Isaac Asimov Read online

  In the 1970s the widely popular and prolific science fiction writer Isaac Asimov began to dabble in the art of the mystery story. Over the next twenty years, until his death in 1992, Asimov wrote more than 120 ingenious tales of detection and deduction, and in 66 of them he presented a group of armchair detectives—the Black Widowers—with mind-teasing puzzles that they strove in often quarrelsome conversation to solve.

  Now the Black Widowers club is meeting again. In a private dining room at New York’s luxurious Milano restaurant, the six brilliant men once more gather for fine fare impeccably served, as always, by that peerless waiter, Henry. They will of course also be joined by a special dinner guest with a mystery to challenge their combined deductive wit: a man whose marriage hinges on finding a lost umbrella, perhaps; or another whose friend is being shadowed by an adversary who knows her darkest secrets; or a debunker of psychics unable to explain his unnerving experience in a haunted house; or a symphony cellist accused of attacking his wife with a kitchen knife.

  In addition to six stories that have never before appeared in any collection, the volume includes the ten best-ever Black Widowers cases, among them the very first to be published (in Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine) as well as the first brand new Black Widowers story to appear in more than ten years. So pull up a chair and partake of the perplexity. An Asimovian feast is about to begin.

  ISAAC ASIMOV wrote more than 400 books on topics ranging from history to poetry, from abstract mathematics to ecological dangers, from the Bible to Gilbert and Sullivan, not to mention two mystery novels and nine collections of mystery short stories.

  HARLAN ELLISON®, multiple Hugo, Nebula, and Edgar award winner, is the author or editor of more than 75 books and more than 1700 short stories, essays, columns, film and tv scripts. Among his collections are Slippage, Angry Candy, I Have No Mouth & I Must Scream, and Harlan Ellison’s Watching.

  CHARLES ARDAI is a Shamus-nominated mystery writer, editor of numerous anthologies, and creator of the Internet service Juno. Charles Ardai “will be the next me,” Isaac Asimov once wrote, “but, I hope, less peculiar.”

  Jacket design by David Cole Wheeler

  Cover photograph © Corbis

  CARROLL & GRAF

  Distributed by Publishers Group West

  The Return of the Black Widowers

  Carroll & Graf Publishers

  An Imprint of Avalon Publishing Group Inc.

  245 West 17th Street

  NewYork, NY 10011

  Collection copyright © 2003 by Winterfall, LLC

  First Carroll & Graf edition 2003

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in whole or in part without written permission from the publisher, except by reviewers who may quote brief excerpts in connection with a review in a newspaper, magazine, or electronic publication; nor may any part of this book be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or other, without written permission from the publisher.

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available.

  ISBN: 0-7867-1248-1

  Interior design by Simon Sullivan

  Printed in the United States of America

  Distributed by Publishers Group West

  For Isaac, with love;

  for Janet, Janet, and Otto, with thanks;

  and for Michael, because I promised.

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  “Foreword” by Harlan Ellison®, copyright © 2003 by The Kilimanjaro Corporation, published by permission of the author. All rights reserved.

  “The Acquisitive Chuckle,” copyright © 1972 by Isaac Asimov, “Ph As In Phony,” copyright © 1972 by Isaac Asimov, “Early Sunday Morning,” copyright © 1973 by Isaac Asimov, “The Obvious Factor,” copyright © 1973 by Isaac Asimov, from TALES OF THE BLACK WIDOWERS by Isaac Asimov. Used by permission of Doubleday, a division of Random House, Inc.

  “The Iron Gem,” copyright © 1974 by Isaac Asimov, from MORE TALES OF THE BLACK WIDOWERS by Isaac Asimov. Used by permission of Doubleday, a division of Random House, Inc.

  “To the Barest,” copyright © 1979 by Isaac Asimov, from CASEBOOK OF THE BLACK WIDOWERS by Isaac Asimov. Used by permission of Doubleday, a division of Random House, Inc.

  “Sixty Million Trillion Combinations,” copyright © 1980 by Isaac Asimov, “The Woman In the Bar,” copyright © 1980 by Isaac Asimov, “The Redhead,” copyright © 1984 by Isaac Asimov, “The Wrong House,” copyright © 1984 by Nightfall, Inc., from BANQUETS OF THE BLACK WIDOWERS by Isaac Asimov. Used by permission of Doubleday, a division of Random House, Inc.

