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

by Asimov, Isaac, 1920-1992

  Finally, we were shown huge stacks of aluminum serving trays on which soldiers ate their meals and were told to shift them from one end of a mess hall to another. These serving trays fit together snugly so that to lift a stack that is a foot high is the equivalent of lifting a hundred pounds or more of solid aluminum.

  I couldn't even begin to lift such a weight so I lifted stacks that were about two to three inches high and my partner (smaller and slighter than I) lifted considerably higher stacks.

  The soldier in charge (only a private first class, heaven help us) watched in gathering annoyance and said to me, "Hey soldier, what's the idea of letting your partner do all the work?"

  I unbent and said, rather snappishly (for it had been a long day and I was tired), "I'm lifting as much as I can."

  "You mean that's all you can lift?" He at once lifted a pile twice as high as the one I was trying to handle. "Look at that."

  And without much in the way of forethought, I said, "We're not all alike, Private. I've got a strong mind and a weak back."

  You'd be surprised how amiss he took that simple statement. He didn't have a mind so weak, unfortunately, that he missed the implication.

  I was promptly set to cleaning out the grease trap, which was supposed to be a very terrible job because it induced nausea. I managed.

  5

  The next day we had our first inspection.

  In the old days, I had never been deft in the laboratory. Now I was never deft in inspection.

  We were carefully told how to make beds so tight that a quarter would bounce off the blanket if dropped on it. No quarter alive ever bounced off any blanket I touched.

  We were also taught to clean our rifles with a greased patch and a ramrod in order to get out the accumulated rust. My rifles invariably manufactured rust and no grease patch ever emerged unstained from any rifle barrel I put my hand on.

  Eventually I learned to name every part of a rifle and to disassemble and assemble one even in the dark, but if I ever had an unrusted rifle barrel I was unaware of it.

  I was in a constant state of terror that I would be punished in some vague way for having blankets on which quarters did not bounce or rifles in which rust could be sighted. The loss of furlough privileges was the least of it. My imagination conjured up visions that were more along the line of being drawn and quartered.

  Hikes were another source of insecurity. We were all supposed to march briskly, with our rifles on our shoulders slanting in a perfectly vertical fashion, and leaning neither to the right nor the left. If ever I achieved that vertical stance, it was only a momentary one as my rifle

  shifted from a left-leaning slant to a right-leaning one or vice versa. Nor did I march briskly. After about a quarter of a mile, I drooped and dragged.

  I never even learned how to salute with the proper snap.

  Yet none of this ever drew upon me a reprimand. Not once was I ordered off to be hung, or even just to be strung up by my left big toe. Noncoms and minor officers passed me by to bark at some soldier on the other side of me who, as nearly as I could tell, was a model of military deportment in comparison to me. Nor did anyone ever make any adverse comment to me after looking through my rifle barrel, even though it seemed to me, as I watched tensely, that I could clearly see rust drizzling down into the officerial eye.

  Many months later, a friendly lieutenant told me that the commanding officer, before basic had begun, had gone over the soldiers with his subordinates and had said concerning me, something as follows: 3

  "Now this guy Asimov you might as well leave alone. He's got a 160 AGCT score and they ain't going to use him anywhere except behind a desk so don't waste time on him. He's the kind of stupe that's okay on those shit tests, but he don't know his right foot from his left and there ain't no use trying to teach him because he ain't got any sense. I been watching and I can see that."

  After that I was ignored by every officer and noncom in the place.

  When I found this out, I was indignant beyond words. Not, you understand, that I quarreled with the commanding officer's opinion of me, which I thought was accurate enough and a credit to his perspicacity. What graveled me was that no one was kind enough to whisper the news to me so that I could relax. I would gladly have agreed to have continued to do my best to make beds, clean rifles, and march, but why should I not have done it with a song in my heart?

