As she said that, it was announced from the stage that, unfortunately, Kohoutek was in his cabin, immobilized by seasickness. Janet, unable to bear the disappointed hum that swept over the audience, elbowed me sharply in the ribs and said, “Get up and volunteer to give a talk.”

  I did, and found myself on stage in thirty seconds, forced to improvise a talk out of nothing. I said to Janet afterward, “But you had just told me how wonderful it was that I didn’t have to give a talk.”

  “Volunteering one is different,” she said.

  18

  Abelard-Schuman was no longer a separate entity, but had merged with larger firms. Frances Schwartz was still running it, however, and she asked me to do a book that UNICEF (the children-oriented agency sponsored by the United Nations) was interested in. She wanted a book on population for youngsters.

  She said, rather plaintively, “As soon as I began working for Abelard-Schuman, you stopped writing for us.”

  That had been only a coincidence, of course, but it was one that smote my conscience. Besides, population was one subject that was particularly dear to my heart. I agreed, therefore, and on December 14 I began a book that was eventually entitled Earth: Our Crowded Spaceship and that was to appear under the imprint of John Day, now a sister firm of Abelard-Schuman.

  About this time also I wrote my eighteenth Black Widowers story, “No Smoking,”248 which eventually appeared in the December 1974 EQMM under the title “Confessions of an American Cigarette Smoker.”

  And even though Comet Kohoutek had fizzled, it had aroused enough interest in comets generally for Walker to want How Did We Find Out About Comets?, which I began on December 27, and which was the seventh of that series.

  In fact, the only flaw in the generally happy first month of our marriage was Robyn’s continued indisposition. Although she was no longer seriously ill, she was by no means well enough to be risked in Vermont, and she was kept at home waiting for the tonsillectomy that would follow upon the doctor’s go-ahead signal. Then we could hope for a permanent recovery.

  Every week that passed, though, made it clearer that her freshman year at college was a washout and would have to be repeated.

  19

  In the year 1973, I published fifteen books again, equaling the 1972 mark. They were:

  133. How Did We Find Out the Earth Is Round? (Walker)

  134. Comets and Meteors (Follett)

  135. The Sun (Follett)

  136. How Did We Find Out About Electricity? (Walker)

  137. The Shaping of North America (Houghton Mifflin)

  138. Today and Tomorrow and— (Doubleday)

  139. Jupiter, the Largest Planet (Lothrop)

  140. Ginn Science Program—Advanced Level A (Ginn)

  141. Ginn Science Program—Advanced Level B (Ginn)

  142. How Did We Find Out About Numbers? (Walker)

  143. Please Explain (Houghton Mifflin)

  144. The Tragedy of the Moon (Doubleday)

  145. How Did We Find Out About Dinosaurs? (Walker)

  146. The Best of Isaac Asimov (Sphere)

  147. Nebula Award Stories Eight (Harper)

  20

  I had a quiet celebration of my fifty-fourth birthday on January 2, 1974, and the next day dared the gas crisis by driving to Middletown, New York, to give a couple of talks. For once it was not the snow I worried about but the gasoline. There was, in fact, light snow, not enough to be bothersome, and by stopping wherever we could for whatever gasoline we could get, we managed.

  And on January 4, I attended my second Baker Street Irregulars dinner, this time as a full member.

  21

  On January 9, 1974, Robyn had her tonsillectomy. All was well at first, but then her white-cell count began to drop and once again the fever returned, so that there was a replay of the terror of November.

  No, not quite. This time at least, we knew it wasn’t leukemia, although no one could offer a real alternative. The best guess was that her white cells had developed a sensitivity to some chemicals (including the tetracyclines) and she had better be cautious in this respect. In any case, she was home by the sixteenth.

  It was the last straw as far as her freshman year was concerned. Nor did Windham College in any way co-operate with her. Despite several requests on her part and several promises on the part of the faculty, there was no attempt to make it possible for her to work on her courses at home. It seemed clear to me that once Windham College collected tuition, they were no longer interested in the student beyond that.

  It became plain to me, then, that not only would Robyn have to repeat her freshman year, but also it would have to be at some college more reasonably concerned for its students than Windham was. For my own part, I urged Robyn to attend some college closer to home so that in case of sudden health problems she not be forced to rely on callous strangers.

  It was at this time I wrote an article about Robyn for Seventeen. The editor, Ray Robinson, told me that they had published articles about the effect of divorce on daughters, but they wanted one on the effect of divorce on fathers of daughters.

  I was willing to comply, although I warned Ray I would have to get Robyn’s approval of the finished product before I could submit it. I wrote “To My Daughter,” therefore, on January 9, the day of her tonsillectomy, and I must admit it was a rather sentimental piece, for Robyn was always (as far as I was concerned) just about a perfect daughter.

  After she had recovered from the immediate ill effects of the operation and was at home, I sent a copy to her. She called me up on the nineteenth to say that it would be all right to publish it.

