Sprague answered very patiently, for he is the soul of dignity and forbearance, but I chafed a bit. Finally, when it was my turn again, the host said to me, "Say, I have a question for you: Suppose you are on Pluto and you're wearing those funny space helmets. How do you kiss?"
"You don't," I said, glowering at him. "You carry on a Plutonic love affair."
The studio audience broke up and it was the host's turn to glower. Apparently guests are not supposed to take the play away from the host. He didn't speak to me again.
I was toastmaster at the banquet on September 6, and did well. It was my first stint as toastmaster, but not my last.
16
I finished The Chemicals of Life on September 15, 1953. It had taken me only nine weeks despite the interruption of the convention and the confusion following the end of the agency.
I made an important discovery: It was easier and faster writing nonfiction than fiction. I had thought so when I wrote the textbook, but the long and tedious sessions with Walker and Boyd had obscured the discovery.
2 Harlan insists he said, "You aren't so much," but I think well of my memory and
I'll stand by my version.
8 Lester del Rey and I are a lot like that, too.
In fact, I was sorry I had finished the book, and I was therefore intent on writing another one of the sort—but not right away, for the second edition of the textbook was in high gear.
Till now I had been collecting new chemical findings that would require revision and expansion of the text, but now Williams & Wilkins had sent us large versions of the book with blank pages in between every pair of printed pages. I made notes, revisions, and reference notations on those blank pages opposite the places where revisions and expansions would have to be made. It ate up a lot of time.
Meanwhile, the October 1953 Astounding came out with "Belief," 4 and the October 1953 Galaxy came out with the first of the three parts into which The Caves of Steel had been divided for serial purposes. Not only that, but also (at my suggestion) F & SF had agreed to reprint my story "The Fun They Had." On this occasion, I heard from the magazine's new managing editor, Robert P. Mills, who wrote to suggest lunch.
Much less pleasant than any of this was the fact that McGraw-Hill was showing definite interest in the student-nurse textbook. They had a woman, M. Kolaya Nicholas, who was working on such a book but who felt she needed help. McGraw-Hill thought we might help her and, worse, Walker thought we might—so I was stuck with it.
17
I drove into New York late in October to oblige Sam Moskowitz, who by now (and ever since) was a good friend of mine. He was giving a class in science fiction at City College 5 and wanted me as guest lecturer. The trip was noteworthy since we finally dared leave David in the back seat alone. (It was a two-door car; he could not get out.)
I gave my two-hour talk to Sam's class on October 23, 1953. I remember very little about it except that I drew detailed diagrams on the board to exemplify my notions of novel structure. Sam remembers it more glowingly than I do. He has never ceased bemoaning the fact that it never occurred to him to tape the talk.
18
For some time now, I'd been suffering from a plague of boils, like Job. They tended to be, more often than not, in or near the armpits,
4 See Through a Glass, Clearly (New English Library, 1967).
5 This is a supercommon situation now, but it was not so then. Sam's class may have been the first college class in science fiction.
and they made life very uncomfortable for me. I mentioned it to Dr. Ryan when I took David in for a routine injection. He gave me a penicillin shot and then questioned me closely on diabetes.
It hit home. After all, I had immersed myself in that biochemistry textbook and there was a whole chapter that dealt very largely with diabetes. One of the unpleasant side effects of the disease was a heightened tendency to infections such as boils. I said, "But my urine has been tested any number of times. There's never been any glucose in it."
He said, "That's a late symptom, and you may be in the early stages. What you need is a glucose tolerance test."
That's not pleasant if you don't like having blood withdrawn, and I don't.
You come in fasting. Blood is withdrawn and tested for glucose content. It should be within certain normal limits. You are then forced to drink a large jug of glucose solution, which is sort of sickly sweet. Glucose is the natural sugar of blood, and if you drink it, it is at once absorbed into the blood, the glucose content of which shoots sky-high.
