I saw Campbell and Margulies during the day and then spent the evening with Gerard Pick and his wife, Helena, a plump and pretty blonde.

  Gerard had got in touch with me some time before because he wanted one of my stories for an anthology. I called him when I was in New York on one of the previous occasions, and when the phone was picked up at the other end, a woman’s voice in my ear said, “Drop dead!”

  I flinched a little and then said, “Could I speak to Gerard Pick before I drop dead?”

  It was Mrs. Pick, of course, who had been expecting a call from someone to whom her remark would have been fittingly humorous. She was overwhelmed with embarrassment and by the time she was through apologizing, we were good friends and nothing would do but that next time I was in New York, I must have dinner with them.

  January 16 was the time, but the meal, although very good from the culinary standpoint (for Helena was, as promised, a good cook), proved to be a hectic one. Shortly before arriving, I had called the Blugermans to inquire about David. He was all right but they told me that Gertrude had called to say that she thought she had found a suitable house but that they wouldn’t take a deposit from her unless I approved also.

  There was nothing to do but drive home the next day and go over with her to see the house.

  It was in West Newton, about two miles south of our Waltham apartment. It was at 45 Greenough Street. On the main floor, it had a large living-room/dining-room combination, an adequate kitchen, and three rather small bedrooms, so that we could have one and assign another to each of the children.

  There was a basement with two large rooms semifinished, one of which was a playroom, the other a laundry. There was a two-car, heated garage under the bedroom portion of the house so that never again, if we took the house, would I be unable to start the car because of the cold, or have to sweep snow off a car before I could use it.

  The living room faced the back of the house, where there was a porch (without a roof, which had blown off in the recent hurricanes) and a pleasant quarter-acre backyard (with a barbecue pit) in which the kids could play. The bedrooms faced the front. There were two bathrooms, and the one attached to the master bathroom had a stall shower. There was also a hopper in the basement.

  Most interesting of all was the fact that there were two finished rooms in the attic (but no plumbing), which I could use as an office.

  Add to that the fact that there were adequate closets, that Newton was known nationwide for the excellence of its school system, and that the price was no more than twenty-four thousand dollars, and what more could we ask? I put down a check for one thousand dollars at once as a deposit. On January 20, I signed a full agreement, and we settled down to wait for a title clearance.

  As though to celebrate, Robbie, who was now eleven months old, produced the first sign of two incisors peeping through her gums.

  There were other reasons to celebrate, too. Writing was going well! I was ready to start the final copy of The Naked Sun, and I had persuaded Brad into letting me do another book of unconnected short stories, this one to contain a larger number of shorter stories than in The Martian Way and Other Stories. I was collecting the manuscripts of stories to appear in that new book, and I was selling additional short stories to the magazines as rapidly as I could write them.

  With books showing every sign of pouring out in a steady stream, and with the thought of the large Doubleday statement that month, I favored buying the house outright—just putting down an additional check for twenty-three thousand dollars.

  We could do it. Living with our accustomed prudence, we had accumulated—despite the expense of two babies—a bank account of thirty-five thousand dollars by then.

  Gertrude, however, thought it unwise to cut our savings by two thirds at one stroke, and she said a mortgage would be a good way of establishing credit. Therefore I applied at my local bank for a fifteen-thousand-dollar mortgage, to stretch over twenty years at whatever the going rate of interest was. I arranged, however, for permission to pay larger installments than called for if I could do so—saving on interest, of course. The bank readily agreed, judging from my appearance, I suppose, that they were in no danger of losing interest. (To ordinary people, I look stupid; to banks, I look poor.)

  Buoyed up by the house situation, Gertrude was taking the additional driving lessons I had arranged for her. On February 2, she took another test, and in the worst possible weather, for a sleet storm hit the city. Despite that, she passed, and had her license.

  By February 15, the title was cleared and the old owners had moved out. Our painter moved in, with his paraphernalia.

  18

  Robbie was one year old on February 19, 1956. She weighed eighteen pounds and had two teeth. She still didn’t like standing and she showed no signs of walking.

  On that day I picked out science-fiction wallpaper for what was to be my office and writing room. It had spaceships on it, planets with rings, and so on.

  When Gertrude passed on my choice to the painter, he looked at it in disbelief and said, “Does the doctor know that this is children’s wallpaper?”

  “The doctor is in his second childhood,” said Gertrude, and that settled it.

  On February 22, we celebrated Washington’s birthday by driving to the new house—with Gertrude at the wheel.

  On March 3, I drove my car into the garage of the new house, enjoying the feeling of having a car in my own garage for the first time in my life.

  I raced to finish The Naked Sun before everything became a shambles. I managed. On March 10, 1956, The Naked Sun was complete, and on March 12 we moved—and left the Waltham apartment after having lived in it for nearly five years, and having had both our children there.

  The next day, we had a phone—one on the wall in the kitchen and an extension in my office upstairs. Heavens! the luxury in which we were living.

  4

  West Newton

  1

  We were now landed gentry, but we found out almost at once that houses have their disadvantages.

