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

by Asimov, Isaac, 1920-1992

  It was the sort of job that had seemed possible with Brand, but Elderfield offered me $4,500 a year, more than I would have had the nerve to ask. I was to work forty hours a week, have two to three weeks' vacation, have technicians under me, and a good, solid problem.

  Elderfield was working on antimalarials at the time. During World War II, malaria was a serious problem for soldiers in tropical climates. In fact, it was the most deadly disease in the world in that there were more people suffering and dying from malaria the world over than from any other serious ailment.

  The chemical used to control malaria was quinine, but during the war, the Japanese controlled the main sources of quinine for a while and the Americans had to develop artificial antimalarials, synthetic chemicals that would do the work of quinine.

  This had been done successfully, and Elderfield had worked on the problem. Now he was anxious to turn to the theoretical end—to find out why synthetic antimalarials worked and to use this knowledge to design an antimalarial that would work better than any other, and better than quinine, too.

  I was tempted, even though I didn't know that I could get along with Elderfield, because the problem seemed interesting. I talked to Morris Kupchan who was running the problem and who was leaving, so that I would be replacing him—and he said the whole deal was excel-

  lent. He said there was absolutely nothing wrong with it in any way, provided I got along with Elderfield.

  It was a relief. The degree was coming in just a few months and now, if I agreed to go in with Elderfield, it would not find me without a job. To be sure, it was not really a job— it was postdoctoral research, a position in which at best I could not stay many years and in which I was quite likely to stay only a single year. In a sense it would be as though once again I had opted for still more education while I postponed the real job crisis.

  But I had to. And even a single year was one year in which I could continue trying.

  I won't say it was satisfactory. Ever since 1939, when I had first failed to enter medical school, I had been improvising from year to year. Nine years had passed; it was 1948; I was twenty-eight years old; I was still improvising.

  Fred Pohl was feeling the urge toward agenthood once again. He asked me where I stood as far as sales were concerned and I told him that for years I had been selling Campbell everything I wrote and had nothing outstanding—except "Grow Old with Me."

  What was that? Fred wanted to know.

  I explained and he offered to try to sell it for me. I had no great hopes. I had shown it to Campbell after Thrilling Wonder had turned it down, and Campbell said it might do as a complete-in-one-issue lead novel, but that in Astounding it would have to appear in two parts, and there was no natural break-point. He had other criticisms, too, which made me feel that even if there were a natural break-point, he wouldn't have taken it.

  It turned out, though, that a young man named Martin Green-berg, 1 whom I had not yet met, was thinking of going into the science-fiction book-publishing business, and Fred thought he might be talked into doing "Grow Old with Me." There wouldn't be much money in it, but a book was rare in the science-fiction world and it would involve much prestige. It might lead to better things, and why allow a manuscript to do nothing but eat its head off in a drawer?

  1 Warning! Years later, I met and worked with another Martin Greenberg, one whose middle name is Harry. These are two different people and must not be confused. The one I refer to here does not have a middle name and I will generally refer to him as Marty. The other, later Martin Greenberg, when I refer to him, will be Marty the Other.

  Me and Bill Boyd, 1947.

  mM^r^^mmm

  The "Cary Grant" picture of me, used on Pebble in the Sky and other early Double titles.

  The jacket for Pebble in the Sky, J 950.

  The jacket for The Stars Like Dust, J 951

  t Hydracon, 1 950. From left to right: Lester Del Key, Evelyn Harrison, Harry Harrison, le, Judy Merril, Fred Pohl, Foul Anderson, Sprague de Camp, and P. Schuyler Miller.

  HOTO BY JAY K. KLEIN

  Harry Stubbs (Hal Clement), photo by jay k. klein

  Arthur C. Clarke, photo by jay k. klein

  < '

  Harlan Ellison, photo by jay k. klein

  John D. Clark, photo by jay k. klein

  John Campbell and Evelyn Gold (of Galaxy) sharing a Hugo in Philadelphia in Gertrude is right in front of John. Willy Ley is on the extreme right with Mrs. Ley to him.

