Before The Golden Age - A SF Anthology of the 1930s

by Edited By Isaac Asimov

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  Laying Professor Hornby under the shelter of the wall, I dragged out the other gun and kicked open a case of ammunition, joining Marston in the defense of the fort. That other time I had had surprise and superstition to aid me in my single-handed victory, but now we two were leagued against outraged fanaticism, and the odds were great. Like locusts they came on, from every side, eyes red with blood-lust, teeth bared in hate-beasts of the jungle, ravening for the kill! It was the debris of our backfire, piled in a matted belt around the spur, that saved us, for here the mad charge must halt and here our guns took their toll. Nor were we two alone, for now I heard the crack of a rifle and knew that Professor Hornby was covering the ledge of rock that ran back at our rear to join us to the hills.

  Even so, I think our defense must have failed but for the tetrahedra. They had not been slow to recognize the changed nature of the Indians’ fight, and they turned that realization to their own advantage, curving around the spur to cut off a second retreat, then laying down their fiery yellow barrage upon the rear of the clamoring savage host, licking them up as a bear licks ants. It was a matter of minutes before the last Indian lay in grey ash on the rocky slope of the crag.

  For a moment matters were at a deadlock. We paused and took stock-three men with their guns against thousands of tetrahedra, armed with lightnings. Hornby had slumped back against the low wall, his eyes closed, his spare frame racked with coughs that brought back blood to his twisted lips. An arrow had pierced his lungs. Marston dropped the machine-gun, now smoking-hot, and grabbed up a rifle. I followed suit. So for perhaps two minutes the rival forces held silent, waiting.

  The Mercutians took the initiative. Their yellow tongues of flame crept slowly up the hillside, scouring it clean—up, up toward our little refuge on the peak. Now they began to glide forward, on every side, beginning the ascent. In answer our rifles rang out, and now there was no doubt as to their vulnerability, for wherever the steel-jacketed lead hit, there the thin crystal splintered and the night was lit by the glare of freed energy, the life-blood of the tetrahedra! We could not save ourselves, but we would do no puny damage!

  Now came a dull thunder from the rear, and by the dim light of the red mist I could see the giant leader of the Mercutians, standing at the summit of the cliff above the valley, commanding the attack. In reply, the yellow barrage began to beat upward along the rock, toward us, and with the same signal a faint, blurred scheme leapt into my fuddled brain! I raised my rifle, fired—not at the advancing front but farther back, into the body of the horde, slowly driving my fire back toward the giant commander, picking off monster after angular monster, nearer and nearer to where he squatted!

  Then he was flinching, gliding back before the sea of flame that burst around him as his crystal warriors fell, and in reply I brought down one after another of those toward whom he was retreating, hemming him in with death, threatening—but not striking! I cannot tell why we did not destroy him, for Marston had followed suit, neglecting the threat of the flame, which waned and died as the tetrahedra woke to the meaning of our fire. Somehow we felt that it was wiser to spare him, and our intuition was good. For a moment he hesitated, then thundered his drumming command, and the ranks of the tetrahedra drew slowly back, leaving us in peace and safety.

  So we remained, virtually prisoners, for eight days. On the third, Professor Hornby died—a blessing, for he suffered greatly. He was the only one who really understood these tetrahedra, and we shall never know how he deduced that they were from Mercury, a fact which Marston later proved. The archaeological data collected by the expedition are lost, too, since both he and Valdez are dead and we could bring out no specimens. The tetrahedra left us alone, barring us from flight with their haze of red energy, which extended up the slope to a level above that of the saddle connecting us with the forested mountain-slopes. Meanwhile they continued their barrage of the jungle, laying it waste on every side, mile after mile, day after day.

  Through the binoculars we had watched them slowly advance, and noted their very human surprise as they burned the covering jungle from the great ruined city which the expedition had sought. It was their first real experience with the works of Man, and it caused a great commotion among them. Led by the purple giant, they swarmed over and through its ruined labyrinth, studying its every niche and angle, learning it. Here was their proof that Earth harbored a civilization—that they might expect real opposition. I do not think they ever realized that our puny defense was a fair example of what that civilization could do.

  Later in the same day they found the wreck of the plane, and this time consternation indeed reigned. Here was a machine of some sort, evidently the product of that civilization that they feared. Moreover, it was recent where the city was ancient. Could it mean that they were watched—that the unseen creatures of this unknown ruling race were lurking in the dark of the jungle, with their engines of war and destruction—waiting? Now, as never before in their descent on Earth, the tetrahedra were faced by the stark blankness of the utterly unknown, and I think that they began to be afraid.

  The little valley was still the center of their activity, and every day we watched their spawning as the sun rode high, saw the piling up of the hordes that would overwhelm our race and planet, and make of it a dead, black thing like that little pocket on the east slope of the Andes. There was always a double ring of the tetrahedra about us now, and their aim-son sea of energy beat high about our prison. The giant who led them came often to observe us, to sit and stare with invisible eyes at our fortress and ourselves. Their drumming speech had grown familiar, too, and I felt that it would not be hard to understand, given the key to its meaning.