  “Triple Devil,” copyright © 1985 by Isaac Asimov, from PUZZLES OF THE BLACK WIDOWERS by Isaac Asimov. Used by permission of Doubleday, a division of Random House, Inc.

  “The Men Who Read Isaac Asimov,” copyright © 1978 by William Brittain, reprinted by permission of the author. Originally appeared in Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine.

  “Northwestward” by Isaac Asimov is excerptedfrom THE FURTHER ADVENTURES OF BATMAN. Published by Bantam Books. Copyright © 1989 by DC Comics. All rights reserved. Used with permission.

  “Yes, But Why?”, copyright © 1990 by Isaac Asimov, reprinted by permission of the Estate of Isaac Asimov, c/o Ralph M. Vicinanza Ltd. Originally appeared in The Armchair Detective.

  “Lost In a SpaceWarp” and “Police At the Door,” copyright © 1990 by Isaac Asimov; “The Haunted Cabin” by Isaac Asimov, copyright © 1990 by Nightfall, Inc. “The Guest’s Guest” by Isaac Asimov, copyright © 1991 by Nightfall, Inc.; all reprinted by permission of the Estate of Isaac Asimov, c/o Ralph M. Vicinanza Ltd. All originally appeared in Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine.

  “The Last Story,” copyright © 2002 by Charles Ardai, reprinted by permission of the author. Originally appeared in Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine.

  “Afterword: Birth of the Black Widowers,” from I. ASIMOV: A MEMOIR by Isaac Asimov, copyright © 1994 by The Estate of Isaac Asimov. Used by permission of Doubleday, a division of Random House, Inc.

  TABLE OF CONTENTS

  Foreword by Harlan Ellison®

  THE BEST OF THE BLACK WIDOWERS

  “The Acquisitive Chuckle”

  “Ph As In Phony”

  “Early Sunday Morning”

  “The Obvious Factor”

  “The Iron Gem”

  “To the Barest”

  “Sixty Million Trillion Combinations”

  “The Redhead”

  “The Wrong House”

  “Triple Devil”

  HOMAGE

  “The Men Who Read Isaac Asimov” by William Brittain

  THE UNCOLLECTED BLACK WIDOWERS

  “Northwestward”

  “Yes, But Why?”

  “Lost In a Space Warp”

  “Police At the Door”

  “The Haunted Cabin”

  “The Quest’s Quest”

  ONE MORE, JUST FOR HARLAN

  “The Woman in the Bar”

  COMMEMORATION

  “The Last Story” by Charles Ardai

  Afterword: Birth of the Black Widowers

  FOREWORD

  HARLAN ELLISON®

  Isaac died (Janet abominates “passed away”) at 2:30 AM on an otherwise undistinguished Monday in April of 1992. It is close on eleven years, as I sit typing this, since my dear old pal went out through that final door.

  Isaac died in ’92. I called Isaac today.

  I’d dialed the 1 and the New York city-code and the first two numerals of his phone number—still imbedded with the unforgettables—my social security number, my Army dogtag code, the date of my wedding anniversary—before I caught myself and hung
up. I call Isaac at least a couple of times a month. And I guarantee you, I probably won’t get through this Foreword to the last book of Black Widowers stories without crying.

  Now let me clarify something. Do not for an instant think that I manifest the hubris, the nerve, the chutzpah to submit myself as one who misses Isaac more than Robyn or Janet or even Jennifer Brehl, who was his editor at Doubleday for years. Nor even more entitled to mourn than was Isaac’s brother, Stan, now himself gone. But I knew him for more than forty years, since I was eighteen, and we were thick as thieves; and at least twice a week for many of those years, when I was mired somewhere in the middle of writing a story, and was stuck for a missing piece of information, rather than do the onerous research to find what I needed, I would punk out and call that number I knew as well as my own.

  We played a little game with each other. Because I was (somewhere in my lazy soul) truly chagrined at interrupting another writer at his creating, knowing it was a pain in the ass, even as such calls cheese me off when I’m working, I would try to make “reparations” by either telling him a new joke, or by assuming one of the myriad accents and timbres I use when recording spoken word performances. The more shamefaced I felt, the more complex and well-sculpted the bogus identity:

  “Is this Dr. Isaac Emisov?” The voice of a petty functionary. A tax collector. An assistant bank manager. A collection agency goon.

