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

by Asimov, Isaac, 1920-1992

  I would say, "Suppose something happens to Gertrude while I'm gone."

  He would say, "What could you do right now if something does?"

  I would say, "Nothing."

  "He would say, "Then f— it."

  I couldn't quite make myself take that attitude, but it did lighten the tension a bit.

  There was a problem about sleeping. Three soldiers were assigned to every upper and lower bunk—one in the upper and two in the lower. James, Upton, and I had one set of bunks, and we tossed coins, odd man taking the upper. Ed James won and climbed above.

  Ed Upton seemed unconcerned, stripped to his underwear, got into the lower bunk near the window and, as nearly as I could make out, fell asleep at once. I stripped to my underwear, got in very cautiously, and tried to hold myself in such a way as to make no contact.

  I got very little sleep on that train.

  We got into Chicago at 3:30 p.m. on March 3 and had a five-hour layover. We seven got out, visited a USO, then trooped over to a bar. There we sang songs (we did that a lot on the train, too, between bridge games) and the other six drank. In particular, we did a soulful rendition of "The WhifTenpoof Song."

  A fellow at the bar was so taken with Dylewski, in particular, that he gave him his card and urged him to come see him after he got out of the Army and there would be a job waiting for him.

  Back on the train we passed through Iowa and Nebraska. I mailed letters in Omaha. We also made up parodies of popular songs, which we referred to as the "Ballads of the Battling Bastards of Bikini." Unfortunately, I don't remember a single parody. Not one.

  I found out that one of the officers on the coach with us was a science-fiction fan. He didn't know who I was, so I asked him leading questions, while the other six listened with straight faces, and finally elicited from him the fact that he read and liked Asimov's stories. After I got him to say that Asimov was "a brilliant fellow," I revealed myself.

  It was funny at the time and for the moment, but it was a bad move. That was one officer who disliked me intensely thereafter—and it served me right. (Fortunately, he never did anything about it.)

  On March 5, we stopped at Ogden, Utah, where I bought a postcard to which was attached a small pack of salt from the Great Salt Lake, and mailed it off to Gertrude. I usually got newspapers wherever we stopped so that I had a chance to read a wide variety in the course of the trip. The only one I specifically mentioned in my diary was the Salt Lake Tribune, which I called "rotten reactionary."

  On March 6, we got off the train and took another to Camp Stoneman, California. I couldn't reach Gertrude that evening; the lines were all busy. The next morning I sent a telegram, which cost $.45, and, after trying all afternoon, finally put through a station-to-station call to her for $2.50 and heard her voice.

  On Saturday, March 9, 1946, we embarked on a troopship called the President Hayes, which was going to take us on our second leg of our trip, and disembark us at Hawaii. That trip was to take us six days, and the President Hayes was no luxury liner. (This was to be my first ocean trip since I arrived in the United States twenty-three years before.)

  There were about two hundred of us sleeping in the same room, with beds stacked three high. (I got an upper and was delighted to get it to myself.) It was so crowded that after waiting in the chow line for what seemed an interminable period, we gave up on dinner.

  It was just as well. Once we got under way, seasickness was endemic. I didn't feel great, but I fought it down. I didn't throw up once, but considering that there were soldiers throwing up all about me, there seemed little advantage to not doing it. Everything smelled just as bad as though I were personally involved.

  I decided to grow a beard for the duration of the ship voyage, together with mustache, through the simple expedient of not shaving. It was my third attempt at facial hair. By the time we disembarked, I looked like a western prospector. The beard, while still very short, was solid, thick, and dark. None of the other six, who had also decided to eschew shaving, could do well at all.

  On March 14, however, I had to shave it off, since it would have been against Army regulations to keep it.

  On March 15, thirteen days after we had left Camp Lee, we were in Hawaii—specifically, on the island of Oahu—in an Army Camp outside Honolulu. Once there, we had nothing to do but wait for the final leg of the trip to Bikini.

  3

  It was a more or less tedious wait, but it affected me not nearly as badly as the initial period of waiting in the Army. I had grown used to Army life, and besides, basic training was over, and I wasn't hounded very much.

  Sometime during my stay in Hawaii, I underwent a turning point

  in my personality. Until then, I had always been eager and willing to display my intelligence and learning—even insistent on it. It wearied people and made me disliked and, in my saner moments, I knew it wearied people and made me disliked—but I couldn't resist.

  Then, one day, I was the only critically needed specialist in the barracks, idly reading something or other, while at the other end of the room, three soldiers were talking to each other.

  They were "nonspecialists" (the kind I always dismissed in my mind as "farmboys"), and they were talking about the atom bomb since that was very much in the minds of all on Operation Crossroads. One of the three took it upon himself to explain how the atom bomb worked and, needless to say, he got it all wrong.

  Wearily, I put down my book and began to get to my feet so I could go over and assume "the smart man's burden" and educate them.

  Halfway to my feet, I thought: Who appointed you their educator? Is it going to hurt them to be wrong about the atom bomb?

  And I returned, contentedly, to my book.

