I wish I could say it had been because I was an incredibly clever businessman, blessed with an unexampled gift of foresight—but it was nothing of the sort. I made my decision on the perfectly silly emotional ground that Doubleday had been good to me and that I must not return evil for good.
*7
I was getting ready for a longer trip, the longest I had made since I was in the Army and the longest I had ever made voluntarily up to that point. The fact was that I had to go to Chicago. The American Chemical Society was meeting there, and months before, Lemon had felt I ought to give a paper there. If that were all, I wouldn't have gone, but it seemed to me, quite independently, that I should.
Giving papers at conventions is an important part of the research scientist's life. It is there that you meet important men in the field; it is there that you impress them (if you do well) and gain important contacts that might help in improving your career. Although I had put research behind me, I felt I ought to do it once at any rate—so I agreed to go.
I didn't look forward to it, though. It didn't even occur to me to go by plane, and that meant it would be an 18-hour trip by train. Nor would there be any specialists accompanying me to play bridge with me.
7 I felt rather like that day on Hawaii when I thought all the other specialists were opting for officerhood.
I took the train on Sunday, April 5, and at once found out it wasn't as bad as I had feared. There were no upper and lower bunks, as there had been seven years before on that long cross-country trip. Instead, I had a roomette for the first time, and I had never even heard of a roomette till then.
To those who have never been in one it is precisely the dimensions of a double bed, since when the bed is lowered it fills the entire room. When it is raised there is a seat, a sink, and a toilet seat in it, as well as a small closet and a rack. I had complete privacy and I emerged only to make my way to the dining car and eat. It was a novelty and I enjoyed it.
The first evening in Chicago, I had dinner with Dick Hoover of Williams & Wilkins, who had seen the first edition of our textbook through its birthpangs and was now to supervise the second edition. Since I was being effervescent, he enjoyed himself and confided in me that the average professor made a deadly dinner companion.
This was a dangerous confession, for when he ordered dark German beer for each of us, I hated to show him what a deadly dinner companion I was by explaining to him that I didn't drink beer.
It arrived in giant steins about the size of a fire bucket each. I sniffed at mine, and though it was dark enough to be a cola drink, it smelled like beer.
"Drink up," said Dick, cheerfully, and went glug-glug-glug.
And I went glug-cough-cough-glug-wheeze . . .
"What's the matter?" he said.
"I'm not used to it," I said, my eyes watering, and tried again.
I managed to get it all down and then Dick somehow got the notion that I was drunk.
"On one stein of beer, too," he kept saying.
I kept saying, "I'm all right. Ain't nothing wrong with me, Dick."
But I must have been doing something wrong, for he insisted I was drunk. He kept shaking his head and I think he decided that some professors might be deadly, but at least they could carry more than a stein of beer.
Fortunately, he saw me back to my room safely.
On the morning of Tuesday, April 7, I gave my talk on the research we had been doing at the Medical School, to the usual apathetic audience of chemists. Unfortunately, there was no way of remembering that I was a chemist, and though I had my speech written out, I forgot to look at it, except occasionally for exact numerical values. What's more, I forgot I was supposed to be serious and managed to get a few titters out of an audience that ordinarily felt they had
done all they needed to do for a speaker by not actually snoring. I remember only one of the titter provokers. I said, "The rat was then sacrificed." I paused and added thoughtfully, "Actually, the rat was killed, but chemists are religious people, and 'sacrificed' sounds more theological."
It was easy for me to talk. The rat may have been either sacrificed or killed, but either way I was not there at the time. In fact, when animals were brought into the laboratory for any purpose whatsoever, I instantly left.
I recognized the importance of animal experimentation and I have written in its defense, but those experiments will not be conducted by me or in my presence. I'm sorry, but I have never forgotten that cat I killed at Seth Low, and that is sin enough to weigh down my soul.
For that matter, my stay at the Medical School had been pure in another way as well. Early in my career there it was necessary for me to say something to, or learn something from (I forget the details completely) a member of the Anatomy Department. I went down to the anatomy lab for the purpose, and while waiting there I relaxed by leaning against a flat table on which a life-size wax figure rested.
Slowly, by the diffusion inward of I don't know what enlightenment, I began to realize what an anatomy laboratory was, and what the wax figure was. It was a cadaver—a dead human being.
I didn't disgrace myself. I didn't start back or turn sick. I merely continued to wait, with my eyes fixed firmly on the floor, completed my errand, and left. I never went back into the anatomy lab in all the time I was at the Medical School. I never saw another cadaver.
And to think I had tried to get into medical school as a student fifteen years before! I daresay I would have grown accustomed to dissection and learned to eat my lunch in the presence of human fragments, as I had once learned to do in the presence of cat fragments—but I'm glad I never had to learn to violate my own personal set of instincts.
18
On the afternoon of April 7, I called Bea Mahaffey, who was editor of Universe Science Fiction, and whose office was in Evanston, just to the north of Chicago. It seemed to me that I had to balance the deadliness of a scientific convention with some science-fictional light-heartedness (and Bea was pretty enough to make me feel very light-hearted indeed).