  I agreed with the logic and gave the manuscript to Fred. On January 31, Fred called to say that Greenberg wanted the manuscript. For a while, I really thought I was going to have a book, and I began to think I was lucky that Merwin had rejected it.

  3

  On February 1, Gertrude and I went to visit Milton Silverman and his wife at Forest Hills. It turned out that Silverman, after three years at a job, was making $5,000 a year, which made a starting salary of $4,500 with Elderfield seem pretty good.

  What's more, Silverman didn't think I'd have gotten along with Brand, whom apparently he knew, and that relieved my feeling that perhaps I might have made the wrong decision in rejecting Brand (who had become more anxious to get me—perhaps because he found he was having trouble getting anyone else).

  4

  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 reached the stands. It contained "Endochronic Properties of Resub-limated Thiotimoline." 2

  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 I lacked the proper gravity of character to make a good chemist. (It had, after all, been my effervescence and irreverence that had, at least in part, stood in my way as far as passing the Qualifyings and getting a promotion at the Navy Yard were concerned.)

  So I asked Campbell to run the article under a pseudonym. I even picked the pseudonym, though I don't remember what it was. Campbell agreed, and that was that.

  Now came February 17. Sharing my laboratory in those days were two other research students of Dawson. One was William Tarpley, a quiet, competent fellow who worked with a firm in New Jersey and who had been given time off to get his degree. The other was Morris Joselow, a large-faced, stoutish fellow.

  It was Tarpley who introduced the subject that morning. He said,

  2 See The Early Asimov.

  c;i8 In Memory Yet Green

  "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?"

  Tarpley thought about it for a while and said, "Well, when I noticed your name on it, I thought, 'Gee, I'll bet he wrote it.'"

  And Joselow said at once, "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. 3

  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 chemists, I was crazy. The very day after its appearance, Professor William von Doering, a young organic

  3 Indeed, inspired by the success, he tried in later years to have a gag article now and then, but they were rarely successful, unless I wrote them—even if I do say so myself.

  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-in-hands, stopped me in the hall to make humorous references to it. I also found out that another member of the department was a rabid science-fiction 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.

  5

  There was worse to come. For six months I had been fiddling proudly with a mechanism for the inactivation of the enzyme. I had postulated two kinds of inactivation, one being reversible and one not. By picking my reaction rates appropriately, I could neatly explain my observations.

  Professor Dawson remained dubious about the mechanism but I kept pushing it with great self-confidence and was putting it into my dissertation.

  Then, on March 1, 1948, while trying to disprove some alternate models suggested by Professor Dawson, I suddenly found myself disproving my own! As I said in my diary, "I found that out definitely at 4:00 p.m. and it was like a cold hand grabbing my heart and not letting go."

  The props were knocked out from under my thesis. There was no way I could go through with that mechanism in the hope that nobody would notice, even if that would square with my peculiar sense of ethics, which it did not. It might have taken me six months to spot the fallacy, but Dawson, who was not an expert in kinetics, was uneasy with it from the start, and there would be bound to be someone on the committee who would see the error at a glance.

  But if I abandoned the mechanism, I could not complete my dissertation, and I would not get my Ph.D. I would have to start all over again—perhaps even on another problem.

  At 4:00 p.m. on March 1, 1948, then, I saw my Ph.D. go glimmering down the same path as "Grow Old with Me" had gone. Was this what it had all come to, all those years of child prodigiousness—just one coruscating, spectacular failure?

  I had to do something. I couldn't see Dawson. He was in conference with another professor who had ripped up the dissertation of a fellow student. (That sort of thing did happen!)

  So I went to the Henry Paper Box Company, where Gertrude was

  engaged in her usual stint, and insisted on going to the movies. This was in accordance with a theory of mine in which, under the pressure of panic, the thinking process goes into a circular rut from which it cannot emerge. The thing to do, then, is to distract one's self just enough to free the thinking and yet not distract one's self so much that thinking ceases altogether. The best way (for me) is to see a superficial movie that amuses the skin of my brain but not the muscle underneath.

  We went to see Bob Hope in Where There's Life, which was perfect for the purpose. I emerged with a couple of alternate mechanisms that avoided the fallacy and that might, however, explain the observations.

