On November 13, therefore, I had lunch with Victoria Schochet of Harper’s and arranged the details.

  That same night, Janet and I had an elaborate dinner with Mac Talley at Trader Vic’s and I found myself agreeing to do an elaborate book on the polar regions of Earth.

  Then, on November 21, Austin Olney came to town and, over dinner, suggested I do a book on the history of the telescope, and I agreed to that, too.

  Before the month was over there was one more item:

  Arthur Rosenthal was no longer with Basic Books, but had moved to Boston. Basic Books was now a subsidiary of Harper & Row, and in charge was Erwin Glickes. I had lunch with him on November 27 and he wanted a large book on nutrition along the lines of Asimov’s Guide to Science, and I agreed.

  When I was going to find time to bring all these agreements to fruition, I couldn’t say.

  15

  On December 1, 1972, Asimov’s Annotated Don Juan was published, nearly two years after I had completed it. (The delay was occasioned by the artist, of course.) It was a beautiful book, though an expensive one, and eventually won a prize for its design.

  Doubleday was sufficiently pleased with it to throw a little luncheon party for Janet and me in its honor. Sam Vaughan, the president of the Publishing Division, and Walter Bradbury were there. So was Larry, of course, and, at my invitation, the del Reys.

  It went very well, and the Doubleday people were pleased with the advance sale. I was not overoptimistic, however. I was glad that Asimov’s Annotated Paradise Lost was safely done and in production. Doubleday was going to do it in the same style as Asimov’s Annotated Don Juan but without artwork and without a box. So much the better.

  16

  On December 4, Richard Hoagland’s cruise came to pass. Janet and I got on the Statendam, which was the Rotterdam’s little sister. For the first time in my life, I got on a ship voluntarily to embark on an ocean voyage and discovered I liked it and was not afraid.

  Along with us on the ship were Ted Sturgeon (with his most recent wife and son), Robert and Ginny Heinlein, Marvin Minsky, Fred and Carol Pohl, and Ben Bova.

  Along with Ben was Barbara Rose, a young woman with whom he was clearly and desperately in love. In fact, some time before, he had said to me, clearly bemused, “You know, Isaac, I think I’m in love with a nice Jewish girl, of all things.” I had then replied, “For goodness’ sake, Ben, you’re Italian; you don’t have to. Quick! Run!” But he didn’t.

  I scarcely blamed him. Barbara was a vital brunette, with a pretty face, lovely eyes, and a stunning figure. She was outgoing and an energetic talker.

  Among nonscience-fiction personalities present were Ken Franklin, an astronomer who had first detected the radio emissions of Jupiter. He was short, plump, curly-haired, and quizzical—a straight-faced jokester. There was also Hugh Downs, best known as Jack Paar’s sidekick on the latter’s late-night talk show.

  The first evening, Janet and I went out on board to see the ship go past Manhattan, by the Statue of Liberty, and under the Verrazano-Narrows Bridge, and there we encountered Norman Mailer, still another member of the group. This time I knew who he was and introduced myself.

  By the time we went to bed, I knew I was not prone to seasickness, and that we could luxuriate freely in our two-room suite. (The ship, alas, was only half full, which meant the owners were running at a loss, but those of us on board had all the more space, and excellent service.)

  While I was on the Statendam, I wrote my 176th F & SF essay, “The Tragedy of the Moon,”226 which appeared in the June 1973 issue of the magazine. I also did my eleventh Black Widowers story, “The Curious Omission.”227 Both items were done in pen and ink.

  It was quite clear that the world generally was not taking the cruise seriously, perhaps because of the large leavening of science-fiction people on board. A New York Times reporter who seemed to be there largely because Norman Mailer was, seemed unhappy about the whole thing. Katherine Anne Porter was aboard, too, which meant that all outsiders felt it incumbent upon them to refer to the cruise as “a ship of fools.”

  By December 6, we reached Florida and anchored seven miles off Cape Kennedy. The giant rocket stood out against the flat Florida coast like a misplaced Washington’s Monument.