  “Asimov. This is Isaac Asimov.”

  “Ah, yes. Dr. Esimov, this is Walter Cuthbert at Manhattan Central office of the Internal Revenue Service…”

  A pause. (Had he caught on yet?) Then, a tiny clearing of the throat, and the response in a deeper, more pillar-of-the-community tone. “What may I do for you, sir?”

  “Well, to be frank, sir, quite a lot. We’ve taken under examination your tax returns for the years 1967 through 1990, and we’ve found sufficient, uh, ‘irregularities’ that the class auditors have passed it on up to my attention.”

  Caution. (The man was no fool.) (But with whom did he think he was playing here?) (Without mercy, one must be, if one is to pull it off.) “What, precisely, Mr. Cuthbert—” he said, pronouncing my name from perfect memory, as opposed to my relentlessly calling him Emisov, Akisov, Etceterasov, “—do you mean by ‘irregularities’?”

  “Well, Dr. Uh—”

  “Asimov.”

  “Mm-hmm. For instance, we see in the years 1971, 1972, 1973, 1974, and 1975, you claimed ‘entertainment deductions’ in an aggregate of $877,463.89; but your total income during that period was only $775,012.44. Don’t you find that a bit, well, perplexing, sir?”

  “Who is this?”

  Shit. He was on to me. “Walter Cuth—”

  “None of that,” he said, now honked-off at being wired up by some nitwit stealing his time, “who are you?”

  “Would you believe Ty Cobb?”

  “HAAAARRRRLLLAAANNNN!” In exactly the same voice, I’m convinced, was used by Judge Roy Bean when he yelled, “Hang the sonofabitch high enuff so’s I can see his boot soles!”

  I am not ashamed simply to state that I adored Isaac, before I actually met him, though we famously crossed paths not more than a year or two after I first read him. (And I will not reprise that meeting, which Isaac misremembered at the top of his voice for more than four decades, despite my clearing up the errors an infinite number of times, in person and in print.) Suffice to say, for the last time, I did not mean to insult him. I was a brash teenager, and I merely misspoke myself as a result of confronting my idol in the, er, rather abundant flesh, for the first time. Snip me some slack, okay?

  But as Isaac wrote in a letter to me on 27 August 1973 (which you can find reproduced on page 113 of Stanley’s 1995 epistolary compilation, Yours, Isaac Asimov):

  I am constantly asked about my feud with you, and I always answer that you and I are good friends. But it doesn’t help. As long as we love each other, however, who cares.

  He meant that, of course, in a real manly guy sort of Iron John bonding love kind of way. Not that there’s anything wrong with, oh crap, forget it. Where was I?

  With three thousand miles between us most of the time, and with Isaac’s refusal to fly, we got together a lot less frequently than either of us would’ve enjoyed. Conventions through the years, conferences, academic gigs. And when I’d be in Manhattan, we would usually grab lunch. Once in a while, with Janet and my Susan, dinner at the Chinese joint down the block from their apartment. But one lunch Isaac and I shared in the late ’70s, before I met and married Susan, is relevant to my being selected from among all the possible candidates to write this Foreword. It was mid-afternoon, in the Spring, if I recall correctly, and Isaac said, “C’mon, let’s take a stroll over to The Tavern on the Green.” That’s Central Park. Nearby.

  So we moseyed on over, and we were waiting to order, and he says to me, he says: “How do you justify your existence?”

  Oh, yeah? I thought. Gonna run that one on me, are you? As if I hadn’t read the first three Black Widowers books. So I responded smartly, “My existence itself justifies my existence.”

  “Tautology!” he ripostes, trying to sneer, not pulling it off.

  “I am unique; a rare jewel existent in the universe in the number of one.”

  “Hooey,” he hoos, trying desperately for a Nero Wolfe moment.

  “I am unique, thus justified in my existence, by what I do, that no other can do.”

  “And what is it that you do?”

  “What it is that I do…is what I do.”

  He muttered something into his appetizer, but I’m not sure what it was; I think the word “slippery” was in there somewhere with the caramelized onions.