If you're normal, the shock of the glucose entry stimulates the production of insulin, which promotes the conversion of the glucose into a form of starch called glycogen, which is stored in the liver. The blood glucose therefore sinks rapidly. If you are an incipient diabetic, however, the formation of insulin lags and the blood glucose sinks only slowly and doesn't reach normal levels for a long time.
Blood samples have to be withdrawn periodically and glucose content determined. A graph is drawn and from the shape of the curve one can tell whether incipient diabetes seems to be present or not.
Eventually, on November 4, 1953, I had Dr. Walker's technician perform the test and when it was all done, I said, "Well?"
She didn't say anything, but walked into Walker's office. I assumed the worst.
Walker came out and said, "The glucose tolerance test is borderline."
"I'm an incipient diabetic, then?"
"No, not necessarily. This borderline appearance also shows up in obesity. Lose weight and take the test again."
Since I weighed two hundred pounds, I decided it was obesity. I tried to lose weight but didn't succeed; even the motivation of possible diabetes wasn't enough.
It might have been if the symptoms had grown worse and if other symptoms appeared—but those things didn't happen. Indeed, the boils became less frequent and finally vanished. I forgot about the matter and remained fat.
*9
Stories were simply flooding out of me now.
There were short-shorts like 'The Immortal Bard/' for instance, in which Shakespeare is brought back to life, takes a course in Shakespeare, and flunks, all in 900 words. This was directly inspired by Gotthard Guenther's remark to me, two years before, that an author need not know anything at all about the meaning of his story.
There were longer stories, like the 6,000-word "The Singing Bell," which dealt with a murder on the moon. I originally submitted it to Ellery Queen's Mystery Magazine, which rejected it. There was also the 9,000-word "It's Such a Beautiful Day," about a civilization in which transportation takes place through speed-of-light matter-transference— but one youngster prefers to walk.
"The Singing Bell" introduced my detective character, Wendell Urth, whose appearance I modeled on Norbert Wiener. He didn't like to travel (like myself, but worse) and remained always in his office.
Naturally, I intended to write another novel, but at the moment I had no ideas.
On November 17, 1953, however, I visited the BU Library, found that they had a file of Time magazines dating back to 1928 and that, since I was faculty, I could take these out. On impulse, I took out the earliest available volume, January to June 1928, and had a fine anachronistic time reliving the Coolidge boom that was taking place while I was living in Miller Avenue.
After that I returned for the next volume and then the next and so on. 6
In doing so, however, I noticed in one of the early volumes a line drawing in a small advertisement which, when I saw it quickly out of the corner of my eye, seemed like the familiar mushroom cloud of the nuclear bomb to me. Rather shaken, for the Time volume dealt with a period that was half a generation before Alamogordo, Hiroshima, and Nagasaki, I took another look. It was only the Old Faithful geyser of Yellowstone National Park and the advertisement was perfectly ordinary.
But at once I thought: What if that were the mushroom cloud? How would a drawing of the nuclear bomb come to be in a magazine that was published many years before 1945?
Why should it be there?
I searched for an answer to this question, had to have time travel,
6 It took me nearly a year to move up into the 1950s to the mingled astonishment and amusement of the librarians who, I understood, called me "the Time professor."
had to have a number of things, more and more complicated, and in the end I decided to write a novelette that I named "The End of Eternity" and that I began on December 7, 1953.
20
On November 27, 1953, I received advance copies of the NAL paperback edition of The Currents of Space. It was my first real paperback. About then I also received copies of Lucky Starr and the Pirates of the Asteroids, my second juvenile.
21
On December 2, 1953, I began my lab sessions with the student nurses. Between that in the morning and my protein class in the afternoon, my time for anything else vanished into nothing. Worse than that was the fact that I found I didn't like laboratory classes, even when I was in charge. In fact, I've forgotten almost everything about that lab, such was my hatred of it, except for one thing.
