That was embarrassing. There was nothing to do but write a special-delivery letter to him, explaining that I had sent the article prematurely and asking him to return it without even opening the envelope. I then put it out of my mind as an example of just one more of those fiascos with which a free-lancer’s life is filled.

  On May 17, I was off being interviewed on a daytime talk show on radio, and called Gertrude afterward for her opinion on how I sounded. She dutifully told me I sounded fine and then said, “There’s a $225 check that’s arrived.”

  I was puzzled. There was no check of that size due. “For what?” I said.

  “For you,” she said.

  “I mean, what have I sold?” I said pettishly.

  “Something called ‘Names! Names! Names!’ ”, she said.

  That was what I called my article on the names of elements. “It’s from Campbell?” I asked, thunderstruck.

  “Yes,” she said.

  I called him up at once to ask what had happened.

  He said he had gotten my letter before the manuscript arrived, but when it did, he couldn’t resist taking a look at it and it turned out much better than he had imagined it would be, so he bought it.

  Listening to that, I decided I had reached the stage where it was useless to consult editors in advance. More and more, I simply wrote what I pleased and then put it up to them.

  8

  I had been gathering references and making changes in the copy of the second edition of the textbook that had been sent me—one with the intervening blank pages. Then in early spring, Dick Hoover of Williams and Wilkins had written to say he would want the manuscript for the third edition by November.

  On May 2, Walker, Boyd, and I sat down for the first of our triple conferences over the third edition. It went pretty quickly. We had the book well organized now and had only to update. The big job would be the index, of course, for even minor changes threw the pagination out so that the index would have to be done from scratch.

  Walker and Boyd didn’t worry about that, though. They knew that I would take care of the index—and all of the other routine details.

  9

  Meanwhile, the final official confirmation of the cardiovascular research project had arrived on May 8.

  My excitement over it had died down considerably. Now that I had had months to think of it, the glamor had faded. I didn’t want to spend inordinate amounts of time and effort traveling about the country learning all there was to know about cardiovascular research. The twenty-five hundred dollars of the grant plus the royalties of the book could not possibly replace the money lost through my not being able to do science fiction in the interval.

  The trouble was that it was becoming apparent to me that time was the most valuable property I had, and that I could not afford to sell it cheaply. And it was becoming rapidly more valuable too. My writing earnings in 1956, thanks to the large Doubleday royalty and my sale of The Naked Sun to Campbell, had already reached the nine-thousand-dollar mark, and it was only early May.

  Yet I could not refuse to do the book. I had pushed for it hard enough, and to abandon it might make it seem that I was knuckling under to Keefer. It eventually occurred to me, therefore, that I ought to write two books. The first one would be a book on blood and all its ramifications, which I would call The Living River. That book I could do in my usual fashion, working from reference material.

  Then, for a sequel, so to speak, I could write the book on cardiovascular research. That, however, would require another grant, and I simply wouldn’t apply for another one.

  This was a little underhanded, but I rationalized that the first book would be valuable to the National Heart Institute and that I would write it as well as I could. But even so, I felt guilty, and I let a long time pass without starting the book or, indeed, doing anything at all on the grant. And, as the months passed, the whole thing weighed more and more heavily on my mind and conscience.

  10

  We had some minor snowfalls after the double whammo in March, one as late as April 8, giving us a White Passover, but by May, summer was on its way and no mistake. On May 17, I mowed the lawn, and that was the first time in my life I had ever used a lawnmower.

  There had been some hot days already by then, but the house remained quite cool. The main floor was not directly exposed to the sun after all, and there was complete four-way ventilation.

  The attic, however, which was my workroom, was the duplicate, as far as temperature was concerned, of the Somerville attic. This time it was bearable, since I could always set my typewriter up in the basement during heat waves and since I knew I would eventually purchase an air conditioner.

  11

  On May 20, 1956, Gertrude and I went out to dinner for a slightly belated birthday celebration for her. With us were the Soodaks, Morris and Edith. We had met Edith at Chester’s Zunbarg in 1948, and she could tell jokes in Yiddish very well. She was an intelligent and vivacious girl, and she married Morris not long after we had come to Boston. When they came to Boston as well, we became friends. Morris was a short fellow, who, like Edith, could tell jokes well. He was sometimes frenetic and overexcited, but then so was I.

  Edith’s birthday was also within a few days of this period, as was that of another woman present. It was therefore a triple birthday celebration for the four couples present altogether.

  It was Gertrude’s first birthday as a house owner (the house was in both our names, of course), and the feeling that the trauma of house-hunting had been lifted from our shoulders for a long time, perhaps forever, was a good one, and contributed to the feeling of festivity.

  In fact, so overwhelmed was I with the end-of-sorrow illusion, that when one of the other women (not Gertrude) said pessimistically that she felt “a mood” coming on I said, “For heaven’s sake, avoid that. Remember, ‘mood’ spelled backward is ‘doom.’ ” It snapped her right out of the mood.

