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

by Asimov, Isaac, 1920-1992

This time I had no trouble and, working steadily, I finished it in five days, even though it was ten thousand words long and the longest of the robot stories to date. On September 16, I took it in to Campbell at 11:30 a.m., and at 2:30 p.m. I called him and found it was an acceptance at $.02 a word. On September 28, I received my check for $200. It was my first post-Army sale.

  Something else followed almost at once. On September 14, I had received a telegram from a lawyer who said that his client (whom he did not identify) wanted to buy all rights to "Evidence." I went to see the lawyer on my way to Campbell on the sixteenth, and all I could get out of him was that his client wanted movie rights in particular and would pay $250 for it.

  Campbell told me he thought $250 was fair for movie rights to a short story, but Gertrude suggested I ask $1,000. (Gertrude was nearer right, but neither she nor Campbell understood the situation any more than I did. I ought to have granted movie rights for a specific period, said rights to be renewed for more money at the end of the period. Selling all rights permanently for any sum was terrible and I was being cheated, but of course I didn't know that.)

  I called the lawyer and asked for $1,000 and that I wouldn't discuss the matter any further unless I knew who his client was.

  On September 20, the lawyer called again and said he was representing Orson Welles. I jumped for joy and let him have the movie rights for $250. Welles was a favorite of mine, both for his movies and, in those days, for a newspaper column he was writing.

  I got Astounding to grant me the necessary rights on September 27, took them around to the lawyer, and collected my $250. I felt great,

  but the whole transaction was barren. The picture was never made, and from that day to this, Welles owns the movie, radio, and television rights to that story and I cannot sell it elsewhere. What a fool I was!

  7

  Professor Boyd of Boston University School of Medicine was in New York on September 18, at the home of a friend of his—Arthur Sard, a mathematics professor at Queens College. Boyd had been corresponding with me all through my stay in the Army and I was eager to meet him.

  I made my way out to Queens and spent the day with him and the Sards from 2:00 p.m. to 10:00 p.m. This included an elaborate and rather formal dinner, for in my diary I remarked on the fact that the salad was mixed in a large wooden bowl, that the chicken was carved by Dr. Sard, and that there were lit candles on the table. I had never encountered such articles of sophistication before.

  Boyd himself was forty-three at the time, a stocky fellow of about my height who (in my opinion) looked like H. G. Wells. We liked each other.

  8

  On Monday, September 23, 1946, I registered at Columbia again, just as though the 4 1 /2-year lapse had never been. I had left a young man of twenty-two; I came back nearly twenty-seven. Had I not been interrupted, I might conceivably have earned my doctorate at the age of twenty-four, which would have been more in accord with my child-prodigy status; but now that could never be. Tens of millions of people had suffered far worse than I did in the course of World War II—but when no one was looking, I sometimes mourned the four-year delay.

  But at least I had done all my necessary coursework before I had left Columbia. Now it was only necessary to do research and nothing more.

  On October 1, I was assigned a research room and started in from the beginning. I discovered, rather ruefully, that in the war years, Linus Pauling's theory of resonance had taken over organic chemistry completely so that I was virtually a beginner again and would have to learn the subject afresh.

  I was asked to be lab assistant at a small salary, but I refused. I dared lose no further time from my research—and I didn't need the money.

  I am ashamed to say I felt a small glow of mean triumph. When I had started research before leaving for the Navy Yard, I had asked to be a lab assistant because at that time I needed the money—and they had refused me. Well, now J refused them.

  Now that I was in New York, bits of the past floated up. Gerry Cohen, my most reliable companion in basic training, showed up in our apartment on a visit on October 5. He was still in the Army and regaled us for three hours with erotic incidents from his recent past. They fascinated us but they might, of course, have been"exaggerated.

  Then, on the evening of October 12, we had dinner with Joe Gold-berger and Lee, along with two friends of theirs (Goldberger had taken to calling himself Gould). It was very pleasant and the food was good though I commented on the high prices with some indignation in my diary. Veal cutlets for Gertrude and myself set us back $1.50 apiece.