  The day darkened; night came; clouds banked on the eastern horizon; and there was a continuous display of faraway lightning-without-thunder ducking in and out of the distant thunderheads. Launch was scheduled for 9:53 p.m. and there had never been any hitch, any hold, any delay in an Apollo launch.

  This time, however, at thirty seconds before launch there was a hold that continued—and continued—

  Midnight came and went and we were into December 7, the thirty-first anniversary of Pearl Harbor, and no one seemed to be aware of this bit of ill omen but myself. In a short time, the launch would have to be postponed to the next night, the ship would have to move away, and we would miss the sight.

  At 12:20 a.m., the hold was lifted and the countdown proceeded to zero. A cloud of vapor enveloped the rocket and I held my breath for fear Pearl Harbor Day would do its work.

  It didn’t. The rocket slowly rose and the vast red flower at its tail bloomed. What was surely the most concentrated man-made night light on an enormous scale that the world had ever seen blazed out over the nightbound shores of Florida—and the night vanished from horizon to horizon.

  We, and the ship, and all the world we could see, were suddenly under the dim copper dome of a sky from which the stars had washed out, while below us the black sea had turned an orange-gray.

  In the deepest silence, the artificial sun that had so changed our immediate world rose higher and higher, and then—forty seconds after ignition—the violent shaking of the air all about the rocket engines completed its journey across the seven-mile separation and reached us. With the rocket high in the air, we were shaken with a rumbling thunder so that our private and temporary daytime was accompanied by a private and temporary earthquake.

  Sound and light ebbed majestically as the rocket continued to rise until it was a ruddy blotch in the high sky. Night fell once more; the stars were coming out, and the sea darkened. In the sky there was a flash as the second stage came loose, and then the rocket was a star among stars; moving, and moving, and moving, and growing dimmer. . . .

  In all this, it was useless for me to try to say anything, for there was nothing to say. The words and phrases had not been invented that would serve as an accompaniment to that magnificent leap to the Moon, and I did not try to invent any. After all, I had nothing more at my disposal than the language of Shakespeare.

  Some young man behind me, however, was not hobbled by my disadvantage. He had a vocabulary that the young of our day had developed to express their own tastes and quality and he used it to the full.

  “Oh shit,” he said, as his head tilted slowly upward. And then, with his tenor voice rising over all the silent heads on board, he added eloquently, “Oh shi-i-i-it.”

  To each his own, I thought.

  17

  The rest of the cruise had to be anticlimactic, but on December 9, we reached St. Thomas, in the Virgin Islands, and Janet and I toured it with considerable interest. It was my first time on a distant island portion of the United States since my stay on Hawaii twenty-six years before.

  Ben and Barbara left the cruise at that point to do some traveling on their own and to return to the United States by plane. Norman Mailer also left, and with him all reporter interest, such as there was.

  Joining us, however, were Carl and Linda Sagan. Carl gave several magnificent talks on the new knowledge of Mars gained from the Mariner 9 probe. Since the reporters were gone, however, nothing of this appeared in the public print. Instead, Norman Mailer’s earlier speech, a rather silly one suggesting ESP experiments on the Moon and offering the possibility of a spirit world surrounding Earth, received the full treatment.

  We were in Puerto Rico on December 10, and again we toured the island. This time Janet and I took separate tours, she to visit a rain forest, and I to visit the great radio telescope at Arecibo.

  Fred Pohl gave a marvelous talk on December 11, while Bob Heinlein’s I thought rather wandering.

  On December 13, we were home again. On the whole, Janet and I had had a wonderful time and I felt, with delight, that she had been compensated for having missed Breadloaf four months before.

  18

  My article on the cruise, which was written for the New York Times at their request, was rejected. I was not utterly surprised. My batting average with the Times was .500 at best.

