She turned out to be a very attractive woman with whom it was a pleasure to talk. I told her about the fourteen weeks we specialists had shared together, and dredged up every story involving Bob that I could remember. The time passed pleasantly, and I saw her a few more times thereafter.
On June 24, I found out what had happened to my application for discharge. It had made its way to Washington and had been placed in suspended animation because I was being placed in an assignment that would utilize my research abilities "to the full." That referred, of course, to Operation Crossroads, which, in all the time I was assigned to it, made no use, not a scrap, of any research abilities of mine, and would not have done so if I had remained with it to the end.
My next step was to avoid being reassigned to something that would continue the suspended animation. I therefore went to Kriegman and asked him to have me assigned to his staff as typist. In that way I would be pinned to Camp Lee and could continue my moves. Kriegman pulled the necessary strings and once again I was off details as of June 27.
On June 30, the first of the two atom bombs was dropped at Bikini. I read about it in the newspapers and, in contrast, Camp Lee seemed rather tolerable to me.
I had a seventh furlough over the July 4 weekend, and on Sunday, July 7, I negotiated the trip from New York to Camp Lee for the seventh time.
5
On July 11, I finally had my discharge hearing. I went in with many a pat on the back and many a grinning remark that no one at Camp Lee had ever been discharged at his own request. At other camps, maybe, but never at Camp Lee, which was a real "chicken outfit."
The interview lasted fifteen minutes, during which I did my best to appear quiet and reserved. I explained the nature of my research at Columbia, why I had ceased doing research (there was no question but that at the Navy Yard I was helping the war effort), and how certain I was that I would go back to research the instant I was discharged.
They then asked me if I would not be able to work at the Army's scientific labs in Chicago, or in chemical warfare, and I did my best to point out that they wouldn't suit me as well as theoretical or "pure" research.
Finally, one of them asked me why I had not tried out for officers' candidate school. I suggested that my eyes would not meet the required standards, but he said he thought that objection could be met. Was there any other reason?
This question, I knew, was the jackpot, win or lose. If I expressed
disdain for officer status, then I could stay in the Army for life, as far as they were concerned, and be a private every day of it. If I expressed enthusiasm for officer status, they would have me sign an application for officer training. Neither alternative was bearable and I had to find something that was neither disdain nor enthusiasm and I had to do it without perceptible pause.
I thought more rapidly than at any time since the case of Professor Thomas, 4V2 years before. I said, more or less, this:
"If my eyes do not disqualify me, sirs, then I don't think that there is anything in my intelligence or in my educational background that could possibly disqualify me. However, as I am certain you all know, it takes far more than intelligence and education to make a good officer. It takes initiative, courage, and a stability of character, which, to my regret, I don't think I possess. It is embarrassing to have to admit it, but if I lied on the subject in order to become an officer, the Army would discover the lie quickly enough."
They didn't ask me anything more, and I was relieved. I didn't want to be an officer under any conditions and that in itself was a character trait that disqualified me, so that my statement was true enough. I had phrased it in such a way, however, as to leave them flattered to ecstasy.
I left, hoping for the best.
And that same day, simply because of the work I was doing for Kriegman, I was promoted to corporal, got my stripes, and had them sewn on. After eight months and ten days as a buck private, I had become a noncommissioned officer!
While I was in town having my corporal's stripes sewed on, I met Gladys Credo, who told me she was writing a letter to Bob, asking for a divorce.
I looked at her in horror. "Because of anything J said about him?"
"No, no," she replied. "I've been thinking of it for a long time."
6
I felt pretty good about my corporalcy. It meant a little more money, of course, but what was really important was that I was promoted. My incapacity to gain promotions, exhibited so forcefully at the Navy Yard, made my promotion a matter of distinction. I wrote to Gertrude about it and made sure that on the return address I wrote Corporal Isaac Asimov, with the first word underlined.
Then, the next day, July 12, my first full day as corporal, I was sent
down to the post office to run an errand. I had been there before and had dealt with a young woman who had seemed both efficient and intelligent.
This time she was not at the desk but some male soldier was. He was talking to someone and paying no attention to me. I stood there, growing visibly more impatient, and when he turned to me at last I told him what I wanted in rather peremptory fashion.
"Can't be done," he said, lazily.
"Oh yeah?" I said. "Well, how about letting me speak to the WAC over there?"
He turned to call her and, for the first time, I noticed he wore a captain's bars. Such was my surprise at encountering an officer where I had thought I was speaking to a fellow corporal that I did precisely the wrong thing. I snapped to attention, saluted, and said, "Beg your pardon, sir."
It was virtual suicide. The captain who, until then, had treated me as a human being, if a totally unimportant one, now turned upon me with a snarl. I had shown fear and, as any other dog would have done, he raised his hackles and the corners of his lips at the scent of it.
"How long have you had those stripes, Corporal?"
"I sewed them on yesterday, sir."
"And they went to your head right away, didn't they?"
It rather took my breath away that even an officer could imagine that corporal's stripes would make me proud in themselves, but I just said, "I'm sorry, sir."
