But I had not been around to advise, and the hearing came up that very night of the thirteenth. The six-foot-three football player, balancing himself precariously on his hind legs, pointed to the five-foot-two girl on crutches whose room he had invaded uninvited, and pleaded self-defense.

  The school, of course, did nothing. Robyn was infuriated by that and cast about for methods that would carry the matter higher, but now I was around to advise. I said, “Robyn, would you be satisfied if you got those boys expelled?”

  “Yes,” said she. “That’s what I want.”

  “Then, consider. If they’re expelled, the Boston College football team will probably lose games and the student body will consider it your fault and you’ll be hounded out of the school. Do you think the Boston College students will care about your knee when a winning football team is at stake? Just let your knee get better and forget it.”

  Robyn might be as fiery about injustice as I am but she could understand that two and two are four, and she quieted down.

  So when February 19 came, I had to celebrate Robyn’s birthday at long distance.

  Her birthday came, as it always did, during the Washington’s birthday week, when schools in Boston invariably closed down and all the students scattered. One of Robyn’s friends, Mary O’Conor, gave up her own vacation, however, and moved into Robyn’s room to help take care of her for that week.

  On Saturday, February 21, Janet and I drove to Boston and saw with our own eyes that Robyn was well, except for the knee, that she could indeed hobble about, and that she was not in worse condition than she said she was.

  As the nearest we could come to a birthday celebration, we took her and Mary O’Conor (a very pretty and shy young woman) to the same steak house where I had fed Robyn and her five roommates nearly five months before (Mary had been one of them).

  We stopped off to see Robyn the next day and then drove home.

  31

  But meanwhile, work continued. A deadline condemned me to produce a piece for National Geographic, one that dealt with an imaginary visit to a space settlement of the kind I had written about in “Good Taste” and “To Tell at a Glance.”

  I was a little nervous, since I had never written for the magazine before and since they were paying me $1.50 a word, a new high for me. I was anxious to be worth it and not certain I would be. I finished the article, which I called “A Visit to L-5,” on Robyn’s birthday.

  Fortunately, National Geographic was happy with it and it appeared in their July 1976 issue under the title “The Next Frontier?”

  43

  Isaac Asimov’s Science Fiction Magazine

  1

  I finished Familiar Poems, Annotated on February 26, 1976, and took it to Cathleen the next day. With that done, I traveled downtown to the offices of EQMM to hand in “The Family Man.” Joel Davis, the publisher, asked to see me.

  Joel is short, slim, good-looking, and always nattily dressed. He would see me occasionally when I was bringing in Black Widowers stories, usually when I was whooping it up with Eleanor and Connie.

  Davis Publications, under his leadership, was doing well, and was expanding. He published more than a score of magazines but, to begin with, he had only a single fiction magazine, Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine. When the competing Alfred Hitchcock’s Mystery Magazine was failing, however, Davis bought it and converted it into a profitable enterprise once more. It was better for the field, he reasoned, to have two strong magazines than one, for with a larger market, writers would be encouraged and the story output would gain in quantity and quality.

  He was looking for further areas of expansion, and one of his executives had taken his children to one of the “Star Trek” conventions just concluded. There the executive had been struck by the numbers and enthusiasm of the fans attending, and he suggested to Joel that a science-fiction magazine might do well.

  Joel thought it might be a good idea, but if he was to have a third magazine he wanted it to incorporate a well-known name into its title, as EQMM and AHMM did. The one science-fiction writer he knew was myself—so it came about that on February 26 he suggested to me the founding of a magazine to be called Isaac Asimov’s Science Fiction Magazine.

  I pointed out the impediments. I had been writing a nonfiction column for F & SF for seventeen years and I would on no account give that up. Joel said it would not be necessary to. Since the column was nonfiction, I could keep that. He would only ask me not to publish fiction in competing magazines.

  I said that the new magazine might hurt Ben Bova and Ed Ferman, who were particular friends of mine, but Joel said that another successful magazine would help the entire field.

  I said that my name in the title would offend science-fiction fans and writers, who might interpret it as arrogance on my part. He said that was ridiculous.

  I said I had no editorial expertise, no desire to be an editor, no time to be one. He said we would find an editor who would work along with me.

  I said I would think about it.

  I did. I asked both Ben Bova and Ed Ferman how they would react to a new successful magazine, and both told me it would help the field, using the same arguments that Joel had. I sounded out people on the use of my name in a magazine title, and no one, other than myself, seemed shocked.

  Since I remained frightened of the project there seemed nothing to do but be quiet, refrain from pushing, and hope that Joel would forget about it.

  2

  Two young women, who had met me casually at one of the “Star Trek” conventions, happened to share the same birthday. It occurred to one of them that a good birthday present for the other would be a luncheon with myself as guest. I let myself be talked into it.

  On March 5, 1976, therefore, I walked into a restaurant at noon and found them waiting for me and very relieved that I had not forgotten.

