Later that evening, at the Plaza Hotel, I chanced to meet the great mime Marcel Marceau, who (it turned out) was a science-fiction fan and a reader of mine. He invited me to attend a show he was giving in New York, and I went on May 6.235 Since Janet had a migraine, I took Judy-Lynn instead, and that may have been the first occasion on which we did what we came to call “talking Watergate.”

  12

  The Saturday Evening Post wanted a short story. I had already sold them a couple of stories that had appeared in some of the minor science-fiction magazines years before. What they wanted this time, however, was a new one.

  Janet was suffering periodic migraine headaches at this time. She had always been subject to them occasionally, but in the spring of 1973 they had become frequent, and during one of them, she had managed to make dinner—and a particularly good one.

  I wondered sadly if the migraine had been the reason, and that made me think of a robot who was out of order and who, because he was out of order, was a creative genius. On May 7, therefore, I dashed off a sixteen-hundred-word short-short that I called “Light Verse.”236

  I was anxious for The Saturday Evening Post to understand it was a new story so, in my covering letter, I stressed the fact. “This is not an old story,” I wrote. “I wrote it this very day.”

  The editors of the Post took the story at once and wrote me saying they couldn’t believe I had done the story in only one day.

  It reminded me that I should be careful about admitting the speed with which I write. Some editors can’t believe a story is good if it is written in a day; it has to be sweated over for a year and a half, perhaps. Actually, the story didn’t take me a full day. It was in the letterbox two hours after I had started it.

  It was published in the September-October 1973 issue of The Saturday Evening Post.

  My fourteenth Black Widowers story, “Quicker Than the Eye,”237 was begun on May 31, and eventually appeared in the May 1974 EQMM.

  13

  The college commencement season of 1973 carried me to Worcester, Massachusetts, where I talked at a community college, and from there I went to Boston to see the children.

  Robyn had a driver’s license now, and with all the self-confidence of the eighteen-year-old, insisted on chauffeuring me. There was something infinitely frightening about being driven by someone you insist on picturing as a little girl cuddling in your arms. That was on June 3, and the next day, June 4, 1973, Robyn was graduated from high school.

  14

  It was four years before that Publishers-Hall syndicate had bought my article “How to Write a Hundred Books Without Really Trying” and then never published it. (It was that which had given me the notion for the Black Widowers story “When No Man Pursueth.”)

  A chemical-engineering magazine, ChemTech, had asked me for an article, for which they could not pay, and it occurred to me that I might get this old article back from Publishers-Hall. Since it had already been paid for, I wouldn’t mind having it published without additional repayment.

  I got the release from Publishers-Hall on June 7, and it eventually appeared in the March 1974 ChemTech, but by then the title had to be changed to “How to Write 148 Books Without Really Trying.” Then, when I finally included it in one of my collections, the name had to be changed again, to “How to Write 160 Books Without Really Trying.”238 This illustrates one of the minor problems of being prolific.

  15

  On June 9, 1973, I began the book on the history of the telescope that I had promised Austin, a book that was eventually called Eyes on the Universe.

  The idea for this had originated not with Austin, but with a corporation that was interested in helping to construct a large telescope that was to be placed in orbit about the Earth. This would, in my opinion, be an important tool for the advancement of astronomy, and I was eager to do what I could to help it along.

  My big fear rested in the fact that I understood very little about the nuts and bolts of scientific instruments, so the corporation, to help me out, sent me a huge crate of literature on the subject. There’s never any difficulty in self-education, if you’re really interested.

  16

  The eclipse cruise was approaching, and embarkation was slated for June 22. It meant missing the crucial part of the Watergate hearings by the Ervin committee—the testimony of John Dean—but there was actually something that worried me more, and that was Janet’s health.

  Not only was there the problem of the migraines, but also she had become conscious of a “bruit,” an abnormal sound in one of her neck arteries. She feared the possibility of a clot there and of a consequent stroke.

  Paul Esserman had sent her to the appropriate specialist, who was talking about an angiogram. This involved the injection of a dye into an artery and the X-ray study, in detail, of the circulation through the brain. It was not a pleasant, nor an entirely safe, procedure. The doctor scouted the need for immediate testing, however, and told her it could be done after the cruise.

  But we worried.

  17

  I drove to Boston on June 17 and talked to the American Society for Medical Technologists, and the next day drove to the suburb of Lexington to talk at Ginn & Company.

  Janet stayed home, for she did not like to accompany me to Boston. She felt that if I had the chance to see my children, she would be in the way. I argued against that, but she insisted.

  It was my custom, when I was out of town alone, to call back after stages that involved traveling so that she would know I was safe (she was always apprehensive about something happening to me when she was not there to protect me).

  At about noon on June 18, 1973, therefore, I called her to tell her that I had negotiated the dozen miles or so from Boston to Lexington and was in one piece.

  She seemed lethargic on the phone and told me she had just awakened. I knew that she had a 1 p.m. patient scheduled and I was concerned over her apparent sleepiness. Furthermore, she seemed not to understand what I was saying, or else she would forget what I had just said and ask me to say it again.

