Robyn arrived on a visit on July 10. It was the first time she had seen our apartment at Park Ten and, unfortunately, considering the leak, it was not at its best.

  Robyn left on July 13, and it was after that that both the rains and the leak reached their peak of intensity. We had to abandon the bedroom altogether, take the bed apart, lift up the carpet, and sleep for four nights on the couch in my section of the apartment.

  It was not till July 22 that the management discovered and replaced the defective gasket in a pipe that could be reached only by breaking through the wall in the stairway leading up to our section of the roof.

  Despite all this, however, I was racing ahead with final copy of Murder at the ABA.

  18

  On July 18, 1975, I visited Steve Spielberg, a movie director, at his room in the Sherry-Netherland. He had done Jaws, a phenomenally successful picture, and now he planned to do another, involving flying saucers. He wanted me to work with him on it, but I didn’t really want to. The visual media are not my bag, really.274

  19

  We left for our fourth summer visit to the Institute of Man and Science on July 27. As we drove along I told Janet that anything could give me an idea and promised I would have a highway plot for a Black Widowers story before we got to the institute. It wasn’t five minutes before I noticed that the Exxon signs had the double “x” so designed as to resemble a tilted Cross of Lorraine, and that was all I needed.

  While at the Institute I wrote my twenty-fifth Black Widowers story, thus doing the first one toward a possible third volume. I called it “The Cross of Lorraine” and based some of it on the June session of the Dutch Treat Club at which the Amazing Randi had impressed me with his impromptu tricks at the dinner table.

  Fred Dannay took the story and it eventually appeared in the May 1976 EQMM.

  The high point, professionally, of this particular seminar came on July 30, when Jay Forrester of MIT came in to argue his belief in the necessity of a world consisting of small, self-sufficient communities. My own view, stated rather forcefully, was that this was no novelty. It had been tried numerous times in world history and there were even names for it. It was called “feudalism” and “the Dark Ages.”

  The real high points, though, were not professional. We had a steady membership at these seminars now. The same people came year after year. They knew us and each other. It was a kind of intense reunion; there were parties each night; the meals were loving bedlam. Then when (after only four days) separation time came, there were sadness and withdrawal symptoms.

  Janet always wept. She had become very fond, in particular, of a couple, Isidore and Annie Adler (he was a chemist at the University of Maryland), and she hated to say good-bye to them.

  20

  I finished Murder at the ABA on August 3. My diary notation for the day was:

  “I just finished Murder at the ABA in exactly two months, although I was off on trips for fifteen days all told, and I lost four more days writing three articles and a story—to say nothing of the anguish of two weeks of leaks.”

  I loved this particular book beyond any I had ever written—partly because it had been written so quickly and in so trouble-free a fashion, and partly because I liked the characters I had created, particularly Darius Just, Sarah Voskovek, and, of course, myself.

  I took in the manuscript on August 4.

  42

  Three Books for Each Year

  1

  I had not forgotten my promise to James Fixx that I would annotate a poem for Horizon. He had sent me a possible list of poems, including Kipling’s If and Stevenson’s My Shadow, but I had my own candidate.

  I wanted to annotate Kipling’s Recessional, for it had a wealth of biblical references. Furthermore, it was written at the time of the very peak success of the British Empire—at Queen Victoria’s Diamond Jubilee in 1897—yet it forecast the possible downfall of that Empire. Indeed, the downfall began two years later with the Boer War and continued to the complete disappearance of the Empire in half a century. There was therefore room for moralizing, too.

  I began “The Annotated Recessional” on August 6 and had it in Fixx’s hands two days later.

  I was very proud of it and was certain that Horizon would be enraptured by it. How wrong I was, for it turned out I had been under a crucial misapprehension. Fixx had been under the impression that my annotations were humorous ones, and he expected my “The Annotated Recessional” to be a burlesque.

  Not only was it serious, but also I wouldn’t for a moment consider anything else, so they returned the manuscript and the project was dead.

  2

  On August 18, I received my advance copy of Eyes on the Universe from Houghton Mifflin. It had a statistical importance, for it was my 165th book and I was fifty-five years old. I had now reached the point where I had published three books for each year of my life.

  And on August 20 (David’s twenty-fourth birthday), I received my advance copy of Lecherous Limericks.

  3

  Casting a damper on the pleasure these books aroused was the sad news concerning Rae Jeppson’s health. A medical examination had shown she had inoperable cancer and it looked as though her remaining life span could be measured only in months. Janet was plunged in grief.

  It had been only two weeks before that that Rae had helped celebrate Janet’s birthday. Rae had not seemed well then but we had no reason to think, at the time, that the feebleness was due to anything other than old age. Now it seemed she would never see another of her daughter’s birthdays.

  That was much on my mind on August 24, when Stanley and Ruth, along with Janet and I, visited the cemetery out on Long Island once again.

  4

  On August 27, I took in the manuscript of my twelfth collection of F & SF essays. I called it The Planet That Wasn’t, from the title of one of the essays included.

