7

  On November 3, Janet’s search for prospective apartments took her to Park Ten, an apartment house that was only five years old.

  We discovered that there would be an apartment on the top floor available in four months. Its size and design were ideal. Each one of us could have two rooms for our respective offices and have them far enough apart to avoid our interfering with each other. The apartment was also on the thirty-third floor and offered a remarkable panoramic view of all of Central Park—and we began making plans to move.

  (At this time, too, I began Asimov’s Guide to Food and Nutrition for Basic Books.)

  8

  November 17, 1974, was Rae Jeppson’s seventy-eighth birthday. That was the birthday my mother had not managed to reach. We drove to New Rochelle and, along with Chancy and Les, took her to lunch. She was as self-possessed and as mentally alert as ever, but was growing rather feeble.

  9

  On November 27, I passed a milestone when I wrote my two-hundredth F & SF essay. It was on the Martian surface as revealed by Mariner 9, and I called it “The Olympian Snows.”262 It appeared in the June 1975 issue of the magazine.

  I had not missed an issue in the sixteen years and eight months since the series had begun, and I enjoyed it more with each passing year. So eager was I to do my monthly essay that my inability to hold back had me routinely sending them in two months ahead of deadline.

  10

  Three days later, on November 50, there was an even more important milestone, for Janet and I celebrated the first anniversary of our marriage. We went back to the same restaurant at which we had had our wedding dinner, and with us we took the Balks, our witnesses.

  11

  The New York Times had become an annoyance to me. I had gotten a larger percentage of rejections from the Times than from any other outlet but one263 in thirty-five years. After they had rejected my article on the Statendam cruise two years before, I could hardly wait to have them ask me to do another article, so that I could turn them down and reverse the situation.

  It was with glee, therefore, that I received a call from Gerry Walker in mid-November. I readied myself for the genial refusal—and he fooled me completely.

  What he wanted was a science-fiction story. They even had the theme. They wanted me to write a story dealing with human beings vs. machines.

  I couldn’t refuse that. Not to take the chance of getting science fiction into the New York Times, even if the chance were a small one, would be to betray the field. I had to agree, after I had quizzed Gerry rather thoroughly and made certain he really meant a science-fiction story.

  I got to work on a story that dealt with a world run with unscrupulous efficiency by a giant computer, Multivac, and the efforts of a few free souls to liberate themselves from this its-for-your-own-good thralldom. One of them finally succeeded in subverting Multivac, and freedom was recaptured.

  I finished it on December 6, 1974, and then couldn’t sleep that night. I was dissatisfied with the story; something bothered me. And then I realized that the question was whether those who said they wanted freedom really wanted it.

  The first thing in the morning, I rewrote the last two paragraphs to introduce a question mark and to leave the matter unresolved. Let each reader decide for himself whether he wants freedom or security if he must choose one or the other.

  I sent it off on December 7, with a covering letter that said the last two paragraphs must not be fiddled with and waited for the inevitable rejection. It never came. The Times fooled me again by accepting the story, which they eventually named “The Life and Times of Multivac.”264

  Then, on December 9, I started The Golden Door, the fourth volume of my American history. It was to carry the story from the end of the Civil War to the end of World War I.

  12

  It was my turn (along with Lester, who had become my perennial partner in such things) to host the December meeting of the Trap Door Spiders. I busily counted the number of guests who arrived at the restaurant on December 15, 1974, for we had not used that particular restaurant before and I had guaranteed a minimum attendance of twelve.

  When the twelfth guest arrived, I felt greatly relieved. But then, just as we were sitting down at the table, Lionel Casson (an archaeologist who spent half the year in Italy) burst in. He was the thirteenth man at the table and it was Friday the thirteenth.

  Nothing happened as a result, naturally, but I did make up my mind to write a Black Widowers story based on that particular superstition. It was the twenty-second story of the series and I called it “Friday the Thirteenth.”265

  I wrote it on the last day of the year and in it I had a chance to discuss the calendar and its mechanics in some detail. Once again Fred Dannay rejected it as too esoteric, and once again I tried it on Ed Ferman with better luck. It appeared in the January 1976 issue of F & SF, and was the third Black Widowers story to appear in that magazine.

  13

  I had received a letter from a lawyer who represented Paul McCartney, who had once been a member of the Beatles singing group. On December 19, 1974, in consequence, I kept an appointment with McCartney.

  McCartney wanted to do a fantasy, and he wanted me to write a story out of which a screenplay could be prepared. He had the basic idea for the fantasy, which involved two sets of musical groups: a real one, and a group of extraterrestrial imposters. The real one would be in pursuit of the imposters and would eventually defeat the imposters despite the fact that the latter had strange supernormal powers.

  McCartney did not have any details on what it was the imposters were up to or how they could be stopped; he had only a snatch of dialog describing the moment when the real group realized they were being victimized by imposters.