  I became rather exasperated and urged her to wake up. She assured me she was well and I had to hang up at last.

  I gave my talk at Ginn & Company and I was no sooner done than I got a message from Chaucy to call Paul Esserman, as Janet was ill.

  Apparently something had happened that morning that had left her in a daze and a semicoma. Had I not called, she might have sunk into a coma too deep to respond to the doorbell when her patients came. I did call, however, and that roused her just sufficiently to answer the door. She was unable to deal with them, but one of them, noting that Janet was really ill, and knowing the name of her internist,239 called Esserman’s office.

  The patient also managed to get Chaucy’s name out of Janet, as a relative who could be notified. The patient called Chaucy, who was already in a state of alarm, for she had happened to have called Janet that morning and, like myself, had been perturbed over how strange Janet had sounded.

  Chaucy came at once and relieved the patient, who then left. Chaucy managed to elicit from an increasingly comatose Janet that I was at Ginn, and Chaucy sent off the message to me. By then, Esserman’s partner, Howard Gorfinkel, had arrived, and soon after, an ambulance came. Janet was in University Hospital only a couple of hours after I had talked to her.

  Gorfinkel’s first thought, judging from Janet’s condition, was that she had taken pills of some sort. He tried to find out what she had taken and asked Chaucy to look about for some note. Chaucy was furiously indignant at the thought that Janet might have made a suicide attempt, stressing the fact of Janet’s happiness with me, but Gorfinkel (wisely perhaps) doubted my gift for inspiring total happiness and continued the search. No note was found.

  When I called Esserman in great panic, after receiving the note, Esserman asked, very gently, if perhaps Janet and I had quarreled. It was my turn to be indignant, for I saw at once what was in his mind. “We never quarrel,” I kept shouting into the phone. “It’s impossible for me to quarrel with Janet.”

  Then I got into my car, and with everyone at Ginn & Company shouting at me to take it easy—to drive carefully—to stay calm—I did no such thing. I drove to New York at a steady eighty miles an hour.

  When I got to the apartment; I found blood in the bathroom, and deduced that Janet had had a stroke. I called the hospital and was told that she was in the intensive-care unit and that I could not talk to her—and I was now certain she had had a stroke. Through my head ran miserable images of paralysis and death.

  I took a taxi to the hospital, found out on what floor the intensive-care unit was, and came out of the elevator like a rocket. Paul, Howard, and Chaucy were all there waiting for me, and they blocked my passage. I was not to see Janet till they had talked to me.

  It turned out that a diagnosis had been made when a neurologist had taken a spinal tap and had found blood in the cerebrospinal fluid.

  She had had “subarachnoid bleeding.” This was bleeding into the outer membranes of the brain, rather than into the brain itself, through the rupture of a tiny artery. That accounted for all the symptoms (and probably for the blood in the bathroom), and it was not a stroke.

  Nevertheless, it was serious enough. She would have to have an angiogram and, very likely, brain surgery. It would be a long procedure and “life threatening,” and that was the whole story, and if I calmed down I could see Janet.

  I saw her. She was hooked up to an intravenous food supply and to various instruments. Her eyes were open and she recognized me and said, just as she had on the occasion of the mastectomy, “I’m sorry.”

  I took her hand, unable to speak, and she said, “I spoiled everything.”

  She meant the eclipse cruise, of course, which was four days in the future, and Esserman told me that she kept saying that she would have to leave in four days and couldn’t stay in the hospital.

  I finally went home and stayed up all night, entirely unable to sleep. I called up Rae and told her the situation, explaining that it might be very bad—and fearful that Rae might consider it some kind of visitation on Janet for taking up with a married man.

  Rae, however, was very consoling in that respect and thanked me for having made Janet happy.

  I called Phil Sigler on June 19 and told him I could not go on the cruise, explaining why. He sounded despairing at the news, saying I was his star, but what could I do?

  I spent most of the nineteenth at the hospital holding Janet’s hand. She would drift in and out of sleep, and her memory was not working at all. She was not clear as to why she was in the hospital, and over and over again she said to me, “Do I have metastatic cancer? Am I dying?”

  I would say, quietly, “No, dear. You’ve had subarachnoid bleeding, and you’ll live.”

  She would close her eyes, contented, and then she would open them and ask about cancer again and I would repeat my answer. It happened over and over and I felt that if it happened often enough it might stick. I was prepared to repeat it all day.

  Then, after one answer-and-response, she opened her eyes and said nothing. Anxious to continue the repetition, I prompted her by saying, “Are you afraid of something, Janet?”

  And she said, in very woebegone fashion, “I’m afraid you’ll leave me.”

  I tried to reassure her.

  18

  On the occasion of the mastectomy, I had expected good news and had received bad. The situation was reversed this time.

  On the twentieth, Janet had her angiogram, and all (quite unexpectedly) turned out to be well. The bursting arteriole had, in bursting, apparently healed the condition (don’t ask me how), and her cerebral circulation was absolutely sound. There would be no brain surgery, for there was nothing that needed to be done, and she was promptly taken out of the intensive-care unit.