  We had a very animated luncheon and I put myself out to be charming and amusing, since both of the young women were attractive and obviously pleased with me. Finally, since the girls had ordered a birthday cake, the waiter brought one with great éclat and put it in front of me, assuming naturally that it was my birthday and that my young granddaughters were helping me celebrate.

  Whereupon I said, haughtily, “Waiter, place that cake in front of the girls. It is their birthday. I am the birthday present.”

  It was a pleasure to watch the waiter give the old-man-with-the-white-sideburns that look of sudden awed respect.

  3

  I was in Hershey, Pennsylvania, on March 12 to give a talk, and found the parking lot crowded. The teen-age boys who were acting as automobile ushers kept directing me farther and farther away from the lecture hall until I finally rebelled and drove my car back and parked it right at the front door.

  A fifteen-year-old boy tried to tell me that I was forbidden to park there, but I snarled at him that I was the speaker, and he shriveled before my anger. He tried to explain that he was only following instructions, but I brushed past him angrily, without listening.

  I then waited for speechtime and discovered that I would not be able to give it. I was feverish with remorse.

  I said to Janet, “Wait here one minute,” and dashed out to find the boy.

  “Listen,” I said, “I’m sorry. I should not have spoken roughly to you. You were doing your job and I was dead wrong. Please forgive me and I will move the car.”

  The boy looked surprised, but smiled and assured me it was all right and that my car could stay where it was and he would keep an eye on it. I went back inside feeling much better.

  Yet never since have I been able to forget that moment when I was nasty to an innocent kid. How much better it would have been for me if I had parked at the edge of the parking lot and walked the distance in the cold to get to the entrance.

  4

  Finally, one month late, Robyn came to New York on March 17. She was greatly improved, but still used a cane. With her was Mary O’Conor, who had never before been in New York, and whom, in return for her loyal help to Robyn, I was determined to show a good time.

  The next day, therefore (the first anniversary of our move into Park Ten), I took them to the top of the Empire State Building, something I had never before done, and arranged to have them take a bus tour of the city. That night Janet took them to a play at Lincoln Center. On the nineteenth, we let them roam the city on their own in the morning, and then took them to Radio City in the afternoon.

  We kept up a steady drumbeat of museums, zoos, and elaborate meals. Janet even took Mary to St. Patrick’s for Sunday-morning Mass. All through I kept stating firmly that it was a twenty-first birthday celebration, and by the time the girls left I had quite convinced myself that the month’s delay didn’t count.

  Meanwhile, I worked on How Did We Find Out About Nuclear Power?, the tenth book in the series, and took it to Walker on March 24.

  5

  I talked at Georgetown University in Washington, D.C., on the evening of March 25. Izzie and Annie Adler (our pals at Rensselaerville) had dinner with us that night, and after the talk they took us on an automobile tour of Washington.

  The next morning, Janet and I wandered through a neighborhood park. It was absolutely deserted and we had the delightful sensation of having unshackled ourselves, temporarily, from the world.

  On the way to the train that was to take us to Baltimore, where I was to give another talk, the taxi driver toured us through the cherry-blossom district where the blossoms, as it happened, had come out early and, apparently, just for us. It was the pleasantest trip to Washington that either of us had ever had.

  Yet something pleasanter took place shortly after I returned home. I received a letter from the president of Boston University, John R. Silber, a man whose dynamic personality makes him perhaps the most remarkable president the university has yet had. It went as follows:

  Dear Dr. Asimov,

  In the course of flying to Chicago on American Airlines recently, I read with pleasure and profit your interesting article in the March 1976 issue of American Way. I took some pride in thinking that you maintain a continuing relationship as an Associate Professor of Biochemistry at the Boston University School of Medicine.

  I wonder if I might ask you to assist me in communicating to the public the quality and stature of our School of Medicine and our University by indicating, when it is appropriate, your affiliation with Boston University. You will appreciate that the reputation of an institution is only as good as the reputation of the its faculty and student body. I believe that your many loyal readers might find it instructive to know of your relationship with the University.

  Your help will be greatly appreciated.

  /s/ John R. Silber

  On April 3, I answered, assuring him that I would co-operate to the full. And I rather luxuriated in the thought that this was my final and full vindication in that long-ago quarrel with Keefer, eighteen years before.

  6

  We were in a presidential election year and I, of course, favored the liberal Democrat who, this year, was Morris Udall. On April 6 I voted for him,280 but I was quite certain that he wouldn’t get the nomination. I was beginning to wonder if it might not be Jimmy Carter who would get it and labored to get myself to feel some enthusiasm for him.

  7

  Professor Dawson was going to be sixty-five on April 8, 1976, and that meant he would be retiring. On April 7, a cocktail party was being given in his honor, and Janet and I attended. She met him for the first time. He was thinner than he had been and his face was lined, but he was still my Professor Dawson.

  Twenty-eight years had now passed since I had received my Ph.D. under him, and I had now been a “doctor” for just half my life.

