It’s a healthy thing, curiosity. I’ve had an acute case of it ever since I was a boy.

  What an annoying little brat I was! When I was in the first grade I discovered by reading the printed warning on its side that one must not, under any circumstances, take the fire extinguisher down from the corridor wall and turn it upside

  9

  down.Why not? I wondered.What would happen? So I took it down and turned

  it over. Foam, of course, came shooting out in wondrous abundance, and teach-

  ers came running from all directions.”Well, I wanted to know what would hap-

  pen,” I told them. If they were amused by my precocious inquisitiveness, they

  kept it well hidden.

  Somehow, a year later, I became fascinated by eels — by the idea that cer-

  tain fishes looked very much like snakes. Snakes interested me. So did snails, and

  frogs, and just about everything else.A fish that looked like a snake was irresistible.

  So I asked Mr. Brenner, the good-natured man who ran the fish market on the

  corner, to get a live eel for me. (In those days we knew all the local market pro-

  prietors by name, the grocer and the baker and the fish man, and we called them

  “Mr.” this and that, not “Sid” or “Jose.”) I was much more extroverted and out-

  going then than I later became, and a lot of people were charmed by the way I

  went around poking my nose into their business. Mr. Brenner, God only knows

  why, promised to get me an eel.

  And he did. He called me into the store a few days later and handed me a

  big whonking brown eel in a huge jar, and I carried it home and (since I had no

  fish tank) put it in the bathtub.We had only one tub to serve the whole family,

  and turning it into an eel-tank would very quickly have caused some household

  inconvenience, but I suppose that when you’re seven you’re better at expressing

  curiosity than you are at thinking about consequences.

  My mother, a third-grade teacher, came home from school a little while later

  and found a live eel in our bathtub.This was over fifty years ago and I don’t quite recall her reaction — but, though she had had plenty of opportunity to watch

  me in action by this time, it was probably less calm than a simple, straightforward

  Cover of eighth issue of

  “Robert, why is there an eel in the bathtub?” I do remember that the eel went

  SPACESHIP , 1950.

  back to Mr. Brenner very quickly and that there was a lively discussion when my

  father got home an hour or two later.

  I had a microscope, of course.When I heard that the brine from pickle-bar-

  rels contained interesting microorganisms, I went across the street to Mr. Cohen’s

  grocery store and asked for some pickle brine.When I explained why I wanted

  it, he gave me a pickle too. Coming home with the brine caused less fuss than

  coming home with the eel had created.

  I saw the man who ran the laundry — I don’t remember his name — read-

  ing a Chinese newspaper. I asked him for a copy and he gave me one and I spent

  an hour trying to figure out how to read Chinese. Languages already interested

  me: at eight, I had already learned a few words of Spanish and a bit of French.

  Got nowhere with Chinese, but it was instructive to see how rich and various

  one planet’s languages could be.

  In 1944 someone gave me a subscription to the National Geographic — I get

  it to this day — and instantly I yearned to see with my own eyes all the places in

  those wondrous photographs, where bizarre creatures dwelled, where alien archi-

  tecture brightened the landscape. I longed to climb the Pyramids and trek the

  Gobi and stare up at the redwood trees of California. Coral reefs, rain forests, gey-sers, volcanoes, Mayan jungle temples, the dunes of the Sahara, the cactus forests

  of Mexico — so long as it was something qualitatively different from Brooklyn,

  N.Y. , I wanted to see it. It was wartime, then, and nobody went anywhere except

  10

  with government permission; but I have diligently spent my adult life searching

  out those myriad places which, back then, I was able to visit only vicariously, via the National Geographic.

  But the Geographic wasn’t enough.The same intellectual hunger that led me

  to turn over fire-extinguishers, bring home eels, peer into microscopes, and pon-

  der the laundryman’s incomprehensible newspaper caused me to turn my atten-

  tion to ever more distant places and eras — other worlds, other epochs. I want-

  ed to make great swooping journeys in space and time. My mind boiled with

  questions.What were the dinosaurs really like? Would we ever go to Mars, and if we did, what would we find there? And the planets of other stars: were they anything like the ones I saw depicted in Planet Comics and the Buck Rogers newspaper strips?

  Ah, that was frustrating! I could never hope to go on journeys to the

  Mesozoic; and as for the glorious raygun and spaceship future shown in the

  comics, I knew even then that I would live to see only a small segment of it, a

  short way into the 2lst century at the very best.

  But then I stumbled on science fiction. It was a handy substitute for the ful-

  This is the first page of the

  fillment of those impossible curiosities of mine. John Taine’s novel Before the Dawn

  manuscript for my first

  was as good an eye-witness account of the dinosaurs as I could hope to have, and

  novel, REVOLT ON

  H. G.Wells The Time Machine showed me the eons to come in 40,000 astonish-ALPHA C , published in

  ing words; and soon I found the sf magazines, too, where writers named Heinlein

  1955.— RS

  and Asimov and Williamson and van Vogt who were depicting it for me in fic-

  tional form with such vividness and clarity that I could almost believe I was there.

