In memory yet green : the autobiography of Isaac Asimov, 1920-1954

by Asimov, Isaac, 1920-1992

  Aton 77, director of Saro University, thrust out a belligerent lower-lip and glared at the young new spa-

  Professor Charles Dawson as he was when he was my research professor.

  Gertrude, not long before I met her.

  Navy Yard people, around 1943. From left around table: Zitin, Heikens wife, Heike Bowen's wife, Bowen, myself, Gertrude, and Zitin's wife.

  ">,::!' ■'■;

  i. V

  V

  >ve, Robert Heinlein, L. Sprague de Camp, and myself at the Navy Yard in 1 944. ow, £/ie same trio (wit/i Catherine de Camp) a generation later, at the Nebula Awards

  Me as a private in Hawaii in J 946, holding a borrowed pipe to look suave and man-of-the-world.

  Now that he was so near his aim, Calvin felt a weakening in his knees.

  But even as he felt all sorts of clammy fears rising within him, he skimmed down the row of cubes, searching for that article, and thanking his stars that the Martians saw fit to use an alphabetical arrangement.

  Upward drifted the cold, emotionless print; thousands of words on every aspect of the pineal gland. Calvin followed it breathlessly, understanding not more than a tenth, and watching, watching for the one vital fact he was after.

  And then it came, so suddenly that it caught him unawares and passed him by. He, laughed hysterically as he turned the machine backward, and for five minutes shut it off altogether until the almost painful sensation of relief that overwhelmed him had subsided.

  Over and over again he read the short description of the chemical and its method of production. It was only bromine, an element that seawater was filled with, yet with a difference. The pineal chemical was an isotope of that halogen; an isotope that was not to be found naturally and that would exist for only a limited period when produced artificially. In terse and cryptic language the nature and strength of the neutron bombardment that produced the isotope was described, and the description sank deep into Calvin's brain.

  And then he was through, all through. To return to Earth-only that was left. Surely, after having completed so much against the laboratory and all of Mars, the return need not frighten him. A sense of bubbling triumph pervaded him, a triumph that shrieked aloud with laughter and then died suddenly.

  The light changed! Dull blue gave way to bright yellow with a suddenness that left him gasping, bewildered, and blinded.

  Martians sprang from nowhere and surrounded him. Calvin fell back, utterly bewildered at the sudden change of the situation. Then, as he recognized the stern, immobile visage of the Chief Elder in the midst of the throng, all emotion was drowned in one flood of tearing, blistering rage.

  His needle-ray was drawn, cocked and aimed in one motion, but in the icy gaze of the Martian potentate he felt his arm grow numb and lax. Struggle as he might, he could not compress the trigger finger. Dimly, he heard the gun clang to the floor.

  A long silence ensued, and then the Chief Elder spoke. "You did very well, Earthman. You were a little reckless, but quick at seizing opportunity."

  A look of astonishment spread over Calvin's face. "You were playing with me?" he demanded. "You allowed me to hope and to all but attain my object that you might snatch it from me in the end?" He felt it difficult to breathe. "Then Martians are sufficiently emotional to indulge in cruelty, aren't they?"

  Calvin suddenly felt weak and futile.

  "I knew your moves from the first," the Chief Elder was saying. "We recognized the possibility of an attempted raid on Deimos as a result of your own individual psychology, and consequently removed the screen from the satellite; showed you the means of entrance; introduced a fictitious rest hour; and refrained from interfering until you had discovered your precious weapon. The experiment was an entire success."

  "What are you going to do now?" Calvin asked bitterly. "All your explanations are of no interest to me."

  "Do? Why, nothing!" came the answer in slow, measured tones. "Your ship is safe. Return to Earth with your weapon."

  Calvin's eyes snapped wide open. His first words were but a meaningless stutter. When he had recovered sufficiently to speak, he cried, "But you refused to give me the secret back on Mars."

