By and large, in this second period of research at Columbia, I dealt with a new generation. The fellow students of 1939 to 1942 were all gone, and the fellow students of 1946 were unknown to me. There were occasional connections, though.
I met Ira Weill, for instance, who, except for red hair, looked very much like Lester Weill of Hilltop days. They were brothers and from Ira I learned that Lester was married and was at the University of Akron.
I made new friends, of course. One graduate student was a beautiful red-headed girl named Gerry, brilliant and full of drive. I admired her enormously, and not just for her beauty. We used to argue the matter of feminism in those days. She complained bitterly about the difficulties women encountered in entering scientific research.
I was sympathetic but, playing devil's advocate, I pointed out that there was the feeling that women, after doing their research and getting their degrees, would then get married, have children, and retire into domesticity—and they would have taken up the place that some man could have used to get his degrees and become a working scientist. (Naturally, I was thinking of Irene.)
Gerry argued this point strenuously and, when it seemed that justice was on her side, I gave up. She went on to get her Ph.D., then married a fellow researcher, had children, and retired into domesticity—at least for a while.
There was James Mann, who shared my research lab at the start. He resembled Tyrone Power in looks (in my eyes, anyway), was a very pleasant fellow and, after a while, joined the Unitarian Church. He was a nonobservant Jew and he urged me to find the same spiritual home, but I refused firmly. I intended to be a nonobservant everything.
16
Apparently our family had Americanized itself into birthday presents. At least on December 7, 1946, my mother bestowed upon me a wristwatch as an advance gift of that sort.
It pleased me at the time, and the remarkable thing, in my opin-
ion, is that I still have it. It's been cleaned innumerable times and has been repaired on occasion, and its face is so dark the numbers are hard to read—but it still works, and I still use it on occasion.
*7
On December 10, I got a letter from Gerry Cohen to the effect that he had been discharged and was a civilian again.
Each time someone I knew in the Army reported he was out, I felt that another link with that deplorable episode in my life had been cut. I was getting to feel that not only the Army, but also the Navy Yard had been a kind of extraneous intrusion upon my life. Those years began to seem, as they have seemed ever since, far less real to me than the years before 1942 and since 1946.
18
I feel that, as a matter of principle, I ought to record every piece of egregious Asimovian stupidity I can remember, if only to have it act as a partial canceling-out of the unjustified reputation I have for universal wisdom.
We received a gas bill for $6.50 toward the end of 1946, which was just twice as high as the gas bill anyone else in the apartment building got. We checked that, to make sure, and we were furious.
On December 11, I went to the offices of the gas company in downtown Brooklyn to demand reparation, restitution, and a groveling apology. I waited in line in the greatest indignation and when I finally got to the window, I slapped down the bill and said, angrily, "See here, we have never used enough gas to bring us up to the $2.00 minimum. We have no children. We both work. We cook perhaps four meals a week. How can we possibly get a bill for $6.50? I demand an explanation."
The man behind the counter looked at me mildly. "You really insist on an explanation?"
"Certainly. If you can think of one besides general incompetence."
"Fortunately," he said, "I can think of one. This is an electric bill."
You never saw so quiet and humble a retreat in your life.
*9 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, what I hoped to accomplish, and so on. When I was done, I was 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 my 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, "111 never understand this."
I said, soothingly, "Nonsense. Just listen to everything I say and all will be as 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.
20
My father turned fifty on December 21, and my father's birthday always meant Christmas and the end of the year.
The year 1946 had ended far better than it had begun, but it was not one of my more successful writing years. I had sold only two short stories (both in the positronic robot series) and nothing more. That
was not surprising. Between the Army in the first part of the year and research in the second, there had been little writing time.
Even so, my two anthology sales and my sale to Orson Welles raised my total writing income for 1946 to $718. There was also my Army pay, Gertrude's Army allotment, her earnings at the Henry Paper Box Company, and the money I got from the GI Bill of Rights. It all came to between $2,000 and $3,000 and, with the writing earnings added, our bank account did not suffer that year.