  On October 19, Gertrude and I visited Fred Pohl and his second wife at their apartment in Greenwich Village. I tasted caviar for the first time on that occasion. While there, a fellow Futurian, Dirk Wylie, and his wife, Roz, showed up. Wylie was not well and he died a few years later. Robert Lowndes, who had put on considerable weight, also dropped by. We weren't kids anymore, any of us.

  And there was a science-fiction convention.

  I hadn't attended any conventions since that first one in New York in 1939. It had set a fashion. Every year over the Labor Day weekend, a "world science-fiction convention" was held. The war years of 1942, 1943, and 1944 were skipped, but except for those, no year has been missed.

  The convention is held in a different city every year, and frequently the cities are much too far away for me to get to, considering that I hate to travel. I had attended none of the world conventions since the first.

  There were, however, also local conventions held in various cities each year. The oldest of these is the "Philcon," a convention held by fans in the Philadelphia area—and always in Philadelphia, of course.

  Although Bob Heinlein and I had left Philadelphia after the war and returned to our native haunts, Sprague de Camp did not. He remained in the Philadelphia area and naturally became an important cog in Philadelphia science-fiction circles and in their convention activities.

  Sprague invited me to the 1946 Philcon and, on October 27,1 went

  down to Philadelphia. The difference between postwar and prewar was quite marked. My iobot stories and the Foundation series had made me a science-fiction celebrity of the first rank, so that I signed endless autographs and was interviewed by a newspaper reporter for the first time.

  As an indication of the passage of time, one of the young women I met there happened to be one of those I corresponded with in the prewar days. I was married, of course, but she had gone me one better. She had been married and divorced.

  I then had dinner with the de Camps, whom I hadn't seen in over a year.

  Then Ed James of Operation Crossroads, who had just gotten out of the Army, came to New York on October 29, and we got a special-delivery letter informing us of the fact on that very day. Dinner was about to be started, but we put everything back in cupboards and refrigerators and dashed out. We had a fancy dinner for four (Ed's wife was along with him).

  After Ed returned from Crossroads, he and his wife stayed in Petersburg at Gladys Credo's old rooms and apparently the landlady told them lurid tales about Gladys and me.

  I was horrified and said, "But I was never alone indoors with her, Ed. Either I saw her in the company of others, or I met her in the street and talked to her there."

  Oh well. As Hamlet said, "Be thou as chaste as ice, as pure as snow, thou shalt not escape calumny."

  And speaking of calumny, the rumors went around Crossroads that I had been taken off the project for any of a variety of reasons discreditable to myself.

  10

  Things disappear as well as reappear.

  In Philadelphia, Gertrude had made a bust of me in clay. It was nearly life-size and it was an excellent likeness. People who visited us, knowing nothing about the bust, would see it and know at once it was of me.

  I was very fond of it myself. After all, it both looked like me and was handsome, and that's a combination that's hard to beat.

  But on the morning of October 7, 1946, Gertrude and I, while scuffling pl
ayfully, managed to knock it off the bookcase and it smashed into a hundred pieces. I still miss that bust.

  Then, on October 10, Gertrude played with some mercury I had brought home for its amusement value. It is fun to play with, since it is

  so heavy and so nonwetting. Unfortunately, Gertrude did not remove her wedding ring while playing with it and mercury will not only wet gold, it also will mix with it readily. Her ring turned a silvery color.

  I took the wedding ring to school the next day and tried driving off the mercury by heating it gently under vacuum. That merely turned it from a silvery color to a dull-gray one. I then tried to heat it more strongly in a Bunsen burner flame and the gold began to melt. (That was one of my more stupid feats since there were sound chemical reasons—I won't bore you with them—for anticipating just that.) I snatched the ring out of the flame but it was clearly ruined.

