Of course, I agreed and wrote the book promptly. When publication time rolled around, however, Henry Schuman had sold his firm to another small firm, Abelard. When my book appeared, then, it was THE CHEMICALS OF LIFE (Abelard-Schuman, 1954).
It was the first nonfiction hook that ever appeared with my name on it and no other; the first nonfiction book I ever wrote for the general public.
What's more, it had turned out to be a very easy task, much easier than my science fiction. I took only ten weeks to write the book, never spending more than an hour or two a day on it, and it was intense fun. I instantly began to think of other, similar nonfiction books I could do, and that began a course of action that was to fill my life-though I did not have any inkling at the time that this would happen.
That same year, too, it began to look as though a second offspring was on its way. This one also caught us by surprise and created a serious problem.
When we had first moved into our Waltham apartment, in the spring of 1951, there were just the two of us. We slept in one bedroom, and the other bedroom was the office. My book THE CURRENTS OF SPACE (Doubleday, 1952) was written in that second bedroom.
After David was born and grew large enough to need a room of his own, he got the second bedroom and my office was moved into the master bedroom, and that's where THE CAVES OF STEEL (Doubleday. 1953) was written.
Then, on February 19, 1955, my daughter, Robyn Joan, was born, and I moved into the corridor in anticipation. It was the only place left to me. The fourth of my Lucky Start novels was begun on the very day she was brought home from the hospital. It was LUCKY STARR AND THE BIG SUN OF MERCURY (Doubleday, 1956) and it was dedicated “To Robyn Joan, who did her best to interfere.”
The interfering was entirely too efficient. With a child in each bedroom and me in the corridor it was bad enough, but eventually Robyn Joan would be large enough to need a room of her own, so we made up our mind to look for a house.
That was traumatic. I had never lived in a house. For all my thirty-five years of life, I had lived in a series of rented apartments. What had to be, however, had to be. In January 1956 we found a house in Newton, Massachusetts, just west of Boston, and on March 12, 1956, we moved in.
On March 16, 1956, Boston had one of its worst blizzards in memory, and three feet of snow fell. Having never had to shovel snow before, I found myself starting with a lulu in a deep, broad driveway. I had barely dug myself out when, on March 20, 1956, a second blizzard struck and four more feet fell.
The melting snow packed against the outer walls of the house found its way past the wood and into the basement and we had a small flood. -Heavens, how we wished ourselves back in the apartment.
But we survived that, and then came a graver worry for me at least. My life had changed so radically, what with two children, a house, and a mortgage, that I began to wonder if I would still be able to write. (My novel THE NAKED SUN, Doubleday, 1957, had been finished two days
before the move.) You know, one gets such a feeling that a writer is a delicate plant who must be carefully nurtured or he will wither, that any traumatic change in one's way of life is bound to give the feeling of all the blossoms being lopped off.
What with the blizzards and the snow-shoveling and the basement pumping and everything else, I didn't get a chance to try to write for a while.
But then Bob Lowndes asked me to do a story for Future, and in June 1956 I began my first writing job in the new house. It was the first heat wave of the season but the basement was cool, so I set up my typewriter there in the unique luxury of being able to feel cool in a heat wave.
There was no trouble. I could still write. I turned out EACH AN EXPLORER and it appeared in issue #30 of Future (the issues of this magazine were so irregular at this time that it was not felt safe to put a month-designation on the issues).
Each An Explorer
Herman Chouns was a man of hunches. Sometimes he was right; sometimes he was wrong-about fifty-fifty. Still, considering that one has the whole universe of possibilities from which to pull a right answer, fifty-fifty begins to look pretty good.
Chouns wasn't always as pleased with the matter as might be expected. It put too much of a strain on him. People would huddle around a problem, making nothing of it, then turn to him and say, “What do you think, Chouns? Turn on the old intuition.”
And if he came up with something that fizzled, the responsibility for that was made clearly his.
His job, as field explorer, rather made things worse. “Think that planet's worth a closer look?” they would say. “What do you think, Chouns?”
So it was a relief to draw a two-man spot for a change (meaning that the next trip would be to some low-priority place, and the pressure would be off) and, on top of it, to get Allen Smith as partner.
Smith was as matter-of-fact as his name. He said to Chouns the first day out, “The thing about you is that the memory files in your brain are on extraspecial can. Faced with a problem, you remember enough little things that maybe the rest of us don't come up with to make a decision. Calling it a hunch just makes it mysterious, and it isn't.”
He rubbed his hair slickly back as he said that. He had light hair that lay down like a skull cap.
Chouns, whose hair was very unruly, and whose nose was snub and a bit off-center, said softly (as was his way), “I think maybe it's telepathy.”
“What!”
“Nuts!” said Smith, with loud derision (as was his way).” Scientists have been tracking psionics for a thousand years and gotten nowhere. There's no such thing: noprecognition; no telekinesis; no clairvoyance; and no telepathy.”
“I admit that, but consider this. If I get a picture of what each of a group of people are thinking-even though I might not be aware of what was happening-I could integrate the information and come up with an answer. I would know more than any single individual in the group, so I could make a better judgment than the others-sometimes.”
“Do you have any evidence at all for that?” Chouns turned his mild brown eyes on the other. “Just a hunch.”
They got along well. Chouns welcomed the other's refreshing practicality, and Smith patronized the other's speculations. They often disagreed but never quarreled,
Even when they reached their objective, which was a globular cluster that had never felt the energy thrusts of a human-designed nuclear reactor before, increasing tension did not worsen matters.
Smith said, “Wonder what they do with all this data back on Earth. Seems a waste sometimes.”
Chouns said, “Earth is just beginning to spread out. No telling how far humanity will move out into the galaxy, given a million years or so. All the data we can get on any world will come in handy someday,”
“You sound like a recruiting manual for the Exploration Teams, Think there'll be anything interesting in that thing?” He indicated the visi-plate on which the no-longer distant cluster was centered like spilled talcum powder.
“Maybe. I've got a hunch-” Chouns stopped, gulped, blinked once or twice, and then smiled weakly.
Smith snorted, “Let's get a fix on the nearest stargroups and make a random pass through the thickest of it. One gets you ten, we find a McKomin ratio under 0.2,”
“You'll lose,” murmured Chouns. He felt the quick stir of excitement that always came when new worlds were about to be spread beneath them. It was a most contagious feeling, and it caught hundreds of youngsters each year. Youngsters, such as he had been once, flocked to the Teams, eager to see the worlds their descendants someday would call their own, each an explorer-