21
On January 2, 1947, I was twenty-seven years old. It was a wonderful birthday, because I couldn't help comparing it with my twenty-sixth, which was spent in the Army. On the other hand, I was more than half as old as my father. I was suddenly aware that I was older by nearly four years than my father had been when I was born.
I was becoming distinctly mature.
I bought myself a postbirthday present—a slide rule. I had ordered one from the bookstore a long time before, but there was a postwar backlog of orders to fill and it wasn't till January 10 that mine came through. It was, according to my diary, "A Dietsgen decitrig duplex polyphase log-log slide rule" and it cost me $16. I still own it and it works as well as ever.
A hundred-page booklet of instructions came with it, and I read just enough of it to get the idea and then fiddled with the slide rule itself and learned how to work it. It was much more fun doing it for myself.
If Razran had only showed me how to multiply two by three on the slide rule back in 1936, I would have gained a decade.
My first use of the slide rule was to check some of the figures in Gertrude's bookkeeping in connection with the Henry Paper Box Company. It was an exciting procedure, marred only by the fact that every time my reading disagreed with her figures, it was my readin
g that was wrong.
22
Another connection with Army life was broken. Jerome Himel-hoch, who had been part of Kriegman's group along with me in my last weeks in the Army, was himself out of the Army now. We visited him and his family on January 31. On the way there, I took Gertrude to my
Columbia research laboratory for the first time and proudly showed her the fancy equipment I was using.
2 3
I finally finished ''Now You See It—" on February 2. It was twenty-five thousand words long, only half as long as "The Mule/' but it still took me several months to complete.
Partly this was because I was still collecting my notes for the book on World War II I wanted to write. Looking back on it now, I grow impatient with myself. How ridiculous it was.
It finally came to an end some weeks later when I went over the notes. I found that I had taken as much as thirty-five thousand words from a single book and 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.
On February 4, I visited Campbell and handed over "Now You See It—" While there, I picked up an advance copy of the March 1947 Astounding, which had "Little Lost Robot" 3 in it.
For the first time, however, Campbell was not completely satisfied with a Foundation story. We disagreed on the ending.
After all, I had grown a little weary of the Foundation and all its works. I had been working on it, on and off, for five years. I had written seven stories, totaling about 185,000 words. I felt it was time to end the thing and get on to something new. Therefore I rounded off "Now You See It—" in such a way as to make it a reasonable ending of the series.
Campbell would have none of it. After he read the story, he told me I could not use the ending as I had it. I had to make the story open-ended and continue the series. He was quite firm about it and I still wasn't in any position to brave Campbell's displeasure.
I rewrote "Now You See It—" according to instructions, the task taking me but a day, and brought it in again on the tenth. Campbell accepted the new version at once and on February 14, 1947, a check for $500 arrived. It came on the fifth anniversary of my blind date with Gertrude.
3 See I, Robot.
24
The $500 made me feel prosperous indeed. The next day we bought a mink-dyed opossum fur coat for Gertrude for $200. It was our first real splurge and it made me feel like a "good provider."
My parents were feeling prosperous, too. At just about this time they were buying a second house close to the store, one that was at 1618 Tenth Avenue, for $9,500.
It was their deliberate intention to extend their real-estate holdings bit by bit until their rental receipts covered mortgage, maintenance, and taxes, with enough left over to make it possible for them to retire from the candy-store business.
2 5
I received a personal letter from Orson Welles on March 3, 1947, and I was delighted and impressed. He said he'd be in New York City soon and would like to meet me.
Alas, he never came; or if he came, he certainly never got in touch with me. That letter, added to the $250, was all I ever got for trifling away the electronic rights to "Evidence" forever.
I made a closer contact with another celebrity. Arnold Toynbee's A Study of History, which Sprague had admired so and to which he had introduced me, had roused the interest of Time, and Toynbee had become a world celebrity.