  Marston seemed fascinated with the things and their ways. There was a spring, just above the limit of the red haze, where we got our water, and he would sit there by the hour, as close to the things as he could get, watching and listening. I could see him sway to the rhythm of their thunderous speech, see his lips move in low response, and I wondered if he were going mad.

  Ever since Marston had first mentioned Professor Hornby’s theory that the things were Mercutians, I had been trying to find some way of verifying it. Now that we were in semi-intimate terms with the tetrahedra, I wondered if I might not get them, somehow, to supply this evidence. I thought of stories I had read of interplanetary communication—of telepathy, of word-association, of sign-language. They had all seemed far-fetched to me, impossible of attainment, but I resolved to try my hand at the last.

  There was some rather soft rock in the structure of the watch-tower, and as Valdez had rescued my tool kit from the plane, I had a hammer and chisel. With these, and a faulty memory, I set out to make a rough scale diagram of the inner planets, leaning a bit on the Professor’s theory. I cut circular grooves for the orbits of the four minor planets—Mercury, Venus, Earth, Mars—and dug a deep central pit. In this I set a large nugget of gold, found in the ruins of the fortress, for the Sun, and in the grooves a tiny black pebble for Mercury, a large white one for Venus, and a jade bead from the ruins for Earth. Earth had a very small white moon, in its own deep-cut spiral orbit. Mars was a small chunk of rusty iron with two grains of sand for moons. I had a fair-sized scale, and there was no room for more.

  Now I was prepared to attempt communication with the tetrahedra, but I wanted more than one diagram to work with. Consequently I attempted a map of Earth, with hollowed oceans and low mountain-ridges. All this took plenty of time and trouble, but Marston was not at all in evidence, and I was not sorry, for my scheme seemed rather pointless, and I did not relish his ridicule.

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  CHAPTER V

  Face to Face

  So things stood when the tropical storm broke over us. Its cause is not hard to explain. Remember, when those scathing fires blasted the jungle, all the superabundant moisture of the region was vaporized. Even our little spring, as it ran down into the crimson haze, vanished in plumes of steam as it passed the scarce visible bound
ary between life and death. To add to this, during all the long summer, the sun had been literally boiling the moisture out of the rain-forests all over the Amazon Basin. The air was nearly saturated with water-vapor, though the rainy season was normally a month off. The electrical disturbances set up by the continual barrage of fire added to the general effect. Things were ripe for a storm, and it camel

  A cloud-burst, it would be called in the United States. The heavens opened in the night, and water fell in torrents, streaming from every angle of the rock, standing in pools wherever a hollow offered itself, drenching us and the world through and through. Day came, but there was no sun for the tetrahedra to feed on. Nor were they thinking of feeding, for very definite peril threatened them. To the tetrahedra, water was death!

  As I have said, their fires had flaked huge slabs of rock from the walls of the ravine leading from the high-walled valley where they slept, choking its narrow throat with shattered stone. And now that the mountain slopes, shorn of soil and vegetation, were pouring water into its bed, the stream that had carved that ravine found its course dammed—rose against it, poured over it, but not until the valley had become a lake, a lake where only the two pearly spheres floated against the rocky wall, the thousands of tetrahedra gone forever—dissolved!

  Water was death to them—dissolution! Only in the shelter of the spheres was there safety, and they were long since crowded. The hordes of the tetrahedral monsters perished miserably in the night, before they could summon the forces that might have spun them a fiery canopy of arching lightnings that would drive the water back in vapor and keep them safely dry beneath. A hundred had come in the twin spheres. A hundred thousand had been born. A bare hundred remained. Our way of escape was clear!

  But escape had been possible before, and we stayed then as now. Flight was delay—nothing more. A miracle might save us, and I think we believed in miracles. So we vainly sought shelter from the deluge in the ruins of the tower, and stared through the falling rain at the two spheres, now clear of the water and perched on the ravine’s edge, above the dam.

  Our ‘local shower” lasted for three days. Then came the sun, and the mountains began to drain. Only the new-born lake remained to remind us of the rains, a lake stained deep violet with the slowly dissolving bodies of the crystal tetrahedra. Those in the two spheres waited for a day, then came forth to survey the ruins of their campaign—the giant leader and a scant hundred of his richly purple subordinates. And now, too, came proof of the method in Marston’s madness.

  The tetrahedra had resumed their guard about the base of our crag, although the crimson barrage did not beat so high nor so vividly. Their master squatted outside the ring, brooding, watching us—perhaps pondering our connection with the tempest that had wrecked his hopes. And now Marston took under his arm the great Indian drum that I had brought away from the place of sacrifice, a drum of ancient ritual, headed with well-tanned human skin, and stalked down the slope to confront the tetrahedra. I stuck by the guns and waited.

  I can see them yet, giant leaders of two utterly different races, born on two planets sixty millions of miles apart at their nearest, inherently opposite and inherently enemies, squatting there on the black rock, watching each other! A rumble of speech from the great leader and the rose-hue of the barrage deepened, climbed higher about the crag. A bluff, it was. Marston did not move.