  We had a nice wide driveway on the street side of the house, and on Friday, March 16, 1956, four days after we had moved in, it started snowing about noon. It kept on snowing. That in itself was not surprising. It had been a bitterly cold winter, following the bitterly hot, dry summer, and there had been much snow.

  But this snowstorm kept on snowing and storming and turned out to be the worst of the season. The wind blew it into the driveway and the retaining walls on either side kept it there, so that when I woke on Saturday morning, there were three feet of snow in the driveway. I am not exaggerating or being dramatic. I measured the snow depth.

  There had been times, as it happened, when I shoveled snow for my father to make a path in front of the candy store. That had always been a minor job. Since I had left the candy store, fourteen years before, I had not shoveled one snowflake.

  At 7:15 a.m. on Saturday, I started shoveling with one of the snow shovels I had bought as part of the normal paraphernalia of a New England house. All Saturday, I chipped away at the snow mountain in front of the house, and finally in the evening, two men and a Jeep came around and for eight dollars bulldozed away most of the snow, leaving it to me to do the work around the edges and along the walkways on either side of the house.

  Whereupon on Monday, March 19, another blizzard hit, and this time we ended with four feet of snow in the driveway. It was the worst one-two snowstorm in the history of the Boston Weather Bureau, nor has anything like it been repeated since—and it came in the first week that I moved into the new house.

  We were too inexperienced to shovel the snow away from the immediate contact it made with the walls of the house. Inside the porch in back of the house the snow piled up against the house halfway to the roof, well above the copper flashing that kept the house impervious to water from outside. When the warmth of the house started melting that snow, the water trickled down the inside of the flashing and into the cellar. I had to race home from school to try to deal with it.

  And the hot-water heater, with the discrimination for which such objects are noted, chose this time to go on the fritz, so that we had to call the appliance people, who already had more than they could handle.

  It all worked out in the end and never again did we have such a ten-day period in the house—but that was the first ten-day period. It hit us hard. We lost all our euphoria concerning the house, and it never really returned.

  2

  There were other problems that seemed to be inseparable from the design of the house. When the snow on the roof melted, it would drip down, forming huge icicles and making puddles on the paths on either side of the house. These would freeze at night and make the paths and steps extremely dangerous in the morning. Had the paths been placed three feet away from the actual walls and eaves of the house, this would not have happened.

  And in the fall, as we discovered half a year later, the trees shed their leaves, and raking proved even more time-consuming than shoveling. And for eight months a year there was lawn-mowing.

  I hated doing anything about the house and grounds. In the first place, I had no aptitude for it; and in the second, I had better things to do.

  It made me look bad because all around us there were husbands mowing and hedge-clipping and planting and weeding and doing all kinds of things. Why not? If they weren’t actually working, there was nothing else to do. For myself, I was always working. I didn’t keep hours, for goodness sake; so I had to hire people when I could to do these things. That looked bad.

  3

  In the short space of time between the two storms, I received the April 1956 Astounding with “The Dead Past”18 in it. The story, one of my favorites, is most memorable to me for what I put in it accidentally.

  What I was planning was a story that inverted the usual assumptions that government planning is tyrannical and that freedom of scientific inquiry is good. In the course of the story, however, I threw in, almost at random, a reference to Carthage that somehow took on a life of its own and quite unexpectedly introduced a subplot that provided the whole course of the story with excellent motivation. Any critic reading the story is bound to conclude I planned that subplot from the beginning, though I swear I didn’t. It made me wonder if I did some planning that I didn’t recognize as such, as my old philosopher-friend Gotthard Guenther had once implied.

  The May 1956 Science Fiction contained my story “Living Space.”19 At that time, Science Fiction was being edited by that old Futurian, Robert W. Lowndes. He worked on a tight budget and had very little money to spend. When he asked me for a story now and then, however, I let him have it, but on my conditions.

  I would not send him a story from the bottom of the barrel. I would write one for him, just as though I were writing it for Astounding. In return, if he liked it, I would expect him to pay the Astounding rate of four cents a word. If he didn’t like it (or if he wanted to take a chance), he could send it back to me. I would then send it on to Astounding and Galaxy, and if they rejected it I would recognize the story as not first-rate Asimov and I would send it back to Lowndes, who might then have it (if he wished) at whatever his usual rates were.

  I tried this same device on other ordinarily low-paying markets and it worked perfectly. Never once was one of my stories sent back to me on the gamble. As a result, some of my best stories of the period, including my all-time best (in my opinion), appeared in minor science-fiction magazines—which paid me top rates for them.

  4

  On March 28, I drove to New York, where I submitted The Naked Sun to both Doubleday and Campbell.

  On this occasion, Campbell, to whose house in Mountainside, New Jersey, I had driven to make the submission, proudly showed me his newest toy. It was called the “Hieronymus machine” after its inventor, and it was a device of surpassing idiocy. It contained a meaningless electric circuit inside, one that could (Campbell seriously claimed) even be replaced by a paper diagram of the circuit without impairing its efficiency.20

  To work the machine, you turned a dial while stroking a plastic surface, and at some reading of the dial there would be a change in the feel of the surface. It would become stickier. From the dial reading at this point one could diagnose diseases and so on.