  "True! But we said nothing about refusing to let you take it. Earth as a suppliant for help, we would refuse, for every world must work out its own destiny. However, when Earth refuses to accept our refusal, but, in your person, attempts a plan foredoomed to failure and carries it out without a moment's hesitation, we no longer refuse. It has not been given you; you have taken it. Return to Earth with your weapon."

  And finally Preston Calvin gained an inkling of the mental processes of these alien, incomprehensible people. His head bowed and with trembling voice he whispered, "You are a strange people, but a great one!"

  There; not exactly a very good story, but not bad for an eighteen-year-old. I wrote it in the first half of September 1938, just as the Munich crisis was heating up to the point of war or surrender, with the Western powers surrendering. No wonder I portrayed democracy as at the point of destruction.

  And I was just beginning my senior year in college and the vast

  chemistry laboratory on Deimos was simply my college laboratories magnified. Not one futuristic detail was I able to imagine though I did mention an atomic power generator and a television screen.

  Oh well. I apologize for this interruption and now let us get back the spring of 1942 and the problem of the Navy Yard job.

  8

  The possibility of a job at the Navy Yard strengthened my confidence where Gertrude was concerned. I went to see her on April 3, 1942, and got into her apartment at last. I told her about the job offer and was as open as I dared be about the possibility of marriage. It wasn't quite a proposal, but I did bring my bankbook with me in order to indicate to her that I was a man of wealth and substance. I pointed out that I had $450 in the bank.

  It never occurred to me that she might have money (and, of course, she didn't). I was quite prepared to take her without a cent, but I was unwilling to take on liabilities. I therefore asked her if, by any chance, she supported her father and mother. She said no. Her father, Henry Blugerman, was a superintendent at a paper-box factory and made an adequate living.

  That was a relief and I guess I showed it.

  Gertrude was amused by all this and took me into the kitchen to introduce me to her mother, Mary, whom I now met for the first time. Mary was just about five feet tall and quite plump. Like my parents, she spoke with a pronounced accent.

  Mary and her husband, Henry, had, like myself, been born in Russia. They came from the city of Kherson on the Ukrainian Black Sea coast. Both had come to Toronto as teen-agers, before the revolution. In Toronto they had married, and Gertrude was born there on May 16, 1917. (She was a little older than I was, but that didn't bother me a bit, either then or afterward.)

  I went home feeling that the marriage business was all but settled —and it was only seven weeks since we had met.

  By April 12, though, Gertrude had had time to think about it. I visited her with the plan of taking her home to meet my parents but she demurred. She was not in love and, under the circumstances, she said, it would be best not to see each other again.

  I was two years older now than when Irene had left and I had the strong promise of a job. This time I did not intend to take the loss of a girl without strong resistance. We were walking on the boardwalk, I remember, on a cloudy and rather dismal day, and I talked and talked.

  What I said I don't remember, but whatever it was I managed to talk long enough and eloquently enough to get myself invited back to the apartment.

  Gertrude's mother was surprised to see me come back, for it had been her impression I was to be given my walking papers. Perhaps she wasn't too depressed, though. According to what I heard later, she had suspected I might be a good catch.

  By April 27, I was sufficiently intimate with the family to be invited to dinner and I discovered that Mary was a superlative cook. When she roasted a chicken I
wouldn't swap it for all the ambrosia on Olympus.

  But I didn't press the marriage business again. I simply continued to see Gertrude and to make it clear, while saying as little about it as possible, that I assumed we would be married, and finally Gertrude accepted the matter.

  We continued to have frequent dates, with one odd contretemps. On May 6, I took, as usual, the streetcar that traveled in a straight line southward from two blocks east of my house to two blocks west of hers. It was a six-mile trip and took about half an hour. On this occasion, though, after the streetcar had progressed two miles, it stopped. All passengers had to get off.

  I walked several blocks to the elevated train that ran on a parallel route, but it wasn't going, either. All public transportation in Brooklyn had stopped, and remained stopped for an hour.