She asked me to write a story for her, and in a fit of expansiveness,
I asked her to bring me a typewriter, never dreaming she would take my grandiloquence seriously—but she brought me a typewriter.
I wasn't man enough to admit I had been boasting, not to a girl as pretty as Bea, so there was nothing to do but sit down and type out a story on the spur. Since the attempted climbing of Mount Everest was much in the news in those days, it occurred to me to explain the repeated failures by postulating the Abominable Snowmen to be Martians. It was a short, reasonably clever story, about 1,300 words long.
Bea read it as it came out of the typewriter, and bought it on the spot—with the provision that her co-editor, Raymond }. Palmer, approve. As it happened, he did, and I eventually received $39 for the story. (Palmer was the man who had sent me my first professional writing payment 14V2 years before, and I would have loved to have met him, but he was away somewhere on that day. That is the closest I ever got to meeting him—but, sentiment aside, it was better to meet Bea.)
"Everest" represents the fastest sale I ever made. It was sold one hour after I had put the paper in the typewriter to begin. It was the first time I had ever sold a first draft.
Bea and I went out for dinner together, and I really exerted myself to impress her with my debonaire manner. (She wasn't going to find me one of Dick Hoover's deadly professors.) Indeed, so successful was I at being lively and witty and effervescent that the middle-aged waitress leaned toward me to whisper that she wished her son-in-law was as interesting as I was. Unfortunately, I was aiming at Bea Mahaffey, who remained relatively unmoved, perhaps because she had no son-in-law.
We went to the movies afterward and then I took her home. I can't honestly say I had anything wicked in mind, though I'd like to believe I was prepared for the worst. The worst proved to be, however, a shake of the hand and a friendly good-bye, and then she disappeared into her apartment house and I turned back to get the streetcar to my hotel.
The next day I took the train and was home on April 9. The roomette had lost the charm of novelty on the return voyage, and I found its supercompactness a little wearying.
l 9
My casually confident visit to Universe was evidence enough that I had come light-years from the time I had first crept, pallid and frightened, into Campbell's office fourteen years before. I was now well
enough known so that I could walk into the office of any science-fiction editor, even one I had never met before, and expect to be treated as a celebrity.
It was not that I demanded or even wanted deference. I just wanted my eccentricities overlooked. I wanted to be able to come swirling in, talking as I came, making jokes, hugging all the young ladies— and not be thrown out.
Of course, there wasn't much room for me to spread myself at the offices of magazine editors. Those were small and cramped and often there wasn't even a secretary. It was different at a book publisher's, particularly a large one.
Doubleday was, of course, a large one, and already by 1952, my small peculiarities were becoming known and allowed for. It was taken for granted that things would be noisy when I was around, and any young woman I overlooked in my all-embracing suavity was liable to be offended.
Doubleday's offices, at each of the four different midtown buildings they occupied since I have known them, usually occupied several floors, each floor a rabbit warren of offices that are not particularly built for privacy. Secretaries usually sit out in the corridors and if the editors have offices, these have doors that are, characteristically, always open.
This meant that when I came in, my voice rebounded off distant walls and it was not merely my own immediate editor and secretary who knew of my presence.
My attitude toward young women amused everyone generally, I think, and the amusement was intensified, I think, by the general impression (frequently expressed out loud) that I was harmless. I even suspect that new girls were warned of my feckless lechery in advance so that they wouldn't run screaming or, worse yet, bop me on the nose. At least none of them ever did either. Mostly they just kissed back.
What struck me most forcibly about any editor's office, by the way (once I got my eyes off the young women), were the books. Every office consists largely of bookshelves.
But, then, that is what editors do—read. They read books and manuscripts and galleys and letters. They read not so much at work, where they are distracted by phone calls, conferences, and visits from loudmouthed cheerful authors such as myself, and snarling, com-, plaining authors such as everyone else, but at home, where, apparently, they read till they fall asleep, face-down, on a manuscript, to begin again when they wake up bleary-eyed.
Why they do it, I don't know. I have never known an editor, from
Campbell on, who didn't fill his or her life with 176 hours a week of work—and who wasn't underpaid.
But there are compensations. When my present Doubleday editor, Cathleen Jordan, a mere slip of a girl, frowns—I tremble. That must be a delightful feeling of power that they have.
Science Fiction at Its Peak
I was very proud of the stories I was writing now. It seemed to me that they were much more deftly written than my stories of the 1940s. I think so to this day.
It seems to me that most people associate me with the 1940s and think of the positronic robot stories, the Foundation series, and, of course, "Nightfall," as the stories of my peak period. I think they're all wrong. I think my peak period came later—in 1953 and the years im-diately following.
By now, after all, the pulpishness in my writing had completely disappeared. That had been taking place all along, through the 1940s, but between what Walter Bradbury taught me and what I had learned at Breadloaf, the change accelerated under my own deliberate prodding.
My writing became ever more direct and spare, and I think it was The Caves of Steel that lifted me a notch higher in my own estimation. I used it as a model for myself thereafter, and it was to be decades before I surpassed that book in my own eyes.
Yet even as The Caves of Steel was raising my science fiction to a new level of expertise, something new was beginning.