The girls were going to have to bring in samples of urine—their own, of course—on which they would then run tests. Walker warned me, however, that I must ask those young women who were menstruating not to bring in their own urine, but to use their neighbor's.
I stared at Walker with horror. I was on difficult enough terms with the girls, as it was, since, as their instructor, I had to curb my naturally flirtatious tendencies, and that reduced me to melancholia. I didn't see how I could get this stuff about menstruation across to them.
I said, "How do I tell them that, Dr. Walker?"
He said, "With your mouth," and walked away.
So I did and the young women took it very calmly indeed. I guess menstruation was old stuff to them.
22
On December 16, 1953, a gentleman from Metropolitan Life Insurance Company arrived with a check for $1,007.90 It represented the twenty-year-old annuity policy my father had opened on my behalf when I was thirteen, in lieu of an allowance for me. I had been paying the premiums myself since 1942, of course. Now that I had the cash worth of the policy, I didn't need it. I'd rather have had the allowance when I was young—but who can forsee the future, and my father had meant well.
2 3
Suddenly I was having a rash of rejections. Lucky Starr and the Oceans of Venus, the third of my Paul French series, was encountering serious objections at Doubleday—the first that had developed over those novels.
On the whole, Doubleday was justified, for Lucky Starr, in this particular adventure, was needlessly close-mouthed, allowing his sidekick to think he was an utter bastard, when I was merely trying to keep things from the reader. I had to rewrite in such a way as to keep things from the reader in a subtler fashion and more in keeping with Lucky's character.
"The Singing Bell" was rejected not only by Ellery Queen, but also by Astounding. Fred Pohl, who was now working with Ballantine, rejected it for one of his anthologies as well. Then F 6* SF rejected "It's Such a Beautiful Day."
Even my appearances in the magazines at this time were minor. The December 1953 Astounding contained "The Micropsychiatric Applications of Thiotimoline," 7 which I thought better than the original thiotimoline article, but which, of course, didn't have the impact of the first.
The December 1953 Universe had "Everest." 8 The editors had tried to patch it up very slightly to take into account Hillary's successful conquest of Mount Everest but didn't succeed, so there I was—I had published a story that depended on Mount Everest's not having been climbed half a year after it was climbed. 9
24 The year 1953 ended with my having published two more books:
9. Second Foundation (Gnome) 10. Lucky Starr and the Pirates of the Asteroids (Doubleday)
This was a comedown from the four of the year before. I was not, however, complaining, for the figures on my writing income showed clearly that the whopping earnings of the year before were no accident. In 1953, in fact, my writing income was $9,660, a little over $1,000 more.
7 See Only a Trillion (Abelard-Schuman, 1957).
8 See Buy Jupiter and Other Stories.
9 This was no tragedy. I frequently tell the story of the "Everest" fiasco in my after-dinner talks and do so with great success. The story about the story has earned me far more money than ever the story itself did.
than the year before and very close to the $10,000 I had long ago estimated to be the absolute most it was possible to earn as a science-fiction writer.
My school income in 1953 was $5,750, slightly above the figure for 1952, but only three fifths of my writing income. The total was over $15,000, a dizzying sum.
2 5
Though writing was making me wealthy beyond the dreams of Croesus (well, that's how it seemed to me at the time), there was unpleasantness at school. There was, for instance, the case of Bernie Pitt.
As I had suspected might be the case at the very start, Bernie Pitt and Bill Boyd did not, in the long run, get along.
For months, it had been clear to me that Bernie disliked Bill, disapproved of his easygoing ways and of his occasional drinking, and utterly discounted his intelligence. As for Bill, his reaction to Bernie seemed to me to be one of increasing anger. Bernie's sardonic humor apparently rubbed him raw.
I kept gloomily apart from this, doing my best to remain detached and noncommittal when either criticized the other to me. I was unhappily aware that I might have warned Bill or Bernie, or both, at the start and that I had refrained from doing so out of the fear that I might have been wrong. But suppose I had warned each of them? Would either have believed me? And if they had, and had the association not been made, how could I have known for certain that things would have turned out as I had predicted?