  I agreed to do a treatment preliminary to writing the story and did. In the treatment I accounted for everything; what the imposters were doing, and why, and how it was that the real group, with all the odds against them, could manage to win out. It was a suspenseful, realistic, and moving idea, and I took it in rather proudly.

  I was paid for it, but McCartney didn’t want it. He went back to his one scrap of dialog, out of which he apparently couldn’t move, and wanted me to work with that. I bowed out politely and my career as a movie writer died a-borning—thank goodness.

  14

  Over Christmas, I wrote How Did We Find Out About Atoms? for Walker, the ninth in that series, and on December 29 I finally finished Eyes on the Universe, having worked on it, on and off, for a year and a half.

  15

  I finished 1974 with eleven books published—less than in either of the two previous years, but a respectable number nevertheless. The eleven were:

  148. Asimov on Astronomy (Doubleday)

  149. The Birth of the United States (Houghton Mifflin)

  150. Have You Seen These? (NESFA)

  151. Before the Golden Age (Doubleday)

  152. Our World in Space (New York Graphic)

  153. How Did We Find Out About Germs? (Walker)

  154. Asimov’s Annotated Paradise Lost (Doubleday)

  155. Tales of the Black Widowers (Doubleday)

  156. Earth: Our Crowded Spaceship (John Day)

  157. Asimov on Chemistry (Doubleday)

  158. How Did We Find Out About Vitamins? (Walker)

  16

  On January 2, 1975, I was fifty-five years old and we celebrated by dining with the del Reys.

  Another kind of birthday celebration came on January 5, when “The Life and Times of Multivac” ran in the magazine section of the New York Times. I was told that this was the first time in its history that the Times had run a piece of original fiction that they had directly commissioned.

  Certainly no story I had ever written had had so large a public on a single day. For the following week, it seemed to me that everyone I talked to made a point of telling me he had read the story.

  17

  On January 7, I was at Channel 13, being interviewed, along with Gerard O’Neill, a physics professor at Princeton University. O’Neill had come out some months earlier with a detailed suggestion on the building of space settlements and had converted me to the enthusiastic support of such things. He was nearly my age, but was tall, slim, and looked much younger.

  I was a little restless during the interview, for I had to get to the del Reys afterward and I was afraid that the natural delays inherent in television would make me late.

  Once it was over I made my good-byes as brief as courtesy could manage, then dashed out into the street, hailed a taxi just passing, tumbled in, and gave Lester’s address. The driver had seen me come tearing out of the Channel 13 building, and asked me what I was doing there.

  “Being interviewed,” I said, with businesslike conciseness.

  “You an actor?”

  “No. I’m a writer.”

  “I once wanted to be a writer,” said the cabbie, “but I never got around to it.”

  “Just as well,” I said, consolingly. “You can’t make a living as a writer.”

  The taxi driver said argumentatively, “Isaac Asimov does.”

  I had no answer.

  18

  Another “Star Trek” convention began on January 10 at the Americana, and Robyn wanted to attend. She arrived with a friend the day before and was afraid that they would not be able to see much, considering the crowds that would attend. I told them to state her name in a good, clear voice and see what happened.

  She got royal treatment; that’s what happened.

  The climax of the convention came on Sunday the twelfth, when William Shatner (Captain Kirk) spoke before a superenthusiastic audience of more than four thousand, who filled the seats and aisles to capacity. Shatner answered all questions with good humor and unpretentiousness and had everyone enthralled. When it was time to leave, he explained there was no way in which he could sign autographs for so huge a crowd and made ready to get off the stage.

  At this point, the young man who had organized the convention whispered in my ear, “Quick. Get on the stage and hold the audience so that Shatner can get away.”

  I said, “They’ll tear me limb from limb.”

  But he was physically pushing me onto the stage while one of his henchmen was busily announcing me.

  I started talking—babbling, rather. I waited for a mad, furious rush to the stage on the part of disappointed “Star Trek” fanatics, but it didn’t come. They seemed to be enjoying me, actually, and I was just beginning to relax and settle down when the organizer approached and whispered, “Shatner’s safely away. Get off, so we can get on with the program.” So I got off.

  Talk about being used!

  19

  I took Janet and Robyn to a party at the Siglers’ on the eleventh. (They were the organizers of the eclipse cruise.) Scott and Maria Carpenter were there, together with tons of Greek delicacies (Marcy was of Greek extraction), among which I wreaked havoc.

  Phil Sigler was enthusiastically in favor of arranging a one-man Broadway show featuring me, and refused to listen to anything I could say against it. For a while, I thought Phil would manage to bring it off and that the day would come when I would find myself stepping out onto the stage of a theater, night after night, trying to hold an audience all by myself.

  Fortunately, it never came to pass.

  20

  I had put together a collection of my little stories that had appeared in Boys’ Life and elsewhere, intending it to serve as a juvenile. The longest of the stories was “The Heavenly Host,” so I called the collection The Heavenly Host and Other Stories and presented them to Tom Aylesworth at Doubleday.

