The Way the Future Was: A Memoir (36 page)

Because of Kathy, Carol and I have found ourselves involved in programs to help handicapped children. Because of that, we have discovered how many of them there are. There isn't a block in America that doesn't hide some children who are spastic, or emotionally disturbed, or perceptually impaired, or somehow, somewhere, cheated of what most of us take for granted. Ten percent of all children are significantly handicapped.

It is important to know that
all of them can be helped
. For a few, tragically, not much more can be done than to relieve a little of the pain and despair. For some, they can be brought to complete and normal lives.

But there is always something.

It isn't always easy to find. I was going to say something about that, and then I remembered it had been said already:

Another blind alley, he had thought in despair. Another, after a hundred too many already. First, "Wait for him to outgrow it." He doesn't. Then, "We must reconcile ourselves to God's will." But you don't want to. Then give him the prescription three times a day for three months. And it doesn't work. Then chase around for six months with the Child Guidance Clinic to find out it's only letterheads and one circuit-riding doctor who doesn't have time for anything. Then, after four dreary, weepy weeks of soul-searching, the State Training School, and find out it has an eight-year waiting list. Then the private custodial school, and find they're fifty-five hundred dollars a year—without medical treatment!—and where do you get fifty-five hundred dollars a year? And all the time everybody warns you, as if you didn't know it: "Hurry! Do something! Catch it early! This is the critical stage! Delay is fatal!"
*

That's from "The Meeting," one of the posthumous collaborations between Cyril Kornbluth and myself. When Cyril died, he left a good deal of incomplete work, some almost-done stories, some just fragments. One was actually a completed manuscript (or would have been, except that somehow a page or two had been irrevocably lost) about a meeting of a parents' association of a school for handicapped children. It wasn't quite a story. It was a scene, but a powerful and beautifully written one, and it had come out of Cyril's own experience of just such a school. Over the years I tinkered most of Cyril's fragments into stories and had them published. "The Meeting" I left alone. At first it was too foreign to my experience for me to know how to handle it. Then it was too close. Of course, "The Meeting" is fiction. The child in it, and the school, are fictitious; but all the schools share the same hope and pain. And, a decade and a half after Cyril died, I perceived how I could make the scene into a story, and did, and Ed Ferman published it in
The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction
in 1972.

Sometimes, when one reads a story, there is a sense of identification and revelation: what is happening in the story is what has happened to oneself, and some painful lump in the subconscious shifts to a more easeful position. Catharsis? Therapy? It is the same for the writer as for the reader. Cyril and I had dealt with frustrations in fiction before—our not-very-successful hurricane novel,
A Town Is Drowning
, was an act of revenge on a storm that had ripped off my roof and flooded his home a year earlier. "The Meeting" was harder to deal with, but I am sure that it too was a kind of therapy for both of us.

The year after it was published I went to the World Science Fiction Convention in Toronto with some hopes of coming back with more than I had had when I left. I had published a story called "The Gold at the Starbow's End" the year before. In my vanity, I really expected to win something for it. Nebula time had come and gone, and somebody else had taken away the prize, but it was up for a Hugo and I was hopeful.

So were Ben Bova and Isaac Asimov, and the three of us were sitting at the same table. Now, we are all old pros, you understand. But as the long-winded speakers wound down and handing-out time came close, conversation flagged at our table. Even Ben ran out of jokes. Isaac had to get up to go to the bathroom six, count them, six times between the serving of the coffee and the presentation of the awards.

Then the awards began. Apart from the Hugos, there are a lot of them, and each speaker seemed impelled to carry on at insane length both in giving and in receiving them. But they came to Best Editor; and it was Ben, for
Analog
, and he got up to collect it and brought it back and plumped it down in the middle of our table.

Then they came to Best Novel. It was Isaac, for
The Gods Themselves
. And he too went up to pick up the trophy, and brought it back, and then there were two.

And then they came to Best Novella and it wasn't mine. It went to Ursula Le Guin's
The Word for the World Is Forest
.

I intensely admire Ursula Le Guin as a writer, and even like that story. But I could have wished very much at that moment that she had never decided to write it. Isaac and Ben were very nice about it, but I could see that I was bringing the class of the neighborhood down.

Then along came the award for Best Short Story. I had actually forgotten that "The Meeting" was even nominated.

But it had been, and it won in a tie with an R. A. Lafferty story, and honor was saved.

By the time I got back to the table with Cyril's Hugo and mine, my sunny nature had reasserted itself. I had had time to reflect that Cyril had had the bad luck to die before awards were common, and so this one was specially valued. I accepted the handshakes and kisses. But I was not prepared for the reactions of Ben and Isaac, who were both staring at the now four Hugos in the middle of the table. "Showy bastard," Ben hissed, and Isaac chimed in, "Yeah! We only got one Hugo. How come you get two?"

11 Have Mouth, Will Travel

In 1965 I encountered a new friend and a new way of filling up my time. I had a phone call from T. George Harris, then an editor for
Look
and later head honcho for
Psychology Today
. George said that he had met a fellow named John Diebold and thought the two of us ought to know each other. So he had arranged a luncheon.

George's instincts were exactly right, at least as far as my own reactions were concerned. John Diebold is a Renaissance man, a management Titan, a cosmopolitan gourmet; I had not met quite his like before. His management-consultancy firm has offices in nearly every city of the world worth living in. Among other ventures, he conducts a Research Institute which tells management people the things they will not learn from the B-School or the Kiplinger Report. At the luncheon—it was at Lutece, of course—Diebold asked if I had thought much about the future of corporate management. I told him what had occurred to me. He invited me to repeat it at the next Diebold Research Institute meeting, and I did, with flourishes and variations.
Business Week
covered the event, with a picture and a quote, and my phone began to ring.