  This does not mean I turned with knife-edge suddenness and became another man. It's just that I was a generally disliked know-it-all earlier in my life, and I am a generally liked person (I believe) who is genial and a nonpusher later in my life. Looking back to try to see where the change began, I find it in this incident in the barracks outside Honolulu.

  Why? I'm not sure I know. Perhaps it was my surrender of the child-prodigy status. Perhaps it was my feeling that I had grown up, I had proved myself, and I no longer had to give everyone a headache convincing them that I was, too, smart. (Of course, I backslide now and then, but not often.)

  4

  Oahu was a pleasant place. In fact, though I consciously resented being there as part of the Army, I couldn't help but enjoy it a little bit.

  There was something unutterably free about always being able to wear shirtsleeves—about feeling no concern for rain. Every day it clouded up and rained now and then, but the rain never lasted for longer than a few minutes at a time and then the sun came out and dried you. 2

  There were flowers everywhere and the people were delightful, though downtown Honolulu itself was unpleasantly commercialized.

  2 This wasn't always so. On April 17 and April 20, there were steady all-day rains of the kind I was accustomed to.

  We visited Waikiki beach, which did not live up to its Hollywood reputation. I was, in fact (used as I was to Coney Island), amazed at its small depth.

  We took tours around Oahu and we visited the Dole pineapple plant on April 18. What I remember most vividly about the sights of Oahu, in fact, was a faucet in the lobby of the Dole plant. When turned, it delivered not water, but pineapple juice—and not just pineapple juice, but the best I've ever tasted before or since, thick and sweet. I had five cups.

  We also periodically visited the USO in Honolulu, which I always enjoyed except for one unpleasant event. At one time, the song "God Bless America" was played, and everyone in the place stood up and sang along.

  As it happens, however, I think the song is a disaster. The tune is one long cliche and the words are embarrassingly mawkish. So I didn't stand up and I didn't sing, and I was pretty conspicuous.

  After it was over, a servicewoman who was a German refugee demanded to know why I had not stood up.

/>   I said, "It's not the National Anthem. I don't have to stand up."

  Whereupon she delivered herself of a strong denunciation of me for my lack of patriotism.

  When she was all through, I said, "You don't demonstrate your patriotism by singing a bad song. If you think that's patriotism, it shows you don't know anything about it." 3

  Since I had clear logic on my side, there was nobody against me but the damn fools. Unfortunately, that category included almost everyone in the room.

  On April 25, by the way, my role as bridge fiend came to a permanent end. Bridge games had continued ever since our train trip, and in one game that day I bid a grand slam that I felt absolutely confident of making, since between myself and the dummy, I owned virtually every trump. Nevertheless, through a piece of elementary miscalculation, I found myself set three. After that, I still played an occasional bridge hand, but only occasionally, and always unenthusiastically. That mishandled grand slam poisoned the game for me.

  For a while, I shifted to chess. What happened was that I read Stefan Zweig's The Royal Game (in my opinion the best story about chess ever written) and tried to drum up a game and couldn't. So I

  3 I would have liked to have asked her if her father had ever sung "Deutschland iiber Alles" and, if so, what that proved, but I was quite certain that she would then assault me and I managed to keep it down, thank goodness.

  tried strategy. I gave The Royal Game to Ed James and said, "Would you like to read a good story?"

  An hour later he came to me and said, "Would you like to play a game of chess?"

  We played quite a few games, but, as usual, I was steadily beaten and my ardor finally cooled.

  In participating in the round of pleasures, I remained prudent, of course, and when payday came around I was generally the only in the barracks who was not long out of cash. On March 31, for instance, various fellow soldiers owed me a total of $11—to be paid back, without interest, of course, on payday.

  In fact, things went along so smoothly that on March 22, when the news arrived that President Truman had postponed the Bikini atom bomb blast for six weeks (hence six weeks longer to wait—I knew it, I knew it), my indignation and despair, though present, were distinctly less intense than they might have been.

  5

  We were all finally given temporary assignments to keep us busy until we shoved off for Bikini, and I, of course, was made clerk-typist.

  That meant a certain discomfort, for I no longer wore fatigues or pulled KP, and when I came up during mess call for my beef and mashed potatoes, it meant that I might find another of the critically needed specialists standing behind the counter in fatigues and serving me. It was a near squeak, then, as to whether I got the mashed potatoes on my plate or on my uniform.

  One of my duties as clerk-typist was to help make up the "morning report." In essence this was a daily account of the whereabouts and status of every individual in the company. Each person who went on furlough, or sick leave, or was AWOL, or who returned from same, had to be mentioned. Each person who was newly assigned to the company or newly detached had to be mentioned—and, as I recall, by full rank and serial number. Each promotion or demotion had to be mentioned. Finally, at the end, a double-entry summary had to be made of all the personnel, listing them downward by rank from five-star general to private and across in every category of presence or nonpresence. Totals had to be recorded both down and across, and the grand total of all the downward totals and of all the crossward totals had to come out the same—on pain of evisceration, I think.

  The actual report was made out in pen and ink by a corporal who was an old hand at it. 4 When he was through with the report he would hand it to me to be typed up. That was by no means a sinecure. It had to be typed with no errors. Every mistake, even that of a single letter, had to be corrected and then initialed by the commanding officer, and the commanding officer objected to that because he could only occasionally remember his initials.