  On June 21, I visited her in an ordinary hospital room. She was no longer comatose (though still without much memory), and I was so relieved I could scarcely endure my happiness.

  Paul Esserman said to me, “You’ll be going on the cruise, then?” “Not on your life,” I said. “I’m not leaving her in the hospital.”

  Paul said, in his soft way, “I’m afraid you’ll have to, Isaac. Doctor’s orders.”

  “But I can’t.”

  “It’s all she talks about—how she spoiled the cruise for you and now you won’t see a total eclipse. We’ve got to keep her calm and relaxed and we can only do that if you go on the cruise.”

  So I called Phil Sigler and said I would go after all, and he sounded as though I had restored him to life. I told him that the condition was that arrangements be made to have me call Janet at the hospital from the ship every day. He promised (and kept that promise).

  19

  On June 22, 1973, I got on the ship. Marci Sigler, Phil’s vivacious and good-looking wife, came to the apartment house to make sure I was coming and personally saw me on board.

  The ship was the Canberra, which was much larger than the Statendam. Among the notables on board were two of the astronauts, Neil Armstrong and Scott Carpenter. With Scott was his clever young wife, Maria. Also present were Walter Sullivan, Frank Branley of the Hayden Planetarium, and George Hamilton of the Fels Planetarium in Philadelphia.

  Unlike the Statendam cruise, this one was filled to capacity. There were twenty-five hundred passengers aboard, all involved with the eclipse, and I think the only empty bed on the ship was one of the two in my room, the one that Janet was to have occupied.

  There were seven at our table: the Carpenters, the Sullivans, the Branleys, and myself. Janet was to have made the eighth, but her chair remained empty throughout the trip.

  It was a hectic table, for I had to keep my mind off Janet, and I did it by a constant running fire of conversation, jokes, and double-entendres. The others naturally rose to the occasion, particularly Maria Carpenter, so that the table was by far the noisiest in the place.

  For that matter, I kept the whole cruise in a continual state of excitement, for I was in an overflowing state of effervescence.

  I gave four talks on the history of astronomy—all of them off the cuff, but using my book The Universe as raw material. I gave each of them twice, since otherwise there was no possibility of reaching the entire audience.

  I was also part of a seminar at one point, and during the course of it, I said, “At the table where I’m sitting—and, as luck would have it, I was placed at the noisiest table on the ship . . .”

  Walter Sullivan, who was also part of the seminar, stared at me in horror as I said that, and cried out, indignantly, “But Isaac, you’re the one who makes it noisy.”

  “Ah,” I said, “that explains it. I wondered why I was always at the noisiest table wherever I go.”

  At another point during that seminar someone in the audience asked me if I had read an article on tachyons in Saturday Review, and with great satisfaction I was able to reply, “Read it, sir? I wrote it.”

  Neil Armstrong was at the next table, and he had the most charming ten-year-old son, intelligent, lively, freckle-faced. I asked Neil if he would sell me the kid. He thought about it and said, “Yes, if you’ll promise to drop him overboard after you buy him.”

  I reported that to the kid who said, wisely, “That sounds like Dad, all right.”

  One time at dinner, the young Armstrong boy came over and said, “Listen! What word has the letter combination XYZXYZX?”

  We had been playing word games, but this one stopped us cold. For some ten minutes, an absolute silence hung over the table as all seven of us tried to think of a seven-letter word with that pattern of letters. I thought of “Sensens,” the trade name of a preparation sold to mask bad breath in my youth, rather like “Tic-Tac” today. That was a proper noun, however.

  Finally, I decided to go through the alphabet and see if I could think of the word by a systematic search through my mind. I began with A and instantly the word popped into my head.

  And just as instantly, I threw up my hands and shrieked, “ALFALFA!!!” The scream resounded through the large dining room and the whole enormous room fell silent.240 The next morning at breakfast someone came over and said to me, “Everyone in the place knows the answer. It’s ‘alfalfa.’ But what’s the question?”

  20

  Naturally, I called Janet every day. It meant finding my way to the small radio room, waiting my turn, and waiting while the radioman (with a thick and beautiful Scots bun) made contact. Then, finally, I could speak to her. I calculated afterward I spent a total of twelve hours in that little room.

  Janet’s memory was still largely out of commission, and each day I had to explain where I was and why. She always sounded cheerful, however, and insisted she was doing well. One day I called Paul Esserman instead, just to make sure that Janet knew what she was talking about. He assured me she was all right and I asked him to explain to her that I had used up my daily call on him.

  I also put my time to good use by writing a fifteenth Black Widowers story, “The Iron Gem,”241 onboard ship. I eventually sold it to EQMM, and it appeared in the July 1974 issue under the title “A Chip of the Black Stone.”

  21

  On June 28, we docked at the Canary Islands, and I got off the ship and walked around a bit. I didn’t take any tours largely because I have a besetting fear of somehow not getting back to the ship on time and having it leave without me. In fact, when we stopped off Dakar on July 1, I didn’t get off the ship at all. I could, however, see the coast from shipboard, and it was a strange feeling to know that I was gazing at Africa.