So for the next five or six years I found myself talking to groups who didn't know anything about science fiction but were willing to listen to what I had to say, all over the map. Corporation presidents in Hawaii, architects in New Haven, Kiwanis in Alabama, international religious conferences in New York, life-insurance executives in Chicago, industrial chemists in Michigan, space scientists in Georgia, mathematicians in Washington, women's clubs, temples, rod-and-gun clubs, churches, interior decorators, soap and detergent manufacturers, science teachers, English teachers, for God's sake
kindergarten
teachers—it snowballs. The way it works, if you talk to a group of eighteen hundred management types, there are always ten or twenty among them who are themselves trying to book talent for the next meeting of their own group. So they are scouting for talent, and if when they catch your act you do not appear visibly drunk or demented, invitations follow.

Publicity helps a whole lot, and there I was very lucky. Sylvia Porter quoted me in her column,
The New York Times Sunday Magazine
ran a lengthy article, I was on a lot of radio and TV shows. It was all interesting. It got me to places I might not otherwise have seen (management people really do themselves well when they meet). But it was getting out of hand. I was occupying some very fancy hotel rooms, but the world outside the meeting places I was seeing only from the windows of a car going to and from an airport. On the day when I realized I had scheduled myself to speak at a luncheon meeting in Tuscaloosa at one and at a Columbia University gathering in New York City seven hours later, I decided I needed professional help.

The persons available for such help are called lecture agents. There are scores of them. I didn't fool around. I went right to the top. Armed with an introduction from a writer who was both a good friend of mine and a highly valued client of his, I spread my problems on the agent's desk. He pondered for a while and then allowed that he
could
help. But he wasn't sure he wanted to, really. Did I have any publicity material?

With some effort I assembled a batch of clippings and notices. (I don't like to keep those things—not because I lack vanity, but because I feel I have too much of it already; keeping a press book panders to urges I had rather suppress.) He thumbed through them, and we talked, rather inconclusively, over a period of a month or two. Then he called me in to say he had solved my problem. His son was just out of Yale and coming into the family business. He had decided to let me be his son's very first lecture client. Gosh, I said, falling to my knees and kissing his ring, when can we start? Right now, he said. And there was a peal of trumpets and his son the Yale man came in and whisked me away.

"Pohl," he said, "I've made a study of your case, and I know what you want. You want to get into the universities."

"Yes," I said, nodding feverishly. "I've always liked talking to college audiences."

"Shut up," he said. "I'm talking here. You've got the wrong act."

"But," I said, "I've never had—"

"Old stuff," he said; "you need to keep up with the times. You don't know what's going on now. The occult! That's what they want to hear about on the campuses. I know this, because I've just graduated from Yale. That's all they talk about there, Buckley and the occult."

"I'll have to think about that," I said, and went away.

I never went back. After a while I got a sort of reproachful note from the father, returning my publicity clips, and that was the end of that.

Since then I've tried a few other lecture agents, but they really are not any solution to any problem of mine, whatever they may do for Alvin Toffler and Arthur Clarke. I do a lot of talking, mostly to college groups (the Yale man was right about what I preferred ), but seldom through an agent. I'll go on talking to colleges as long as they go on letting me, too, because, next to writing, it is my favorite vice. College students are about the best people in the world, and rapping with them from time to time is a bigger high than dope.

In the last few years I edited
Galaxy
, things were coming along. Both
Galaxy
and If were finally monthly. The paperback book sidelines, Galaxy Novels and MagaBooks, had faded away, but we began to add other magazines: first
Worlds of Tomorrow
, then a wild idea that I had dreamed up over a quitting-time drink with Bob Guinn,
International Science Fiction
. The idea was to publish science fiction from foreign authors, little of which had appeared in the United States at that time. It seemed to me that some of it was quite different from what we were reading from the Anglo-American school, and maybe worth showing to an American audience. Bob thought it was a dumb idea. Still, he mentioned it to our distributors next time he saw them, and they thought it exciting. So we brought it out, with stories by Soviet, Australian, French, German, Italian, and other writers, the first time most of them had been seen in the U.S.
*

For most of this time the person who did all the manuscript reading, copy-editing, proofreading, blurb writing, and general donkeywork was me, sometimes with a secretary, sometimes without. It now began to be more than I could handle, and I started looking for an assistant. The Hunter College placement office sent down a resume that looked interesting: Judy-Lynn Benjamin—a recent graduate, early twenties, specialist in James Joyce, some writing background; she sounded great. I arranged for an interview, and I hired her.

A little later we added another title,
Worlds of Fantasy
. I have written a little fantasy and read a lot of it; some of it I enjoy immensely, but it is not an area in which I feel very confident of my judgment once I get below the obvious masterpieces. So we took Lester del Rey aboard to edit that and for various kinds of expertise.

I thought they made a good team, Judy-Lynn and Lester, and congratulated myself on my wisdom in hiring them.

A dozen years later, I am not so sure. They thought they were a good team, too. Now married, they are collectively Del Rey books, an imprint of Ballantine Books. Lester is still handling the fantasy, and Judy-Lynn the science fiction. And they are the competitors I fear. In this week's
Times Book Review
the top best seller on the mass-market paperback list is Judy-Lynn's
Star Wars
, and still high up on the trade-paperback best-seller list is Lester's
The Sword of Shannara
. And one of these days I am going to have to explain to my employers at Bantam just how I happened to let these two books get away from me.

However antlike and industrious an editor is, the aphids that squeeze out the honey are the writers. Editing is such a big ego trip that it's hard to remember that. Sometimes I forgot. The telephone isn't congenial to me, and letters don't always say what needs to be said. I tried to spend as much time as I could with writers, one on one, face to face, and burned up a lot of jet fuel doing it.