That left me in a puzzle as to where the check might be and I decided to be in New York the following Monday.
I was, and when I saw him on January 8, he explained that he wanted a revision—not much of one, but a revision. After having sold Campbell seven stories in a row without any question over a space of nearly two years, even a slight revision was a bad setback. The revision only took me a few days; I sent the story in again on the fifteenth, and on the twenty-fourth I got a check for $147—but the incident shook me.
On the January 8 visit, we discussed the next Foundation story, and Campbell said he wanted to upset the Seldon Plan, which was the connecting backbone of the series. I was horrified. No, I said, no, no, no. But Campbell said: Yes, yes, yes, yes, and I knew I wasn't going to sell him a no, no.
I made up my mind, rather sulkily (I was still brooding over "Escape"), to follow orders, but to get my own back by making the new Foundation story the longest and biggest and widest yet. On January 26, 1945, then, I began "The Mule."
On that day, I had been married 2V2 years, and that may have influenced me, for the heroine, Bayta, was modeled on Gertrude—certainly in appearance. Toran, her husband, was modeled on myself, though his appearance wasn't described as similar to mine.
Bayta was, of course, the key to the whole story and was the person who defeated the Mule at the end, while Toran was definitely subsidiary and bumbled about in Bayta's wake. I suppose that was the way I viewed the family situation. I was clever academically and I had a writing talent. For the rest, I never felt that I was particularly bright in anything that had to do with ordinary living and with human interrelationships.
As for the Mule himself, his personal appearance was based on my friend Leonard Meisel, who by then was the only person at the Navy Yard with whom I could completely relax.
I worked rapidly, more rapidly than I had at any other time during the war. To be sure, the story took me some 3V2 months to complete, but it ended being fifty thousand words long, approaching novel length. It was the very first story I had ever written that was so long, that had so intricate a plot, and that had so lengthy a cast of characters. And with Gertrude to inspire me, I think that Bayta was the first successful, well-rounded female character I ever had in any of my stories. 7
It helped the progress of the writing that news in the world outside looked so good. With the new year, the Soviets opened another offen-
7 I loved Susan Calvin of the robot stories passionately, but she could scarcely be considered well-rounded.
sive in the East and swooped into Germany proper. By the time I was working on "The Mule/' the Soviet Army was within striking distance of Berlin, and I felt that every day I was taking a giant stride toward New York and my return to research.
18
On Saturday, February 3, 1945, there was another science-fiction dinner, including the Heinleins, the de Camps, and the Asimovs. This time, instead of Hubbard and Williamson, there were present Henry Kuttner and his wife, C. L. Moore. It was the first time I had ever met them.
Kuttner wrote fast-moving, action-filled stories when he wanted to, but he was a very quiet fellow who said almost nothing the entire evening, but sat on a couch with his wife, holding hands.
The Kuttners had a copy of the March 1945 Astounding, which contained "Blind Alley," 8 and "Dead Hand" was announced in it as slated for appearance in the April 1945 issue. When that issue eventually appeared, it turned out I had the cover again. 9
As was not true of the first dinner party, the food and service were horrible. It embarrassed Bob (who was hosting it) extremely.
The peak moment of embarrassment came when someone tried vainly to get a waiter to bring a fork, and Heinlein finally, by main force, stopped one in midflight and demanded a fork. The waiter nodded, walked over to another table piled high with dirty plates and assorted garbage, and looked over the scraps for a possible fork. We yelled out, "Never mind," and the diner who was short a fork made do with his fingers.
19
With my seam-sealer project completed in the Navy Yard, I went on to handle a dye-marker project.
A dye marker is a reddish-brown powder containing fluorescein which, when dumped in water, produces a bright and fluorescent green solution. It is kept in a plastic container that can be ripped open. If an airman is forced to leave his plane over sea and to float about on a gas-filled rubber raft, he might be able to stay afloat and alive for days, but he would be difficult to spot from potential rescue planes high in the
8 See The Early Asimov.
9 See Foundation and Empire (Gnome Press, 1951, later published by Doubleday). It appears in the book as "Part I—The General."
sky. By dumping the dye marker in the ocean when he sees a friendly plane overhead, a splotch of bright green is produced that is far easier to see than the boat itself.
The great task I set myself was to work out some way of devising a laboratory test that would predict, accurately, how well the dye marker would be seen from a plane. The sure way of doing it would be to have someone fly in a plane and note the ease with which different samples of dye marker could be noted. That, however, it seemed to me, would be very expensive in terms of planes, gasoline, and pilots—to say nothing of the chance of accident—so that a satisfactory laboratory test would be valuable indeed.
The only trouble was that in order to decide whether the laboratory test gave useful results, they would have to be checked from the air to begin with. Working with a batch of different samples of dye markers, you would run the lab test on each and list the dye markers in order of efficiency. You would then view them all from the air and check whether they were in the same order of efficiency. You could then check the boundary limit of effectiveness for sighting and you would be all set. No one would then ever have to fly a plane to check a dye marker again.