He then proceeded to chew me out in true captainly fashion. (Officers are given a six-week course on outchewing and a six-minute course on military strategy.)
I was certain that I would be broken to private after twenty-four hours as a corporal and I was even revolving methods of explaining this to Gertrude—but the captain wore himself out with the expulsion of sufficient steam and decided to take no further action.
7
If he had broken me it would have made very little difference, for on July 18, 1946, two months and five days after Gertrude's letter had initiated the whole thing, I got the news that my discharge was approved. My little speech, I suppose, had done the trick.
I began at once to prepare for shipping out to Fort Meade, the place that had been my home in my first week as a soldier.
While doing so, I attended the first wedding in my life on Saturday, July 20, and did so in almost civilian effervescence. I was warned that at the reception there would be a lot of gentle old women who would not appreciate my notions of humor and that I must be very quiet. I promised and, on the whole, behaved myself until the bride-to-be fanned herself and said that, really, now that the whole thing was soon to be over, she didn't see what the excitement was about.
"Really?" I said. "Wait till tonight."
And I was promptly dragged out as unfit for genteel company.
That night I was taken to the noncommissioned officers' club and encouraged to drink. I was only too glad to do so because I was feeling hilarious. I grew even more hilarious after a few drinks and came to be incapable of walking in any trustworthy fashion. I had to be escorted to the latrine twice (though I do believe I was still capable of unzipping on my own) and then had to be carefully put to bed, as on the night of the Seder three months before.
The next day I awakened with the first hangover in my life, and the humor of the thing eluded me. When I spent
a social day with Lieutenant and Mrs. Kriegman, therefore, I stayed shudderingly away from any liquor.
8
Early on the morning of July 24, 1946, I was on the train to Fort Meade and left Camp Lee forever SVz months after I had seen it for the first time. On that day the second atom bomb was exploded at Bikini, and my fellow specialists were still there. I still felt too good at my own fate to feel guilty about theirs.
Sometime later I received a letter from Ed James, dated June 28. He told me that the letter I had written on April 1 had slowly made its way from the ACS president to the desk of the Secretary of War, and back down again to the admiral in charge of the test.
From the letter, and from still later information I received, it seems that the remaining six specialists were called in and chewed out at the admiral level. They held fast, claimed that the letter had only gone to their professional organization, that they hadn't the slightest idea it would go elsewhere, and managed to put the blame on me. That was the intelligent thing to do since I wasn't there and couldn't be punished. Besides, most of the blame did belong to me.
There was some talk of court-martial but it couldn't possibly have stuck. In the end, although the letter did not get them off the Opera-
tion, it did (Ed told me) result in their getting barracks and better living conditions as a way of quieting them down. They were taken off KP, for instance, so it all did some good.
I did feel guilty at having been out from under when the refuse hit the fan.
9
By dinnertime I was at Fort Meade. I mailed my belongings ahead to Windsor Place, and at 4:30 p.m. on July 26, 1946 (my fourth wedding anniversary, as it happened), I was duly mustered out of the Army with an honorable discharge.
I had been in the Army for eight months and twenty-six days, just about one third of the two-year-hitch I originally assumed would be my lot, and for about one month of that time, all told, I was on furlough in New York. At no time had it really been bad. Homesickness and frustration were all I suffered, and if I could have avoided those, I might even have had a rather good time.
I took the train back to New York and called up Gertrude as soon as I got into the station. She said, "Go to a hotel."
I said, "What!"
Apparently she had had a small cyst removed from one of her lower eyelids and the operation had produced a black eye and she didn't want me seeing her like that.
What nonsense! I refused to go to any hotel unless she went with me, and by 11:30 p.m. I was with her. I had made my anniversary by half an hour, and that anniversary was the happiest one I spent with her.
On Sunday the twenty-eighth I took the train to Windsor Place. I was in civilian clothes again (hurrah) and at the station, and an Army major inadvertently stepped on my foot.
"Pardon me," he said, automatically.
I waved a lordly hand, "That's all right, bub," I said, and with that, I knew I was out of the Army.
PART V
Into and out of tAanhattan
Dean Street
On the twenty-ninth, I went to Columbia and arranged for my return. There was no question but that my status there was perfectly regular, and in September 1946 I would register and begin research.
Meanwhile, the month of August had to be spent largely in apartment hunting, and that wasn't easy. Now that the war was over, everybody wanted an apartment, and during the war years, none had been built. They were very scarce and, in consequence, very expensive. The apartments that Columbia was building in Nyack had been slowed by labor problems, wouldn't be ready for quite a while and, when we went to look at them, we found that they were not at all suitable.
There didn't seem to be any problem with money, however. My Army pay, Gertrude's allotment, and twenty dollars a week that her father paid her for working at the Henry Paper Box Company had kept us both going through the Army interval, and the savings account was intact.