  Eventually, John Blugerman removed the mercury, which was only in the gold surface, by drilling it off with a dental drill, but the ring wasn't really useful thereafter.

  I missed that ring, too. It had been engraved with our initials and the wedding date.

  11

  For once I was getting along with a superior. Professor Dawson and I were soulmates.

  This was not because I had ceased to be me. It was entirely because Dawson didn't mind my peculiarities. Indeed, he was amused by them.

  For one thing, I was always running into him with excited ideas, or comments, or results. "Phenomenon-a-minute Asimov" he used to refer to me in speaking to others.

  Sometimes the excitement arose over something not entirely creditable to myself.

  One time, for instance, I reported to him that a sample of enzyme wasn't working no matter what I did. I was very gloomy about it for I couldn't understand what I had done wrong. And then I became aware of the fact that I was not using a 2-milliliter pipette, but a 0.2-milliliter one—one that had only one tenth the capacity of the former, though it had the same outward dimensions. Therefore I was always adding just one tenth the amount of enzyme I thought I was adding.

  This was a terribly stupid mistake for a chemist to make. A good chemist should be able to tell the capacity of a pipette in the dark just by the feel of it.

  Of course, I was far too excited to think about the stupidity of the matter and, therefore, to hide the fact so that no one would know how stupid I was. After all, I had solved the problem of the nonworking enzyme. I therefore rushed into Dawson's office (quite disregarding the fact that he was talking to someone) and said, "I've got the answer to

  the enzyme problem, Dr. Dawson. I was using a 0.2-milliliter pipette instead of a 2-milliliter pipette."

  Another research professor might have kicked me out of the laboratory for aggravated stupidity in the first degree, but Professor Dawson chose to regard it as an example of honesty. In fact, he was quoted to me as using the term "absolute integrity" in reference to myself, and I didn't quite have the absolute integrity to tell him it was only stupidity.

  As a matter of fact, Dawson had lots of opportunity to observe my stupidity/integrity. According to a system he had himself worked up, all students entered all experimental results each day in a notebook in which every page was backed by carbon paper and an identical copy page. At the end of each day, the carbons were handed to Dawson. 2

  I handed in my carbons dutifully each day, and every week Dawson and I would go over them together. Since I was always undeft enough to have some experiments that went stupidly awry, Dawson had many occasions to laugh.

  It turned out, as a matter of fact, that he had saved a particular set of experimental results I had recorded in early 1942 before I left for the Navy Yard. I had conducted the experiment with such incredible lack of skill that my results came out all over the place. I made a mark for each observation on the graph paper, and they covered the paper in almost random fashion. It looked as though the paper had been hit by shotgun pellets, a point I incautiously mentioned, so that everyone called it "Asimov's shotgun curve" after I had drawn a curve of the proper shape cavalierly through the midst of the marks.

  Every once in a while, then, when Dawson wanted to boast about me to someone, he would pull out that shotgun curve. Apparently, the logical thing for any student of normal intelligence to do was to record their observations on scrap paper before entering it in the book and then enter them only if they looked good—and it never occurred to me to do that. That was just compounded stupidity, again, but Dawson chose to consider it absolute integrity.

  Of course, he knew very well that I was a hopeless mess in the laboratory. At one time he said to me, "Don't worry, Isaac. We've got plenty of hands and if you can't run the experiments we'll hire someone to run them for you, You just keep getting the ideas; that's what we need."

  On the other hand, he could speak, frankly, too.

  I once told him of my futile attempts to enter medical school, for

  2 The idea was, I think, that no student could then hocus the observations, though that notion didn't occur to me for years. I thought Dawson just wanted to look at the observations. Eventually, when it finally occurred to me that some people considered it conceivable that observations could be altered, I wrote a mystery novel about it.

  he was now serving as the premedical adviser, and he said to me, "It's a good thing you didn't get in, Isaac."

  "Oh? Why is that, Dr. Dawson?" I smirked, for I expected him to tell me what a great chemist I was and how the world of chemistry couldn't have endured the loss of me.

