She was feeling well the next morning, however, and for four days she and I went sight-seeing—Central Park, Metropolitan Museum of Art, NBC, and so on.

  At NBC, I had been working on and off, for some months, with a producer, Lucy Jarvis, writing a special on the cult of youth for television. I didn’t enjoy it any more than I had enjoyed doing “The Unseen World.”

  Naturally, when I did arrive at NBC for story conferences, I eased my unhappiness by engaging the various pretty young ladies in lighthearted banter, and my role was clearly that of the “sensuous dirty old man” concerning whom I had written.

  When I took Robyn to NBC on May 22, the young women in Lucy Jarvis’s office were horrified. There I was with my arm around a very young woman of spectacular appearance and with every evidence of extreme affection on my part—and the instant feeling was that I was flaunting every canon of good taste by bringing my latest starlet-conquest with me.

  There was an almost palpable explosion of relief when I introduced Robyn as my daughter.

  11

  Robyn left on May 24, and that night Lester and I co-hosted a Trap Door Spiders dinner at Lester’s place. Once again I did well. My guest was Martin Gardner, and he was just as good at captivating the membership as Ken Franklin had been the year before. Martin was voted in, and I was not backward at pointing out to the general membership the high quality of my guests.

  12

  The trip to Europe was now almost upon us, and the thought of long travels and of three weeks away from home was unsettling—so I wrote something to keep my mind off it. Specifically, it was my nineteenth Black Widowers story—a Christmas story called “Season’s Greetings.”

  Alas, it was rejected, and since its plot was such that there wasn’t the faintest hook on which to hang an F & SF submission, I retired it and saved it for the next collection, in which it eventually appeared.252

  13

  On May 30, 1974, we boarded the France. I was at sea for the fourth time in a year and a half—four different ships of four different nationalities, since the Statendam was Dutch, the Canberra Australian, the QE2 British, and the France, of course, French.

  There were strong rumors that the France was going to be decommissioned. It was indeed going to take an extra day in making its crossing in order to save on fuel, since the price of oil had gone up steeply since the episode of the embargo. This upset our itinerary somewhat and, for a while, led us to think the trip would be washed out altogether.

  And, indeed, on the last day of the crossing, the news became definite that the France would be decommissioned.

  It was a quiet crossing, consisting almost entirely of eating, as I recall. The dining room was so arranged that the passengers made an entrance, sweeping down the stairs, dressed as though each one were starring in a Hollywood musical. Janet grew restless since we were dressed as though we were eating at a neighborhood restaurant, but I told her that on the Canberra, I (with no wife to ride herd on me) had dressed casually at all times, wearing sneakers even to the captain’s functions.

  I spent some time writing my twentieth Black Widowers story, “The One and Only East.”253 This one Fred Dannay eventually took, and it appeared in the March 1975 issue of EQMM.

  14

  On June 5, 1974, we disembarked in Southampton and I was in England for the first time, since, as a three-year-old child, I passed through it on my way to the United States, fifty-one years before.

  Steve Odell of the Mensa organization was there waiting for us in a car hired for the occasion. He had worked out the itinerary of our sight-seeing tour and was to chauffeur us about (driving carefully on the left side of the road).

  He drove us through the New Forest, where wild ponies had foaled, so that Janet was ravished by the sight of colts here and there. She also enjoyed the sight of the immemorial beeches. We were driven to Salisbury, where we were placed in an excellent hotel, and went to see Salisbury Cathedral.

  I was instantly immersed in English history and I realized clearly that my youth, spent as it had been hip-deep in books written by English writers, had made me culturally an Englishman.

  I was determined to try all the English items of diet even though it killed me (for I had heard many stories of the poor quality of the English cuisine). I began with steak-and-kidney pie at the hotel in Salisbury and loved it. There was a rich “gattoh” (accent on the first syllable) for dessert. It tasted like good cake to me and it was quite a while before I grasped that a gattoh was the naturalized version of the French gateau.

