Our family still owns the only herd of dinachickens in existence and we are the only suppliers for the worldwide chain of restaurants-this is the first and oldest-which has grown up about it.

Poor Dad! He was never happy, except for those unique moments when he was actually eating dinachicken. He continued working on the Chrono-funnels and so did twenty other research teams which, as he had predicted would happen, jumped in. Nothing ever came of any of it, though, to this day. Nothing except dinachicken.

Ah, Pierre, thank you. A superlative job/ Now, sir, if you will allow me to carve. No salt, now, and just a trace of the sauce. That ’ s right…Ah, that is precisely the expression I always see on the face of a man who experiences his first taste of the delight.

A grateful humanity contributed fifty thousand dollars to have the statue on the hillside put up, but even that tribute failed to make Dad happy.

All he could see was the inscription: The Man Who Gave Dinachicken to the World.

You see, to his dying day, he wanted only one thing, to find the secret of time travel. For all that he was a benefactor of humanity, he died with his curiosity unsatisfied.

My original title had been Benefactor of Humanity, which I thought carried a fine flavor of irony, and I chafed when Leo Margulies of Satellite changed that title. When The Saturday Evening Post asked permission to reprint the story (and it appeared in the March-April 1973 issue of that magazine) I made it a condition that they restore the original title. But then, when I saw my own title in print, I thought about it and decided that Leo's title was better. So it appears here as A STATUE FOR FATHER again.

Bob Mills, by the way, whom I mentioned in connection with BUY JUPITER, was a very close friend of mine when he was working with F amp; SF and with Venture. He is not one of those with whom I have lost contact, either. He has sold his soul to the devil and is now an agent, but we see each other now and then and are as friendly as ever.

It was Bob who contributed to my switch to nonfiction, too. Since I hated writing research pieces, I began, in1953, to write imaginative pieces on chemistry for the Journal of Chemical Education. I had done about half a dozen before it occurred to me that I was getting nothing for them and was not reaching my audience.

I began writing nonfiction articles for the science fiction magazines, therefore; articles that gave me far more scope and far more variety than any scholarly journal could. The first of these was Hemoglobin and the Universe, which appeared in the February 1955 Astounding.

InSeptember 1957, however, Bob Mills called me up and asked if I would do a regular science article for Venture. I agreed with alacrity and the first of these, Fecundity Limited, appeared in the January 1958 Venture. Alas, Venture lasted only a very few more issues before folding, but I was then asked to do the same column for F amp;SF. The first of these was Dust of Ages, which appeared in the November 1958 issue of that magazine.

The F amp;SF series lasted and flourished. The request had been for a fifteen-hundred-word column at first and that was the length of all those in Venture and the first in F amp;SF. The request came quickly to raise the wordage to four thousand and, beginning with Catching Up With Newton, in the December 1958 issue of F amp;SF, they were the longer length.

The F amp; SF series has been amazingly successful. My two hundredth article in the series appeared in the June 1975 issue of F amp;SF. So far I have not missed an issue, and it may be the longest series of items by one author (other than the editor) ever to have appeared in a science fiction magazine. These articles are periodically collected by Doubleday into books of essays, of which at this time of writing there have been eleven.

Most important of all, though, is the fun I get out of these monthly articles. To this day I get more pleasure out of them than out of any other Writing assignment I get. I am constantly anywhere from one to two months ahead of deadline, because I can't wait, but the editors don't seem to mind.

In a way it was Bob Mills who helped establish my present article-writing style, one of intense informality that has managed to leak across into my fiction collectionstoo (as this book bears witness).While I wrote that column for him he constantly referred to me as “the God Doctor,” while I called him “the Kindly Editor,” and we had fun kidding each other in the footnotes till he resigned his post. (No, that was not cause-and-effect.)

Anyway, the articles helped confirm me in my nonfiction and made it even harder to get to fiction. Bob, you must understand, did not approve of my not writing fiction. Sometimes he suggested plots for stories in an attempt to lure me into writing, and sometimes I liked his suggestions. For instance, one of his suggestions ended as UNTO THE FOURTH GENERATION, which appeared in the

April 1959 issue of F amp;SF and was then included in NIGHTFALL AND OTHER STORIES. That story is one of my

personal favorites.

I thought he had suggested another winner when I wrote up one of his ideas in RAIN, RAIN, GO AWAY. I wrote it on November 1, 1958, submitted to him on November 2, and had it rejected on November 3. Kindly Editor, indeed!

Eventually I found a home for it, though, and it appeared in the September 1959 issue of Fantastic Universe Science Fiction.

Rain, Rain, Go Away

“There she is again,” said Lillian Wright as she adjusted the venetian blinds carefully. “There she is, George.”

“There who is?” asked her husband, trying to get satisfactory contrast on the TV so that he might settle down to the ball game.

“Mrs. Sakkaro,” she said, and then, to forestall her husband's inevitable “Who's that?” added hastily, “The new neighbors, for goodness sake.”

“Oh.”

“Sunbathing. Always sunbathing. I wonder where her boy is. He's usually out on a nice day like this, standing in that tremendous yard of theirs and throwing the ball against the house. Did you ever see him, George?”

“I've heard him. It's a version of the Chinese water torture. Bang on the wall, bill on the ground, smack in the hand. Bang, bill, smack, bang, bill-”

“He's a nice boy, quiet and well-behaved. I wish Tommie would make friends with him. He's the right age, too, just about ten, I should say.”

“I didn't know Tommie was backward about making friends.”

“Well, it's hard with the Sakkaros, They keep so to themselves. I don't even know what Mr. Sakkaro does.”

“Why should you? It's not really anyone's business what he does.”

“It's odd that I never see him go to work.”

“No one ever sees me go to work.”

“You stay home and write. What does he do.”

“I dare say Mrs. Sakkaro knows what Mr. Sakkaro does and is all upset because she doesn't know' what I do,”

“Oh, George.” Lillian retreated from the window and glanced with distaste at the television. (Schoendienst was at bat.) “I think we should make an effort; the neighborhood should.”

“What kind of an effort?” George was comfortable on the couch now, with a king-size Coke in his hand, freshly opened and frosted with moisture.

“To get to know them.”

“Well, didn't you, when she first moved in? You said you called.”

“I said hello but, well, she'd just moved in and the house was still upset, so that's all it could be, just hello. It's been two months now and it's still nothing more than hello, sometimes. -She's so odd.”