  By March 5, I finally got to see Dawson, explained the fallacy shamefacedly, and suggested the alternate mechanism, which I had bounced off Tarpley successfully and which was so much simpler that no fallacy could hide in it.

  Dawson was, as usual, not surprised either at my stupidity or at the way I owned up to it, and was his usual encouraging self. He had me see some faculty members who specialized in such matters and I received a quick education from them.

  I went back to writing the dissertation on the new basis, and the sense of panic subsided. In March, I saw Dawson nearly every other day and spent hours, it seemed to me, on single paragraphs. The deadline for turning in the dissertation in completed form was April 15, and I have never approached an income-tax deadline with the sense of desperately racing against time as I did that one.

  6

  As was predictable, I began complicating my new mechanism to make it seem more spectacular, but this time Dawson would allow me no display of erratic brilliance. Firmly, he drew me back to the original simplicity.

  On March 21, we finished the dissertation, which reached the point where we were both as satisfied as we were likely to be. The next step was to produce the finished copy for distribution to the various professors who would make up the examination committee. That meant seven copies, typed as clearly and as error-free as possible. It meant a Table of Contents, a list of acknowledgments, neat tables, and diagrams carefully drawn and reproduced.

  I began on the twenty-third, typing slowly and taking half an hour per page. It took all day to do fourteen pages. The next day I went to

  the School of Engineering and was taught how to use the equipment that would reproduce certain tracings I needed. (This was before the day of Xerox duplications.)

  They also told me how much they would charge to do my diagrams for me in professional form. It came to as much as $40, and I was struck dumb. Professor Dawson said, "Do your own!"

  Both Joselow and Tarpley had drafting equipment, and both brought theirs in. I learned how to use that, too, and, working as carefully as I could (considering my well-known lack of deftness), I made my own drawings.

  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. 4

  On April 5, I had all the copies neatly bound and gave the original to Professor Dawson. At his suggestion, I then got tabs and placed them in each copy in such a manner that the interviewers could easily turn to any of the tables, figures, or appendices.

  I still have several copies of the dissertation. 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.

  On April 6, my examining committee was chosen. There was Dawson himself, of course, together with Beaver, Dodson, Ralph S. Halford, and Charles G. King from the Chemistry Department. There was also David E. Green, a noted biochemist, from the Medical School, and Ryan from the Biology Department. The date of the examination was set for May 20, 1948, and I had six weeks to amuse myself by studying

  4 Stanley had managed to get the money to go to New York University, was finishing his freshman year, and was doing well.

  desperately, by attempting to foretell the questions I would be asked, and by trying to find out from others what Doctor's Orals were like.

 
; 7

  It was hard to believe during the month of March that anything at all existed outside the dissertation, but dimly I was aware of the great world outside. The Cold War was in full swing now and the Soviet Union was blockading West Berlin, so that we seemed almost at the edge of a shooting war again.

  On April 9, in fact, a draft bill was offered that would subject those from eighteen to thirty to a new heightened draft, with a year of Army service required to gain deferment. Since I had had less than nine months of Army service and was still under thirty, a faint echo of the old feeling returned. The Army again? Had I outsmarted myself by too efficiently achieving a discharge?

  It came to nothing, of course, but it reconciled me to civilian life, however hard I thought the dissertation period was.

  My GI Bill of Rights benefits were running out but they would last just through that spring, and that should carry me through my Doctor's Orals. I was selfishly glad I had applied for the benefits against my principles, since they had paid all my educational expenses since my return to research.

  What's more, it seemed that Gertrude was finally being replaced at the Henry Paper Box Company and that an accountancy student would come in three afternoons a week to do the bookkeeping.

  It did mean that the family income was drying up. No more GI Bill of Rights, no more paycheck for Gertrude, and to top it off, I hadn't sold a single story so far in 1948. I hadn't even written one.

  None of the leads into industrial jobs that I had followed during the winter were turning up anything, and the word was that Elderfield had failed to get some of the government grants he had applied for. I suddenly felt that even Elderfield's offer might not be secure.