  There seemed no alternative but to walk, so that was what I did, carrying the box of candy I was taking to her. It was a four-mile walk, which was nothing for me in those days, but I was keenly aware that I was going to be late so I walked as rapidly as I could. A rapid walk of four miles brought me to Gertrude's place in a fairly broken-down condition, and I had to hand her the box of candy wordlessly and then sit down to recover.

  When I was finally able to explain what had happened, Gertrude said with astonishment, "Why didn't you take a taxi?"

  I might have told her that I had tried and that no taxis were available. Taxis didn't cruise much in Brooklyn, and those that did would undoubtedly find passengers at once when public transportation failed. I would have had no chance of finding one and if I told the story pathetically enough, I would have been a hero.

  Once again, though, the clever lie eluded me. I told the truth— which was that taxis had never occurred to me—and all I accomplished was to give an impression of foolish miserliness.

  PART IV

  The War and the Army — in That Order

  Philadelphia

  Life in the great world outside continued without regard to my growing expectations with regard to Gertrude and a job. In the spring of 1942, the Japanese had completed their occupation of the Philippine Islands and were busily engaged in rooting the Americans out of their last foothold on Corregidor Island in Manila Bay. Elsewhere the Japanese were advancing in Burma and had about completed the occupation of Southeast Asia and the Dutch East Indies. There was even some feeling that the British might lose India.

  In Europe, the Nazis had survived the Russian winter, had suffered disappointingly few territorial losses, and now they were preparing to resume their blunted blitzkrieg. The clouds were dark in all directions.

  In the smaller world of writing, Campbell had made one of his periodic experiments in advancing Astounding's respectability by making it large size so that it would be displayed on the newsstands along with the slicks and so that it would get more in the way of fancy ads. It didn't work, and I hated the change myself because it upset the even line of my science-fiction-magazine collection.

  In any case, several of my stories appeared in the large size. "Runaround," 1 the third of my positronic stories to appear in Astounding, was in the March 1942 issue, and "Foundation" 2 in the May 1942 issue.

  I was withdrawing, somehow, from all this. I scarcely mentioned the appearance of the new stories in my diaries. Where I was not concentrating my thoughts on Gertrude, I was concentrating them on the possible job in Philadelphia.

  On April 10, I made the train trip to Philadelphia for the second time in my life and worked my way out to the Navy Yard in the city's southern outskirts. I was amazed at its size, at the density of its military population, at its tight security, and at the beauty of its laboratory equipment. I was interviewed and it seemed to me clear that I would get the job. I was fingerprinted for the first time.

  What followed then, though, was a long delay that drove me to

  1 See I, Robot.

  2 See Foundation (Gnome Press, 1950, later in a Doubleday edition; it appears as Part II, entitled "The Encyclopedists").

  distraction. It was my first experience with government red tape. I was told I would hear in two or three weeks, but it wasn't till six weeks had passed, and May 11 had come, that I received my appointment as junior chemist at the Navy Yard.

  On May 13, 1942, I took the train to Philadelphia for the third time, and there occurred, now, a break in my life almost as deep as had occurred to my parents when they took the train and the ship to the United States.

  I had till that day maintained connections, albeit tenuous ones, with people out of the past—with Sidney Cohen, with Mazie (the girl I had known in Decatur Street), with Uncle Joe, Aunt Pauline, and Cousin Martin. Contact was virtually broken in every case after I left for Philadelphia.

  All my friends from college and graduate school receded into the distance. The periodic visits to Campbell and Pohl came to an end. The Futurians were gone and so was Scott Feldman, the war game, the Brooklyn Authors Club.

  Even inanimate objects went. I left my magazines, my manuscripts, my diplomas, and my original painting of "Nightfall" in Brooklyn, and I never saw any of them again. Eventually they must have been sold or otherwise disposed of.

