Chapter 7: Praise from Asimov

“God, I’ve done it!”

After painstakingly revising his heavily marked-up manuscript and copying out a clean final draft, Enni held the finished work in his hands and cried out in delight.

The revision and transcription had taken him from early morning to noon in the blink of an eye.

His excited voice carried out of the bedroom and was heard by Mary, who was preparing lunch.

Mary’s cheeks flushed. “That child. I really must hurry and introduce him to some girls.”

She had heard plenty of stories on radio programs about people who, after suppressing their desires for too long, became psychopathic killers. She certainly did not want her son to turn out that way.

Still, with Enni’s looks, he would hardly have trouble finding a girl.

As she was thinking this, Mary saw Enni emerge from the bedroom with something tucked mysteriously against his chest.

“Mom, I’m going out for a while.”

Enni did not even have time for lunch. He was desperate to take his work to Asimov and let him read it.

He had promised, after all.

And surely Asimov would be able to offer some excellent suggestions for revision.

“What’s the rush? And what are you hiding?” Mary asked, raising an eyebrow as she wiped her hands on her apron.

“Uh… It’s about finding a job.”

Enni answered casually, slipped on his shoes, wheeled his bicycle outside, and left the house.

“…”

“Could the boy really have developed some kind of mental disorder?”

Left alone, Mary pressed a hand to her chest. She quickly put on her shoes as well, then hurried downstairs, making for the building’s only public telephone. She intended to call the church and ask whether they knew of any suitable unmarried girls of an appropriate age.

…

Enni pedaled down Fifth Avenue, crossed the Brooklyn Bridge, and soon reached the candy store.

After locking up his bicycle, he walked straight into the shop without even waiting to catch his breath.

Behind the counter, Asimov was as usual: head bent over a story magazine, so absorbed in reading that he did not notice anyone entering.

It was his mother, Anna, who called out, “Isaac, your friend is here!”

Only then did Asimov look up.

When he saw Enni, his eyes immediately lit up. “Tell me it’s finished. Tell me you’ve completed your work.”

Enni smiled and pulled the stack of pages from inside his coat. “I thought you could take a look before I submitted it and see whether there’s anything that needs changing.”

Asimov grinned. “Come on. Let’s go into the back room. I need somewhere quiet to read it properly.”

Seeing the two boys grinning foolishly at each other and behaving so mysteriously, Anna merely rubbed her forehead. She had long since grown accustomed to it.

“Isaac, if you don’t come out for lunch on time, I’m not warming your food again!”

“I’m not hungry at all!”

Asimov’s slightly chubby cheeks trembled. His eyes held not the slightest interest in food, only a pure and overwhelming hunger to read.

The back room of the candy store was where the Asimov family rested during the day.

Apart from two reclining chairs set in the middle of the room, every available space was occupied by newspapers, magazines, and books. The scent of printing ink hung in the air. There was no doubt that all of them belonged to Asimov.

There were novels in every imaginable genre, magazines, school textbooks, and books covering a wide range of scientific fields.

A prodigy who had entered Columbia University at fifteen and its graduate school at nineteen, Asimov was clearly fascinated by books from every discipline and had read widely.

“Coffee? Or tea with sugar?”

“Coffee will do.”

Asimov poured two cups, one for Enni and one for himself, then immediately forgot everything else and began reading with complete concentration.

“‘He Who Learns the Truth at Dawn.’ What an intriguing title!”

A good novel could capture a reader’s interest from its title alone, and Asimov eagerly plunged into the text.

The manuscript ran to more than twenty thousand words. Reading it closely while pondering its science-fiction concepts took considerable time.

By the time he finished, twenty minutes had passed in an instant.

“Enni, this novel… it’s marvelous!”

“I never imagined science fiction could be written like this!”

Asimov pushed up his glasses, his eyes wide with astonishment. He had always believed that the mainstream science fiction of the day emphasized solid construction and airtight technological logic.

But this novel, He Who Learns the Truth at Dawn, possessed tremendous dramatic force.

To put it simply, if mainstream science fiction was a magnificently constructed building, then this novel was a dazzling explosion—an overwhelming assault on the mind.

Moreover, the science fiction published in the major magazines tended to follow clearly defined formulas. Its subject matter was concentrated around a handful of familiar categories, such as alien invasions, time travel, robot rebellions, and prehistoric civilizations. The patterns of those stories were remarkably fixed.

Enni’s novel, however, had completely broken free from the narrative frameworks of every science-fiction story on the market. It was astonishingly avant-garde.

Asimov felt as though he had taken some kind of drug. His mind remained in turmoil long after he finished reading.

“Your novel is filled with tragic emotional tension. It pushes the conflict between the pursuit of knowledge and the struggle for survival to the extreme, while exploring the value of life and the ultimate meaning of existence.”

“At its core, it offers profound reflections on truth and life. It also expresses a cautious attitude toward technological progress, while showing an abundance of humanistic concern.”

Asimov paused. Only then did he take his first sip of coffee.

After moistening his throat, he continued.

“Especially the science-fiction concepts. They’re remarkably solid, and the technical ideas are fully developed.”

“The Einstein Equator, the Altar of Truth, the Hazard Removers, vacuum decay… God, how does your mind even work?”

“If I’m not mistaken, the concept of the Einstein Equator was inspired by the first particle accelerator in the world, built at Cambridge University in 1932 by the British physicist John Cockcroft and the Irish physicist Ernest Walton, wasn’t it?”

“I’m very fond of their papers. They have the potential to win a Nobel Prize.”

“And beyond that, the most brilliant element in your novel is the concept of vacuum decay. It’s based on the Dirac sea theory proposed in 1930 by the Nobel Prize-winning physicist Dirac, isn’t it? Then you developed the idea further in a very reasonable direction.”

“When most people are still writing hackneyed stories about alien invasions and haven’t escaped the taint of pseudoscience, you’ve created a novel with an astonishingly imaginative plot that still manages to combine scientific plausibility with compelling storytelling!”

After all those words, everything finally condensed into a single sentence.

Asimov pressed down on Enni’s shoulder and whispered, “You’re high, aren’t you?”

Enni: “…”

Once he recovered from his speechlessness, Enni still could not believe that Asimov had given the novel such high praise.

It made him happy as well. With Asimov’s taste, even if the novel failed to pass the editorial review at Amazing Stories, it would certainly be accepted by one of the lesser science-fiction magazines.

The manuscript was twenty-four thousand words long. Even at the lowest rate of half a cent per word, it would earn him 120 dollars.

That was the equivalent of more than a month’s hard work at the Safeway supermarket company.

…