  Furthermore, there was a strict system of abbreviations that prevailed. The word "for" was abbreviated "fr," the word "from" was abbreviated "fm," the word "today" was abbreviated "tody," and so on, in the interest of conciseness. Of course, if a word were not on the list of compulsory abbreviations, it was forbidden to abbreviate it. Thus if there were occasion to use the word "approximately," to use the abbreviation "approx" would necessitate redoing the entire report. The military mind remains unparalleled as a vehicle of creative stupidity.

  I sometimes asked the corporal to let me do the morning report from scratch, just for the fun of it. He consistently refused for fear, I suspect, that I would take his job away from him. One morning, however, he came in with the statistics of the day and said, "Okay, Asimov, do it yourself this time."

  I saw the reason for that at once. A whole batch of promotions had come through; each had to be mentioned individually, and the double-entry column had to be radically revised. (Ordinarily, the double entry for one day was very much like the one for the day before so that it offered little trouble.) Working through all this, plus the usual complement of more ordinary changes in status, took me over an hour. I was rather shamefaced when I brought it in, later than usual, to the commanding officer.

  He held it upside down and considered it carefully. "Are you sure this is all right, Private?" he asked.

  "Yes, sir," I said.

  "Good!" I showed him where to sign his name and he carefully blocked out the letters, getting most of them right. 5

  I then handed it to the corporal who took it to the headquarters building where a bevy of WACs labored to produce a similar morning

  4 I remember him because he wrote a few pages of pornography that remain, to this day, the most skillful I have ever read and that I'm certain consisted of a personal reminiscence.

  5 My remarks impugning the intelligence of officers need not be accepted as literally true. It's just that while I was in the Army I swore a mighty vow that someday I would write a book impugning their intelligence, and vows are sacred; you know.

  report that had to check with ours exactly, or a whole series of officers went into a whole series of tantrums.

  The corporal walked in (I found this out later), tossed the morning report on the desk, and said, "There it is."

  A WAC looked up round-eyed. "You're finished?"

  All around her the floor was littered with morning-report blanks that hadn't worked out.

  "Sure," said the corporal, nonchalantly, "nothing to it."

  "Nothing to it? I'll bet your report is all wrong."

  "Bet it isn't."

  It took the WACs half a day to produce a report they could agree on and one in which the double entry checked, and when they were done, they found, to their unutterable chagrin, that it matched the corporal's report to the last digit—and until then, they had all had the serious suspicion that the corporal's brains could be switched with that of a Siamese cat to the serious harm of the cat.

  Several days later, I was sent to the headquarters building on some trifling errand and announced my name. This at once made me an object of curiosity. At all offices possessing my records I invariably became known as "the 160," and all the girls flocked around to see if I had two heads.

  One of them, struck by a horrible suspicion, suddenly asked, "Say, do you work for Corporal So-and-so?"

  "You bet," I said, cheerfully.

  "And did you make out the morning report on such-and-such a day?"

  "The day with all the promotions? That's right."

  "Well, no wonder," she said, in exasperation. "Listen, don't tell that bum you told us."

  "Of course not."

  I imagine they plotted some revenge, but if so, I never discovered its nature.

  My typist duties made it possible for me to carry through a project that we seven specialists had long been brooding about. It seemed to us quite clear that we weren't doing anything of importance in connection with Operation Crossroads; that our inspection of the material exposed
to the blast could be performed by any eighteen-year-old nonspecialist and that, in fact, the eighteen-year-olds and we were being assigned to the work without distinction among us. We were just being wasted on

  the project, to make various officers seem more important, and ought to be sent back to our original units—where we could apply for discharge.

  The trouble was that we could not appeal on this basis to anyone in the military. We had to go through channels, starting with our immediate superior, who would, of course, quash it at once and give us much trouble in the process.

  Nor could we write to Congress, since that was forbidden.

  It occurred to me, then, that we could write to Dr. Bradley Dewey, who was head of the American Chemical Society. After all, the ACS was my professional society, and I was a member in good standing. The other specialists were also either chemists or chemical engineers.

  If Dr. Dewey cared to take the matter further, that would be his responsibility. We would certainly be careful not to ask him to do anything. A copy would also be sent to Credo's wife, who knew a senator. If she happened to take it to him, that was not our fault either.

  I typed up the letter carefully on April 1 (it didn't occur to me that it might be taken as an April Fool joke, or I would have dated it March 31.) It covered three pages and came, I should judge, to about thirteen hundred words. The composition was entirely mine, and I still have a copy of it, but it is too tedious to quote, except perhaps for the last paragraph:

  "Perhaps this is a sample of a more general misuse of men thoughout the Army. If so, it should be investigated, for the overall good of America's scientific future."

  Once it was done, there came the matter of signing it and, to my amazement, after having enthusiastically concurred in the writing of the letter, and having energetically approved my first draft, there came a general reluctance to sign. In particular, no one wanted to sign first, since each claimed that the first signer would be assumed to be the ringleader.