The Way the Future Was: A Memoir (32 page)

"
Possible
" monthly publication? I got on the phone. But by then, of course, it was Labor Day weekend. I couldn't reach either Sol or Bob to ask them what the hell they thought they were playing at. When the convention was over and I was back in New York, I found out: they had got to thinking after I left. And they had chickened out.

I've said that Bob and I got along well most of the time, barring occasional yelling. That was one of the times for yelling.

Although I had been talking about it for months, I think they had never really perceived how important it was to me. They thought it over for a while and then decided to placate me. Look, said Bob (or Sol), we're just scared to make a move with either
If
or
Galaxy
. We're sorry we are, but we are. But if you're all that ape-shit for a monthly magazine, we'll tell you what we'll do. We'll start a third magazine for you. We'll make that one monthly.

That took me aback. The last thing I wanted right then was another magazine. It seems to me that a magazine, any magazine, is or at least ought to be a living creature. It should have a personality and an identity of its own. Not part of a litter; an individual. I was a long way from attaining that with either of the two magazines I already had.

On the other hand, my bluff was called. It was an offer I could not turn down. I figured, fuzzily enough, that maybe I could start the new one and make it work as a monthly, then merge it with, say,
If
. I would insist on maintaining the monthly schedule with the new composite, I dreamed; and then, when that had been shown to work, it would be easy enough to get
Galaxy
back up there, too. . . .

So I accepted the deal and got to work. We picked out a title: Worlds
of Tomorrow
. We designed a logo. I bought the stories. We signed a distribution contract. We sent the first issue off to the printer. . . .

By then I was beginning to see flaws in my rosy reasoning. Suppose it
did
work as a monthly. I had had no luck at all in getting Bob and Sol to change the frequency of
If
or
Galaxy
. Just what would be my chances of getting them to
kill
a moneymaker in order to merge it with another book?

But in the long run it didn't matter. The problem never came up. By the time
Worlds of
Tomorrow came out, Bob and Sol had had another failure of nerve. The test project designed to establish the potential of monthly publication, too, was a bimonthly.
*

Worlds of Tomorrow
lasted several years, and even published some pretty good stories that I might not have been able to get into either
If
or
Galaxy
. In order to distinguish it from the rest of the herd, I had decided to feature long, complete-in-one-issue seminovels, and there were some fine ones by Gordon R. Dickson, Philip K. Dick, and others. But I had also decided to try to include some material on extrapolative science—not exactly fact, but not exactly science fiction, either. They were, I thought, among the best things in the magazine. We had a series on future weaponry written by someone who knew the subject so well that he could not use his own name. And we had freezing.

Shortly after the magazine was born, I found in the slush pile something that was not exactly a manuscript. It was a privately printed, spiral-bound book called
The Prospect of Immortality
, by someone called Robert C. W. Ettinger.

One of the interesting fringe benefits of a career in science fiction is that one gets to hear from a lot of geniuses, and from a lot of nuts. It is not always easy to tell at first encounter which is which. I looked at the book without much enthusiasm. Then, as I began to read it, Ettinger began to come through as a person who had had a wild idea that might—that just possibly
might—
really work.

The argument of the book was easy enough to follow:

If you wanted to live forever, there was at least a reasonable hope that the technology to make that possible was already at hand. By following certain simple directions, you might never die—or, more accurately, if you did die now and then, it needn't be fatal.

How was this to be achieved?

By means of the deepfreeze, said Ettinger. Go ahead and live your life. Die when you have to. Then, at the moment of death, have your body popped into a freezer. A
cold
freezer, around the temperature of liquid nitrogen, maybe even liquid helium. You could keep an organic substance—including your very dear own personal body—at liquid-gas temperatures without essential change for a long time. No physical change. No chemical change. No chemical processes taking place at all, except for a little free-radical activity, glacially slow and not to be worried about. There might be a touch of radiation damage from prolonged exposure to cosmic rays—but not quickly. Not for days, weeks, months, or centuries. Perhaps not even for millions of years.

And this, said Ettinger, was not theory, it was scientific fact.

That was one of the two bases his plan rested on. The other was not exactly a fact, but it certainly seemed at least a good gambling bet. That was that medical science would continue to learn. Sooner or later, Ettinger said, doctors would know how to do three things at present difficult or impossible: (1) how to cure or repair whatever damage had killed you in the first place; (2) how to repair whatever additional damage had been done to your body by the freezing process itself—mostly cellular damage from the phase-change of water to ice; (3) how to start you up again (as we now are able to start up again people who through drowning or electroshock or heart arrest would once have been buried instead). All this might take some time, he conceded. But dreaming away in the deepfreeze, time was what you had plenty of.

Was this science fiction or a real hope? Did it mean that some real person now in the agony of terminal cancer could really have some expectation, however slim, of living once more in health and comfort?