  Fortunately I had a solution for virtually all nonfiction rejections. Later that month, I rewrote it, at greater length, as my 177th F & SF essay, “The Cruise and I,”228 and it appeared in the July 1973 issue of the magazine.

  As for “The Curious Omission,” which I had written onboard ship, Fred Dannay rejected that (my third Black Widowers rejection in a row).

  19

  Someone representing Woody Allen called me and asked if I would look over a movie script Allen had written. It happened to be science fiction and Allen was uncertain whether he had handled it correctly, so they needed the word of an expert.

  Ordinarily, I would have denied being an expert and ducked the responsibility, but I am a great fan of Woody Allen’s and I wanted to see the script. I wasn’t disappointed. Since I was able to picture Allen perfectly, sight and sound, reading the script was like seeing the movie, and I howled over it. I called the fellow who had sent me the script and tried to give him my opinion, but he suggested lunch.

  I had lunch with Woody Allen and two of his friends on December 20, and when Allen asked me about the script, I told him flatly that it was terrific.

  Did it need changes? he wanted to know. No, I said, it was perfect. Was I sure? Yes, of course I was sure. Allen protested that he knew nothing about science fiction. I said that if he refrained from telling people that, no one could possibly guess.

  I was getting a little uneasy, though. After all, I was pushing as hard as I could to get Allen to do the picture and he would be putting the money into it. What if I were wrong?

  Allen must have been getting uneasy, too. Did this guy, Asimov, really know what he was talking about? “How much science fiction have you written?” he asked.

  Feeling a little nervous, I said, “Not much. Very little, actually. Perhaps thirty books of it altogether.” Then, diffidently, I explained in a half whisper, “The other hundred books aren’t science fiction.”

  Allen turned to his friends. “Did you hear him throw that line away? Did you hear him throw that line away?”

  Apparently my skill at showmanship (was that what it was?) convinced him. He asked me to serve as technical director for the movie, which meant going to wherever it was he was shooting it. I refused and recommended Ben Bova instead (who took the job and did very well).

  Finally, Woody Allen said to me, “Well, how much do I owe you?”

  I said, “I enjoyed reading the script so much, Mr. Allen, that you don’t owe me anything.”

  I rather thought that Allen would at this point force more money on me than I would have had the nerve to ask for—but I was wrong. He said “All right,” and that was that. I never got a penny.

  The movie, as it happened, was Sleeper. It came out, in accordance with my recommendation, just as Allen had written it, and I was right, thank goodness. It was the most successful picture he had made up to that point and I was sure I would get a letter of thanks, but I never did.

  20

  I was also involved in a project originated by Gerald Walker of the New York Times. He was incensed over what he considered the rotten way in which publishers promoted, publicized, and sold their books, and it occurred to him that writers, in protest, ought to walk up and down Fifth Avenue with books in a pushcart, peddling them to passersby. The trick was to show that even this would produce more sales than publishers could.

  Gerald asked me to join in. I had no complaints against my publishers, who were making me much more money than I had ever dreamed I could earn—but I felt it important to show solidarity. Just because I was doing well didn’t mean I oughtn’t pitch in for those who weren’t.

  So I contributed books to “Operation Pushcart” and was on hand to help with the festivities. It took place on December 23, 1972, at Fifth Avenue and Sixtieth Street, and, alas, it was a fiasco.

  It rained heavily and the participating authors all huddled miserably under umbrellas. Since there were no passersby, we had to buy each other’s books. When we finally tried to move the pushcart down Fifth Avenue despite the rain, policemen stopped us on the grounds we didn’t have peddlers’ licenses. And, of course, reporters were on hand to put scoffing stories in the newspapers.

  21

  Christmas wasn’t so good. Chaucy was preparing a feast, as usual, but she had the flu, and her son Bruce, in the early-morning hours of December 24, was rather badly hurt in an automobile accident. Under the circumstances, festivities were canceled.

