It's Been a Good Life

by Isaac Asimov

  [May 1947] In running my chronometric experiments, I put my enzyme solution into the vessel first and then quickly dumped the catechol solution into it. The enzyme reaction starts at once. First, of course, I had to prepare the catechol solution fresh, for it would undergo spontaneous changes that would make the experiment meaningless if it were allowed to stand around too long.

  At the beginning of each day, therefore, I would prepare the catechol solution. I would weigh out a fixed quantity of solid catechol, which comes as white, very fluffy, needlelike crystals, and then I would dump it little by little into a beaker of distilled water.

  Catechol, as it happens, is very readily soluble, especially when it exists as fluffy crystals that present a large surface to the water. The result is that as soon as the catechol touches the surface of the water it dissolves. It just seems to vanish without ever penetrating the water's skin.

  As I watched it one morning I thought idly: What if it dissolves just before it hits the water?

  That, I thought at once, might make the basis for a science-fiction story.

  But then I thought again. It would not be long now before I would have to write up my research observations in the form of a long and complicated dissertation. That dissertation would have to be written in a convoluted and stylized fashion or it would never pass.

  I dreaded that. I had spent nine years now trying to learn to write clearly and well, and now I would have to write a dissertation turgidly and sloppily. It would be even worse than doing a Navy Yard specification, and I didn't know how I could bear it.

  Well, then, instead of writing a story about a compound that dissolved before it hit the water, why not write a mock dissertation about it? Why not deliberately write turgidly and sloppily and in this way draw the fangs of the monster?

  I suggested such a thing to Campbell and he laughed and said, "Go try it."

  Before I visited Campbell that day, I had dropped in to see the editor of Thrilling Wonder.... Sam Merwin Jr. (his father and namesake had been a well-known author and editor).... Not only did he want a story from me but also he wanted a 40,000-word lead novel for Startling Stories, the sister magazine. Startling featured such a lead novel in every issue, and good ones were hard to come by. I was enamored with the notion myself, since 40,000 words at $.02 a word came to $800, so I agreed to try.

  I got to work on the story for Merwin on June 2. I called it "Grow Old with Me." This was supposed to be a quotation from Robert Browning's "Rabbi ben Ezra" and should have been "Grow Old Along with Me," but I remembered the line incorrectly and didn't bother checking.

  It dealt with an old tailor who managed to get transferred into a future in which old people underwent euthanasia unless they could prove themselves useful to society. The problem was to work out a way in which an old tailor from the past could prove useful enough to a society of the future to be kept alive. I was so excited at the thought of $800 that I did ten pages that first day and five the day after.

  Then, on June 5, unable to resist the other project, I began writing my mock dissertation, which I called, in true dissertation form, "The Endochronic Properties of Resublimated Thiotimoline." (I had intended a still longer title but it would have to fit into the Astounding table of contents and I would have to be realistic about it.) I finished it on June 8, complete with tables, graphs, and with ref erences to nonexistent journals, and then took it to Campbell. [Who took it, for $60.]

  In addition to taking a course on advanced organic theory.... I spent the summer of 1947 making endless calculations concerning my chronometric observations. I was trying to find the most satisfactory theories, the clearest explanations of what was happening-in short, the best possible way of arranging my forthcoming dissertation.

  And I also spent it on "Grow Old with Me." . . . By August 27, 1 had quite a bit of it in final copy and took it in to Merwin for an interim report, so to speak.... I called him the next day and again found he liked it. He urged me to continue at full speed.

  I was certain that sometime in 1948 I would complete my research, get my degree, and be out in the cold world. It meant I would need a job, for nothing in my nine years' career as a professional writer gave me any cause to suppose that I could ever support myself with my typewriter.

  [At] the annual convention of the American Chemical Society.... I registered with the employment clearinghouse. With my usual Asimovian flare for relying on lofty principles when that was not advisable, I added to the card on which I listed my vital statistics and my qualifications the totally unnecessary note: "Not interested in any work having any connection with the atomic bomb."

  This was stupid, since no one was likely to offer me such work, and if anyone did, I could always have turned it down. As it was, I made myself seem like a trouble-making radical, and you can guess the result. Throughout the entire five days of the convention, I received not one call to an interview....

  The utter failure at the convention put me under a dank blanket of apprehension concerning the future. I had for quite a while been totally absorbed in the gathering success of my research-the clear indication that I would have an interesting dissertation and therefore my degree. I couldn't help but view that as the climax of my education and my life, almost as though I were envisaging a cartoon in which I stood on a podium with light radiating from my head, stars going on and off, and the caption reading, "Success!"

  Except that that's not how life is. It goes on, and by the time I had my degree, I must also have a job, and how was I going to get that? Aside from the lack of interest at the convention, the fact was that the job market had been declining steadily since the war, and as a Jew who spoke with a Brooklyn accent and, as anyone could tell at a single glance, lacked sophistication and poise, I was scarcely in the first rank of candidates for any job.

  [After big revisions were demanded of "Grow Old with Me"] For the first and only time in my life, I openly lost my temper with an editor. I snatched up the manuscript, said, "Go to hell," and stalked angrily out of the office.