  Campbell insisted I try the machine. Ordinarily, I would have refused, since I lack any desire at all to lend myself to such folly. On this occasion, though, I was delivering a manuscript on which thousands of dollars would rest on Campbell’s decision and, frankly, since the dianetics thing, I no longer trusted the rigidity and integrity of his judgment.

  So I agreed to play. Naturally, no matter how I turned the dial I felt no change in the feel of the plate; there was no onset of stickiness and I certainly wasn’t going to lie to Campbell and say there was so that he could then use me as evidence of the working of the Hieronymus machine.

  So I twisted and stroked, and stroked and twisted, while my fingers grew sweaty with anxiety and began to slip more easily along the plate.

  “Mr. Campbell,” I said, hesitantly, but truthfully, “the plate feels slippery.”

  “Aha,” said Campbell, triumphantly, as he carefully took the reading. “Negative stickiness!”

  And that’s how great nonsense discoveries are made.

  Yet I might have saved myself the trouble if I were trying to use my compliance to sell him the novel, for he read through it that day and when I returned the next, he rejected it. I was quite dismayed, but after we talked it over, ways of revising it to meet Campbell’s objections were devised.

  That was a relief, for I wanted it in Astounding, even though it was the sequel to The Caves of Steel, which had appeared in Galaxy. It seemed to me that I ought to alternate serials between Gold and Campbell.

  I also gave Campbell another gag article, “Paté de Foie Gras,” a mock-serious study of a goose that laid golden eggs, which I thought was much cleverer than my thiotimoline articles. Campbell took the new article without trouble.

  On that occasion, too, I picked up an unusually large check from Marty Greenberg: one for $750.

  5

  I attended the student-faculty show on April 7, 1956. I did that every year and I routinely gave a talk as part of the festivities—a funny talk, naturally.

  I had become quite used to doing this, since I always talked at any science-fiction gatherings I attended—not just the national conventions, but small local gatherings, too.

  Generally, I had no trouble. Once in a rare while, though, I did poorly, and this was one of those rare whiles. According to my diary, “My own bit at the show, by the way, was a flop, but total. Hostile audience.”

  I don’t remember why they were hostile or how it showed itself, but I never took part in a student-faculty show again. In fact, I never attended one again.

  I do remember, though, that I made some humorous comments about Dean Soutter’s secretary, who wore skin-tight clothes and had the figure to make the procedure worthwhile. The secretary complained to Soutter, and Soutter called me in to his office and asked me to apologize in writing.

  I pointed out the generally licentious tone of the show (and my comments were as nothing compared to the tastelessness of some of the proceedings). Soutter said that the standards of behavior for faculty were tighter than for students.

  I thought about it, decided I was in the wrong, and typed the required apology. I also typed a letter of resignation, showed it to Soutter, and asked if he wished me to put it through channels.

  “No,” he said, “I asked for an apology. Nothing more.”

  That was a relief. It had occurred to me that I might be hounded over little things just to force my resignation through petty humiliations. (Such things have been known to take place.) What I had done was a risky test of that.

  Had he asked me to put my resignation through channels, I would have counted on Walker to stop it. Had Soutter himself accepted my resignation then and there, I’d have been in trouble indeed, but I didn’t feel he would choose to go over the department head. As it was, I felt Soutter was being honest and that I might be able to rely on him in future crises.

  6

  I sent in the revised The Naked Sun on April 10, and, thank goodness, Campbell took it, as I found out when I called him on the sixteenth. It meant nearly three thousand dollars, and this time I didn’t even have to hand over 10 per cent to Fred.

  But then, the next day, Brad called and told me that The Naked Sun needed a lot of work. He complained of my inaccurate use of words. As an example, he questioned the phrase “knife-edge suddenness.” How sudden, he wanted to know, is a knife edge?

  I chafed at this and found myself wishing that editors wouldn’t try to be writers. I still hadn’t reached the stage where I felt I could cross him, but I longed to tell him that “knife-edge suddenness” meant that something had changed in a period of time no greater than the width of a knife’s edge, and that it was a colorful metaphor that no reader would fail to understand. I kept my mouth shut, though.

  I drove to New York and on the nineteenth went over The Naked Sun with him. Things weren’t too bad. No more work was involved in Brad’s case than there had been in Campbell’s. By April 29, I had completed the revision, incorporating Campbell’s changes (at least, those I wanted to make permanent), and with this Brad was satisfied.

  7

  I got what seemed to me the brilliant idea of writing an article on the names of the elements. What did the names mean and why were they given to the individual elements?

  I wrote to Campbell to suggest the notion, and when I didn’t hear from him at once, I found I could not wait, but began the article on April 29, 1956. It was the longest article I had yet written—seventy-five hundred words—and I didn’t finish till the evening of May 6. I still had not heard from Campbell, so I mailed it to him on the morning of the seventh, and when the mail arrived later in the day, there was a letter from him, vetoing the idea.