And without another word he disappeared.

Mercedes went through the motions of preparing supper and they sat at the table almost as though it had been any other day.

Johannison said, “Is it true? Is it all real?”

“I saw it, too,” said Mercedes. “I heard it.”

“I went through my own books. They're all changed. When this-pause is over, we'll be working strictly from memory, all of us who are left. We'll have to build instruments again. It will take a long time to get it across to those who won't remember.” Suddenly he was angry, “And what for, I want to know. What for?”

“Alex,” Mercedes began timidly, “he may have been on Earth before and spoken to people. He's lived for thousands and thousands of years. Do you suppose he's what we've been thinking of for so long as-as-''

Johannison looked at her. “As God? Is that what you're trying to say? How should I know? All I know is that his people, whatever they are, are infinitely more advanced than we, and that he's curing us of a disease.”

Mercedes said, “Then I think of him as a doctor or what's equivalent to it in his society.”

“A doctor? All he kept saying was that the difficulty of communication was the big problem. What kind of a doctor can't communicate with his patients? A vet! An animal doctor!”

He pushed his plate away.

His wife said, “Even so. If he brings an end to war-”

“Why should he want to? What are we to him? We're animals. We are animals to him. Literally. He as much as said so. When I asked him where he was from, he said he didn't come from the 'yard' at all. Get it? The barnyard. Then he changed it to the 'universe.' He didn't come from the 'universe' at all. His difficulty in communication gave him away. He used the concept for what our universe was to him rather than what it was to us. So the universe is a barnyard and we're-horses, chickens, sheep. Take your choice.”

Mercedes said softly, “'The Lord is my Shepherd. I shall not want…'“

“Stop it, Mercy. That's a metaphor; this is reality. If he's a shepherd, then we're sheep with a queer, unnatural desire, and ability, to kill one another. Why stop us?”

“He said-”

“I know what he said. He said we have great potentialities. We're very valuable. Right?”

“Yes.”

“But what are the potentialities and values of sheep to a shepherd? The sheep wouldn't have any idea. They couldn't. Maybe if they knew why they were coddled so, they'd prefer to live their own lives. They'd take their own chances with wolves or with themselves.”

Mercedes looked at him helplessly.

Johannison cried, “It's what I keep asking myself now. Where are we going? Where are we going? Do sheep know? Do we know? Can we know?”

They sat staring at their plates, not eating.

Outside, there was the noise of traffic and the calling of children at play. Night was falling and gradually it grew dark.

One memory I have concerning THE PAUSE reinforces my constant delight that I am at the writing end of things and am not part of any other facet of the literary game.

I was in the offices of Farrar, Straus amp; Young at a time when the anthology was in the early stage of production and the woman who was the in-house editor was agonizing over the title of the anthology. It was supposed to be In Time To Come, but she thought that lacked something and was wondering about alternatives.

“What do you think, Dr. Asimov?” she asked and looked at me pleadingly. (People often think I have the answers, when sometimes I don't even have the questions.)

I thought desperately and said, “Leave out the first word and make it Time to Come. That strengthens the concept 'time' and makes the title seem more science-fictional.”

She cried out at once, “Just the thing,” and Time to Come was indeed the title of the anthology when it appeared.

Well, did the change in title improve sales? How would they ever know? How could they be sure it didn't actually hurt sales?

I'm very glad I'm not an editor.

While all this writing was going on, my professional labors at the medical school were doing very well. In 1951 I had been promoted to assistant professor of biochemistry, and I now had the professorial status to add to my doctorate. This double dose of title didn't seem to add to my dignity in the least, however. I continued to have a “bouncing, jovial, effervescent manner,” as Sprague would say, and I still do to this day, as anyone who meets me will testify, despite the fact that my “wavy brown hair,” while still wavy, is longer and less brown than it used to be.

All that effervescing made it possible for me to get along very well with the students, but perhaps not always so well with a few of the faculty members. Fortunately, everyone was quite aware that I was a science fiction writer. It helped! It seemed to reconcile them to the fact that I was an eccentric and they thereupon forgave me a great deal.

As for myself, I made no attempt to conceal the fact. Some people in the more staid callings use pseudonyms when they succumb to the temptation to write what they fear is trash. Since I never thought of science fiction as trash, and since I was writing and selling long before I had become a faculty member, I had no choice but to use my own peculiar name on my stories.

Nor did I intend to get the school itself into anything that would hurt its dignity.

I had sold my first book, PEBBLE IN THE SKY, some six weeks before I had accepted the job at the medical school. What I did not know was that Doubleday was going to exploit my new professional position in connection with the book. It was only when I saw the book jacket, toward the end of 1949, that I saw what was to be on the back cover.

Along with a very good likeness of myself at the age of twenty-five (which breaks my heart now when I look at it) there was a final sentence, which read: “Dr. Asimov lives in Boston, where he is engaged in cancer research at Boston University School of Medicine.”

I thought about that for quite a while, then decided to do the straightforward thing. I asked to see Dean James Faulkner, and I put it to him frankly. I was a science fiction writer, I said, and had been for years. My first book was coming out under my own name, and my association with the medical school would be mentioned. Did he want my resignation?

The dean, a Boston Brahmin with a sense of humor, said, “Is it a good book?”

Cautiously, I said, “The publishers think so.”

And he said, “In that case the medical school will be glad to be identified with it.”

That took care of that and never, in my stay at the medical school, did I get into trouble over my science fiction. In fact, it occurred to some of the people at the school to put me to use. In October 1954 the people running the Boston University Graduate Journal asked me for a few hundred words of science fiction with which to liven up one of their issues. I obliged with LET'S NOT, which then appeared in the December 1954 issue.