  Such magazines as Astounding Science Fiction and Startling Stories became the National Geographic of this next phase of my intellectual

  development.

  “He had never seen a humanoid,” Jack Williamson

  wrote, in a classic story published in 1947.“Smaller and slim-

  mer than a man.A shining black, its sleek silicone skin had a

  changing sheen of bronze and metallic blue. Its graceful oval

  face wore a fixed look of alert and slightly surprised solici-

  tude.Altogether, it was the most beautiful mechanical he had

  ever seen.”

  And a door opened for me, and I was in the rhodomag-

  netic future of “With Folded Hands,” and for the next hour

  my curiosity about what the world of two or three hundred

  years hence was going to be like was satisfied. I knew. I was

  there. Jack Williamson had taken me there. Science fiction, for

  the moment, had soothed my need to peer into the impos-

  sible-to-attain worlds beyond my own probable lifespan.

  You understand. You’ve had the same experience, or

  you wouldn’t be reading this book.

  That overriding curiosity that never lets up — that

  hunger to get answers to the most audacious questions —

  I’ve always had it, and I have it still, though I don’t bring live

  eels home any more.You have it too.And, I’m willing to bet,

  have eel stories of your own to tell.

  1997

  11

  C R I M E S O F M Y Y O U T H

  Hear my confession,folks.A career of crime lies buried deep in my past,and

  I can’t keep it concealed any longer.When I was a boy I committed dozens

  of murders for the sake of what I thought of as “science.” My intensive research,

  as I thought of it then, added not one iota to the sum of human knowledge. It

  RS with parents, age six

  was all brutal folly and nothing more than that, and, thinking of it now, I feel cov-

  months or so.

  ered with guilt over the loss of all those innocent lives. Mea culpa, mea culpa, mea maxima culpa.

  These lethal depredations of mine took place somewhere around 1945 or

  1946.That is, I was ten or eleven years old, bristling with the sort of savagery that I suppose is universal in prepubescent boys. In my case, because I was a bright prepubescent boy who was expected by all to achieve wonderful things when he

  grew up, I could cloak my boyish savagery in an aura of serious purpose. My lit-

  erary talents had not yet revealed themselves, back then. It was generally assumed, even by me, that I was ultimately going to be a scientist of some kind. And so,

  during those long-ago summers in the earliest years of the atomic era, what I did

  was kill a lot of hapless frogs. A lot of frogs, indeed.

  Looking back now on the cheerfully cold-blooded boy I was then, I feel not

  only shock but disbelief. How could I have been so cruel? I will swat a mosquito

  today, under proper provocation, and I will spray poisonous vapors on the hordes

  of ants that invade our house every winter, and sometimes I will step on a garden

  snail who’s munching on some horticultural rarity of mine, but otherwise I go out

  of my way not to take life, and I don’t feel so good about the necessity of offing

  those mild-mannered ants and snails. (Mosquitoes are a different story.) Indeed,

  when it comes to my fellow creatures, I am today a veritable St. Francis of Assisi, at least so far as harming them with my own hands goes. I will carefully gather up

  spiders who intrude into the household on sheafs of paper and carry them gently

  outside; I scoop drowning salamanders and even wasps and hornets out of the

  12

  swimming pool; I catch garden moles in tin cans and transport them to

  woodsy areas nearby, where I not only release them but hover around to

  defend them from stray cats until they have scurried out of sight.

  There is a little inconsistency in my piety, I admit, where the issue of

  food comes in. Last night’s swordfish steak was not synthetically grown in

  a test tube, nor the veal scaloppini of the night before. I have no illusions

  about that. I have made a treaty with myself whereby I allow other peo-

  ple to kill on my behalf, yea, even unto innocent lambs and calves, in order

  to provide me with food. I forgive myself that sin on the grounds that I

  was created an omnivore without being consulted about it, and thus I look

  upon meat as an important, even necessary, part of my diet. But if I had to

  hunt and butcher the animals I eat myself, I have no doubt at all that I’d

  be a vegetarian.

  That’s now, though. Let’s look at then.

  The ten-or-eleven-year-old me is quite different from the present-day

  item, and not simply because I didn’t wear a beard in the mid-l940s.There’s

  the matter of that sense of my destiny as a future scientist, something that

  vanished from me utterly as soon as I realized, somewhere around the age

  of thirteen, that I was obviously intended to be a writer.There was a component

  of hearty extroversion in me back then, too, that would disappear also in another

  few years.And, also, there was a certain blithe amorality about ten-year-old me that now strikes me as altogether alien.That little boy could easily have grown up to

  be the sort of white-coated villain who coolly hands placebos to dying children

  or practices vivisection on someone’s pet cat or dog captured at dawn in the sub-

  One of my Earliest

  urbs in order that some question of medical research can be answered. But some-

  Rejection Slips.— RS

  thing changed in me around the time I turned thirteen and I grew up to be the

  creator of the gentle, tormented telepath David Selig of Dying Inside and that reluctant warrior, the peace-loving Lord Valentine of Lord Valentine’s Castle.

