“I will fix this,” he said, “so the light will go out when you close the trunk.”

  “No,” I said, “remove the bulb.”

  He did.

  By September 22, with the car still alive, Janet and I made our first trip together in it. We went to Yale, where we had dinner and I gave a talk. We spent most of our time wondering if the car would be all right in the morning. It was. It had been cured.

  33

  While all this was going on, I finished The Hugo Winners, Volume III on September 10, and that night attended a Gilbert and Sullivan Society meeting, with Brad Danach in attendance. That was the occasion on which I gave an impromptu speech (as William S. Gilbert) in a little amateur re-creation of an evening with Gilbert and Sullivan and their friends. I also recited a bab ballad with incredible brio and overacting while Brad’s photographer took endless photographs.

  On September 17, Lester and I co-hosted a Trap Door Spiders dinner, at which Brad Danach was my guest. He wanted to bring in the photographer, but she was a woman. I asked for a dispensation from the rest of the members, but Jean Le Corbeiller (a dryly humorous mathematician) objected, not on the ground that she was a woman but that she was a photographer. He objected to the publicity, so she didn’t get in.

  George Scithers was there, and an extraordinary change had come over him. Ordinarily, he was a quiet fellow who let others do the talking. This time, however, he was virtually manic with joy, and all he could talk about was IASFM. He had clearly thrown himself into the editor’s job with all his heart and all his mind, and I was delighted. Clearly, I had chosen the right man.

  34

  On September 29, Brad Darrach came to see me one last time, with the photographer. The idea was to take a picture of me sitting on an armchair constructed of my books.

  I objected. For one thing I thought it would be in poor taste. For another, I didn’t want to pull my books out of the bookcase. They were carefully arranged in chronological order and would be troublesome to put back.

  Brad persisted and finally beat me down. With very poor grace, I took out the books and piled them up about a hassock to make an imitation armchair, sat in it, and then put everything back.

  35

  On October 4, I completed The Collapsing Universe and took it in to Walker.

  I immediately got started on another collection of science essays from miscellaneous sources, my fifth. I called this one The Beginning and the End after the most ambitious single essay it contained.

  36

  The presidential campaign featured debates between Carter and Ford, which I watched with my heart in my mouth. Carter, I thought, did worse than I had hoped, partly because he did not enunciate clearly. Ford, on the other hand, did much better than I had thought him capable of doing.

  On October 15, I tried to watch the single debate between Mondale and Dole, the two vice-presidential candidates. Unfortunately, I was at the Trap Door Spiders at the time, and when I turned on the television set, Gilbert Cant (the prototype of the terrible-tempered Tom Trumbull of the Black Widowers) objected. Between my desire to see the debate, and the offense I took at Cant’s tactless language, I stormed out of the place, went home, and watched it there.

  I was glad I did. Dole’s Nixonian viciousness must have turned off many voters, while Mondale’s smooth gentlemanliness must have turned on an equal number. I thought, then, and had no reason to change my mind later, that it was that debate that held on to just enough Democratic votes to make the difference.

  That same day, Janet finally sold the house in New Rochelle after having spent four months in the harassing details of cleaning it out and putting it into shape for sale.

  44

  Autobiography

  1

  The Carborundum Company wanted to give me an award for excellence, but I had to go to Niagara Falls to get it, and I had to be there on October 21.

  By a curious coincidence, I was heading out to Western New York at that very time of year. It was the only trip I was making there in all of 1976, so that it was possible to do it. As it happened, however, the coincidence was entirely too good, and on October 21 I was committed to a talk at Alfred University. I explained that I could not be in two places at the same time.

  The Carborundum people exploded. It had been Alfred University that had nominated me for the award, so how dare they hire me to talk on the evening of the award?

  They called Alfred and in no time at all the Alfred talk was pushed forward two days. I could talk at Alfred on the nineteenth, at Brockford Community College on the twentieth, and be in Niagara Falls on the twenty-first.

  To sweeten this extension of the trip, the Carborundum people insisted on sending a limousine for me that would take me everywhere, provide me with picnic lunches en route, and pay for all expenses, there was no way we could refuse the enveloping fog of corporate generosity.

  On October 19, a limousine was waiting for us at 7:00 a.m., and over the next four days we were indeed chauffeured everywhere. Going and coming, the car was laden with a food hamper that contained incredible delicacies in amounts that were at least five times what we could eat.

  We were impressed by this royal treatment, but we could never relax with it. We were too old by far to take to such things. We missed the privacy and flexibility of being alone in our own car, and felt guilty of ingratitude because of it.

  The luxury continued in Niagara Falls itself. We toured the Falls and the electric-generating plant. We had lunch in a revolving restaurant in a tower overlooking the Falls, and a fancy award dinner in a museum in Buffalo.

  The award itself consisted of a modernistic bronze sculpture of something that looked like a woman’s torso with a huge hole in the abdomen. Eventually, it was shipped to our apartment and, after some experimenting, we found a place for it in the living room. Oddly enough, I grew to like it.