  22

  During 1972, I had published no less than fifteen books, outdoing the previous record of twelve, in 1966. They were:

  118. Asimov’s Biographical Encyclopedia of Science and Technology (Revised Edition) (Doubleday)

  119. The Left Hand of the Electron (Doubleday)

  120. Asimov’s Guide to Science (Basic Books)

  121. The Gods Themselves (Doubleday)

  122. More Words of Science (Houghton Mifflin)

  123. Electricity and Man (Atomic Energy Commission)

  124. ABC’s of Ecology (Walker)

  125. The Early Asimov (Doubleday)

  126. The Shaping of France (Houghton Mifflin)

  127. The Story of Ruth (Doubleday)

  128. Ginn Science Program-Intermediate Level A (Ginn)

  129. Ginn Science Program—Intermediate Level C (Ginn)

  130. Asimov’s Annotated Don Juan (Doubleday)

  131. Worlds Within Worlds (AEC)

  132. Ginn Science Program—Intermediate Level B (Ginn)

  The three Ginn Science Program books were for the fourth, fifth, and sixth grades. (I received copies of the remaining two, for the seventh and eighth grades, shortly after the beginning of the new year, so that they were included among my 1973 books.)

  The Ginn Science Program books were finally published more than five years after I had written the first word of my share—and, in my opinion, they fizzled. Considering the amount of time and work I had put into them, the money they earned was completely trivial.

  23

  I began the new year of 1973 by putting together my tenth collection of F & SF essays, The Tragedy of the Moon, and on January 2, 1973, I celebrated my fifty-third birthday very quietly.

  24

  On January 5, 1973, I attended the annual meeting of the Baker Street Irregulars, a society of Sherlock Holmes enthusiasts, whose attitude toward the “sacred writings” was a curious mixture of high dedication and low camp.

  I went as the guest of Edgar Lawrence (one of the Trap Door Spiders), who was also a Baker Street Irregular. I went, to be honest, to scoff, but I remained to enjoy myself.

  Once again, as in the case of the Trap Door Spiders and the Dutch Treat Club, my appearance as a guest led to a suggestion that I join as a member, and I did. It came to be my third stag organization, one of which, the Dutch Treat Club, met weekly; one, the Trap Door Spiders, monthly; and one, the Baker Street Irregulars, met annually.

  At this first meeting, I encountered Robert Lowndes, who had been a Futurian with me thirty-five years before and who, as an editor, had bought a number of stories from me. He had become quite gray and quite stout—but then so had I.

  I also met Banesh Hoffman, a physicist from Queens College, whose book The Strange Story of the Quantum I had read and had admired extravagantly.

  25

  I took in The Tragedy of the Moon and Asimov’s Annotated Paradise Lost on January 8, and arranged matters concerning a third book.

  I had by now done a hundred “Please Explain” columns for Science Digest, and for years it had been understood between Larry and myself that when the hundred mark was reached, Doubleday would put out the collection.

  Doubleday, however, had done six books of mine in 1972 and had no less than four more books of mine in press. I was acutely conscious that since I had come to New York I had tended to overlook Houghton Mifflin. I asked Larry’s permission to give “Please Explain” to Houghton Mifflin, and he agreed.

  At noon that same day, I went to Brooklyn to give a talk at Public School 88. It was not the sort of thing I usually did, but this school was near Windsor Place, and the condition was that I be driven about the old neighborhood—where I had last lived twenty-five years before.

  This was done, and I was rather overwhelmed to see that the old candy store, which my father had owned for sixteen years and in which I had worked for six, was desolate, abandoned, and boarded up.

  Finally, in the evening, I went to a birthday party for the old vaudevillian and stand-up comedian, Joey Adams. I found myself in the same room with a number of show-business people, including Ginger Rogers, Jan Peerce, and Tiny Tim. What really rather overwhelmed me with mortification, though, was that Roy Cohn, the sidekick of Senator Joseph McCarthy and who figured prominently in the television hearings nineteen years before, walked into the room. This time I managed to avoid an introduction, and I didn’t have to shake the hand that had shaken the hand of McCarthy.