  And then he took up the great drum. He had cared for it as for a child during the long rain, sheltering it as best he could, testing the tautness of its grisly membrane, drying it carefully with sun and fire during all the previous day. Now I learned the reason.

  Slowly, softly, using the heel of his palm and his fingers in quick succession, he began to drum. This was not the rhythmic throb of native dances, not the choppy voice of signal drums. Faster, ever faster the great drum of sacrifice boomed forth its message, until the beats melted into a low, continuous thunder of bottomless sound, mounting in volume to a steady, rolling roar, rising and swelling in delicate inflection. His wrist must have been wonderfully strong and flexible to so control the sound! On and on in great throbbing billows rolled the drumming, and but for its thunder all the world lay still—Marston and I on the slope of the spur, the tetrahedra about its base, the purple giant beyond, on the shore of the lake. On and on, thundering through my brain in dull, insistent beatings of dead surf on the beaches of a dead world, possessing me, filling me, speaking to me in the voice of the storm—speaking—that was it! Marston was speaking to the tetrahedra with the voice of his giant drum!

  During those long, empty days on the crag-side he had been listening, learning, drilling into his scientist’s brain the meaning of every voiced command that the great master of the Mercutian tetrahedra thundered to his crystal hosts, learning their inflections, storing them in his mind! He had memorized a simple vocabulary—sounds that signified the great commander, the horde, the tetrahedra as a class; simple verbs for coming and going, for altering the barrage; words for human beings, for their planet and our own—a host of nouns and verbs that even yet seem beyond the power of any man to glean from the muttering of an alien race, coupled with the actions that fitted the words. But Marston had learned, and with the sullen voice of the giant drum he was replying, in rough, broken, ill-chosen words, falteringly expressed, words that the tetrahedron understood!

  For the crimson mist faded, vanished. The crystal ranks split, and through the lane between them glided the giant ruler, coming to where Marston sat with his drum. He stopped, spoke in words very like those that Marston had used—simple words, such as our own babies learn, roughly connected.

  “What—you?”

  And the drum: “We—tetrahedra—Earth.” I translate rudely, as they spoke. His words were not so literal as I must make them, to suit our limited tongue—were ideas, rather than words. And yet, they got their message across!

  The giant was startled. How could we, misshapen, flabby monstrosities, be rulers of a planet, equal to themselves? He was incredulous:

  “You—tetrahedra?”

  The drum muttered approval, as for a fulfilled command. The idea had been transferred, but the purple giant did not seem to think much of it.

  “You—weak! (Easily vulnerable, like vegetation, was the sense of the term used.) You—dead—easy. (Here he used a term with which he had designated the tetrahedra shattered in the battle with the Indians.) We— tetrahedra—our planet—and Earth!”

  There wasn’t much answer to that one. They could rule both planets with ease. And yet—Marston called to me.

  “Hawkins, bring down those stones you’ve been chipping, and a flask of water. Wait—bring two flasks, and a gun.”

  So he had seen me at work and guessed my plan. Well, his own beat it hollow, but if he had an idea, I wasn’t going to hinder him. I lugged the slabs down and went back for the stoppered canteens of water and the gun. At his directions I set one flask against the rock of the hillside, above him. He took the other. And all the while his drum was murmuring reassurance to the giant and his horde.

  “You work the slabs, Hawkins,” he said, “while I talk. I’ll translate, and you act accordingly.” The drum spoke:

  “Sun—Sun—Sun.” He pointed. “Your Sun—our Sun.”

  The tetrahedron approved. He came from our own Solar System.

  Now he was pointing to my diagram, to the Sun, the Earth and its orbit. “Sun. Sun. Earth. Earth.” I rolled the jade bead slowly along its groove, the white moon-pebble following in its spiral course. I rolled the other planets, showed him their colors and relative sizes. Marston was drumming again, as I touched planet after planet, questioning.

  “Your planet—your planet? Your planet—what? This?”

  The giant disapproved. It was not Mars.

  “This?” It was anything but Venus! Venus must have been pretty wet for the completest comfort

  Eagerly—”This?” Assent! The Professor was right! They came from Mercury! But Marston wanted to be sure. He found a white spec
k of quartz in the black stone that was Mercury, and now he turned it to the golden Sun—held it there as Mercury revolved slowly in its orbit. There was emphatic approval. Mercury it was—the planet with one side always to the Sun. So far, so good. Marston took my other plaque—the relief map of Earth.

  “Earth—Earth.”

  Yes, the Mercutian recognized it. He had seen it thus from space.

  With a crystal of quartz, Marston gouged our particular section of South America, pointed to the ground, to the lake, the forests. “This—this,” he said.

  More approval. They knew where they were, all right.

  Now he reopened a closed subject. He started up the monotone of reassurance, then superimposed on it a few deft words.

  “You—tetrahedra—Mercury.” They sure were!

  “We—tetrahedra—Earth!” Not so good! He repeated: “You—Mercury. We—Earth. We—tetrahedra!” There were evident signs of dissent! Marston swelled the reassurance-tone, then added a sharp call to attention, raised his gun, fired twice, threw the weapon down, and redoubled his assurance of well-meaning and safety.