It was also wonderful because he was so generous. I didn't understand how extraordinary this was until I looked back on it, but he would introduce me to amazing people. So, you know, because of him I had Claude Shannon on my thesis committee or he got, you know, he introduced me to people like Barney Oliver or the... Really he would take me, whenever he went to a conference like NASA had a huge... They brought in a bunch of VIPs to decide what the future of NASA was going to be after the space shuttle.

And these amazing people showed up like Robert Heinlein and mostly people Marvin's age. [John] Tukey, that's where I met Tukey for example, was at that conference. The guy that invented the Fourier transform and a lot of statistics. And became friends with him. I met amazing people there. But Marvin brought me, as an undergraduate probably then, and I got to participate in this amazing conference. I actually got to... Since Heinlein was why I'd gone to MIT, I got to tell Heinlein the story of, you know, reading Have Space Suit - Will Travel, that's why I went to MIT. And Heinlein was a very kind of grumpy guy and he said, 'I'm not responsible for your life, kid'. I was sort of disappointed but his wife came up to me afterwards and was very nice to me and said, 'Don't worry, he's just like that'. And she was very nice to me. But, you know, that I could go to a conference like that was extraordinary.

So he made sure that I met these amazing people like Arthur Clark for example would come to his house, science fiction writers like Isaac Asimov and he would always be sure that I knew they were coming and introduce me to them. Ted Sturgeon was another one of my favourites. He loved science fiction writers. And he really, you know, was... Set it up so that they met his students. Really was pretty extraordinary, I think, to get a chance to know those people.