  And it was at that lunch tryst that I said to him, “Listen, Toots, you use Lester in those Black Widowers stories, and Sprague and Don Bensen and even Lin Carter, but you’ve never used me as a character. Howzabout?”

  Now, you will, I hope, remember that Isaac appropriated me as the paradigm for the most likeable character in all his books, the charming, witty, urbane and insightful Darius Just, ’tec avatar of Murder at the ABA. You do recall that, am I correct?

  So Isaac smiled that lovely son-of-a-Brooklyn-candy-store-owner smile, and he agreed to bring Darius Just in for dinner with the Widowers. The fourth collection, Banquets of the Black Widowers. The story is “The Woman in the Bar.”

  I asked the editor, Mr. Ardai, if he might add that most excellent piece of work to the already-submitted table of contents, but whether the traitorous and untrustworthy Ardai chose to accede to this pathetic, tiny request is something I will not know till I see the finished volume.

  (Ardai’s own presumptuous story, the penultimate entry in this book, contains veiled references of a most painful nature to your humble essayist. I choose not to make a big Who-Struck-John of it, but as Montresor said to Fortunato in “The Cask of Amontillado”: “Nemo me impune lacessit.”

  (No one harms me with impunity.

  (Didn’t think I’d notice, eh, Ardai? Thought your heartless little barbs would be politely overlooked, did you? Well, sir, not to make a big Who-Struck-John of it, but be on your watch, Ardai. Gardyloo, I say, sir, gardyloo! The moment of Divine Retribution slithers toward you through the hours, leaving a moist ebon trail of poison and rodomontade! Where was I?)

  So that explains why I, the model for Darius Just, having been cast as a guest at one of the Widowers’ banquets, was the humble, self-effacing, yet absolutely correct choice to write these words of introduction to the last collection of Black Widowers stories we shall see. Book six, curtain falls.

  Isaac loved puzzles. Geezus peezus, that was a dopey thing to say. Of course he loved puzzles. Duh. Otherwise, why these six volumes, plus the novels, plus virtually everything he wrote, fiction or nonfiction. It was all in aid of solving the puzzles. Of fiction, of life, of the universe around us. And the universe out there.

  He wrote sixty-six Black Widowers stories, of which these are the last few. In them, the character o
f Emmanuel Rubin, who was modeled after one of my earliest mentors, the late Lester del Rey, world-class pain in the ass, is not one scintilla as overbearing and anarchic as the template. Lester could make poison ivy nervous. The magnificent L. Sprague de Camp—Widower Geoffrey Avalon—is not a millionth as arresting and erudite as was the original…

  (Pardon me yet another digression. This is a true story about Sprague, who was also a friend of mine, though separated from me by even more years than was Isaac. I’d used Sprague as the prototype for the character of the college professor in my story, “No Game For Children” and we’d gotten to know each other pretty well. But I’d met him years earlier, when I was still in high school in Cleveland, and had come to New York under the aegis of Algis Budrys, who took me to a meeting of The Hydra Club, the fabled monthly gathering of the top science fiction professionals, where I met L. Ron Hubbard and Robert Sheckley, as well as, later, Cornell Woolrich; and on and on.

  (So there I was, this urchin, and I’m hobbing as well as nobbing with the giants of the field, del Rey, Kornbluth, Pohl, Merril, the lot of them. And right in the middle, tall and lean and elegant as an ebony sword-cane, was Sprague de Camp. And as I had located and read the novels he’d written with Fletcher Pratt, and as he was considered the most sapient humorist in sf at that time, I was especially observant of his actions, hoping AJ or Lester would introduce me. And I watched him as he behaved, well, rather oddly. He would stand at the outer perimeter of a group of people who were heavily into their conversation, and at some point—almost invariably when they broke up with laughter—he would jot notes into a small spiral-top note-pad. Then he’d move to another group of chatters, and the pattern would be repeated. This went on for an hour or so, until Jay Stanton [whose loft it was] grabbed him and, loud enough for everything else to come to a silent standstill, cried out, snatched the note-pad from de Camp’s hand, and began leafing through it.

  (“What the hell is this all about?” Jay demanded.

  (“What’s he been writing?” Lester wanted to know.