  It was wrong of me to do that. An editor is entirely within his rights to reject a story, even a story he has ordered.

  As I progressed in my dissertation, I went over it with Dawson, who insisted on considering each sentence at length and deciding how it could be made more accurate.

  It was a chore for me because I was used to writing quickly and to consider only my own judgment in such matters. However, I wasn't writing for an editor but for a committee of professors, and Professor Dawson knew better than I how to appease them. I therefore consistently followed his suggestions, although I moaned now and then.

  The greatest difficulty arose over my use of the constant M. I had introduced it at the appropriate time to indicate how the well-known chronometric equation, which had appeared in a number of papers emerging from Professor Dawson's group, could be corrected and, by use made of it, made more nearly a straight-line function.

  After a while, Dawson put down his pen and said, "What is M?"

  I was surprised. "Why, you know what it is, Dr. Dawson. It's mixing time."

  "Why don't you say so?"

  Now I was really surprised. "But Dr. Dawson, if I say so now, I'll kill the suspense." I couldn't believe that I had to explain this.

  "Isaac," he said, "I hate to break the news to you, but you're not writing one of your science-fiction stories."

  I was horrified. "You mean I have to define M?"

  "The instant you first use it."

  I did so, though I muttered something about "ruining the whole thing."

  It really did spoil my fun and erased any pleasure I could have had in the dissertation. Nor did it really help. Once it was all done and under consideration, one professor was reported to have said, "It reads like a mystery story." And he didn't say it with approval.

  February 17, 1948, was the silver anniversary of the family's arrival in the United States.

  Quite independently, it was also the day the March 1948 Astounding re
ached the stands. It contained "Endochronic Properties of Resublimated Thiotimoline."

  The previous June, when I had sold it to Campbell, I had feared it might come out not long before I was slated to be up for my doctorate and that it might be used to prove that I lacked the proper gravity of character to make a good chemist.... So I asked Campbell to run the article under a pseudonym. Campbell agreed....

  Now came February 17. [One of the other research students] said, "Hey, that was a funny satire on chemistry by you in the new Astounding, Isaac."

  I grinned foolishly and beamed with pride, as I always do on such occasions, and said, "Thanks."

  And then, after a goodish time, I suddenly remembered the pseudonym and said, rather stiffly, "What makes you think the article was by me?"

  ... "Well, when I noticed your name on it, I thought, `Gee, I'll bet he wrote it.' "

  [Another student said] "Don't tell me you put your own name on a satire on chemistry when your dissertation is coming up?"

  Since that was precisely the thought that flashed through my mind, I went off and called Campbell.

  Campbell remembered I had asked him to use a pseudonym, but he had an explanation for failing to do so. "I forgot," he said. Perhaps Campbell forgot out of an instinctive feeling that forgetting was the proper thing to do. He had a number of infallible instincts.

  For one thing, as I found out from Campbell a few weeks later, the article proved to be a howling success with the readers. He received a flood of letters from them and, as a matter of fact, interest in the article has never died down.

  Campbell said that some readers had even fallen for it and thought thiotimoline was a real compound. They flooded the New York Public Library (he said) demanding to see the journals I had quoted and were reluctant to believe the librarians who assured them there were no such journals.

  Then, too, the thiotimoline article seemed to tickle the fancy of every chemist who happened to be a science-fiction fan. By word of mouth, it spread to chemists who never read science fiction. I began to get requests to have it printed in obscure little periodicals put out by chemical associations. I got letters from chemists who clearly did not know I had ever written anything else.

  The thiotimoline article was, in fact, the first thing I had ever written that made any mark at all outside the closed circle of science fictiondom-and I owed it to Campbell's forgetfulness.

  But that still left me in trouble at home, and if I thought it would escape the eyes of the Columbia scientists, I was crazy. The very day after its appearance, Professor William von Doering, a young organic chemist who was already making his mark in the world and who was himself the kind of eccentric who wore bow ties in a world of four-inhands, stopped me in the hall to make humorous references to it. I also found out that another member of the department was a rabid sciencefiction fan, so he couldn't possibly have missed it. And if two members knew, then there was no hope of secrecy-everyone would know.

  I was sunk in misery and decided that I would never pass my oral examinations.

  [After more problems with the research] I finished the dissertation, all seventy-four pages of it (enough length to make a good Foundation novelette, but with infinitely more sweating and less enjoyment) on April 3, and went over the whole thing, proofreading it with Stanley's help. (Stanley had managed to get the money to go to NYU, was finishing his freshman year, and was doing well.)

  The title is "The Kinetics of the Reaction Inactivation of Tyrosinase During Its Catalysis of the Aerobic Oxidation of Catechol," a far worse title than that of my thiotimoline satire. What's more, I achieved a far more involuted and turgid academese than I had dared put into my satire. Here is a sentence taken at random from my dissertation: "It will be recalled that an analysis of the Chronometric Equation (see Section: The Q-t RELATIONSHIP) led to the conclusion that if the equation satisfactorily expressed the entire reaction course, the time required for half the original enzyme to be inactivated was independent of the initial enzyme concentration (see Equ. 8) and that the overall rate of enzyme inactivation was proportional to the 1.5 power of the concentration of active enzyme present in the system at any time (see Equ. 12)."