  (On the whole, the food I ate in England was delightful from beginning to end as, of course, was the food I ate onboard ship. In the course of the trip I gained 10 pounds, my greatest departure from my stabilized weight of 180 in the 10 years since I had lost 30 pounds. Fortunately, I lost it in the month following my return and got back to 180 pounds.)

  Steve, at my request, even took me to a pub in Salisbury, where I cautiously ordered a sherry. I hoped I would see a game of darts, but no one played that evening.

  On the morning of June 6 (the thirtieth anniversary of D-Day), Steve drove us to Stonehenge, which was every bit as impressive as I thought it would be, especially early in the morning on a featureless plain with ourselves almost the only ones violating its ancient brooding.

  We went on to Avebury and then to Bath, where we were taken through the Roman ruins. We went out to the Forest of Dean at the Welsh border, where we stayed in a hotel that Queen Elizabeth I had once visited.

  It had been raining on and off all day, mild sprinkles that never lasted long and were not very annoying. Interspersed were sunshine and summer clouds. After dinner, Janet and I took a walk among the beeches of the forest and the bluebells on the ground, until another sprinkle drove us under one of the trees.

  The Sun was out even while it sprinkled, and a rainbow appeared in the eastern sky. Not one rainbow either, but two. For the first time in my life I saw both the primary and secondary bows, separated, as they should be, by a distance of ten degrees of arc. Between them, the sky was distinctly dark, so that, in effect, we saw a broad band of darkness crossing the eastern sky in a perfect semicircle, bounded on either side by a rainbow, with the red side of each bordering the darkness and the violet side fading into the blue.

  It lasted several minutes and we watched in perfect silence. I am not a visual person, but that penetrated—and deeply. Two months later, in fact, the incident inspired my 197th F & SF essay, “The Bridge of the Gods,”254 which eventually appeared in the March 1975 F & SF.

  On June 7, we drove to Gloucester, visited the cathedral there, then drove through charming little towns in the Cotswolds and admired the neat and orderly English countryside as much as we admired the polite and quiet people we met everywhere.

  We finally got to Stratford-on-Avon, where I filled myself with Shakespeare, sausage rolls, pork pies, and canal locks. That evening we saw King John at the Stratford theater.

  The next day we went down to Oxford, and that evening we saw a robin (the English robin and not our own thrush) who observed us for a long time and seemed to think us a curiosity. We also heard a nightingale, which was perched on a TV antenna.

  The next morning was Sunday the ninth, and we wandered about a nearly deserted Oxford on our own, peeping into the various colleges and listening to a cacophonous medley of church bells in a stubborn competition that seemed to go on forever.

  At one point we tiptoed into Trinity College and listened to the services that were going on. Without warning, I became aware of a plaque on the wall honoring the memory of Samuel J. Wilberforce, the bishop who had debated evolution with Thomas Henry Huxley and, in my excitement, I shattered the silence by exclaiming to Janet, “Look, there’s Soapy Sam.”

  Then we were taken to London, where my work would begin. We were staying at Brown’s, a wonderful old-fashioned London hotel, but the room was unsatisfactory and Janet was depressed.

  I urged her out into the streets of London for a pleasant walk and a chance of finding a good English dinner somewhere. Unfortunately, it was still Sunday and London was closed down. At Piccadilly Circus, I spied an open restaurant and we made for it—and it turned out to be an American-style pancake place.

  But we made a satisfactory meal of it and the next morning changed rooms.

  There followed some five days of endless interviews here and there, with surpassingly pleasant interludes. We had lunch on a boat anchored in the Thames, and Panther Books made a fuss over me. They told me I was their best-selling author.

  “Your best-selling science-fiction author?” I said in disbelief.

  “No,” they said, “our best-selling author of any kind.”