  8

  I finished Alpha Centauri on April 13, but there was little cause for celebration that day.

  I detected blood in the urine and thought at first I was having another kidney stone, but there was no pain, and the quantity of blood increased rapidly. I fled to Paul Esserman, who said there would have to be an examination to find the source of the blood, and that meant a cystoscopy.

  For two days, I was uncomfortably aware that the cause could conceivably be cancer of the bladder. On April 15, I was cystoscoped at University Hospital and, having firmly refused general anesthesia, I didn’t enjoy it at all.

  However, there was absolutely no sign of cancer, and it seemed to be just a little prostatic bleeding of no great significance—just something that tends to become more likely with age. I was sent on my way with a pat on the shoulder and a supply of a sulfa drug to take to prevent the complications of infection.

  As it happened, I was slated to be in Baltimore to attend a local science-fiction convention at which I was guest of honor. With my clean bill of health, I went to Baltimore on the sixteenth, but my stay there was considerably hampered by the fact that it took me a couple of days to recover from the cystoscopy. I hadn’t been so physically uncomfortable at a convention since the 1956 World Science Fiction convention in New York.

  9

  Joel Davis had by no means forgotten about Isaac Asimov’s Science Fiction Magazine. All my objections had been met and it remained to find an editor.

  That would not be easy. We would have to find someone knowledgeable in the field of science fiction and with editorial experience, yet someone who was not so well known that he would scorn to work on a magazine bearing someone else’s name. Furthermore, it would have to be someone with my taste in science fiction so that we could work together harmoniously.

  It occurred to me that George Scithers might be the man. He was a science-fiction fan of long standing (I had met him seventeen years before, when we had returned together from the Detroit convention of 1959), and he saw eye to eye with me. He had editorial experience, since he ran a small publishing house called Owlswyck Press.

  I consulted him on the matter, and on April 19 he said he would like to try the job. I arranged to have him see Joel, and the result was that George became editor of the magazine.

  10

  On April 25, 1976, I gave a talk at a temple in Syracuse, New York, and in the course of the question-and-answer session afterward, I had some harsh words to say about the Book of Deuteronomy. I don’t really think that had anything to do with what transpired afterward.

  At the conclusion, I talked in the lobby to various people who had been in the audience, and the lights were put out in the auditorium itself. Our coats were back there and Janet, fearing that I might hurt myself trying to get them in the dark, dashed back to run the errand herself.

  On her way back, laden with coats, she managed to stumble over some unguarded steps in the dark. She hurt one foot so badly she couldn’t stand.

  Fortunately, Jay Kay Klein and his wife, Doris, were in the audience. With their help we got Janet to a nearby hospital, where they X-rayed her foot, decided there were no breaks, and put her on crutches. (A later X ray in New York revealed that there was indeed a hairline fracture in one of the footbones, and she had to stay on crutches for six weeks.)

  Syracuse was only the start of the lecture tour, and we had to drive out to Jamestown, New York, in the westernmost corner of the state, so that I might talk at Jamestown Community College.

  That night I was suddenly struck by chills since I had, apparently, developed a drug reaction to the sulfa drug I was still taking. Had I told Janet I was having chills, she would have divined the cause and taken me off the pills. However, I dared not add to her troubles and, unaware of the cause, I continued to take the pills faithfully, and continued to get worse.

  By the morning of the twenty-seventh, I knew I was feverish, but I had to get to Cornell for the third talk of the tour, and since Janet couldn’t drive, I had to. I put a good face on it and tried to behave normally.

  I managed to get to Cornell where, as bad luck would have it, they threw the book at me. There were three interviews, a cocktail party, a dinner, the talk, and then no less than two receptions, since Carl Sagan wanted to give one at his house, and the students wanted to give one on the campus, and neither would give in. I had to settle matters by agreeing to go to both.

  On the morning of April 28, I drove back to New York, feeling worse than ever. We got back at 2:30 p.m. and I had just enough strength left to undress and fall into bed. Somehow I could no longer pretend that I was well, and I became semicomatose. I remember something poking at my mouth and found out later that it was a thermometer. The fever was high, of course, and a hobbling and panicky Janet managed to get me over to the hospital, where I was examined and where I was taken off the sulfa drug and put on Ampicillin.

  The next day I was back to normal and got to work. In fact, I was well enough to drive to Boston on May 2 and then to Rhode Island, giving a talk in both places.

  11

  May 7, 1976, was the official publication date of Murder at the ABA, only eleven months after I had begun to write it. We had, indeed, achieved the goal of books by the next convention.

  Doubleday wanted me to attend the convention as a way of promoting the book, but it was being held in Chicago, and with Janet on crutches and myself in the aftermath of two difficult trips, we just couldn’t. It was disappointing all around.

  12

  Rae Jeppson was still alive but she was finally forced to admit that she could no longer run the house in which she had lived alone since her husband’s death sixteen years before. Janet arranged to have full-time nurses in the house.