  Then two days later, on the twenty-ninth, I began a project that Beth Walker had been urging on me for many months. She had wanted a book on black holes. (“Think black holes,” she kept saying every time she saw me.) I had agreed but it wasn’t till now that a hole in my schedule had opened. I made use of the title that Beth herself had thought up: The Collapsing Universe.

  Dick Winslow, for whom I had done Life and Energy at Doubleday fourteen years before, had been with Walker for quite some time now, and he was to be my editor for this one.

  I did twenty-five thousand words of The Collapsing Universe in four days, before turning away in order to renew my depleted energies by doing some of The Golden Door.

  I also gave some thought to “The Annotated Recessional,” which Horizon had rejected. The intense pleasure I had experienced in doing it was not something I could lightly abandon.

  It occurred to me that I had a contract and advance from Doubleday for Asimov’s Biographical Encyclopedia of War and Battle, which had lain idle for two years now and which I did not honestly know when I could get to in the future. Once before, in connection with Life and Energy, I had revitalized dead contracts by doing an entirely new book under it. Why not again?

  If Doubleday would agree to shift the War and Battle advance to a new book, Familiar Poems, Annotated, I could do that quickly and with the greatest of pleasure.

  I could take in two annotated poems as samples. “The Annotated Recessional” I had already done, and on September 3, I annotated William Ernest Henley’s Invictus. I then took them in to Larry, who was sympathetic, of course, but who had to consult the editorial board.

  If I had been judicious I wouldn’t have done another stroke of work on the book till I heard of Doubleday’s decision, but I was caught. Although I did my best to work on The Collapsing Universe and The Golden Door, I found myself sneaking in bits of annotations. By the time I got the word, on September 16, that Doubleday had approved Familiar Poems, Annotated, and would do it on the War and Battle contract, I had completed the annotation of sixteen poems.

  5

  Unlikely markets were continuing to request science-fiction stories. High Fidelity magazine wanted a science-fiction story dealing with some aspect of sound in the future. On September 18, I wrote a story called “Marching In,”275 on the use of music to treat mental disease. It appeared in the May 1976 issue of that magazine.

  Bell Telephone magazine asked me to do a far-out story on communications, and on October 19, I did one called “Old-fashioned,”276 which was, in a way, a deliberate reprise of my first published story, “Marooned Off Vesta” thirty-seven years before. “Old-fashioned” appeared in the January-February 1976 Bell Telephone magazine.

  6

  I was in Boston on October 9 to give a talk at Suffolk University, and I seized the occasion to call Robyn (who was a college sophomore now) and arrange to take her to dinner.

  “Could you take a roommate, too, Dad?”

  “Of course, Robyn,” I said, expansively.

  I drove out to Boston College and there was Robyn with five roommates. She had reserved a table for seven at a fancy steakhouse.

  I recovered rapidly, however. After all, it meant I would be surrounded by no less than six lovely girls, each one of them twenty-one.

  I couldn’t resist a little kidding, though, “Girls,” I said, as we crossed the parking lot toward the restaurant door, “feeding you all is going to be expensive, so I hope you will confine yourself to mixed green salads and, perhaps, grapefruit for dessert.”

  “Dad,” said Robyn, scandalized, “don’t say things like that. You’ll inhibit them. They don’t understand your sense of humor.”

  How could she say that? I hadn’t been talking to the young women long, even while we were still back in the dormitory, before one of them interrupted my suave double-entendres and gushed, “Oh Dr. Asimov, you’re exactly like Robyn’s description of you.” I can imagine what she must have described. My odd sense of humor, certainly.

  Besides, they weren’t inhibited. Those young girls, who were probably accustomed to eating squash seeds and marshmallows for dinner, one and all ordered shrimp cocktails, rib roasts, and pecan pie. It was like feeding survivors of a shipwreck who had been drifting for three weeks at sea.

  7

  Graham Chedd was an English science writer who was working in America for WGBH, the educational TV channel in Boston. He had film of James Watson, Francis Crick, and others that dealt with the discovery of the double-helix structure of DNA. Graham had written commentary for the film, and the whole was to air on “Nova,” a highly esteemed science show.

  He wanted me to recite the commentary, and to do it at Cold Spring Harbor, where there were important biological research laboratories, of which Watson himself was now head. Graham promised it would take no more than two days.

  I drove there on October 14, and it did take two days—two days to recite not more than twenty minutes’ worth of talk.

  For the first time in my life I was an actor, reciting someone else’s words. Of course, they kept saying they wanted me to give the information in my own words, using the written commentary as a guide, but they didn’t really mean it. When I did it differently, they made me repeat.

  What’s more, they had a director who, even after I recited a passage letter-perfect, had me do it again in order to squeeze a different intonation or gesture out of me.

  Then, even after I had done it absolutely correctly, I would have to repeat it because the Sun had gone behind a cloud midway and thrown off the camera—or, what was just as bad, the Sun had come out from behind a cloud.