  Here is the beady-eyed, ruthless little Robert Silverberg of fifty-plus years

  ago, though, stalking through the marshes of a muddy little lake in Ulster County,

  New York.A city-bred boy, turned loose every year for eight wondrous weeks in

  the relatively unspoiled world beyond the urban pavement.Watch him go at it:

  Catching frogs with ruthless swoops of his unerring right hand. Killing them

  without a flicker of remorse by a process euphemistically known as pithing, which consisted of driving a spike through their little heads. Cutting them open, then,

  with deft strokes of a keen blade that would have been better employed for its

  intended purpose, which was carving model airplanes out of balsa wood. Peeling

  back the froggy integuments; staring with fascination at the tiny internal organs

  within. And then, I suppose, throwing them away, their purpose served.

  But what purpose was that? I told myself, of course, that doing this thing to

  frogs was part of my scientific education.What was I learning, though? That frogs

  have curious little organs of various colors inside their soft little abdomens? One frog would have taught me that much. But I kept on catching and dissecting

  them, frog after frog, spending those carefree summer days marching around in

  the marshy part of the lake until I spied a small green nose above the water, and

  then pouncing, pithing, slicing, staring.

  I was a skillful frog-hunter. I’ve always had terrific reflexes. Sometimes I’d

  put my cupped hand down against the muck and trap the poor frog before it had

  13

  a chance even to jump; otherwise, I’d grab it in mid-air with a diabolical twist of the wrist as it tried to flee.What a wonderful achievement! Here’s the frog, two

  inches long, minding his own business in the water. Here’s the gigantic boy, a full four feet tall or even bigger, descending like the wrath of Jehovah.The deft hand

  descends. And seizes.

  How did I get into this business of dissecting frogs? Why, I must have read

  about the importance of knowing what was inside frogs’ bellies in one of the

  textbooks of biology that my obliging father, guiding me toward the future lab-

  oratory career that never was to be, provided for me. Or maybe there was an

  account of pithing technique in some issue of Nature Magazine or Natural History, both of which I read faithfully back then. I must have had some guidance of that

  sort, because I certainly knew not only the technique of pithing frogs but the

  term itself, which sticks in my vocabulary decades after my crimes themselves

  came to an end.

  It would be nice to think that I actually learned something of a scientific

  nature by killing all those frogs. I still have one of those biology texts of long ago

  — Biology and Human Welfare, Peabody and Hunt, 1933 — and on page 441 is a

  diagram of the internal organs of a frog. I hope that I consulted it as I worked, so that I did in fact discover that this thing here was the frog’s liver, this the kidney, these the large intestines, this the bile sac. I might then have gone on to contem-plate the functions of these tiny organs, their interrelationships, the ingenious

  design of them. I could have come away from these boyish exploits, then, not

  only with some awareness of the nature of metabolic processes in small amphib-

  ians, but also — what would have been much more valuable to the writer I

  would one day become — a sense of the well-nigh miraculous nature of life, of

  This was taken at the 1956

  the astounding perfection of design that informs even the humblest of the uni-

  Worldcon in N.Y., I know

  verse’s myriad creatures.

  not by whom. A.J. Budrys

  Did any of that cross my mind? Or did I, all the while pretending to be a

  on the right and a fan

  named Charles Harris on

  scientist, simply get a kick out of catching frogs and cutting them open? I can’t

  the left. – RS

  tell you that, not after more than half a century. I can only plead innocent boy-

  ish curiosity as my defense. I didn’t know there was anything wrong about killing

  frogs, and it never occurred to me that frogs might have feelings too, and I real-

  ly, really wanted to know what they looked like inside.That might excuse the first frog, or maybe even the next two or three.The human race has done many a hor-

  14

  rible thing out of sheer curiosity, and some of those horrible things have led

  eventually to beneficial consequences. Dissecting the little girl next door would

  have been beyond the bounds of innocent boyish curiosity, but I think a frog or

  two could be deemed expendable, considering the restless, questing nature of the

  kid I was.

  Nevertheless, I can’t find any excuse for continuing to cut up frogs after my

  first few. Even the infamous Nazi surgeon Joseph Mengele probably was actual-

  ly learning something from the ghastly experiments on human beings that he

  conducted in the death camps, whereas I, once I had satisfied my curiosity about

  the shape and color of the internal organs of frogs, was learning nothing further

  about them, and should have stopped. But for the fact that Mengele was exper-

  imenting with human beings and I was simply fooling around with frogs — and

  frogs don’t have, so far as we know, hopes and dreams and soaring visions — a

  case could be made out that I was doing something even more evil than he was.

  Mengele, at least, was carrying out real scientific investigation, however mon-