On May 9, 1976, which was Mother’s Day, we took Rae to a restaurant for luncheon.281 After lunch, we toured all the parts of the area that Rae loved—flower beds, lake shores, and so on. It was a gorgeous day and we let Rae call the shots, so that she filled her eyes with all the lovely sights of home that, we felt, she would never see again.

  Then, when we could see she was tired, we took her back to the house, within which she was increasingly bedridden thereafter.

  13

  John Minahan had by now left American Way for what he felt was a better job on the West Coast. I had written twenty-one essays for him.

  Taking over was his second in command, Diana Jones, a very sweet and pretty young woman, with whom I had no trouble. My essays went on with no perceptible jog.

  14

  As a result of the “Nova” program I had taped at Cold Spring Harbor the previous October, I had received an invitation to speak at the laboratories there.

  The invitation had originally been for February, but I agreed only on condition that the talk be delayed till May so that it would be possible for Janet to do some nature sight-seeing.

  Alas, when May came, Janet was on crutches, but we had to go through with it, of course. We drove out to Cold Spring Harbor on May 15 and, crutches and all, Janet managed to negotiate Sagamore Hill and immerse herself in Theodore Roosevelt, whose home it had been. The next morning we visited an arboretum, which was gorgeous, and toured the laboratories under the guidance of James Watson.

  It was all far better than we had a right to expect and, of course, it was all due to Janet, who gamely maneuvered her crutches and never allowed herself to grow sulky and self-pitying at the difficulty.

  She was progressing, though, and the crutches were becoming less and less necessary. On May 22, she went to her mother’s with me and, for the first time since the accident, she did the driving.

  15

  I let myself be persuaded to read some of my stories at the Brooklyn Museum on May 23 for a token fee. It was my first time reading, rather than speaking, and it had its pleasures, but I was dreadfully conscious of how far short of Harlan Ellison I fell as a reader.

  16

  It was college-commencement season. Over the Memorial Day weekend, I spoke at commencements at Drexel University and Ursinus College.

  In Boston, David, who had taken a special course as a computer operator, had accepted a temporary job in the field to fill in for a hospitalized employee and had apparently given satisfaction.

  As for Robyn, who had completely recovered from her knee injury, she had successfully completed her sophomore year as well.

  Two more commencements came at Ramapo College on June 6 and at Kean College on June 10. It was the first time I had given four commencement addresses in a single season.

  17

  Janet was off the crutches now and walking just about normally. She did not come with me to the last two commencements, for she was now at Rae’s bedside almost continually.

  Meanwhile, I wrote a science-fiction story for an industrial firm that manufactured lasers. They wanted to publish it as a booklet that might serve as an interesting think-piece for its customers, and I called it “Think.”

  18

  When I came back from Kean College on June 10, I found a message from Janet waiting for me. Her mother had died at 4 p.m.

  Janet had been with her all that last day, sitting at her bedside for six hours. As Janet sensed the end approaching, she said, “I love you, Mother.” Those were the last words Rae heard.

  Rae stirred and whispered, “I love you, too,” and those were the last words she spoke. A short while after, with Janet holding her hand, life peacefully ebbed away.

  She died five months short of her eightieth birthday.

  On June 15, we attended a memorial service for her. John and Maureen Jeppson had come in from California to attend. Janet and I sat in the first row and I kept my arm firmly around her while she wept quietly.

  19

  Rae’s death meant there was the house to be disposed of. By Rae’s will, it was Janet who inherited the house in which she had lived with her parents for years and that still held many of her youthful possessions.

  I had thought, when I had first come to New York and gotten to know Rae, that if Janet ever inherited the house, she would want to move into it, and I was resigned to that.

  As it turned out, however, Janet was not keen on suburban living and, now that we had found a satisfactory apartment, did not wish to leave Manhattan. (That suited me.) This meant, though, that she would have to face some months of disposing of its contents. Some she kept, some went to relatives and friends, but most went to various charitable organizations.

  The one thing she did that she later bitterly regretted was to sell the grand piano at which she had sat and played uncounted times. There was just no room for it in our apartment and we got an upright piano instead. Once the deed was done, however, she found she could not reconcile herself to it and she found herself hating the upright as a poor and miserable substitute.

  20

  While Janet made a beginning at the long and formidable task of selling the house, I put together a third batch of limericks under the title of Still More Lecherous Limericks.

  The matter of Isaac Asimov’s Science Fiction Magazine (or IASFM, as I was beginning to think of it) was also progressing. On June 21 I spent the morning at Davis Publications having photographs taken of myself. It was Joel’s plan to have my picture on the cover for issue after issue, as Alfred Hitchcock’s was on his magazine. That did not strike me as a good idea, since I have strong opinions as to the limited nature of my visual appeal, but I was overridden.

  21

  For two years, Shell Oil had been running what it called the “Bicentennial Minute.” Each evening there would be a one-minute presentation of something that had taken place two hundred years ago that day. And each day some other celebrity or semicelebrity would do the presenting.