  6

  If I thought I did poorly on bed make-up and rifle cleaning, I hit new depths of degradation on the physical-conditioning test, held on November 27. It was the physical version of the AGCT score and again I managed to make the extreme. I was best in the company (maybe in the Army) in AGCT and worst in the company (maybe in the Army) in physical conditioning.

  There was nothing I could do without falling apart. I hit rock bot-

  8 1 wasn't there and I don't know how accurate the lieutenant was in making his report to me.

  torn in the running test. They ran us five at a time and a fellow stood near the finish line with a stopwatch calling off numbers as each person passed the line. Somehow they matched time and soldier but I don't know how, for I was tensely waiting my turn.

  Four others and I finally started off and the man at the finish line called out four times, realized no one else was passing, and shouted, "Next five!"

  "Wait!" cried a medley of voices, and the time man looked up in surprise and found I was still trying to reach the finish line. I was walking.

  That day we were also issued gas masks, though gas had not been used at any time in World War II. We had to march with gas masks on and I simply could not pump enough air through the absorbent. It was either strangle to death with the gas mask on, or take it off. I took if off. I would probably have been court-martialed and shot if I had been caught at it.

  Later on, we were forced to smell samples of various poison gases, just in case we were called upon to fight World War I again. I held my breath till out of range.

  We also spent some days on the rifle range, where for the first and last time of my life I shot firearms. I fully expected to be bothered by the noise but discovered I wasn't. When I concentrated on hitting a target neither the bang of my own rifle nor my neighbor's made any impression on me.

  Firing a rifle at a stationary target, I found, was purely mechanical and required no skill, once you had properly zeroed in your sight—that is, you fired a shot after having brought the crosshairs on target. If you ended up a little to the right of bull's-eye, you adjusted the crosshairs a little to the left, and so on. Eventually you hit bull's-eye every time.

  If they had let me count the shots only after I had zeroed in the sight I would have had a perfect score, but they insisted on counting the imperfect shots that took place in the course of adjusting the sight.

  Then, after a break, in which I took my turn down in the pit observing other soldiers' shots, I was forced to take a new rifle at random to complete my shooting.

  I said that I wanted my own rifle, which I had zeroed in perfectly, but since that was rational it merely confused the sergeant. He just pointed to some rifle lying on the ground and said, "Get started, soldier!" in the Army ape-language you get to understand after a while. Naturally, I found the sights in the strange rifle adjusted to hit the next county and I wasted shots correcting that.

  In the end, I got a score of 160, which earned me a "sharpshooter"

  score and a special kind of gizmo to hang on my chest. I never enjoyed it, though. I would have done much better if I could have injected a few brains into the heads of the noncoms in charge. (Not likely, of course, for their heads were solid and would have quickly rejected the foreign substance even if they had been hollow.)

  7

  By now, one Gerald Cohen was a good friend of mine. When there was an offer of a weekend pass (that is, from Saturday noon to Monday morning) I would have been delighted to take it, had I but known how to get home. I could take the train in Washington and get to New York in four hours, but how did I ge
t from Camp Lee to Washington?

  I was on the point of rejecting the pass (if I couldn't go to New York to see Gertrude, there was no point in going anywhere) when Gerry said he was going to New York and he would show me how. I accepted both the pass and his offer eagerly, therefore.

  Gerry took me down to Petersburg on December 1, therefore, took me to the bridge leading out of town, and explained how one hitched a ride. You stood there, he said, with your thumb aiming in the direction you wanted to go, and you tried to look pathetic.

  "Now you stand here and practice," he said, "and 111 just step into the drugstore for a minute, then I'll come out and show you how to do it right"

  He stepped into the drugstore and he may have come out in a minute, but by then I was gone. A car driven by a Navy lieutenant, junior grade, stopped almost at once and picked me up, so that I was off on my first furlough from the Army. The war had not yet receded so far into the distance that soldiers could be ignored. A uniform was a guarantee as far as pick-ups were concerned. In all my stay in the Army, I never had any difficulty in getting a ride.