On March 10, 1947, Toynbee was lecturing at Bryn Mawr, near Philadelphia, and Sprague was enormously excited. He suggested I come to Philadelphia to hear Toynbee, and although my own infatuation with Toynbee had passed, I have always found it difficult to resist Sprague, whom I have always admired just this side of idolatry both as a person and as a writer.
I went to Philadelphia, therefore, and, in Sprague's company, listened to an hour lecture by Toynbee on contacts between civilizations. I found it fascinating, and afterward, when Sprague managed to make his way to Toynbee and to introduce me, I was delighted at the opportunity of shaking hands with the man.
Afterward, Sprague and a few others started a "Toynbeean Society" and I was made "temporary secretary." Nothing very much happened to the Society after that (that I knew of, at least), so I suppose it didn't get far.
Meanwhile, I was working steadily and successfully at my research, which consisted of making many, many "chronometric" measurements.
It worked thus: A certain quantity of enzyme was mixed with and allowed to work on a compound called catechol. While it was working, drops of the mixture were dribbled into a starch-iodide solution resting on an illuminated, milk-white sheet of glass. At a certain point in the enzyme reaction, enough quinone was produced from the catechol to turn the iodide into iodine, which reacts with the starch to form a black addition-compound. The first trace of a black fog against the illuminated background as a drop falls into the solution marks the end point.
The time between the start of the enzyme reaction and the end point is measured with a stopwatch. The important part of the research then lay in analyzing the time measurements and trying to builda picture of the enzyme-catechol interrelationships that would account for them.
I would stand there running test after test with my stopwatch in hand, making use of all sorts of different conditions and recording the time in every case. I once ran as many as 32 chronometrics in a single session, but I was told that Lloyd Roth could run 50 or 60. A fellow researcher, Frank Mallette, 4 claimed he had once done 120 in one day. How all this was possible, I couldn't imagine, but considering that I was my undeft self, I considered 32 sufficient.
One thing I found was that I could not duplicate the results of anyone before me. Thinking about it, I decided that it took time for the enzyme to mix with the catechol, so that the reaction didn't proceed at top speed from the beginning. I tried stirring the solution faster and faster, and sure enough, my results differed less from the ideal the faster I stirred. I therefore introduced a "mixing time" constant into the equation and everything worked perfectly. How the devil the preceding investigators had managed to get ideal results without taking mixing into account I was never able to figure out.
2 7 For three months, ever since I had sold "Now You See It—," I had been limping along with a story called "No Connection." This story
4 It was Mallette who had been an assistant in the food analysis laboratory and who had, under instructions, given me difficult unknowns to "get rid" of me. I heard the story from him at about this time.
began as a result of a conversation Campbell and I had gotten into over my story "The Hunted." After Thrilling Wonder had rejected that story, I tried it on Campbell, who shook his head, and in the conversation that followed, free association seemed to give rise to the notion of a co-operative society of intelligent bears threatened by an aggressive society of intelligent chimpanzees.
I wasn't too enamored of the idea so that it went slowly, but I was determined to finish it. After all, it was neither a robot story nor a Foundation story, and with few exceptions, every story I had written in the past six years had been either one or the other. I was becoming anxious not to find myself in a Foundation/robot rut.
On May 20, I finally finished it, and took it in to Campbell on the twenty-sixth. It was 7,500 words long, and on May 31, I received a welcome check for $150.
In my conversation with Campbell on the twenty-sixth, however, something rather unusual came up. It came about this way:
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 ma
ke 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 5 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 tur-
5 I did not record, in mv diary, exactly which morning, but it could not have been long before May 26, 1947.
gidly 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 on that May 26, and he laughed and said, "Go try it."
On that same May 26 something else happened. Thrilling Wonder, despite its rejection of "The Hunted," still insisted it wanted Astounding-type stories from me, so before I visited Campbell that day, I had dropped in to see the editor of Thrilling Wonder. The editor was, at this time, Sam Merwin, Jr. (his father and namesake had been a well-known author and editor).
In memory yet green : the autobiography of Isaac Asimov, 1920-1954 Page 61