By December, Bernie reported to me that Boyd had delivered an ultimatum to him to the effect that he had "two months to change his ways."
I was stirred by curiosity to ask, "What ways?"
Bernie shook his head. He didn't know.
I privately thought that Bernie would not be gone in two months, that Bill would not be that arbitrary, and that Bernie would have to the end of the fiscal year to find another position. I was wrong. Bill fired Bernie on January 7, 1954, with pay to the end of the month. Bernie had been on the job for 2^4 years.
The episode showed me the wisdom of my determined and, finally, successful drive to get out from under Lemon. He could no longer force me to undergo the humiliation of being fired out of hand.
To be sure, I had a similar problem. Dean Faulkner, hearing about all the writing I was doing, was annoyed at my neglecting my research.
How he found out about it and what made him annoyed, I don't know. Lemon both knew and was annoyed and might, conceivably, have told Faulkner of it in order to make trouble for me, but I have no evidence of that.
In any case, Faulkner asked me to come see him, and on December 29, 1953, we had a forty-five-minute talk. I explained the nature of the nonfiction I was doing—showed him my articles in the Journal of Chemical Education— explained my views on the importance of teaching, and won him over. At least there were no more complaints on how I spent my time—from Dean Faulkner, that is.
26
I was thirty-four years old on January 2, 1954, and I celebrated my birthday two weeks later by finishing that blasted revision of Biochemistry and Human Metabolism and sending it off on January 15. I-use first-person singular, but that doesn't imply that Walker and Boyd were not involved in the revision. Certainly, however, they were involved to a far smaller extent than I was.
And on January 22, I started on my share of the student-nurse textbook, which we decided to call Chemistry and Human Health.
It was a depressing January. It was the coldest stretch of time since I had arrived in Boston, and I had trouble starting the car in the morning, especially when there was snow—and there was lots of it. The car, as it happened, had to sit in the driveway exposed to the elements beca
use there was no garage attached to the house, and there were times when the engine was simply too cold to start—and at least once I ran down the battery trying.
I finished my protein-structure course that month but decided I didn't like lecturing that much—not when it meant I taught both semesters, with the student nurses thrown in. And I had to do more with the student nurses than with the laboratory portion of the course. Walker was supposed to do the lecture but he was frequently unable to come in. He had abandoned his city home and moved out to his wife's family farm since his father-in-law was too old to live there by himself. It meant a long commuting distance of forty miles, and in bad weather he was reluctant to try. Sometimes, even in good weather, problems kept him at home. One time, a horse was sick—and when he didn't come in, I had to give a lecture on some subject on short notice.
Then, too, Marty Greenberg sent me a statement (at last) that carefully worked out my total earnings, over and above what small sums I had been paid, at no more than $950. This seemed low to me,- con-
sidering that it covered four books, but unless I had an accountant go over Marty's ledgers there was nothing to do but take his word for it.
What's more, he only sent me the figures; not a check. He might have felt that sending both figures and a check might have induced a heart attack in me, and he was far too concerned about my health to risk that.
Oh well, the February 1954 F &> SF contained 'The Fun They Had," which now appeared for the first time before a science-fiction audience. The February 1954 Astounding included the first part of "Sucker Bait," 10 which Campbell had converted into a two-part serial, the fourth serial I had had in Astounding. The first part got the cover.
"The Singing Bell" was rejected by Argosy, its fourth rejection, and with a printed rejection slip, yet. It was a humbling experience.
However, January did see advance copies of The Caves of Steel in book form arrive, and this was the book that, up to that time, I felt most satisfied with. And on February 2, Fred Pohl accepted "It's Such a Beautiful Day" for an anthology of original stories he was doing for Ballantine.
In memory yet green : the autobiography of Isaac Asimov, 1920-1954 Page 85