  I had only occasionally been in automobiles in my life. I had never been in a car on a modern intercity highway before. Certainly, I had never experienced hour after hour of smooth sixty-miles-an-hour driving before. No words could express my admiration for the driver. It took him three hours to reach the train station in Washington, and I stumbled incoherently in my attempts to thank him. He waved it away nonchalantly and drove off. 4

  I was down at Brighton Beach at eleven forty-five and saw Ger-

  4 Later on, I became more nonchalant myself. A simple "Thank you" proved to be enough.

  trude for the first time in thirty-one days. This time she had reserved the room at the hotel, and oh my goodness, was that different from sleeping in the barracks!

  On the evening of December 2, I set out on the return journey. Getting to Washington was no problem, but once there, it was useless to expect to hitch a ride late at night to Petersburg. I had to take a midnight train—and not the kind of train that made the run between the big cities of the Northeast. It was a wretched, slow, uncomfortable horror of a train on which I had to sit up all night, packed in with many other soldiers, and with civilians as well. I got into camp at 5 :oo a.m. on December 3.

  8

  There was one drawback to the furlough and that was the fact that I had an infected right big toenail, which grew worse and worse till I could barely walk.

  I had tried everything from soaking in Epsom salts to the application of some sulfa drug preparation. In the end, half the nail had to be cut away.

  It was done in two installments. On December 15, the doctor swabbed it with a liquid and it grew very cold. I assumed he was using ethyl chloride, which evaporates so quickly it freezes the skin temporarily and makes it incapable of feeling pain. "He quick-froze it," I said in my diary. Sure enough, it didn't hurt.

  Some weeks later, the doctor cut more of my nail off. This time he broke an ampule, squirted some liquid on the toe, and the skin turned white.

  "What's that?" I asked in astonishment.

  "Ethyl chloride," he said, cutting away deftly.

  "Ethyl chloride! Then what did you use the first time?"

  "I just washed it in alcohol."

  Goodness! The first cutting had been made without anesthesia, and I had been so convinced the nail was frozen, I had felt nothing.

  9

  Occasionally, I walked guard in another make-believe aspect of Army life. On the night of December 10, I had the pleasure of breaking my guard shift on a bed's bare springs, with a rolled-up mattress as pillow and with all my clothes on.

  The next day I got my first Army pay, $36.30. It in no way compensated. 5

  10

  My mail was copious enough. Sprague de Camp was a particularly faithful correspondent, and I even heard from William Boyd of Boston University, who wrote to tell me how much he liked "The Mule." As for Marcia, she sent me a 1946 diary so that I might continue my daily recordings.

  By all odds the most interesting item I read was not in any letter, though. On December 17, 1945, I came across an article in the Army Times for December 15, which dealt with a new Army order that allowed the release of chemists engaged in research.

  That galvanized me into activity at once. For over a year before induction I had done whatever I could legitimately do to avoid induction; and now it was my intention to do whatever I could legitimately do to gain release.

  The thought of doing something, of arranging interviews, of marshaling arguments in my mind, made a little more bearable such ridiculous activities as bayonet practice and marches in full field pack through melting snow and slush.

  On December 20, I saw some sergeant in the administrative building. There had been reports that no one in administration had heard any such order, and I was selected as the soldier to see and enlighten them, since I had been first and loudest in the field. I had the clipping ready, complete with the number of the order and so on.

  I was half afraid that they would tell me the whole thing was a hoax. The sergeant merely said I would need proof that I was in scientific research in civilian life.

  Fine! I asked for nothing better. My Christmas furlough started the next day and I would surely be down at Columbia to get whatever documentation was necessary. The thought kept me warm awhile I was indoctrinated into the mysteries of the submachine gun that day.