It was the most creative thing by far that I had ever tried to do in the Navy Yard, and I was excited. Although I had never been in a plane and although I was scared of accidents and (remembering my two experiences on roller coasters) certain that I would be very upset over the feeling of being high up and of having, perhaps, a sensation of imminent falling—I applied for permission to conduct the plane test.
On March 9, 1945, I was taken up twice in a two-motored plane. A dye marker that I predicted would be unsuitable on the basis of my lab test proved, indeed, to be unsuitable when studied from the air, and I was very satisfied at that. I wrote in my diary, "The most interesting feelings were seeing the earth tilt when we banked, an air pocket we hit, and the first take-off. I wasn't the least bit airsick."
Nor was I conscious of being terribly afraid. However, I must have been pretty tense while flying, for the next day all my muscles were stiff and sore.
I applied for a whole series of plane flights to calibrate my lab test in detail, even though my first flight hadn't made me the least bit keen on airflight in general.
Hardecker was not particularly pleased by the expense that would be entailed. He called me in, tapped my request, and said, "Can you guarantee that this will succeed?"
"No, of course not," I said, surprised. "The point of the test is to
find out whether it will succeed. It may not, of course, but that would be a useful finding, too. If we knew in advance that the test would succeed, we wouldn't have to run it."
Hardecker shrugged. "If you can't guarantee success, you can't have the plane."
And that was that. I might have put up a harder fight if I had found flying more delightful.
Hardecker's reaction reminds me of an earlier time when some of the more highly placed civilians in the Navy Yard got tired of the poor quality of the coffee and sent a sample back for analysis. It seemed to have a green tinge and someone had suggested that there was copper in it.
I analyzed it and there was no detectable copper in it—or any detectable quantity of a few other heavy metals I thought might conceivably be present. I brought back my report.
"No copp
er?" they asked.
"No copper," I said, "and none of the other heavy elements I've listed."
They looked at me in contempt. "Then you didn't find out anything?"
"Finding nothing," I said, "is finding out something."
But I couldn't get that across to them.
The Draft
The war in Europe was winding up. The Americans had crossed the Rhine River in March; the Russians were within reach of Vienna, as well as of Berlin, and had taken Danzig, where it had all started ^Vi years before. In the Pacific, American forces had landed in Okinawa.
That meant, of course, that the draft pressures began to increase. Once again, the conversation at work became entirely a matter of who was in what draft classification, who was being called up, who had gotten a stay of execution, and what the Navy Yard was going to do.
The Navy Yard was resigned to losing most of its younger men who were in 2B and intended to ask for deferments for only a fraction of them—presumably the most important fraction. For those persons who were 2BL nothing was to be done at all, since it was felt that the "Limited" designation would keep them out of the Army anyway. I was 2BL because of my eyes, but my draft classification expired on April 2. Then what?
There was nothing to do but wait.
Gertrude and I went to New York on our monthly visit on April 7, 1945—and I had as yet received no word from the draft board. 1
I took the chance of stopping by at my local draft board on April 9 and inquired delicately as to my status. The girl there said they hadn't gotten around to me, but she was perfectly pleasant and there was no indication of trouble.
I went home the next day, but Gertrude didn't come back till Thursday, April 12, 1945. When I got home from work, she had not yet showed up, but just as I was preparing to leave for dinner, there was the sound of a key in the lock and I greeted her enthusiastically. We went out to dinner and had a wonderful time. Afterward, we took a walk to the local park and relaxed in the mild weather. We were feeling better than ever as we left to go home.
1 My parents visited the Blugermans and had dinner with them on the evening of the eighth. While it was still daylight, my father went up to the roof of the apartment house and from that roof he saw the Atlantic Ocean rolling its waves in upon Brighton Beach. That was the first time he had seen the open ocean since he had landed in Brooklyn twenty-two years before, though at no time had he been more than a few miles from it.
And then I caught sight of the newspaper headlines at a newsstand.
President Roosevelt had died! He did not live to see the end of the war. The whole weekend was devoted to national mourning, and Gertrude and I mourned, too.
Harry S Truman was President, but I had no hopes for him.
In the middle of that three-day period of mourning I got a card from the draft board extending my deferment for another six months. I would have appreciated receiving it a little sooner so that I might have enjoyed it more.
The month of April ended with the Germans in collapse, with the Soviets in Berlin, and with Adolf Hitler a suicide. In the first week of May, in which I excitedly waited for the end of the war in Europe and the end of the long nightmare of Nazism, I saw National Velvet in the movies and Oklahoma on the stage. They would have filled me with hilarity at any time, but coming the week they did, I nearly burst with pleasure. The only black spot in the blaze of light was that Roosevelt had not survived a little longer to see the end of Hitler.
I kept racing ahead in the last stages of "The Mule." It was almost as though the Mule's ambitions were collapsing in time to Hitler's. 2
On May 8, 1945, the war in Europe was over. It was V-E (Victory in Europe) Day.
For me, on a much smaller scale, the month had its victory, too. I finished "The Mule" on May 15, brought it to Campbell on May 21, and received the acceptance on May 29 in the form of a check for $875—50,000 words at $.0175 per word.