A certain publisher, Henry Schuman, was interested in putting out a line of science books for teen-agers. For this purpose, he visited Bill Boyd in order to induce him to produce a teen-age version of his book Genetics and the Races of Man.
Bill felt entirely too busy at the moment to oblige, but once again he turned a nonfiction editor in my direction, as two years before he had done in the case of Angus Cameron of Little, Brown.
On the evening of April 14, 1953, therefore, I visited the Boyds in order to meet Schuman and talk to him.
I was perhaps not as eager to do nonfiction as I had been. After initial interest, Little, Brown had turned down The Puzzle of Life, and after initial interest, Macmillan had turned down The Chemistry of Life. What's more, it was clear by now that the textbook Biochemistry
and Human Metabolism was neither a critical nor a financial success. The second edition would be a clear improvement scientifically, but I had no illusions that that would do anything to improve its earning power.
Besides which, science fiction was going like a house afire, and I was deeply involved with The Caves of Steel.
Nevertheless, Schuman was talking not of textbooks, not of books for the general public even, but of books for teen-agers. That was a new wrinkle. I agreed to give it serious thought, but I kept my enthusiasm low. I was not in the market for more fiascos—yet I thought about it.
I was more impressed with something else that happened at about this time. On April 22, 1953, as a gesture of friendliness, I took a young woman whom I had met at the school to lunch at Howard Johnson's. She brought a girlfriend along and, as is common for me, I flirted outrageously.
Generally, women do not take me seriously in this respect, and I tended to rely on that. The girlfriend, however, whom I was meeting now for the first time, returned innuendo for innuendo in the coolest possible manner and left me uncertain as to what to do.
Eventually lunch was over, and since I had agreed, to begin with, to drive the young woman I knew to her next appointment, I did so. Her friend accompanied us and then asked if I would drive her home to her place in Cambridge, and it would have been ungallant of me to refuse. When I got there, she invited me up to her apartment, and again it would have been ungallant of me to refuse.
What it amounts to is that she then seduced me.
Don't get me wrong. She didn't use force, or even much in the way of persuasion. Nor did I object or scream or fight.
However, I was scared, and even though I was alone with a woman in her own apartment, a woman who was plainly intent on sex, there wasn't a chance in the world that I would have made the first move. But I didn't have to. She did and I just followed along, with my teeth more or less chattering, and not out of passion.
I was just about a third of a century old and it was the first time I had ever indulged in illicit sex, either premarital or extramarital.
It left me riddled with guilt and yet, in an odd way, triumphant. I had never really felt myself to be "good in bed." I had known for years that I was not deft in the laboratory and I felt that sex was a kind of
laboratory exercise that I was equally undeft at. I had no reason to think otherwise till then. This young lady, however, had apparently had a good time and was kind enough to say so.
For the first time I thought, "Hey . . ."
Now you might think that, having learned this, I instantly plunged into a maelstrom of sex.
Not so. I don't say I wouldn't have liked to, but the fact is that I didn't. I still felt guilty, and so I remained much as I had been before. The proof of it is that my writing continued at the same prodigious rate as before. Anyone who considers my output can see that I must spend virtually (and virtuously) all my time at the typewriter.
Nevertheless, not quite entirely. There were times, once in a rare while, when the o
ccasion offered itself, when a woman would make it clear that it was all right with her, and then, if it seemed all right with me, too, I would allow the matter to work itself out to its logical conclusion.
I have no intention of recounting all the cases and times in clinical detail. My autobiography is not a peep show, but I must tell you enough to account for the way I am, it seems to me, and it is important that in the end, I was satisfied that I was good in bed. Independent evidence all seemed to point in the same direction, with no significant word or action to the contrary.
And, as it happens, though sex has nothing to do with writing or lecturing or any other cerebral occupation, so tightly is sexual achievement tied in with self-esteem that once I gathered I was good in bed, I was automatically far more self-assured in every other respect, and I believe this contributed to the mid-1950s as my peak period in science fiction.
3
I finished The Caves of Steel on May 24, 1953, and I was enormously pleased with it. Fred Pohl was pleased with it. Horace Gold was pleased with it. Horace was never so pleased, however, that he didn't want changes, and he called me up collect to tell me so in a seventeen-minute conversation. Nevertheless, he was going to pay me at the rate of $.04 a word, which meant $2,520 after Fred took his percentage.
At just about this time, too, advance copies of Second Foundation arrived, and now the entire Foundation series was in book form.
I was grateful to Marty Greenberg for putting out the Foundation series as well as I, Robot when no one else seemed interested in doing it —and on the whole he had produced attractive volumes.
It was quite clear by now, however, after three years of doing busi-
ness with him, that he was extremely slow in paying even the smallest sums and that he did not produce the kind of statements that the contracts called for. I never knew how many copies of my books he sold so that I could at least know how much in debt to me he was. The situation looked worse when I compared it with the efficient and businesslike way in which Doubleday produced all statements in full detail, and all checks with prompt readiness.
In memory yet green : the autobiography of Isaac Asimov, 1920-1954 Page 83