It's Been a Good Life

by Isaac Asimov

  It was time to explode an atom bomb in such a way that its effects could be carefully studied. This was slated to happen at Bikini, an atoll in the Pacific. The experiment was named "Operation Crossroads," I suppose because the atomic bomb placed humanity on a crossroads to death and destruction or to life and prosperity, depending on how nuclear energy was used . . .

  Among the army personnel were to be a number of "critically needed specialists" designed to lend flavor and importance to the army's role, and I was to be one of those critically needed specialists. For this I had my AGCT score to thank.

  [After being sent to Hawaii to await Operation Crossroads] 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.)

  [One of the backsliding moments, in 19671 It seems that I had once read in The Historians' History of the World that Abd er-Rahman III, the greatest King of Muslim Spain, who had reigned fifty years with great success and prosperity, had confessed that in all that time, he had had only fourteen happy days. It seemed a remarkable commentary on the human condition, and I remembered it-especially since I myself had had far more than fourteen happy days.

  A couple of weeks before my lunch with [editors] Tim [Seldes] and Wendy [Weil], I had bought a paperback book of quotations edited by George Seldes, Tim's uncle. I like books of quotations and tend to buy them when I see them. This one, however, was filled with quotations that were expressed in such turgid and unmemorable prose that (even though I agreed with virtually all the liberal sentiments) I threw the book away.

  It did, however, have the Abd er-Rahman III quotation under "Happiness." It went something like this: "I have reigned fifty years at the height of prosperity and power, loved by my friends, respected by my subjects, and feared by my enemies, yet in all that time I have known but fourteen completely happy days." I noticed that quote because until that time I had thought I was the only person in the world who knew it.

  At the lunch I said to Tim, "I just bought your uncle's book of quotations."

  "Really," said Tim, "and did you notice the mistake in the very first item?"

  Well, I hadn't. I knew that Tim asked me that only to puncture the rumor that I had a photographic memory, and the fact was that I hadn't the faintest idea what the first item in the book was. Thinking rapidly, however, I recalled that in the introduction to the book (I read introductions) it stated that the paperback (which I had bought) differed from the hardcover edition in listing quotes alphabetically by subject rather than by author. If in the hardcover the listing were alphabetically by author, then the Abd er-Rahman III quote was probably first.

  Thinking that through took only a few seconds, so when I said, calmly, "Yes, I did," it sounded as though there had been no pause at all.

  Tim said, disdainfully, "You're bluffing. You don't even know what the first quotation was."

  "Yes, I do," I said. "It was Abd er-Rahman III's statement, "I have reigned fifty year. . . ." and I completed it with reasonable accuracy.

  Both Tim and Wendy were now staring at me, and Tim said, "And what was the error?"

  "Although Abd er-Rahman III is quoted as saying he reigned fifty years, they give his dates of his reign, and he died after reigning only 49 years," I said (having happened to notice everything about that fascinating quotation). "That's not really a mistake, however. He was counting the years by the Mohammedan lunar calendar, in which there are only 354 days to the year." I then went on (remembering another item I had noticed), "The quotation is only first in the hardcover, of course. In the softcover it is on page 441 and under......

  Tim could stand no more. He leaned across the table, seized my lapel, bunched it, drew me toward him, and said loudly, "Asimov, to choose a phrase at random-you're a prick."

  I couldn't have done it for any other quotation in the book, and it was sheerest luck that Tim had picked on it.

  [April 1946-about to go by ship to Hawaii] I had completed my first half year in the army, and I was rather astonished I had survived it as well as I had. I hadn't even gotten into trouble with any of the officers except-nearly-once.

  I was walking down the street near the barracks one morning, with my cap shoved back on my head, my hands in my pockets, whistling cheerfully-quite as though I were a teenager back in Brooklyn-and I passed a colonel.

  The trouble was that I passed him without seeing him, as I used to pass the candy store's customers once.

  "Soldier!" came the call.

  I stiffened, stopped whistling, withdrew my hands from my pockets, adjusted my cap, and stepped up briskly. "Sir?" I said, saluting.

  He returned the salute. "Do you know who I am?"

  "I don't know your name, sir, but you're a colonel in the United States Army."