It was an incredible sum. That one check was only a little less than
1 had made in the first three years after my first visit to Campbell. It represented a quarter of my annual salary at the Navy Yard. Yet my comment in the diary was, "Falls flat somehow, however. Guess I'm so sure of sales these days, the thrill is gone."
Certain success evicts one from the paradise of winning against the odds.
3
I was in New York on May 21, 1945, in order to submit "The Mule," and with the war over in Europe and obviously soon to be over in Asia, it was time to be arranging my postwar life.
2 The Mule was in no way a Hitlerian character, however. The story line worked out as it did, in fact, precisely because the Mule was not a complete villain.
I visited Columbia to check on the situation and found that I was still on the rolls and that I could return at any time, just as though I had never left. Professor Dawson remembered me with no trouble despite my absence of better than three years. Milton Silverman was still there, as was Phyllis of the phase rule class. Both were about to get their Ph.D.s.
Unfortunately, the draft situation continued its downward slide, and my recent renewal of 2BL status began to look shaky. General Hershey, who headed the Selective Service, suggested that the lists of those with mild physical defects be combed to see if they could serve as replacements—and among those with mild physical defects was none other than myself.
There was nothing to do but wait. I had seven months to go before my twenty-sixth birthday when, in all likelihood, I would be safe, for the accent had always been on those under twenty-six.
It was going to be a long seven months, though, and as uncertainty set in and intensified, I found myself unable to write or, indeed, to think of anything but the perennial "Will I or won't I be drafted?"
4
I celebrated Memorial Day 1945 by donating blood to the Red Cross for the first and only time of my life. Among my many physical fears is that of being jabbed for blood samples. These days this is routine at physical examination and, as I grow older, I have those examinations more frequently. And always I hate the blood sampling and turn my head away and grit my teeth and moan. I always threaten to faint but somehow I never have.
This time, though, I managed to work myself up to giving the blood voluntarily—a very difficult task.
I had never been blood-typed, and in this case, I wasn't exactly. I was just checked to see whether I was blood type O. Blood type O represents a "universal donor." In blood of that type there is no substance that gives rise to antibody reactions, so that in general it can be given to anybody. If one is not of blood type O, then one's blood can only be given safely to someone of the same blood type.
I was not blood type O.
When I was done, I was given orange juice, chocolate, and cookies. The loss of a pint of blood is trivial, but the psychology of it is not. So while I felt weak and dizzy and regaled myself with fattening material that I could, for the moment, eat virtuously, I listened to the conversation about me.
Some fat slob in my vicinity announced he was blood type O.
"Really," said someone else. "I notice they were particularly interested in blood type O. Why is that?"
"That's because/' said the slob, "O blood is particularly rich and wholesome."
I was furious. My blood was just as rich and wholesome as his. The damn fool just didn't understand blood chemistry. I knew better than to try to explain the matter so I said nothing, but I burned all that day, and all that night, and all the next day and so on, right down to the present time whenever I think of it.
I'd have forgotten about the blood donation after a few months, and, thinking I had never given any, could easily have been shamed into making another donation. As it is, I have never forgotten the donation, and don't want ever to give another and run the risk of having the value of my non-O blood impugned again.
5
As I said earlier, the Navy Yard had reserved its limited ability to hold onto its young employees and requested deferment only for those it felt were in pa
rticular danger of the draft. Where someone was in a "limited" classification, they relied on the classification to keep him out.
Now that the Army had decided to lower its standards so that some 2BL's were eligible for the draft, the Navy Yard would be in no position to defend them because they would not have listed them as essential.
What it amounted to was that of two employees precisely equal in position, age, efficiency, and so on, the one with normal vision would be deferred and the one with bad vision would be drafted. It was a neat method of sticking the Army with inferior material—as American as apple pie.
While I marveled at the casual dishonesty of it, I was well aware that I was at the cruddy end of that particular stick.
On June n, I was called for a physical again, to see if, on closer observation, my eyes weren't as bad as they seemed. I promptly asked for a transfer to Philadelphia and gained a month. (Every month counted, with my twenty-sixth birthday looming.)
As day after day passed, with rumors, speculations, and conflicting statements from Navy Yard higher-ups giving us endless grounds for excitement, Leonard Meisel said to me, "Won't Columbia take you back?"
I was off like a shot, working my way up through the chain of com-
mand. My thesis was a simple one: If the Navy Yard was not going to request my deferment, then the implication was that I was no longer useful to them. In that case, I said, give me my release and on that very day I would be back at Columbia engaged in important scientific research.
"Choose," I said, in effect, "deferment or release."
I got to the top and someone had to go off to Washington to discuss the situation with the Secretary of War or somebody. When he came back, the word was that deferments were out. Did I really want my release?
Wait, I said. It was Monday, July 2 (just six months to go before my twenty-sixth birthday), and Gertrude was already in New York for her monthly visit and I would welcome the chance to see her. I took emergency leave and chased out to New York with my hopes high.
In memory yet green : the autobiography of Isaac Asimov, 1920-1954 Page 52