I was no authority on any of these subjects. I am no real authority on most subjects, for that matter; but the nature of an editorial job is that ignorance is no excuse. Whether you know enough to make a decision or not, you still have to make the decision. And I was impressed by the amount of homework Ettinger had done. He had calculated the replenishment rate for liquid nitrogen as it bubbled off the cooling jacket around the corpsicles and had looked up the market price for LN
₂
. The idea was science fiction. In fact, I had read it in a story by Neil R. Jones back in the early 1930s.
*
But Ettinger had put numbers into it. He had gone beyond that. He had considered the religious, moral, political, and ecological consequences of what he proposed, and found the arguments for all of them. His own credentials were satisfying. He was on the physics faculty of a respectable university; and in every case where I knew enough to decide whether a statement of his was true or false, it was true.

None of that proved that freezing would work. But it was not to be dismissed as a crackpot pipe dream. So I made arrangements to publish an extract from his book, and it appeared in Worlds
of Tomorrow
.

When I finally had the printed issue in my hand, I perceived, a little belatedly, that here at last was a chance to do what I had always wanted to do: to use the electronic media to publicize science fiction.

By then I had become fairly accustomed to microphones and cameras. In particular, I had become a regular on the all-night radio talkathons run by Long John Nebel in New York City.

Long John was (and is) the king of nighttime radio. He is a legend in his own right, professional photographer and roadside auctioneer turned radio personality, with a slavishly devoted audience of all-night short-order cooks, nurses, night watchmen, students, and insomniacs. First to last, I've done the Long John show maybe four hundred times. And maybe four hundred times I've asked myself what I was doing there.

One reason, I guess I have to admit, is that I seem to have a fondness for the sound of my own voice. Another reason is Long John himself, marvelous quirky man that he is. Most of all, it is because I have met a great many interesting people in Long John's studios: scientists, writers, politicians, flying-saucer nuts (and also, I add at once, UFO experts who are not at all nutty); that human killing-machine, Roy Cohn; the late H. L. Hunt, roly-poly right-wing Santa Claus who called himself "the richest Gentile in the world";
*
Gene Leonard, the cybernetics-systems genius who single-handedly caused New York City's worst newspaper strike by automating the composing room of
The New York Times;
Mel Torme, the great old "Velvet Fog" himself; admired comedians like Phil Foster and Victor Borge—well, for four hundred shows I imagine I could think of four hundred names. Some have become good friends, and one or two I will consider myself very fortunate if I never see again. Collectively it was like an immense, never-ending cocktail party. I've appeared on several hundred radio and TV shows in perhaps twenty countries, but the one I keep coming back to is Long John. If I'm not on it for more than a month or so, I get withdrawal symptoms.
*
*

What I did
not
do all those Long Johns for was to sell my books.

I may have had some such notion in the beginning, but I learned better. I'm not sure that it's possible at all to promote science fiction by radio or TV exposure. The electronic audience is too broad-based and, forgive me, too ignorant. Ignorant of what science fiction is all about. I don't mean to put the mundanes down, but science fiction is a special taste. Most people who don't read it anyway are not going to be moved to do so by hearing me chatter between midnight and six a.m.

But freezing—ah, that was something else! That was the
exact
kind of thing that one could promote on radio and TV, and Long John had exactly the right program to do it on.

I was in a peak period with Long John at the time, doing the show at least once a week and sometimes three or four times. When I mentioned Ettinger's idea to John, he jumped at it. We scheduled a show right away, and the response was immense. The phones at the Galaxy Publishing Corporation office began ringing as soon as the doors were open, listeners who wanted to know where they could buy the article we had been talking about. We did a repeat show, and then another, and then got Ettinger himself on the air for one of them. By phone. John had no budget for flying guests in from Michigan, and neither did I. I took the show on the road, to other radio and TV shows in New York. A year or so later I wrote a lead
Playboy
article about life prolongation in general, and
Playboy
's fantastically competent public-relations person of the time, Tania Grossinger, booked me onto every radio and TV show I had ever heard of, and some I hadn't, from Johnny Carson on down. And on all of them I talked about Ettinger's freezing program. After I had done this maybe fifty times, it began to enter my slow, tiny mind that maybe Bob Ettinger would feel a little resentment at somebody else's taking his very own idea and running around the country with it. He came to New York around then and we had dinner.
*
I waited for a suitable moment and then asked him if he, well, minded my talking so much about his brainchild. Bob smiled his slow, gentle smile and said, "Not a bit. You see, I'm very selfish. I want to be an immortal superman. In order to make that possible, it has to be possible for everybody else to be one, too, and any way that happens is all right with me." So the Chautauqua went on. It didn't do an awful lot for
Worlds of Tomorrow
. That one first issue had a hell of a sale, but little of it carried over to any other issue. It did, I think, do something for the freezing program.

Because of all this, a lot of people I meet seem to think that I am one of the elect. I'm not. It isn't that I don't believe it might work. I thought the chances reasonably good when the whole notion was only a gleam in Bob Ettinger's eye. Now there is a lot more substance for the opinion. There are freezing organizations in half a dozen countries. They publish journals. They conduct research. They've even frozen eighteen or twenty real people who are now lying in their big thermos bottles with the liquid N
₂
percolating around them,
*
waiting for that great thawing-out day. There are thousands of card-carrying immortals in the United States alone. The cards are real. They look like Medic-Alert IDs, and they say:

NOTICE!

If you find me dead,
immediately
pack me in dry ice and call the number below. On no account autopsy, embalm, fold, spindle, or mutilate me.