  Well, I thought so, and she thought so, but Ray didn’t think so—he rejected it. (Fortunately I had warned Robyn of that possibility.) Ray said he wanted one to reflect the anguish of the father a bit more, but there was nothing I could do about it. Through the separation and the divorce my relationship with Robyn remained perfectly loving, and whatever anguish there was did not involve her.

  I put the article to one side and eventually seized the opportunity to publish it in one of my collections.249

  22

  Galaxy had a new editor, Jim Baen. He was a young man whom I had never, to my knowledge, met. He called me on January 23 to ask if I had any science-fiction stories I could submit to him.

  “Sorry,” I said, “I don’t have anything.” Then I remembered. “I do have something,” I said (thinking of “Stranger in Paradise”), “but you wouldn’t want it.”

  “Why won’t I want it?”

  “Because it’s been rejected by Judy-Lynn del Rey and by Ben Bova, so I assume it is a stinker.”

  “May I see it and judge for myself?”

  That was only fair, so I sent it to him and the next day he called and said he wanted it.

  “Are you sure?” I asked, fatuously.

  “Of course I’m sure,” he said, and it ran in the June 1974 issue of If.250

  I worried, on and off, that Jim, in his eagerness to have an Asimov story, had taken a bad one, but later in the year my old Futurian friend, Don Wollheim, chose it for his Best of the Year anthology, and I knew that Don wouldn’t take a bad Asimov story for the sake of the name.

  23

  I felt very much a living monument when I found that Joseph Patrouch, ]r., of the University of Dayton, had written a book called The Science Fiction of Isaac Asimov. (He had given a three-point course at the university with that precise title, too.)

  Patrouch had sent sample chapters to Larry Ashmead, who had liked them and who had asked me if I would mind if Doubleday did a book of that nature. I said that Doubleday had my full permission to go ahead and that the book did not need to be a panegyric; if there was negative criticism, that was all right, and there was no necessity to show me the manuscript in advance.

  Larry disregarded that. On January 28, he sent me the manuscript and I read it, at a sitting, in four hours, with the phone off the hook. No manuscript ever absorbed me more, not even one of my own. Patrouch was not completely favorable, but even when he turned thumbs down, he did so reasonably.

  I returned the manuscript to Larry, correcting only one date as a factual error and making not one other request for modification.

  24

  I attended a “Star Trek” convention on the February 16–17 weekend, and something like fourteen thousand fans attended! I was incredibly lionized. It was impossible for me to move two steps in any direction without being halted for autographs.

  It made me feel so all-powerful that at one point I tried to jump up onstage in one agile leap. But I was fifty-four, not twenty-four; I missed, fell down, and banged myself up a bit. I then had to limp up the stairs with difficulty. It taught me a much-needed lesson.

  25

  Robyn was nineteen years old on February 19, 1974, and her health was at last quite back to normal. In fact, she had gotten herself some sort of temporary job that involved considerable driving.

  She always had the capacity to find temporary jobs when she was idle, and always had the willingness to work at them.

  39

  Great Britain

  1

  It was definite by now that we were going to Great Britain in June, and on February 23, we spent the evening at Marvin Grosswirth’s talking to Victor Serebriakoff about it.

  I firmly rejected his plan of having Mensa pay all my expenses. For one thing, I wanted to go first class, and I didn’t want to be inhibited in my enjoyment thereof by worry over British Mensa’s financial welfare. I was willing to have Mensa arrange an itinerary for us and supply us with a car and chauffeur, provided we paid all expenses, including that of the car and chauffeur. Victor looked puzzled, but he agreed.

  2

  On February 28, I went to Boston to attend Boskone as the guest of honor. For the first time, Janet accompanied me to Boston. She was my wife; why not? And so my Boston friends met Janet now.

  At this time David was in the hospital briefly with some sort of viral infection, and I seized the opportunity to visit him. In the preceding two years, it seemed everyone had been taking turns at the hospital: I once, David once, Robyn twice, Janet twice.

  3

  On March 15, I wrote my 193rd F & SF essay, “Skewered!”251 It was on a mathematical subject that always elicited considerable mail, so that I would have written more of them if I only knew more math. Since it was a seventeenth essay, it meant I could put together another collection, my eleventh, which I called Of Matters Great and Small.

  4

  On April 2, we left for a lecture tour westward. Our first stop was California, Pennsylvania, not far from Pittsburgh. It was a small town that had apparently been founded by a bunch of Forty-niners heading westward under the doughty banner of “California or bust.” When they busted in western Pennsylvania, they founded a town named California and turned defeat into victory.

  When I parked my car there and got out, a young man passing on a bicycle called out, “Hello, Dr. Asimov.”

  I said, “How do you know I’m Dr. Asimov?”

  He said, “The newspaper said you’d be coming in today and I don’t figure there would be two strangers in town.” That was keen logic.

  I gave my talk there on the evening of April 3, and that night we were kept awake by a terrific thunderstorm in which the lightning flashed continuously and the sky was a steady rumble while the rain came down as though it couldn’t wait to flood us.

  We were fortunate it was no worse. There were tornadoes not far to the west, and one of them destroyed Xenia, Ohio.