  "Did you salute me when you passed me just now?"

  "No, sir."

  "Why not?"

  "I was thinking of something. sir, and I didn't see you. I'm sorry, sir."

  He asked me if I knew the reason for military courtesy and I was able to give him a reasoned exposition. He asked me to whom I was assigned and I told him. He asked me what I was doing, and I explained my position as critically needed specialist on Operation Crossroads.

  "And your qualifications for that job?"

  "Two degrees in chemistry from Columbia University, sir."

  Up to that point, I was sure I was going to be reported and disciplined, but now he sighed. I guess the thought of a private with two degrees in chemistry broke his heart. He said, "I've been in the army for thirty years, and I'll just never get used to these new ways."

  He left me in discouragement and I waited till he was out of sight, then went my way.

  [Due to a snafu-situation normal, all fucked up-Isaac's allotment was stopped because somewhere in the army it was assumed he'd been discharged.] [A colonel] who impressed me as a rather good-natured, long suffering fellow, said, "You never applied for discharge, did you?"

  "Yes, I did, sir. On February 11, I applied for a research discharge under Order 363."

  He spread his arms. "Well, it's probably some mixup but it's against Crossroads policy to send anyone to Bikini who may be subject to discharge. I may have to take you off the project."

  I returned to the ship and must have set a world record for holding my breath, for the Cortland was due to leave for Bikini three days later, on May 17....

  I left for Camp Lee [to straight
en out the snafu] the day before the ship left Hawaii for Bikini. This meant that I never saw a nuclear bomb explosion close up. It also meant that, perhaps, I did not die of leukemia at a comparatively early age.

  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.... 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 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.

  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 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....

  "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.

  (He was promoted to corporal, and on July 18 his discharge was approved.] 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 1 was out of the army.

  Thirteen.

  On Monday, September 23, 1946, I registered at Columbia again, just as though the four-and-a-half-year lapse had never been. I had left a young man just 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 ...

  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.

  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.

  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.

  (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.)

  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 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.

  Part of my duties as a research student was to prepare a seminar on my research. I had to explain the nature of the problem, then go on to explain what I was doing and why, wha
t I hoped to accomplish, and so on. When I was done, I expected to field searching questions from the floor. Other people in the department were supposed to attend, and the idea was that no one was to become too ingrown, that each student should be exposed to all the other currents permeating the Columbia chemistry department.

  That was the theory, but many people found seminars frustrating. Those who lectured on the problem seemed never to grasp the level of ignorance of those not working on it-or were afraid to show anything less than complete erudition. In five minutes, usually, the lecturer had left his audience behind and completed his presentation talking only to himself and his research professor.

  I did not intend to do this in no, seminar, which was slated for December 17. I lacked intellectual insecurity and I did not feel it necessary to be erudite. Besides, I had my fiction-writing experience, in which one has to assume the reader begins by knowing nothing of the story one is going to tell.

  I prepared my talk meticulously, therefore, from first principles. I went into the seminar room some hours before the talk, and covered all the boards with equations and chemical formulas. One student, stumbling into the room as I was finishing, looked at the mass of hieroglyphics with dismay and said, "I'll never understand this."

  I said, soothingly, "Nonsense. Just listen to everything I say and all will be clear as a mountain pool."

  What made me so sure of that, I don't know, but that's how it was. I gave the talk from the beginning and moved slowly along all the equations and formulas, without having to suffer the distraction and interruption of having to write them down as I talked.

  In the end the audience seemed enthusiastic and Professor Dawson told someone (who promptly passed it on to me) that it was the clearest presentation he had ever heard. It happened to be the first time I ever presented a formal hour-long talk to an audience in my life.

  [February 1947] I was still collecting my notes for the book on World War III wanted to write. Looking back on it now, I grow impatient with myself. How ridiculous it was.... I found that I had ... in excess of two million words of notes altogether. I started indexing the notes toward the end of February, and that was the giveaway. It was clear that the indexing was an impossible job, and the whole project suddenly faded and died. I doubt that I ever wasted so much time on so futile a project in my life-but at least I learned how not to write a nonfiction book, so perhaps it wasn't all that futile after all.