  On the evening of the tenth, Victor Serebriakoff was host to us at a dinner at his club. The next day I spoke at Kings College and wore my red jacket, explaining that I intended to join a fox hunt. The students let that go but were puzzled by and fascinated with my bolo tie, something I had taken to wearing when Janet explained that she found my clip-on bow ties ridiculous.

  I had shepherd’s pie for lunch at the college, and that afternoon there was an elaborate Doubleday reception in my honor. Present among others were science-fiction writers Jim Blish and John Brunner. We all had a fancy dinner at an Italian restaurant.

  Janet went off to do some sight-seeing while I was busy with my talks and interviews, visiting the gardens at Kew, for instance.

  On the morning of the twelfth, however, she and I did some sightseeing in combination, visiting the Royal Institution, which was only a block from Brown’s and where I saw Faraday memorabilia. We then went to Dickens’ house and even stopped off a bit at the British Museum.

  In the afternoon, I signed books for ninety minutes at London’s largest bookstore, with fans queuing up in good order for blocks.

  That evening I attended a science-fiction fan-club meeting at a bar, one that had the air of an impromptu convention. Ruth Kyle was there. She and Dave Kyle were living in England at that time, and Dave was recovering from an appendectomy.

  It made me conscious of the passage of time. Nineteen years before she had been Ruth Landis, the young girl who had helped make memorable the Cleveland convention at which I had been guest of honor. Now she was a plump matron who seemed completely out of place among the fans—while I was carrying on precisely as I had at Cleveland.

  On the thirteenth, Steve took me by train to Birmingham, where I signed books for three hours at four different bookshops. We stayed at an American-style hotel. I told Steve I could tell it was American-style because it was civilized enough to have washcloths. Steve said, in his reserved English manner, that Englishmen carried their own washcloths because they could never tell where strange washcloths had been. It put a new light on the matter.

  Finally, on Friday the fourteenth, I gave my talk to Mensa, the talk for which I had originally been asked to come to England. Dave Kyle was there, fresh from the hospital. So was Jay Kay Klein, who for twenty years had been attending almost every science-fiction convention of any importance with his camera, taking endless photographs. Arthur Clarke introduced me in a hilarious speech and set a level of quality I did my best to maintain. The proceedings were recorded and I believe Mensa made a respectable sum selling copies.

  On that occasion it was announced that I had been appointed one of the two international vice presidents of Mensa. It was a purely honorary position, but I worried about it, since I wasn’t sold on the idea of anything as artificial as IQ as a proper way of marking off a group of people who might, too easily, come to think of themselves as “superior.”

  As a direct result, I wrote my 195th F & SF essay, “Thinking About Thinking,”255 in which I carefully expressed my disenchantment with IQ tests. It appeared in the January 1975 F & SF, and I rather thought that its appearance would lead to my being drummed out of Mensa, but nothing happened.

  On Saturday, June 15, we were on our own, having said good-bye to Steve Odell the evening before after nine days of constant association.

  We decided to visit Westminster Abbey, but between sleeping later than we had planned, and deciding to walk rather than take a taxi, we managed to get to a large boulevard along which a procession of cavalry, with the men in red uniform and plumed hats, riding gallantly on beautiful horses,256 were passing by. It was a celebration of the Queen’s birthday and suddenly there came an open carriage, and Elizabeth II, plainly visible and recognizable, came by waving to us and, presumably, to the other people watching. That was an utterly unplanned bit of sight-seeing.

  We then got to Westminster Abbey and, moving about unguided, we found the graves of Newton, Rutherford, Darwin, Faraday, and Maxwell in a cluster. They were five of the ten scientists I had listed as the all-time greatest in my article “The Isaac Winners,”257 which had appeared in the July 1963 F & SF.

  That evening we had a farewell dinner at Simpson’s with Victor, at which I ate a saddle of mutton and a treacle tart, and then we saw Pygmalion with Diana Rigg (whom I adored in the TV show “The Avengers”), and we loved it. Victor took us backstage and we got to meet Miss Rigg, who was wearing a dressing gown with, clearly, nothing underneath it.