  5

  I had done several articles for Family Weekly and they were putting on a fancy luncheon at the Plaza for April 21, and I was invited. I felt it would be worthwhile for me to go and yet I didn’t think I would enjoy being trapped with hundreds of strangers, so I asked Janet to come with me. She, ever obliging, did so.

  Once there, it proved considerably more interesting than I thought, for there were well-known television personalities included in the crowd. I even met Roy Fisher of the World Book Year Book days a decade earlier. Joyce Brothers, the television psychologist, was at our table.

  Once settled at the table, and finding some of our companions were congenial, I looked at the booklet before me and realized it was an awards luncheon, and that we were sitting right near one end of the head table at which, presumably, the awards winners were to be found.

  I looked up curiously to see who they were and there, at our end of the table, not six feet from where we were sitting, was Alan Alda, the star of the M*A*S*H show.

  As it happened, that was Janet’s favorite show and she was very deeply enamored of Alan Alda. I wanted to tell her who was sitting so near her before she could find out for herself and, of course, I found I had lost my voice. I just yammered and finally managed to say, “Aldal Alda!” and pointed.

  Janet looked up, puzzled, and her eyes widened. She said, excitedly, “It’s Alan Alda.”

  “You want his autograph?”

  “You’ll embarrass me.”

  “Of course I won’t.” I bounced up. “Mr. Alda,” I said, “I’m Isaac Asimov.”

  He said, “Why aren’t you at home writing a book?” so I knew he knew who I was.

  “It’s my wife’s fault,” I said. “She’s deeply in love with you and she’s sitting right there and wants your autograph.”

  Janet colored a pretty beet-red, and Alan Alda said, “Poor woman,” and signed.

  Then Janet said I had embarrassed her. How, for goodness sake?

  6

  Robyn agreed with me about starting fresh in a school nearer home, and had no desire to return to Windham, which, in any case, she had disliked extremely.

  The choice lay between Boston College and Boston University. I favored Boston University myself—my own school—but Robyn said that Boston College was closer to home, smaller, in better surroundings, and seemed more comfortable. —So Boston College it was.

  7

  There was a dinner at the Regency Hotel (where the Dutch Treat Club and the Baker Street Irregulars met) on May 2, one that was devoted to environmental causes. Barry Commoner was one of the speakers, but I remembered his article in Science thirteen years before, and took care not to get close enough to be introduced.

  The dinner was excellent, but after it was over, two cigars and three cigarettes were lit in my vicinity and I simply got up and left. I wrote a letter afterward to the man who had invited me and explained that I thought human beings who considered themselves committed to the preservation of the environment should not pollute and, far more important, should not pollute the air of their nonsmoking neighbors with the stench of carcinogenic smoke.

  I got no answer.

  8

  I finally finished The Ends of the Earth on May 7, after sixteen months of very much on-and-off work on it, and delivered it to Mac Talley.

  9

  Watergate kept heating up steadily, and a constant diet of it for over a year had not sated me. Nixon sank ever deeper into a quagmire of his own making, and his endless retreats struck me as somehow similar to the steady decline of Hitler in the last two years of World War II.

  I was looking forward to his impeachment, conviction, and removal from office as a salutary lesson to all future Presidents to take seriously and honestly their oath to uphold the Constitution. Consequently, I could scarcely bear to miss any news broadcast.

  On May 10, 1974, when I was returning from a dinner in New Jersey, I hastened, in order to get home before midnight and the last news broadcast of the day. Walking into the apartment at a quarter of midnight, I turned on the radio at once so that I would not forget.

  My attention was caught at once by the statements being made by whoever it was on the program in progress. I listened for a while and called out, “Janet, there’s a joker here spouting my ideas.”

  Janet came in, listened two seconds, and said, “It’s you, Isaac.”

  And so it was. About a month earlier I had taped an interview with Casper Citron and had forgotten about it. It was running now and as usual I didn’t recognize my own voice when unprepared for it.

  10

  I had been invited to give the commencement address at Boston University School of Medicine. There was no fee, but that didn’t bother me. It was the most spectacular demonstration yet that I had been right in my quarrel with Keefer (seventeen years in the past) and that the school now recognized my value.

  We drove to Boston on May 18, and had dinner with Austin Olney. David joined us and now met Janet for the first time. He was no longer living at home, but had a small room of his own in a rather rundown section and was looking about for better quarters. It seemed an appropriate step toward independence, and I approved.

  The next day I gave my commencement talk. It was the first med school commencement I had attended since the one, thirteen years before, at which John Jeppson had graduated.

  We drove back to New York, taking Robyn with us. Once back, I was anxious to begin making the rounds of New York with her, but on the twentieth she was tired and perhaps a little feverish and I was paralyzed with tenor that she might be having a relapse.

  She lay on the couch in the living room reading, and I sat at the dining-room table, unwilling to let her out of my sight—so unwilling, in fact, that I wouldn’t use my typewriter but, using pen-and-ink, wrote a science-fiction story that Boys’ Life had requested. The story was “The Heavenly Host,” and it appeared in the December 1974 issue of Boys’ Life.