  Or else there were the sounds of hammering from a construction site nearby, or the sound of someone calling in the distance, or the sound of an automobile grating over the gravel in the nearby parking lot. It was almost impossible to keep the universe motionless and soundless for forty-five seconds at a time.

  And with every repetition of the same passage, it became more juiceless and insipid to me, more hateful to try to say.

  And it was hot. The temperature soared into the eighties both days even though it was the middle of October. To maintain the proper air of scientific gravity that the show required, I had to wear a somber, long-sleeved shirt, with a four-in-hand tie, and a full business suit, while all around me were technicians and executives in sports shirts open at the neck.

  I found the whole thing incredibly tedious, but in the end they had the show, and it has been shown over and over again on TV. I watched it on its first showing out of curiosity, but without pleasure.

  8

  After I had come back from Evansville four months before, I would have welcomed an end to long trips for a while, but on October 21, Janet and I took off for Dayton, Ohio.

  The reason for that was that Joe Patrouch, who had written that excellent book about me and my science fiction, wanted me to speak at the University of Dayton where he taught, and I found myself unable to resist.

  The talk took place on the evening of the twenty-second. Lennie Meisel, of my Navy Yard days, now lived in Dayton, so I met him at the talk, together with his sister, whom I recalled as an adolescent girl in Philadelphia.

  The next day we drove eastward to Wooster, Ohio, where another science-fiction friend had wanted me. He was Tom Clareson, who edited a scholarly magazine, Extrapolation, which dealt primarily with science fiction, though at such a rarefied level that it rarely had occasion to mention me.

  We reached home again on the twenty-fourth.

  9

  Shortly after I returned, I received a call from Larry Ashmead. “Are you sitting down, Isaac?” he asked.

  That was always a dreadful question, portending doom. I said in alarm, “What’s the matter, Larry?”

  He said, “I’ve got good news, but I’m afraid it’s bad news, in a way.”

  I didn’t need any more. I may have my faults, but slowness of apprehension is not among them. “Oh my goodness,” I said, “you’re leaving Doubleday.”

  And he was. He had put off telling me until there was no way of hiding it anymore. I was the last person to be told, and no rumor of the change had reached me. I suppose no one dared be the one to tell me.

  After he hung up, I remained in my chair, stricken, for a full hour, while Janet tiptoed around, wondering what was going to happen to me. After all, I hate losing any editor, but Larry wasn’t just any editor.

  From the time he was Dick Winslow’s assistant and had dealt with Life and Energy, we had been working together for fourteen years, and in all that time there hadn’t been one cross word between us, or a single failure to see eye to eye.

  I went to Doubleday on October 27 to say good-bye. Larry knew that my primary loyalty was to Doubleday as a corporate entity, that my relationship with it antedated my friendship with him, and that not even for Larry could I leave it. He never asked me to.

  Of course, I wasn’t losing him altogether. He had taken a job with Simon and Schuster, and I could still see him regularly and, eventually, even do a book for him. That only cushioned the loss, however; it didn’t cancel it.

  I had to choose a new editor, though. By now, I had been with Doubleday for a quarter of a century and had published sixty-one books with them, so I could have picked my editor and chosen one as high in the echelons as I wished.

  I didn’t, though. I know my own eccentricities, and I felt it would be much safer to have someone who knew them also.

  Cathleen Jordan had entered Doubleday as Larry’s secretary, but she had quickly revealed enough ability to become an editor. She, rather than Larry, had handled the nuts and bolts of Murder at the ABA, and I had liked working with her.

  I therefore asked if I might have Cathleen for my editor, and Doubleday was pleased at the choice. Oddly enough, Cathleen was, too. My first book for her was my fourth recycling of my early essays—Asimov on Numbers.

  10

  It was a difficult November. New York City was in a financial crisis and seemed on the edge of bankruptcy. I was laden down with New York City bonds and had to face the possibility that if the city actually went bankrupt, I would find myself semi-wiped out. Fortunately, the city held on, even though it got no sympathy from the rest of the nation, and cruel sneers from many (including some from the Nixon-appointed and Nixon-pardoning President of the United States).

  11

  Fred Dannay had an idea for the EQMM issue that would be on the newsstands at the time of the Bicentennial celebration. Why not run three stories: a contemporary story dealing with the Bicentennial; a historical story dealing with the 1876 Centennial; and a science-fiction story dealing with the 2076 Tricentennial?

  To handle the science fiction, he turned to me and I was sufficiently intrigued by the notion to agree. I spent the first two weeks of November writing “The Tercentenary Incident,”277 and, on November a 3, 1975, I took it in to the EQMM offices. It was a robot story and rather stiff science fiction in which I had made no concessions for the mystery audience. I was more than half afraid Fred Dannay would reject it, but he didn’t. He even paid me a bonus, and it appeared in the August 1976 EQMM.

  12

  Meanwhile, I had not stopped writing limericks just because I had published Lecherous Limericks. To be sure, the book was proving a disappointment, and I might well have abandoned the whole notion of limericks as unremunerative—but I don’t work for money alone.