  Finally, after Shell had worked its way through 737 celebrities, they reached me as the 738th. On June 23, I taped a Bicentennial Minute for presentation on July 7 (the 738th Bicentennial Minute). It dealt with a bomb threat to Congress that was received on July 7, 1776—but was not carried through.

  22

  On the night of June 24, while Janet was in New Rochelle working on the house, I seized the opportunity to stay up late and do work on a manuscript to which I had been asked to write an Introduction. At about 1 a.m. I sniffed smoke.

  I got out of bed, wandered through the apartment, and followed my nose to the door. I looked through the peephole and found the hall full of smoke.

  For the first time in my life I was in a building that was on fire—and there I was, alone in an apartment on the thirty-third floor.

  What had happened, apparently, was that there was an explosion and fire in an apartment on the twenty-ninth floor. The firemen had arrived eventually and by the time the smoke had penetrated my consciousness, the fire was under control. So well constructed was Park Ten that the fire had remained confined to the apartment in which it had originated.

  Afraid that Janet might hear distorted news of the fire on the radio or in the newspapers, I called her on the morning of the twenty-fifth and told her the story in as humorous a fashion as I could.

  It didn’t help. She broke into tearful lamentations at the thought that I might have been fried in my bed, and no amount of my insistence that I had at no time been in even the slightest danger helped.

  23

  Scheduled for Bicentennial Day, July 4, 1976, was a parade of beautiful sailing ships (“tall ships”) up the Hudson River. When Janet first heard of the plan the previous spring, she made reservations at a motel on the Hudson River so that she might watch the display.

  We got into the motel room about noon, and with us were Stanley and Ruth, who had come to join us. The room we were in had windows angled southward so that we could see the ships coming northward from the harbor.

  Immediately across the corridor was another room which was, through an incredible stroke of luck, empty, and the windows of which angled northward. A co-operative chambermaid left the door of the room open and Janet could watch the ships moving northward toward the George Washington bridge.

  She kept dashing from room to room in a mad attempt to watch the ships coming and going simultaneously, while the television set remained on in both rooms so that she could see things at close quarters as well. Finally, even Janet had enough and, sated, all four of us left the motel for a jubilant dinner at an Italian restaurant.282

  24

  On July 9, we left for Rensselaerville for the fifth consecutive year. This time we arrived on a Friday, even though the program did not begin till Sunday. It meant we had two days entirely to ourselves, and that was delightful. We had a chance to visit with Hal Williams, who ran the institute and whom ordinarily we scarcely saw; to dine in relative privacy; and to ramble about freely by day and by night.

  This time we had persuaded Ben and Barbara Bova to come. The program was to deal with space colonies, and the Bovas fit as though they had been manufactured for it. And, of course, Izzie and Annie Adler were present, also.

  As was invariably the case, all went beautifully, and on the last morning, July 15, the festivities ended with Terri Rapoport (who had been an attendee two years before, but who now ran the show with intelligence and efficiency) presenting me with a plaque that, in essence, praised me for my suave way with women.

  While Terri read from the plaque I slipped my arm around her waist. Since she was barely five feet tall, I misjudged and my hand ended on her right breast. There was laughter. I looked down in surprise and said, “Oh that’s just the Asimov grip.”

  And from the audience, Ben Bova called out, “Is that anything like the swine flu?” I was wiped out again.283

  I got back that evening to discover that advance copies of The Bicentennial Man and Other Stories had been received, and we then had dinner at Ruth Schoonmaker’s. She lived in Park Ten also, and was a trustee of the White Institute. Tall, large, and hearty, she routinely took care of our apartment while we were gone, and we returned the compliment when she was gone.

  25

  While I had been in Rensselaerville, I wrote the first draft of my twenty-seventh Black Widowers story, “The Sports Page.” I took it in to EQMM on July 19, and it appeared in the April 1977 issue of the magazine.

  Meanwhile, I had to write a Christmas story for Boys’ Life. On July 23, I wrote one called “The Thirteenth Day of Christmas,”284 and I jubilantly thought it the cleverest children’s detective story I had ever written. Robyn had arrived on a visit that day so I gave it to her to read and she agreed with me.

  Unfortunately, and inexplicably, Boys’ Life rejected it. That was perhaps because the story involved the Soviet legation to the UN and possible terrorist activity against them. Boys’ Life may have felt it was too politically oriented.

  In any case, I tried EQMM and I was rather astonished when it was taken. Perhaps the motif that made it unacceptable to Boys’ Life was the very thing that made it right for EQMM. At any rate, the story appeared in the July 1977 EQMM.

  26

  Brad Danach, a very pleasant and intelligent writer of about my age, came to interview me for People magazine. He explained that he planned to interview me periodically and to go places with me in an effort to get a rounded picture of me. For instance, Ben Bova and I were slated to go out to Long Island to do a TV bit about the movie 2001, and Brad asked if he could go with us. Why not?

