They’d blown up that old photograph twelve feet long, and Damon Knight was staring mournfully up at it when Doc and I came over to shake hands. “We were such kids,” he said. True enough. We’d ranged from sixteen—that was Cyril—to Don Wollheim, the old man of the bunch: why, then he had been at least twenty-three or twenty-four.
So much has been written about the Futurians these days that sometimes I’m not sure myself what’s true, and what’s just press-agent puffery. The newspaper stories make us sound very special. Well, we certainly thought we were, but I doubt that many of our relatives shared our opinion. Isaac worked in his parents’ candy store, Johnny Michel helped his father silk-screen signs for Woolworth’s Five and Ten, Dirk Wylie pumped gas at a filling station in Queens, Dick Wilson shoved trolleys of women’s dresses around the garment district on Seventh Avenue. Most of the rest of us didn’t have real jobs at all. Remember, it was the tail end of the Great Depression. I know that for myself I considered I was lucky, now and then, to get work as a restaurant busboy or messenger for an insurance company.
A young woman came over to us. She was reading from a guest list, and when she looked at me she wonderfully got my name right. “I’m from Saturday Evening Post Video, “ she explained. “You were one of the original Futurians, weren’t you?”
“We all were. Well, Doc and I were. Damon came along later.”
“And so you knew Dr. Asimov and Mr. Kornbluth from the very beginning?”
I sighed; I knew from experience just how the interview was going to go. It was not for my own minor-league fame that the woman wanted to talk to me, it was for a reminiscence about the superstars. So I told her three or four of the dozen stories I kept on tap for such purposes. I told her how Isaac lived at one end of Prospect Park, in Brooklyn, and I lived at the other. How the Futurians would have a meeting, any kind of a meeting, and then hate to break it up, and so we’d just walk around the empty streets all night long, talking, sometimes singing—Jack and I, before he finished his first play; Doc and I, reciting poetry, singing all the numbers out of our bottomless repertory of the popular songs of the day; Cyril and I, trying to trick each other with our show-off game of “Impossible Questions.”
“‘Impossible Questions,’ “ she repeated.
“That was a sort of a quiz game we played,” I explained. “We invented it. It was a hard one. The questions were intended to be about things most people wouldn’t know. Like, what’s the rhyme scheme of a chant royal? Or what’s the color of air?”
“You mean blue, like the sky?”
I grinned at her. “You just lost a round. Air doesn’t have any color at all. It just looks blue, because of what they call Rayleigh scattering. But that’s all right; these were impossible questions, and if anyone ever got the right answer to anyone of them he won and the game was over.”
“So you and Dr. Asimov used to play this game—”
“No, no. Cyril and I played it. The only way Isaac came into it was sometimes we’d go over to see him. Early in the morning, when we’d been up all night; we’d start off across the park around sunrise, and we’d stop to climb a few trees—and Cyril would give the mating call of the plover-tailed teal, but we never had a teal respond to it—and along about the time Isaac’s parents’ candy store opened for business we’d drop in and his mother would give us each a free malted milk.”
“A free malted milk,” the woman repeated, beaming. It was just the kind of human-interest thing she’d been looking for. She tarried for one more question. “ Did you know Dr. Asimov when he wrote his famous letter to President Franklin Roosevelt, that started the Pasadena Project?”
I opened my mouth to answer, but Doc Lowndes got in there ahead of me. “Oh, damn it, woman,” he exploded. “Isaac didn’t write that letter. Alexis Carrel did. Isaac came in much later.”
The woman looked at her notes, then back at us. Her look wasn’t surprised. Mostly it was—what’s the word I want? Yes: pitying. She looked at us as though she were sorry for us. “Oh, I don’t think so,” she said, politely enough. “I have it all here.”
“You have it wrong,” Doc told her, and began to try to set her straight.
I wouldn’t have bothered, though the facts were simple enough. Albert Einstein had written to the President claiming that Hitler’s people were on the verge of inventing what he called “an atomic bomb,” and he wanted FDR to start a project so the U.S.A. could build one first. Dr. Alexis Carrel heard about it. He was a biochemist and he didn’t want to see America wasting its time on some atomic-power will-o’-the-wisp. So he persuaded his friend Colonel Charles A. Lindbergh to take a quite different letter to President Roosevelt.
It wasn’t that easy for Lindbergh, because there was a political problem. Lindbergh was certainly a famous man. He was the celebrated Lone Eagle, the man who had flown the Atlantic in nineteen twenty-something all by himself, first man ever to do it. But a decade and a bit later things had changed for Lindbergh. He had unfortunately got a reputation for being soft on the Nazis, and besides he was deeply involved in some right-wing Republican organizations—the America First Committee, the Liberty League, things like that—which had as their principal objective in life leaving Hitler alone and kicking that satanic Democrat Franklin D. Roosevelt out of the White House.
All the same, Lindbergh had a lot of powerful friends. It took two months of pulling hard on a lot of strings to arrange it, but he finally got an appointment for five minutes of the President’s time on a slow Thursday morning in Warm Springs, Georgia. And the President actually read Carrel’s letter.
Roosevelt wasn’t a scientist and didn’t even have any scientists near him—scientists weren’t a big deal, back in the thirties. So FDR didn’t really know the difference between a fissioning atomic nucleus and a disease organism, except that he could see that it was cheaper to culture germs in Petri dishes than to build billion-dollar factories to make this funny-sounding, what-do-you-call-it, nuclear explosive stuff, plutonium. And FDR was a little sensitive about starting any new big-spending projects for a while. So Einstein was out, and Carrel was in.
By the time Isaac got drafted and assigned to the secret research facility it was called the Pasadena Project; but by the time Doc got to that point the Saturday Evening Post woman was beginning to fidget. “That’s very interesting, Mr. Lowndes?” she said, glancing at her notes. “But I think my editors would want me to get this sort of thing from Dr. Asimov himself. Excuse me,” she finished, already turning away, with the stars of hero worship beginning to shine in her eyes.
Doc looked at me ruefully. “Reporters,” he said.
I nodded. Then I couldn’t resist the temptation any longer. “Let’s listen to what he does tell her,” I suggested, and we trailed after her.
It wasn’t easy to get near Isaac. Apart from the reporters, there were all the public relations staffs of our various publishers and institutes—Don Wollheim ‘s own publishing company, Cyril’s publishers, Bob Lowndes’s, The New York Times, because Damon was the editor of their Book Review. Even my own publisher had chipped in, as well as the galleries that sold Hannes Bok’s paintings and Johnny Michel’s weird silk screens of tomato cans and movie stars’ faces. But it was the U.S. Information Agency that produced most of the muscle, because Isaac was their boy. What was surrounding Isaac was a mob. The reporter was a tough lady, though. An elbow here, a side-slither there, and she was in the front row with her hand up. “Dr. Asimov? Weren’t you the one who wrote the letter to President Roosevelt that started the Pasadena Project?”