  We were home on October 22, and the next day I was finished with The Beginning and the End.

  2

  November 2 was Election Day. I voted the straight Democratic ticket at 8:30 a.m. and spent the rest of the day waiting. My side hadn’t won a presidential election since 1964, and I wasn’t at all sure we would win now. The polls said it would be razor-edge close, and it was.

  It wasn’t till 1:00 a.m. that I finally decided Carter would win, and even then I went to sleep not entirely confident there might not be a last-minute change with the final dribble of votes. Fortunately, there wasn’t.

  3

  On November 12, I discovered that Mary K. would soon be leaving Houghton Mifflin. That was almost as great a shock as Larry’s departure from Doubleday.

  4

  On November 15, we picked up the November 22, 1976, copy of People magazine, with Brad Darrach’s article on me. I had already seen advertisements of it, including one on the back page of the New York Times in which I was shown seated on my armchair of books. And there it was in the article itself.

  Another of the photographs showed me embracing Janet with my left arm encircling her neck and my right reaching down to her left buttock and squeezing it. I admit this was rather customary for me, but I had never thought this would be put on display before countless millions of strangers who might be leafing through the magazine. Fortunately, Janet didn’t seem to mind.

  The article itself was well written and good-natured. Such articles can easily eviscerate a subject in casual phrases here and there, but Brad had nothing but good things to say of me.

  5

  The Collapsing Universe seemed to be creating great interest, even in advance of publication. On November 19, Beth Walker called to tell me that the Literary Guild had picked up the book as an alternate selection for May 1977.

  6

  For once we did not go to Chaucy’s for Thanksgiving. With great difficulty we prevailed upon her to let us take her out. After all, now that Rae were gone there was no reason she should feel compelled to prepare the feast for family reasons.

  As it happened, Robyn was coming to visit us for Thanksgiving and she joined us, making it a party of five.

  Robyn stayed till Sunday, and after she left I consoled myself by writing a small Valentine’s Day science-fiction story, which American Way had requested of me. I called it “True Love.” I took it in on November 29 and it appeared in the February 1977 issue of the magazine.

  7

  Janet and I went to Philadelphia on December 2 so that I could speak at the University of Pennsylvania that evening, and our hotel was across the street from Philadelphia General Hospital.

  It was an exercise in nostalgia for Janet, for she had served a year’s internship at the hospital in 1952–53, and now it was being phased out as a medical institution. On the morning of December 3, we walked over to the hospital, and Janet wandered somewhat disconsolately over its grounds. It was as though a year of her life were also being phased out.

  She got into the building in which the room she lived in had been located and made her way up to its actual site. The area was now devoted to experimental animals.

  “Well,” said Janet, “it’s gone up in the world.”

  8

  On December 13, I finally finished The Golden Door after fully two years of on-and-off work. Naturally, with one book done, I had to start another, and that was Mars, the Red Planet, the third in my astronomy series for Chancy. I began it on December 14.

  9

  The first issue of Isaac Asimov’s Science Fiction Magazine was published on December 16, 1976. It began its life as a quarterly so that the first issue was dated Spring 1977. On its cover was an incredibly dignified photograph of myself, with dark jacket and four-in-hand tie.

  Inside, we had two stories by John Varley (one under the pseudonym of Herb Boehm), whom I considered the very best writer to have come into the field since Heinlein. Also included was an almost self-contained portion of Time Storm, a forthcoming novel by Gordon Dickson.

  Charles Brown, the publisher of Locus (the science-fiction news-magazine), contributed the first of a book-review column that was planned for each issue, and Martin Gardner contributed the first of a mathematical puzzle series.

  As for myself, I contributed the editorial, and my story “Think!,” which had appeared only in an advertising booklet previous to that.

  As a way of celebrating, George Scithers brought Joel Davis as his guest to a meeting of the Trap Door Spiders, which he was co-hosting on December 17. I was afraid Joel might find us too eccentric for compatibility, but Gilbert Cant engaged him in lively conversation so I think our good publisher enjoyed himself.

  10

  I had, for a while, been exchanging letters with Martin Greenberg, who was first at Florida International University and then at Michigan State University, over the possibility of anthologizing some of my stories. The first time I received a letter from him, I responded by asking cautiously if he were the Martin Greenberg who had once owned Gnome Press.

  When he answered in a very puzzled fashion that he was not, I urged him to use his middle initial, at the very least, if he had one, if he expected to deal fruitfully with the science-fiction world.286 From then on, he signed himself Martin H. Greenberg, and I invariably addressed my letters to him, “Dear Marty the Other.”

  He and Joseph Olander (also of Florida International University) had conceived the project of preparing an anthology of a hundred short-short science-fiction pieces (twice the number that Groff Conklin and I had anthologized fifteen years before), and they wanted me in on it. They would prepare Xerox copies of perhaps twice the necessary number; I would weed out the best and write blurbs and an overall Introduction.

  In the end, I agreed. On December 21, I signed a contract with Doubleday for the book.