There was still more the Army could pay us. Each veteran could get a certain amount of money for his education under something called the "GI Bill of Rights," the exact amount depending on the length of his stay in uniform. It was my intention to refuse to sign up for it on the grounds that I had done my best to stay out of the Army and once in, had done my best to get out of the Army, and that therefore it wasn't just to take money from them.
Everyone else on both sides of the family thought this attitude was quixotic of me and I let myself be talked into it. The deciding push came from the thought that I didn't know how long it would take me to do my research and I didn't want to fail to get my doctorate simply because I ran out of money.
The Army money might make my finances last just those necessary extra months that might make all the difference and with that in mind I let expediency triumph over principle. I do that every once in a while, and I always hate it. I hated it this time.
At least I was spared the discomfort of finding my beloved New York changed. Changed it undoubtedly was, but I was protected from that by my nonvisual tendencies. The only thing that bothered me
about my long absence in Philadelphia was that I had lost touch with the politics of New York City and New York State—and in some ways I never caught up again.
Perhaps worse was that the students in the chemistry department were a new generation and now, at last, I was among the oldest of the students instead of the youngest—an uncomfortable blow.
You can't go home again.
Apartment hunting was interrupted on August 15 with a trip to Philadelphia, of all places.
Henry Blugerman needed paperboard for his company, and paper-board, too, was caught up in general postwar shortages. He knew of a place in Philadelphia where it might be obtained, so Gertrude and I agreed to go there.
We did, and found the place, but Gertrude expended all her eloquence to no avail. There was no paperboard.
We then went down to the Navy Yard, which I now visited for the first time in 9V2 months. It was Gertrude's very first visit.
With my usual caution, and my desire to keep all options open, I asked if I might have a leave of absence to complete my doctoral research. The notion in my mind was this: If, after obtaining my degree, I could not find a job, I might (if I chose to) return to the Navy Yard, at least for a while. That might be preferable to unemployment.
It could be done, I was told, provided I returned, temporarily, to the Navy Yard as an active employee. I drew the line at that. It was too intolerable a way of keeping that option open. I resigned once and for all, 4^/3 years after beginning work there.
We had dinner with Bernie Zitin, Leonard Meisel, and Roy Machlowitz at Shoyer's, Philadelphia's famous Jewish restaurant, which I had eaten at for the first time shortly before induction. Meisel then drove us to Wingate Hall, which we had left nearly a year before, in order to get information concerning some relative of the manager who managed apartments in New York.
Then we took the train back. It was the last whiff of our Philadelphia years.
3
On August 12, we had located a furnished iVi-room apartment, with a closet-kitchenette, that might do. It was distinctly smaller than our Philadelphia apartments and was nearly double the rent—$70 a
month—but it was in New York, not in Philadelphia. In fact, it was on 213 Dean Street, which was within walking distance of the downtown Brooklyn shopping district. That was an undeniably good point.
We had to consider it, and the more we looked elsewhere at altogether impossible places, the more the Dean Street apartment looked reasonable to us.
By August 27, I was so certain that the Dean Street apartment was the best we were going to get that I went to considerable trouble to beat the landlord down to $50 a month by promising to pay him the entire $600 for the year, in advance. The money was paid over on the twenty-ninth and that brought our bank account down to $3,330. As I said in my diary on that date, rather gloomily, "We are now the proud possessors of a closet on the first floor of 213 Dean Street, Brooklyn."
4
Meanwhile, though, on August 20, I had picked up the September 1946 Astounding, which contained "Evidence." 1 Could I have imagined when I mailed off the story from Hawaii four months before that I'd be reading it in the magazine as a civilian?
On August 22, 1946, I received my Social Security number: 055-24-6410.
That same day I received a letter from Gerry Cohen. He was still at Aberdeen Proving Grounds and he was under the impression I was still at Operation Crossroads.
On August 30, Katherine Tarrant told me of a new anthology, Adventure in Time and Space, edited by Raymond J. Healy and J. Francis McComas. It was a large Modern Library giant put out by Random House and contained a number of the best pieces of the Golden Age of magazine science fiction.
One of the stories it contained was "Nightfall," the second of my stories to be anthologized. For it, Katherine said, I would get $66.50 (the check arrived on September 7). I now thought of that sum as representing six weeks' rent or one year's gas and electricity.
I bought a copy of the anthology—$3.01 with tax.
5 On September 4, 1946, we moved into 213 Dean Street. It was the first time we had an apartment of our own, however small, in almost exactly a year, and the first time ever in Greater New York
1 See I, Robot.
And on September 6, my letters to the various specialists began to return, marked "moved—address unknown." By now, apparently, Operation Crossroads had broken up. The original estimate of six months had been fair enough after all.
On September 9, I went to see Campbell and brought up "Little Lost Robot" for further discussion. I had made two false starts. Campbell pressed to have me try again, and we even discussed two more Foundation stories.
I went home full of eagerness and started "Little Lost Robot" a third time, on September 10. It was about a robot which, interpreting an order too literally, lost itself in a crowd of similar robots and had to be identified quickly or great danger would ensue.
In memory yet green : the autobiography of Isaac Asimov, 1920-1954 Page 59