  27

  Janet turned fifty on August 6, 1976, and while the day wore on, festivities kept her mind off her age. Chaucy and Les Bennetts arrived and we had a good Chinese dinner. After dinner, Ruth Schoonmaker came up to join us.

  The next day, though, Janet, conscious of her half century, and missing her mother badly, mourned her departed youth.

  28

  My magazine was approaching closer and closer. On August 8, I wrote an editorial for the first issue in my usual friendly and informal style, speaking directly to the reader. It struck the note I wanted to maintain and that I knew George would go along with. In fact, he wrote a set of directions to prospective writers, outlining what we wanted, in very much the same friendly style.

  I began to feel good about the magazine.

  29

  Larry Ashmead had now been at Simon and Schuster for nine months and he suggested I do a book on the various ways in which the world might come to an end. By a peculiar coincidence I had just written an article on that very subject, which I called “A Choice of Catastrophes” (and which eventually appeared in the March 1977 Popular Mechanics).

  I therefore said I would love to do a book on the subject for him, and Larry was delighted. He promptly set about putting the wheels in motion.

  30

  By August 20 (David’s twenty-fifth birthday), Brad had enough material to feel he ought to get photographs. A woman photographer arrived and proceeded to take what seemed like hundreds of pictures.285

  31

  Earlier in the year, Janet had seen advertisements for an “astronomy cruise” to Bermuda. She wanted very much to go, and I had signed us up for it.

  On August 21, 1976, we therefore boarded the Statendam (on which we had taken our very first cruise to see the Apollo 17 liftoff 3½ years before).

  On August 22, we went on deck where Fred Hess, a planetarium expert, pointed out the star patterns visible to the naked eye. It was the first time I had ever had a chance to have the sky described by an expert. It was a beautiful mild night and the sky was more splendid than a planetarium dome could have been. Janet used her binoculars to look at the objects described, and the high point came when we saw the Andromeda Galaxy for the first time. If the cruise had ended at that point, we would have had our money’s worth.

  We arrived in Bermuda before sunrise on the twenty-third, and I was up on deck to see the sun lift above the horizon. The very first little bulge of light was apple-green, which meant I had seen the “green flash.”

  We remained four days at Bermuda, and it was delightful. (We had never been there before; the Caribbean cruise of the previous February, which had been slated to make its first stop there, had been unable to do so because of rough seas.)

  The main activity was the observation period each night at a farm spot inland, where various people set up their telescopes and everyone took turns in looking.

  That was not all. Peter Nelson (a middle-aged botanist with a heart of gold) took Janet and myself through the island’s botanical gardens on the twenty-third with such a wealth of information for us that Janet might as well have been in the Garden of Eden, and the joy in her face made me glow.

  We also took a tour in a glass-bottom boat, visited the aquarium and the zoo, wandered about the streets and shops of Hamilton, and in all ways enjoyed ourselves.

  While we were doing this, I wrote my twenty-eighth Black Widowers tale, “The Second Best.” Inspired by the presidential campaign, I had this one contain a puzzle involving presidential campaigns of the past. It didn’t occur to me, unfortunately, that the story couldn’t be published till after the campaign was over and that it would then be timely no longer.

  Fred Dannay rejected it and I had to retire it for publication in what I hoped would eventually be a third Black Widowers collection.

  We left Bermuda on the twenty-sixth and were in New York on the twenty-eighth. The cruise had been a complete success.

  32

  We bought a new car on September 8, and moved up in the world. Until then, I had owned only Plymouths and Fords; now I owned a Dodge. It was a smaller car than my most recent Ford, but I had headrests, leanback seats, and power windows for the first time.

  What I also had was a mystery. Four days after I had obtained the car I went down into the garage to take it on an inaugural drive, and found it was completely and utterly dead. There was nothing to be done on a Sunday, but the next day, I managed to get it started from another car’s battery, then took it cautiously down to the dealer’s garage. I had it fiddled with and brought it back. By September 18, a Saturday this time, it was dead again.

  I hit the ceiling with a thud that could be heard for miles and called my lawyer, Don Laventhal.

  One thing about lawyers is that they stay cool. “You’re a writer, Isaac,” he said. “Compose a letter to the Chrysler people in Detroit. Then show it to the dealer.”

  I did so. It didn’t take me long, and the letter breathed flame and fury. Fortunately, the dealer was open on Saturday. I took a taxi there, charged in, cornered the boss in his office, and read him the letter. It rather stirred him up.

  He got a new battery, drove me down to the Park Ten garage, and (while wearing his business suit) replaced my battery. Then he started looking over the electrical attachments from headlights to taillights. He was nearly at the taillights, when he called out loudly, “Aha!!”

  When the trunk opened, a light within automatically went on; when it closed, it automatically went out—except that in this particular car, it didn’t go out. All the while the car sat in the garage, the lit interior of the trunk (invisibly lit, for the light could not be seen from outside) drained the battery.