  11

  Having given up laboring over Thanksgiving, Chaucy could not be talked out of her Christmas feast. Rae, of course, was not there, and she was badly missed, but young Leslie made up the number by being accompanied by her fiancé, George, who had run for political office the month before (and had lost) and who was a very attractive man. Unfortunately, the engagement broke up eventually.

  12

  Actor José Ferrer visited us on December 30. Having heard of Asimov’s Guide to Shakespeare, he arrived under the mistaken impression that I was a scholarly Shakespearean who could be useful to him in his work. I felt guilty at having to disappoint him and gave him a copy of the Guide as compensation.

  13

  The year 1976 saw twelve books published:

  170. “The Dream” “Benjamin’s Dream,” and “Benjamin’s Bicentennial Blast” (privately printed)

  171. Asimov on Physics (Doubleday)

  172. Murder at the ABA (Doubleday)

  173. How Did We Find Out About Atoms? (Walker)

  174. Good Taste (Apocalypse)

  175. The Planet That Wasn’t (Doubleday)

  176. The Bicentennial Man and Other Stories (Doubleday)

  177. More Lecherous Limericks (Walker)

  178. More Tales of the Black Widowers (Doubleday)

  179. Alpha Centauri, the Nearest Star (Lothrop, Lee & Shepard)

  180. How Did We Find Out About Nuclear Power? (Walker)

  181. Familiar Poems, Annotated (Doubleday)

  14

  On January 2, 1977, I was fifty-seven years old, and for the first time since 1969 the del Reys were not part of the celebration. That had to be delayed but we had dinner with Chaucy, Les, and their son, Bruce.

  15

  Since the previous September I had been interviewed every Thursday afternoon for a program on the Canadian radio network. The topic was always some scientific point currently in the news, and there was generally another person being interviewed with me—he the particular specialist on that particular topic and I the perennial generalist.

  I was very faithful about this and even interrupted my lunch in the revolving restaurant when I was out in Niagara Falls the previous October in order to be interviewed.

  On Wednesday, January 5, however, hours were spent by the engineer of Park Ten on our refrigerator, which was giving us trouble, and I was sufficiently eroded by exasperation to give in to Janet’s demand that I take a nap. I took the phone off the hook to avoid interruptions.

  I awoke refreshed, went back to my typewriter, and put the phone back on the hook. It rang at once. I picked it up and a voice said reproachfully, “You bad boy! Where were you?”

  It was the Canadian program. What I had forgotten was that on this particular week I was going to be in Philadelphia on Thursday to give a talk to IBM people there and simply would not be able to get to a telephone, so that the interview was being held on Wednesday instead.

  It was incredibly humiliating to have forgotten an appointment and it was with difficulty that they could get me to stop apologizing. Fortunately, Lester del Rey agreed to stand in for me the next day and (of course) did a marvelous job.

  Unfortunately, January 10 was our delayed birthday celebration with the del Reys, and Lester seized the opportunity to discuss the matter of having to pitch in for friends who were growing senile and could no longer be depended upon to fulfill their obligations.

  I had no complaints, though. It took a long time for me to hear the end of it, but it would have taken a longer time for Lester to hear the end of it if the situation had been reversed.

  16

  I was slated to give still another talk in Philadelphia on the evening of January J6, and could, as a result, visit the local Philadelphia convention of “Philcon.” There I met John Varley for the first time. He was young, handsome, and about six and a half feet tall. It seemed unfair for one person to have all those positive physical characteristics and to be so good a writer besides.

  17

  January 19, 1977, was the twenty-seventh anniversary of the publication of Pebble in the Sky, my first book. For eleven years I had been renewing the copyrights of my magazine stories, one by one, and now I had to face the first of the copyright renewals of my books.287

  18

  Murder Ink was a small bookstore on the Upper West Side, which had been established by Dilys Winn. It was devoted to the murder mystery, and by the time Dilys sold it to Carol Brener, it had made itself a landmark.

  Both young women were fertile with promotional notions, and one of them was to take mystery enthusiasts to Mohonk Mountain House for a weekend in January, one that was to be devoted to all sorts of mystery gimmicks and was to be called “Dead of Winter.”

  I was asked to come along as a speaker, and when we heard it was to be at Mohonk, we accepted at once. We were driven up to the resort on a no-smoking bus (itself a fine idea) on January 27.

  Phyllis Whitney, a writer of Gothic novels, spoke charmingly the next day and I followed with a talk that dealt mainly with Murder at the ABA. There were also lectures on self-defense and on makeup.

  At one point I was kidnapped at “gunpoint” by an extraordinarily beautiful young woman and taken to an unused lavatory where the rest of the group was to find me through deduction from planted clues—except that they never did. For one mad moment I thought the young woman would stay with me in the lavatory, but the guarding was taken over by a couple of uninteresting young men.

  Present at the festivities was Walter Gibson who, forty years before, had been “Maxwell Grant,” the man who had written The Shadow novels from which my father had learned English. He was in his eighties now, still vigorous, and a delightful sleight-of-hand performer.