  Even the candy store was gone—at least as far as I was concerned. After sixteen years of day-in, day-out work in it, I left it on May 13, 1942, and never went back to it except to visit. Stanley, who was now approaching his thirteenth birthday, took over.

  Something else vanished, too. For years I had wanted an Encyclopaedia Britannica and finally my father managed to scrape together the money to buy a copy, and on March 11, it arrived. I began a project of reading it from cover to cover—not every word, to be sure, but lots of them, and at least I looked at every entry. I was in the third volume when I left, and my last words as I left were, pointing to the encyclopaedia, "Gee, now I'll never know how it came out."

  The only thing I did not leave behind when I went to Philadelphia was Gertrude. I left her behind physically, but my whole purpose in going was to come back later and take her with me to Philadelphia.

  3

  The YMCA was full when I got to Philadelphia, but they directed me to a rooming house where I could stay the night. The next morning,

  May 14, I made my way through an incredible gauntlet of security and showed up at the chemical laboratory of the Naval Air Experimental Station.

  My immediate superior was Bernard Zitin, a very thin fellow, taller than I, with crisply curled black hair, an asymmetric nose, and a stammer. He was very bright and very helpful. He drove me to West Philadelphia so that I might examine possible rooms and I finally chose to move into 4707 Sansom Avenue.

  It was not really an independent apartment, but a room in someone else's house. It was the only time in my life I ever lived with strangers, although I must admit the people who owned the house were reasonably good to me during the time I stayed there.

  It being wartime, the Navy Yard was on a six-day week, but it was my plan to leave the Navy Yard each Saturday just as soon as the workday ended (at 4:00 p.m., for work began at 8:00 a.m.) and make my way to Broad Street Station. There I would take the train to New York, go straight to my parents', wash, shave, dash over to Gertrude's place, then return and sleep in my own bed. Sunday, I would visit Gertrude again and then take an evening train to Philadelphia to start the week again. (Of course, I would bring my laundry to New York for my mother to take care of and head out to Philadelphia with fresh clothing-)

  It was a dreadful routine, but I kept it up for week after week. Because I was in New York only for the twenty-four-hour period centered about Saturday night I could never see Campbell, but that didn't matter. I didn't want to see anybody but Gertrude, and writing, which had been at a halt since February, continued to be nonexistent.

  I was under the impression, after all, that the purpose of my writing had been to pay my way through school. Now there was no school to be paid. Indeed, the work I was doing was paying me. Why should I write, therefore? I even stopped reading science-fiction magazines, for the f
irst time in thirteen years (I think because reading science fiction activated guilt feelings over my failure to write it.)

  I tried to take advantage of my newfound independence. After all, what was to follow was the longest stretch in my life—the very longest —in which I was completely alone and not beholden to anyone; in which no one might tell me yea or nay in my personal life.

  I seized the opportunity to do as I wished, therefore. Here is one example I remember. I loved soda pop, as who does not. Occasionally my mother would take a large-size soda-pop bottle, containing four glasses worth, into the house and dispense it to us. I usually got the equivalent of one glass worth.

  Well, on one of my first days in Philadelphia, I bought a large-size

  soda-pop bottle, took it up to my room, and drank it all while I read a mystery. I promptly made an important discovery: One glass is about enough; each succeeding glass was less good, and the last glass was vile.

  Being free to live as I wished taught me quickly enough that I wished to live soberly and reasonably—exactly as my parents had always expected me to live. It was a dreadful disappointment.

  I had arrived in Philadelphia on a Wednesday night. By Saturday night I was home again, and, to my mother's dismay, did exactly as I had planned to do. I dashed to Gertrude's place immediately and stayed there half the night. It was Gertrude's twenty-fifth birthday and she seemed glad to see me. She asked me of her own accord to write to her periodically from Philadelphia, and agreed to see me every Saturday.

  The next Saturday when I came home, I had to lean against the door of the living room before entering because Gertrude was there. My parents had arranged it as a surprise to me, and it was the first time she had met them. My parents were very favorably impressed with her.