  Tom liked the stories and I assumed that I had made another sale and entered it in my books as such. On January 14, however, I was rather thunderstruck when I received the manuscript back again. The Doubleday publishing board had turned it down.

  It was only the third book that Doubleday had rejected out of the scores they had accepted (the other two rejections were The Death Dealers and Fantastic Voyage), and I had no reasonable complaint.

  I took the collection to Walker & Company at once, since they had for a long time been asking me for any science-fiction book that Doubleday didn’t want.

  The trouble was that Walker didn’t want a collection either, but, on reading the stories, they decided they did want “The Heavenly Host.”

  I said, “It’s only thirty-seven-hundred words long.”

  “I know,” said Beth. “Rewrite it and make it twice as long and we’ll have a nice little children’s Christmas book. Then we’ll put out a collection later on.”

  I hate rewriting, but I also hate not selling a book, so I agreed to do as she wished.

  21

  On January 16, I took part in a day-long conference with a group of would-be promoters who were thinking of developing a science-cruise business. Also there were Carl Sagan and George Abell, another astronomer with a winning personality and with a two-tone beard to add to his charm.

  The idea rose out of the very successful eclipse cruise of a year and a half before, and I was enthusiastic in a modified sort of way. I was willing to go on cruises, given ample warning so that I could adjust my schedule and provided I were not required to take airplanes or long overland trips to get to the ship.

  We all had dinner together and I helped enliven it with limericks. Ever since the trip back from Great Britain I had been constructing them on occasion and I had half a dozen doozies written down. One of those I constructed on this occasion was:

  A certain hard-working young hooker

  “Was such an enchanting good-looker,

  There were fights ’mongst the fuzz

  Over whose turn it was

  To pinch ’er, and frisk ’er, and book ’er.

  The reaction was sufficiently favorable to cause the first dim sensation of possible publication of a limerick book to stir within me.

  Nevertheless, the general success of the serious portion of the day’s conference was limited, for the scheme never came to fruition.

  22

  More and more, I was writing my science-fiction stories for periodicals that were completely outside the science-fiction field as such. It was an indication of how respectable science fiction had become. The outsiders came to me much of the time because, through the years, I had somehow become the most visible of the science-fiction writers.

  “The Life and Times of Multivac” in the New York Times was an example of this visibility, and one of the people who saw it was William Levinson, editor of Physicians World.

  In the same issue of the magazine section was an article entitled “Triage,” dealing with a system of choosing whom to save and whom to allow to die when conditions do not allow of saving all. It occurred to Levinson that the subject, which was of interest to physicians, could be treated in particularly imaginative fashion through the medium of science fiction. Since my name was staring at him on the same Contents page, he approached me.

  I was struck by the idea and agreed to try. I started the story, which I called “The Winnowing,” on January 19. Levinson accepted the story.

  On January 27, not long after “The Winnowing” had been successfully disposed of, Naomi Gordon appeared at the office again. She had been there months before in order to talk me into doing a story for her Bicentennial Man anthology, and now she was more urgent about it and more glowing about the tremendous plans she had for it.

  She made it plain that she was not suggesting I write a science-fiction story set in the matrix of the Bicentennial year of 1976, but that I could deal with anything at all that might be suggested by the phrase “Bicentennial Man.”

  It was clear by the nature of things that the anthology would have to be published in 1976, and there was little time for delay. She had brought the contracts with her and offered to pay me in advance if I would sign on the spot. What with a fresh sale of “The Winnowing” spurring me on, I could not resist. I agreed to do a story for the anthology and signed the contract.

  The deadline was April 1. That gave me two months, which I thought would be enough.

  23

  The AAAS was meeting in New York now and, on January 30, 1975, I gave a talk entitled “The Science-fiction Writer as Prophet” to an enthusiastic audience of three thousand attending the convention. I was told afterward that it was easily the best-attended and most enthusiastically received of any talk given during the convention.

  Nevertheless, when, a few days later, the New York Times ran an overview of the convention, and specifically discussed the talks in terms of popularity and attendance, including the series of talks to which mine belonged, no mention was made of me at all. The Times might publish my science fiction, but they still prissily ignored a talk that referred to the field when the discussion was of science.

  But then, early on the morning of Saturday, February 1, I attended a meeting of the National Organization of Non-Parents (NON). I had to give the keynote address to a group of less than a hundred attendees.

  Presiding was the founder of the organization, Ellen Peck, an attractive young woman with a stunning figure and a natural penchant for wearing clothes that set it off. As I rose to speak, I smiled at Ellen with natural appreciation and referred to her as a “sexual tornado.” Then, with mock caution, I added, “Of course, I don’t know this myself, but her husband has assured me of it.”

  I went on, further, to loosen up the early-morning audience by reciting a limerick I had just constructed: