It was fun to reread this story because of the memory it evoked: I’ve never written a story under more pleasant conditions. Getting there was rather complicated, though.
One Sunday morning Analog Editor Ben Bova called me and asked whether I would do a story for a special issue he was putting together about Immanuel Velikovsky. He said he had in mind something about the scientific method. I was fixing breakfast at the time, frying bacon, so I said sure, I’ll do you a story about Francis Bacon. About all I knew of Bacon was that he was an impressively eclectic philosopher and was generally credited with having formulated the scientific method.* I suggested to Ben a sort of famous-person-as-alien story; Bacon was actually an extraterrestrial, stranded for life on this backwoods planet, who made a living the best way he knew how: being superior.
I still think that would make a good story. If anybody out there wants to write it, I’d love to read it.
At the time, I was sweating out the last couple of chapters of an adventure novel. My wife and I were taking a charter flight to Jamaica on Wednesday, and I was grimly determined to finish the book before we left (made it by thirty minutes). I was sort of enjoying the role of Superhack, on a round-the-clock schedule of catnaps and writing, but I did need a short break, so I slogged out through the ice and snow to the University of Iowa library, thinking I would pick up a Bacon biography and a couple of critical works to read in Jamaica.
Well, the university had about 500 volumes by and about Francis Bacon, but 490 of them were in Latin, a language whose sound I admire. Of the remainder, I really couldn’t find one that looked like poolside reading. Reluctantly, I abandoned the idea (but did mention Novum Organum in the adventure novel, so the morning wouldn’t be a total loss).
Came up with a more manageable idea, called Ben, he approved it, and I packed a small typewriter in there with the skin-diving gear.
So this story was written in a succession of mornings on the veranda of a lovely hotel just north of Montego Bay. The management thoughtfully provided a coffee pot, and I sat in the dark of the morning, in the cool night breeze, watching odd green lizards stalk the edge of the light, listening to the quiet surf, sipping strong Jamaican coffee, smoking strong Jamaican cigars, writing with delicious ease. Feeling that ineffable sense of perfect time, perfect place, perfect occupation: fragile, wistful, never to be repeated or forgotten.
Writing in the fierce Iowa winter, I had set the adventure novel in Key West and Haiti. So in the most clement weather this side of Eden, I wrote a story about a planet with storms that wrack its surface clean of life.
* Lower-case bacon, I know a great deal about, including an infallible method for cooking perfect bacon every time. Cook it in the nude. This trains you to keep the heat down so it won’t stick or spatter, and it can’t burn.