  "Because you would have made a lousy doctor, Isaac."

  Well, it was true.

  I owe a great deal to Dawson and I am selfish enough to wish it were true that (as he keeps telling me in recent years) his greatest claim to fame now is the fact that he was my research professor. If it were true, it would be a pleasant way of returning, even if only inadequately, his faith in me and his kindness to me.

  12

  On November 1, 1946,1 was aware that it was just one year since I had been inducted into the Army, and that it was better than three months since I had gotten out. It gave the day such a glow of relief.

  And on November 5, Gertrude was able to vote as an American citizen for the first time. Thomas E. Dewey was running for governor of New York on the Republican ticket and we both voted against him, of course—but he won.

  That election, in fact, put the notorious Eightieth Congress into office, the first Congress in a quarter of a century to be dominated (narrowly) by the Republican Party. Truman had proven so inept in the eyes of the country that there were strong cries for his resignation, even from Democrats.

  Heinlein seemed to me to be an ultraliberal all through the days of the Navy Yard, and so had Leslyn. Now I got a letter from Heinlein saying that it was his idea that Truman appoint a leading Republican as Secretary of State and then resign. The Republican would succeed to the presidency and would run the country with a Republican Congress. This was the first indication to me that he had grown conservative.

  I disapproved of this suggestion that the Constitution be subverted and that the United States be converted into a parliamentary democracy, but I did not choose to quarrel over it. I answered with a short letter of bare disagreement.

  *3

  I had not entirely lost the knack of being rejected. Back in February 1942, Campbell had rejected "Victory Unintentional," and in the 4V2 years since, I had written eleven stories and sold them all.

  Now I heard that Thrilling Wonder Stories was trying to improve the quality of its stories and was willing to pay $.02 a word, matching Astounding's rates. I raked through the barrel and found "Big Game/' which I had originally written as a Probability Zero story five years before. It was only a thousand words long, but I rewrote it, lengthened it to three thousand words, and called it "The Hunted." I sent it to Thrilling Wonder on October 30, 1946, and on November 9, it was rejected. I was rather devastated. My name had not yet become magic. It couldn't carry everything.

 
; But it was really a pre-1942 story. I consoled myself with that and continued working on a new Foundation story, which I called "Now You See It—"

  I got the news that same rejection day, in a letter from Leslyn, that Bob Heinlein had sold a science-fiction story to The Saturday Evening Post. In the 1930s, The Saturday Evening Post had been the Mecca and Paradise of all writers. Any beginner automatically sent his first miserable little brainchild to the Post, and anyone who got in at any stage in his career had Made It.

  The cachet still lingered in 1946 and it was good that Bob had gotten in.

  To be sure, my first reaction had been of miserable envy—Bob could make the Post and I couldn't even make Thrilling Wonder. It didn't take much thought, however, for me to see that Bob had done us all a terrific favor and that there was reason to rejoice. Every science-fiction writer would find the world easier for him because Heinlein had made the field more respectable and, sooner or later, we would all profit as a result. Between Heinlein and the atom bomb, it became difficult to think of science fiction as childish and silly anymore, and there were great days ahead.

  Heinlein no longer wrote for Astounding, however. I think he and Campbell must have come to a bitter parting of the ways over something. I don't know what it was. Campbell never volunteered information, and I didn't think it proper to ask.

  I got a letter from Lieutenant Kriegman on December 2, except that he was Captain Kriegman now. He wanted Gertrude and me to visit him at his home in Newark. I was tempted, but the date of the visit coincided with my initiation into Phi Lambda Upsilon, the chemists' honor society.

  I had the choice between looking back toward the horrible days of the Army or forward toward a possibly glowing chemical career, and I

  chose to look forward. It was a hard choice and it rather spoiled the initiation for me since Kriegman had been good to me. For some years after that, I got a card from Kriegman each Christmas with a letter written across it. I responded each time, urging him to write more often, but he never did.