“Good lord, no!” Isaac said, “No, it was a famous biochemist of the time, Dr. Alexis Carrel. He was responding to a letter Albert Einstein had written, and—What is it?”
The man from the Daily News had his hand up. “Could you spell that, please, Dr. Asimov?”
“E-I-N-S-T-E-I-N. He was a physicist, very well known at the time. Anyway, the President accepted Dr. Carrel’s proposal and they started the Pasadena Project. I happened to be drafted into it, as a very young biochemist, just out of school.”
“But you got to be pretty important,” the woman said loyally. Isaac shrugged. Someone from another videopaper asked him to say more about his experiences, and Isaac, giving us all a humorously apologetic look, did as requested.
“Well,” he said, “I don’t want to dwell on the weapons systems. Everybody knows that it was our typhus bomb that made the Japanese surrender, of course. But it was the peacetime uses that I think are really important. Look around at my old friends here.” He swept a generous arm around the dais, including us all. “If it hadn’t been for the Pasadena Project some of us wouldn’t be here now—do you have any idea how much medicine advanced as a result of what we learned? Antibiotics in 1944, antivirals in 1948, the cancer cure in 1950, the cholesterol antagonist in 1953?”
A California woman got in: “Are you sure the President made the right decision? There are some people who still think that atomic power is a real possibility.”
“Ah, you’re talking about old Eddy Teller.” Isaac grinned. “He’s all right. It’s just that he’s hipped on this one subject. It’s really too bad. He could have done important work, I think, if he’d gone in for real science in 1940, instead of fooling around with all that nuclear stuff.”
There wasn’t any question that Isaac was the superstar, with Cyril getting at least serious second-banana attention, but it wasn’t all the superstars. Quite. Each one of the rest of us got a couple of minutes before the cameras, saying how much each of us had influenced each other and how happy we all were to be seeing each other again. I was pretty sure that most of us would wind up as faces on the cutting-room floor, but what we said, funnily enough, was all pretty true.
And then it was over. People began to leave.
I saw Isaac coming out of the men’s room as I was looking for the woman with my coat. He paused at the window, gazing out at the darkling sky. A big TWA eight-engined plane was coming in, nonstop, probably from someplace like Havana. It was heading toward Idlewild, hardly higher than we were, as I tapped him on the shoulder.
“I didn’t know celebrities went to the toilet,” I told him.
He looked at me tolerantly. “Matter of fact, I was just calling Janet,” he said. “Anyway, how are things going with you, Fred? You’ve been publishing a lot of books. How many, exactly?”
I gave him an honest answer. “I don’t exactly know. I used to keep a list. I’d write the name and date and publisher for each new book on the wall of my office—but then my wife painted over the wall and I lost my list.”
“Approximately how many?”
“Over a hundred, anyway. Depends what you count. The novels, the short-story collections, the nonfiction books”
“Over a hundred,” he said. “And some of them have been dramatized, and book-clubbed, and translated into foreign languages?” He pursed his lips and thought for a moment. “I guess you’re happy about the way your life has gone?”
“Well, sure,” I said. “Why wouldn’t I be?” And then I gave him another look, because there was something about his tone that startled me. “What are you saying, Eye? Aren’t you?”
“Of course I am!” he said quickly. “Only—well, to tell you the truth, there’s just one thing. Every once in a while I find myself thinking that if things had gone a different way, I might’ve been a pretty successful writer.”