  That's one sentence and it's enough. No need to risk coagulation of the brain by going any farther.

  There are, generally, two types of responses to a doctor's orals. One is paralysis which, at its extreme, leaves you unable to answer any question, including "What is your name?" The other is hysteria, which at its extreme leads you to respond to "What is your name?" with a long, jolly peal of laughter....

  It was clear that I was going to react in the second fashion: not paralysis, but hysteria. I was laughing as I went in.

  I got up and gave my speech with only an occasional giggle, and then the questioning began....

  One fellow asked me how I knew the potassium iodide I used was indeed potassium iodide. My impulse was to answer truthfully that I never questioned it. It said, "Potassium iodide" on the label and that was enough for me.

  Some dim instinct warned me that that was the wrong answer. I thought desperately and quickly and said, "Well, sir, it dissolves as potassium iodide does, and yields iodine as potassium iodide does, and it gives me my end point as potassium iodide would, so it doesn't matter what it really is, does it?"

  That was a good answer.

  One fellow asked me how I knew that the enzyme I used was indeed derived from the mushroom species I said it was. I said it came from mushrooms bought at the grocery store.

  "So what?" said he.

  "So Agaricus campestris is the only species sold in the grocery store."

  "How can you be sure of that?"

  Again I had to think rapidly. "If I had any doubts, sir, I would have referred to a text on mushrooms."

  "Whose?" he said.

  I said, shrewdly, "Yours." That was a bad answer. He hadn't written any such text.

  At one point, I muffed questions I ought not to have muffed ... at another point when I didn't know the answer, I hesitantly guessed and Dawson, who sat opposite me at the other end of the table, leaned back so that no one would see him (they were all looking at me, of course) and shook his head slightly from side to side.

  Whereupon I said, despondently, "But I see that Dr. Dawson is shaking his head at me, so I guess I'm all wrong."

  That was surely one time that Dawson had reason to disapprove of my "absolute integrity" for he turned a distinct pink and said, "You were not supposed to say that, Isaac," and everyone turned to him and made mock-serious comments about helping his student unethically.

  No one was really unkind to me, however, and after an hour and twenty minutes, Professor Ralph S. Halford asked me the final question.

  He said, "What can you tell us, Mr. Asimov, about the thermodynamic properties of the compound known as thiotimoline?"

  For just an instant I was thunderstruck, and then the hysteria I had been fighting off all this time washed over me and I broke into peal after peal of helpless laughter and had to be led from the room.

  I had reason to laugh. It didn't seem conceivable to me that they would tease me in that fashion if they had not by then decided to pass me. Apparently, thank goodness, they had read the thiotimoline article and had taken it in the spirit in which it was meant.

  I was right. In five minutes they had come out and, as was traditional in the case of a pass, each held out his hand and said, "Congratulations, Dr. Asimov!"

  I had made it. I was Isaac Asimov, Ph.D.

  Fourteen.

  POSTDOC

  The next day, June 3, 1948, I officially started my postdoctoral stint with [Robert C.] Elderfield.... The Columbia Appointments Office had issued a handout to the newspapers saying that the average Ph.D. salary, fresh after graduation, was $5,400 a year. Since I was only going to get $4,500 from Elderfield, it was clear that I was considerably below par....

  Now that I was through with my doctoral effort, I felt it possible to begin new things. For one thing, I bought
a copy of Glasstone's Textbook of Physical Chemistry ... the first scientific book I ever bought of my own volition and not because it was a class requirement. It served as the nucleus of my personal library of science which, as the years passed, was to grow larger and larger and more and more important to me.

  Second, it was time, at last, to begin a new science-fiction story. It was now a full year since I had made my last sale-the thiotimoline piece. Since then, I had written only "Grow Old Along with Me," which, of course, had been a fiasco. On June 3, 1948, therefore, I began "The Red Queen's Race," a tale involving time-travel paradox.... It featured a tough-guy detective as hero-quite unusual for me... .

  My postdoctoral work was going on unimpressively. I was running tests on all kinds of antimalarials, making observations, preparing graphs, trying to find out what happened to it in living tissue in order to decide whether it was changed into some intermediate form that was itself more active. Then, perhaps, the intermediate could be isolated, analyzed, synthesized, and used directly.

  The trouble was that I didn't see anything coming out of my efforts. I was constantly terrified that Elderfield would say so and kick me out-not that I was afraid either of him or of being kicked out in themselves-but the specter of unemployment was a very fearful one for anyone who had spent his second decade of life in the Great Depression.

  On September 7, however, the Segals [friends met on a Catskills vacation] dropped in and Jack asked me what kind of work I was doing. They knew I was doing chemical research at Columbia but knew no details. My mind was full of it at the time so I explained the importance of antimalarials, the nature of quinine, atabrine, and quinacrine, using my hands and fingers to represent chemical formulas. I explained that what we wanted to know was what happened to these substances in the human body to see if these were changed into the real antimalarial and what that might be.