  11

  Friday, December 21, 1945, was my father's forty-ninth birthday. I spent all day getting home on my second furlough and that was as good

  5 At home, meanwhile, Gertrude completed the necessary routine for citizenship. She went to Philadelphia on December 13, 1945, to take the tests, and early in January of 1946 she became an American citizen.

  as any other way to celebrate it. I took the train from Petersburg this time and arrived at Union Station in Washington to be greeted with a fearful Christmas rush. Although I had arisen at 5:00 a.m., I didn't get home till 9:00 p.m. and spent the first night of my furlough at Windsor Place.

  The next day I rushed to Columbia even though it was a Saturday, and I was fortunate enough to catch Professor Thomas. I arranged to get all the documentation I needed, then rushed to the Henry Paper Box Company to see Gertrude for the first time in twenty days. The proof of research arrived on the twenty-seventh.

  The furlough lasted a total of ten days, and by and large it was active in a pleasant way, except for the fact that my father had the flu and ran a bad fever for a day or so. I alternated between Windsor Place and Brighton Beach and saw all I could of Gertrude.

  Christmas itself was quiet and peaceful and I spent it serenely reading murder mysteries.

  On December 26, I met with Charles Schneeman, one of the more popular and successful science-fiction illustrators of the time. It was the first time I had met him. He was a handsome man, who looked younger than his thirty-three years; talkative, energetic, full of enthusiasm.

  He had written me a few letters earlier in which he had spoken without details, of a project he had in mind. Now he told me about it. He wanted to do a science-fiction strip of the quality of "Terry and the Pirates," he to do the drawing and I to do the continuity.

  I was dazzled by the project (especially by Schneeman's predictions as to the money we could make on it), and before the furlough was over I had written up some continuity for a sample Sunday strip and eventually got it to him.

  Schneeman prepared one strip, finally, and it looked beautiful but nothing ever came of it. Nevertheless, it was the first time that I looked beyond the routine of writing for the science-fiction mazagines themselves.

  12

  On December 30, I met Fred Pohl at the candy store. He had been in the Army for thirty-two months, had achieved the rank of sergeant, and had just been discharged that month. He had been in Italy and in France during the war but had not seen actual action.

  He said, "My AGCT score was 156. What was yours?" I reddened (I k
now I did, because I felt myself redden) and said, "I got 160, Fred."

  "Shit!" he said.

  He didn't doubt me for a minute. I would have been dreadfully hurt if he had—not at his questioning my ability to get the score, but at his thinking I would lie just to put him down.

  He was full of news about the Futurians. He himself was divorced and remarried. His second wife, a WAC captain, was still in Europe. Dick Wilson was in Tokyo; Cyril Kornbluth had been in the Battle of the Bulge; and Don Wollheim was suing Robert Lowndes for $25,ooo. 6

  And so the year of 1945 drew to its close. It had been a dreadful year in some ways, filled first with apprehension of induction, and then of induction itself and the dull and toilsome life of a private in basic training.

  I was most regretful over the fact that it might have been a very good year if the shadow of the Army had not fallen over me. My writing earnings for my eighth year as a professional were $1,022. It was the third year in which my earnings had passed the thousand-dollar mark, and it had all been done in the first five months of the year with the sale of two stories. How much might I have earned if the whole year had been as normal as 1941 or 1944? My total earning of the year, including the ten months at the Navy Yard, came to over $3,600—not as good as the year before, of course.

  Still, I was in no mood to concern myself too deeply with figures and comparisons at this time. What occupied my mind almost exclusively was the prospect of discharge. On the evening of the thirty-first, I headed back to camp, the Columbia documents proving my status as a research chemist warming my duffel bag.

  It had to do a lot of warming, though, for I spent the last hours of the year in Union Station in Washington waiting for the midnight train to Petersburg. When midnight struck and a cry of "Happy New Year" went up, the cry I managed to send up was rather on the hollow side.

  To this day when I am in Union Station, there is still enough of the old roof pattern to remind me of that moment of the turn of the year from 1945 to 1946, and it still gives me a chill.