  What I remember most about that meal is this: I had ordered Lobster Diavolo, and Gertrude, who had been studying the menu indecisively, said, “That sounds good. Bring me one, too.”

  Eventually, the waiter arrived with an enormous platter on which both orders for Lobster Diavolo rested in succulent and widespread glory. He put it proudly down in front of me, for it was a dinner fit for royalty, and the two of us, redoubted trenchermen though we were, would have trouble finishing it.

  And I said, calmly, “Well, that looks good. And where is my wife’s platter?”

  12

  I hadn’t wanted a mortgage in the first place, but since I got one to establish a credit rating, it seemed to me the credit rating would be even higher if I paid it off quickly. What I did, then, was to pay it out of current income, in installments as frequent and as large as I could manage. I was careful, however, not to touch our savings past the slash caused by the necessity of making the down payment on the house to begin with.

  Thus, on March 21, I used part of Campbell’s check for The Naked Sun to present a payment of twenty-seven hundred dollars to the bank.

  13

  Of course, we all have our little superstitions, and I tend to feel that any change in venue might affect my writing. Every time I move, it is always a relief to me to find that I can still write, even though my surroundings have changed.

  I shouldn’t have worried this time, though. By May 22, we had been there ten weeks and I had sold two articles and a poem parody, to say nothing of having revised a novel successfully for both Campbell and Brad. I had not, however, written and sold a complete work of fiction since I had moved into the house, and that made me a little uneasy.

  On May 22, then, I was delighted to get word from Larry Shaw that he was taking “Jokester,” which I had written earlier that month.

  “Jokester” had arisen out of a lunch I had had with Larry. I was telling him a number of jokes (I’m a good jokester), and he said, “Who makes up these jokes, Isaac?”

  “Who can say?” I said.

  Larry said, “Why don’t you write a science-fiction story about it?”

  So I did, and included six of my favorite short jokes as part of the story.

  And if that wasn’t enough, I went on to write what was (in my opinion) the best science-fiction story I ever wrote and (if you want my secret opinion) the best science-fiction story anyone ever wrote—much better than “Nightfall”—and I wrote it right there in the house in West Newton.

  It came about this way:

  On June 1, 1956, I received a request from Bob Lowndes for another story. I was already thinking about writing another story about Multivac (“Franchise,” which had been the first, had been written as a direct consequence of my introduction to Univac in the 1952 election).

  I had worked out ever greater developments of Multivac, and eventually I was bound to consider how far I could go; how far the human mind (or, anyway, my human mind) could reach.

  So as soon as I got Bob’s letter I sat down to write “The Last Question,” which was only forty-seven hundred words long, but in which I detailed the history of ten trillion years with respect to human beings, computers, and the universe. And, in the end—but no, you’ll have to read the story, if you haven’t already.

  I wrote the whole thing in two sittings, without a sentence’s hesitation. On June 4 I sent it off, and on June 11 I got the check from Lowndes—at four cents a word.

  I knew at the instant of writing it that I had become involved in something special. When I finished it, I said, in my diary, that it was “the computer story to end all computer stories, or, who knows, the science-fiction story to end all science-fiction stories.” Of course, it may well be that no one else agrees with me, but it was my opinion at the time, and it still is today.

  While I was writing and selling these stories, previously sold stories appeared. In the June 1956 Saint Detective Magazine, there appeared my story “What’s in a Name?”21 The magazine had altered the name of the story to the utterly undistinguished “Death of a Honey-Blonde” but I changed it back when it appeared in one of my collections. It was the first piece of fiction I had published that was not science fiction. It was a “straight” mystery, although its characters were chemists, its setting a chemistry department, and its solution depended upon a chemical gimmick. It was therefore borderline science fiction.

  The May 1956 Astounding contained “The Abnormality of Being Normal”;22 the July 1956, F & SF contained “The Dying Night,”23 another Wendell Urth story, and the August 1956 Infinity contained “Someday.”24

  14

  As of July 1, 1956, my salary was raised again, to sixty-five hundred dollars a year. I had not asked for the raise.

  15

  Fletcher Pratt died on June 10, 1956, at the age of fifty-nine. He had organized the war games I attended in the years just before I went to Philadelphia. He had also supervised my interview by the students at the Breadloaf Conference.

  I remember walking along a New York street with him some time in 1955, while he was telling me of a book he was planning on the history of cooking. The Chinese, he said, always suffered a shortage of fuel but never suffered a shortage of hands, so they chopped all their food and quick-fried. The medieval Europeans, however, with a shortage of labor but endless supplies of fuel, developed stews and casseroles that could be heated for hours without attention.

  Then we said good-bye, and I remember his smile as he waved his hand and turned away—and I never saw him again.

  16

  Robyn was a year and a quarter now and would still neither stand nor walk spontaneously, though she would do both if allowed to hold on and if urged forward.

  Then, on June 14, 1956, when Gertrude and I were in the kitchen, talking, Robyn walked in. She was a tiny little creature, with her long blond hair in a pageboy, and Gertrude said, “Hello, Robyn!”