  And that was it. On the morning of Sunday, June 16, we took the train to Southampton and boarded the QE2 for the journey back to the United States.

  15

  We enjoyed the QE2 even more than we had the France. We ate at the Queen’s Grill, the poshest of its restaurants, and were better fed than we ever had been in our lives. The gods on Olympus can keep their ambrosia; I will take the chocolate soufflés in the Queen’s Grill.

  The trip west was even quieter than the trip east had been. At one of the dinners, when the neighboring tables were all stiff and silent, and I was looking out at the ocean, I constructed a limerick and, on impulse, recited it. I said:

  There was a young girl of Decatur

  Who went out to sea on a freighter.

  She was screwed by the Master,

  An utter disaster.

  But the crew all made up for it later.

  Everyone laughed, and the reserve broke down at once. I was delighted and wrote down the limerick. Thereafter, I began making it a practice to construct limericks whenever I was trapped in company and bored, and from then on I always wrote them down.

  Finally, on Friday, June 21, we were back in New York and at our apartment, after twenty-three days’ absence. The trip to Great Britain had been a smashing success in every way.

  In fact, the only irritation of the trip was the absence of Watergate material. Ship’s news and the English newspapers seemed to find it completely unimportant, and I had the terrible feeling that it had suddenly vanished. It was with great relief that, on my return, I discovered that Nixon’s troubles had continued to mount steadily.

  16

  Richard Repanes, Marcia’s younger son, graduated from high school on June 25. The entire family came to Manhattan afterward and we treated them to dinner.

  Additional family meetings came on the twenty-eighth, when Janet and I drove out to visit Stanley and Ruth so that we could all attend a showing of “The Last Question” at the Vanderbilt Planetarium on Long Island. It was my third watching, since I had seen it first in Rochester and later on in Philadelphia.

  We stayed over at Stanley’s house that night. When I found I was having trouble falling asleep in a strange bed, I found Treasure Island in the bookcase and began to read it as a possible soporific. No chance. I stayed awake all night and finished it.

  17

  Ben Bova had finally achieved his divorce also and, while we were off in England, he and Barbara were married. On July 5, the four of us celebrated with a dinner at Luchow’s.

  18

  On July 14, we went to Rensselaerville for our third year, and again it went off perfectly. On July 18, we were back in New York, and I did the last bit of Our Federal Union, finishing it on the twenty-first.

  That meant I immediately began How Did We Find Out About Energy? for Walker.

  19

  On July 24, 1974, I was interviewed at CBS and spoke solemnly and seriously of the problems of overpopulation, energy depletion, pollution, and so on. When the interview was over, the interviewer, putting away his recording equipment, asked me why, if everything was as I said, society was doing nothing about it.

  I said, “Everyone has certain short-term goals, and if these are met, each person is satisfied and refuses to worry about long-term survival. Even I myself, for instance, have my short-term goals. If some all-powerful genie were to offer to wave a wand and solve all the world’s problems, but only on condition that Nixon get away with it—I would hesitate, because right now the most important thing in the world to me is the saving of the American system of government through the impeachment and conviction of the scoundrel in the White House.”

  At this point, a young woman entered and said, “I heard what you just said, Dr. Asimov, and I want you to know that the Supreme Court has just voted 8 to 0 against Nixon. He will have to deliver the tapes.”

  I was utterly jubilant, completely forgetting my predictions of universal disaster within a generation.

  It seemed to me the absolute end for Nixon. The House Judiciary Committee was debating the impeachment resolution and would certainly approve it, and the House as a whole would certainly approve it, too.

  Then with the tapes in the hands of the prosecution I felt no doubt at all that there would be ample evidence of Nixon’s criminal behavior and that the Senate would therefore vote to convict him.