 1972 EQMM under the title of “The Man Who Never Told a Lie,” but I used my own title in the collection.