  It took a couple of seconds for us to do the double-take and say, simultaneously, “You’re walking!”

  And so she was. She had finally decided it was time on that day, and she never went back to crawling. From then on, somehow, she wasn’t a baby anymore, but a little girl—blond-haired, blue-eyed, and beautiful.

  17

  June saw the temperature hit the high nineties for several days in a row, and I was forced to move my typewriter into the basement where, on June 15, I began another story for Lowndes called “Each an Explorer.” I finished it in three days.

  On June 17, I drove to New York with David, after some fear that I might not be able to do so because a small group of special technicians threatened a strike that would tie up the New York subway system. Fortunately, the danger passed.

  In the course of the trip, I submitted “Each an Explorer” to Lowndes, which he eventually took, and found that Campbell had accepted another article, “The Sea-Urchin and We,” on comparative biochemistry. I also discovered that I had sold “First Law” (which I had written fifteen years before for “Probability Zero”) to Fantastic Universe.

  On June 24, I started still a third story for Lowndes. This one, inspired by the near-miss subway strike, was called “Strikebreaker” and dealt with a situation where the strike of one man completely stops a world and threatens it with destruction. It was another one that went very quickly, and on the twenty-seventh I sent it to Lowndes. He took that one, too.

  I was also about to begin the fifth of my Paul French juveniles, Lucky Starr and the Moons of Jupiter. The whole rationale for the Paul French pseudonym had disappeared, since there wasn’t going to be any TV series. I made no effort to hide my identity, therefore, and in Lucky Starr and the Moons of Jupiter I even introduced the three laws of robotics, which was a dead giveaway to Paul French’s identity for even the most casual reader.

  I also dropped the “space ranger” bit, with the corny futuristic space shield Lucky Starr was supposed to wear. It never appeared after the second book in the series.

  Copies of the fourth book of the series, Lucky Starr and the Big Sun of Mercury, had reached me on March 16, 1956.

  The student-nurse textbook, Chemistry and Human Health, had come out even earlier in the year. Of all the books on my list, it is the one I least regard. There was no second edition, no second printing, virtually no sales. You couldn’t even say it dropped dead; it was stillborn.

  Copies of Inside the Atom reached me on March 14, 1956. It proved the most successful of the juvenile science books I wrote for Abelard-Schuman.

  In July, I wrote a series of three interrelated articles for Campbell, all on biochemistry: “Planets Have an Air About Them,” “The Unblind Workings of Chance,” and “The Trapping of the Sun.” Campbell took all three.

  I was distinctly growing even more interested in writing articles than in writing stories, and an idea came to me that I began putting into practice when Lillian McClintock and her husband visited Boston on July 21. I took them to lunch at Locke-Ober’s and there tried to talk them into doing a collection of my science articles in Astounding. I brought her my manuscripts to read.

  18

  Gertrude and I celebrated our fourteenth wedding anniversary on July 26, 1956, by going to a good restaurant with our neighbors, Mr. and Mrs. Harvey Pofcher.

  And for once our anniversary (usually celebrated in a sweatbath) came on a pleasant day. In fact, the summer of 1956, except for the mid-June heat wave, was extraordinarily pleasant. It was as though the weather gods knew we were no longer living in a top-floor apartment.

  The pleasant weather made it possible for me to continue writing stories at top speed. One of them was “Let’s Get Together,” which I based on a suggestion by Howard Bensusan, a graduate student at the medical school. He was a handsome and good-natured fellow who had fallen prey to polio and was on crutches permanently, though this did not affect his sunny disposition.

  19

  For the first time since David was born, Gertrude and I made plans to have a summer vacation together. This meant leaving the children with Mary and John Blugerman. They got in at 8:30 p.m. on the night of August 7, 1956, and we left the next day for “Timberland” in the Adirondacks.

  It was not an extremely exuberant vacation, but the surroundings were pleasant and there were some good points. The entertainer-in-chief was a young man named Martin Chamin, who did a creditable imitation of Jerry Lewis.

  The first night in our cabin I was disturbed by the low talking, tittering, and laughing of a group of young people just near enough to be bothersome and just far enough away to be undistinguishable. About 2 a.m. I wearily put on my pants and slippers and walked out the door toward them.

  They fell silent as they watched me approach and I said nothing. Neither did I particularly hasten my steps. Finally, when I was virtually on top of them, I peered at each one in an exaggeratedly myopic fashion and said, mildly, “I thought there was someone there.”

  They burst into relieved laughter (I suppose they had expected yelling, outraged screaming, followed by complaints to the management) and in great good humor broke up and went their separate ways. It was an example that more could be accomplished by a smile than by a frown, but I have the greatest difficulty in remembering that in moments of crisis and outrage.

  In any case, Martin Chamin was one of the group, and we were friends thereafter.

  I was sitting on the lawn one day at Timberland when a group of young men nearby began to talk about science fiction. I called out to them, “What authors do you like?”