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

by Edited By Isaac Asimov

  “Here in these marble corridors, we of the Esthetts are born and educated. We work only at our art; we work only when it suits us, and our work is carried from here to the Surface above. There it is carefully explained by the shelks, and the choicest is preserved. The artists who produce this work — listen carefully, wild man — the artists who produce this work are called from their home to join the great guild of Chosen Ones who live on the Surface and spend the rest of their lives decorating the glorious palaces and gardens of the Holy Shelks! They are the happiest of men, for they know that their work is praised by the very Lords of Creation themselves.”

  He was panting with the effort caused by his story, but he struggled bravely on:

  “Can you wonder that we feel ourselves superior to the men who have allowed themselves to become little better than animals, little more than rabbits skulk­ing in their warrens, miles below the ground? Can you wonder that—”

  His speech was suddenly cut off by a sound from the corridor without. It was the sound of a siren, whose tones grew shriller and shriller, higher and higher until it seemed to pass entirely beyond the range of sound heard by human ears. The Esthett was suddenly beside himself with eagerness. He began to struggle out of his bed, managed after several fail­ures to get to his feet, waddled to the door and then turned.

  “The Masters!” he cried. “The Holy Shelks! They have come to take another group of artists to the Surface. I knew they would be here soon, wild man, and it was not for nothing that I listened to your long, tiresome story. Try to escape if you can, hut you know as well as I that none can escape from the Masters. And now I go to tell them of your presence!”

  He slammed the door suddenly in Tumithak’s face and was gone.

  For several minutes, Tumithak remained motionless in the apartment. That shelks were so near to him seemed incredible. Yet he expected every minute to see the door open and to have the horrible spider-like creatures rush in and slay him. At last, it seemed, he was in a trap from which there was no escape. He shivered with fear, and then, as always, the very intensity of his fear shamed him and caused him to take a new grip upon himself; and though he trembled violently at what he was about to do, he moved to the door and examined it carefully. He had decided that the chances of escape would be greater in the corridor than if he waited here for the shelks to capture him. It was several minutes before he dis­covered the secret of the latch, but then he swung the door open and stepped into the corridor.

  The corridor in Tumithak’s vicinity was fortunately empty, but far up the hallway, the obese Esthett could still be seen, bustling ponderously on his way. He had been joined by others, many as fat as he; and all were hastening, as fast as their weight would let them, up the corridor, in the direction in which the square of the city evidently lay. Tumithak followed them at a discreet distance, and after a while, saw them turn into another corridor. He approached the corridor cautiously, the determination forming in his mind to slay the fat one that intended to betray him, at the first opportunity. It was well that he used care in his approach, for when he peered around the cor­ner he saw that he was not a hundred feet from the town’s great square.

  He had never seen such a great square. It was a huge hail over a hundred yards in diameter, its tessellated marble floor and carved walls presenting an appearance that made Tumithak gasp in wonder. Here and there statutes stood on van-colored pedestals, and all the doorways were hung with beautiful tapestries. The entire square was almost filled with Esthetts, over five hundred being present.

  Not the halt, its furnishings nor its inhabitants had much effect on Tumithak. His eyes were occupied in observing the great cylinder of metal that lay in the center of the hail. It was just such a cylinder as the one he had seen on the carving when he first entered the city—eighteen or twenty feet long, mounted on four thickly tired wheels and having, he now perceived, a round opening in the top.

  While he looked, a number of objects shot out of the opening and dropped lightly before the crowd. One after another, just as jacks from a box, they leapt from the opening, and as they nimbly struck the ground the Esthetts raised a cheer. Tumithak drew hastily back, and then, his curiosity overcoming his caution, dared to peep again into the hail. For the first time in over a hundred years, a man of Loor gazed upon a shelk!

  Standing about four feet high, they were indeed spider-like, just as tradition said. But a close look showed that this was only a superficial resemblance. For these creatures were hairless, and possessed ten legs, rather than the eight that belong to a true spider. The legs were long and triple-jointed and on the tip of each was a short rudimentary claw much like a finger nail. There were two bunches of these legs, five on each side, and they joined the creature at a point midway between the head and the body. The body was shaped much like the abdomen of a wasp, and was about the same size as the head, which was certainly the strangest part of the entire creature.

  For the head was the head of a man: The same eyes, the same broad brow, a mouth with tight, thin lips, and a chin—all these gave the head of the creature a startling resemblance to that of a man. The nose and hair alone were missing, to make the face perfectly human.

  As Tumithak looked, they entered at once upon the business that had brought them down into the corridor. One of them took a paper from a pouch strapped to his body, grasping it nimbly between two of his limbs, and began to speak. His voice had a queer, metallic clack about it, but it was not a bit hard for Tumithak to dis­tinguish every word he said.

  “Brothers of the Pits,” he cried, “the time has come for another group of you to make your homes on the Surface! The friends who left you last week are eagerly awaiting your arrival there, and it only remains for us to call the names of the ones to whom the great honor has fallen. Listen carefully, and let each one enter the cylinder as his name is called.”

  He paused, allowing his words to sink in, and then in a silence that was impressive, he began to call the names.

  “Korystalis! Vintiania! Lathrumidor!” he called, and one after another, great, bull-bodied men strutted forward and climbed up a small ladder that was low­ered from the cylinder. The third man called, Tumi­thak noticed, was the one who had conversed with him in the apartment. The look on his face, as well as on the faces of the others, was one of surprise and joy, as if some incredible piece of good luck had befallen him.

  Now Tumithak had been so absorbed in observing the shelks and their vehicle that he had forgotten mo­mentarily the threat that the Esthett had made, but when he saw him approaching the shelks, the Loorian’s terror returned. He stood, rooted in his tracks with fear. But his fear was unnecessary, for apparently this unexpected piece of good fortune had driven everything else from the simple mind of the Chosen One, for he climbed into the cylinder without so much as a word to the shelks standing about. And Tumithak gave a great sigh of relief as he disappeared into the hole.

  There were six shelks, and six Esthett’s names were called; and as fast as they were called, their owners stepped forward and clambered, puffing and grunting, into the car. At last, the sixth had struggled down into the round opening and the shelks turned and followed. A lid covered the hole from below, and silence reigned in the hall. After a moment, the Esthetts began to drift away, and as several moved toward the corridor in which Tumithak was concealed, he was forced to dart back through the passage some distance and slip into an apartment to avoid discovery.

  He half expected some Esthett to enter the apartment and discover him, but this time luck was with him and after a few moments, he peered cautiously through the door to find the corridor empty. He emerged and quickly made his way to the main hail. It was deserted of Esthetts, now, but for some reason the cylinder still remained in the same spot; and Tumithak was suddenly seized with an idea that made him tremble with its magnitude.

  These shelks had obviously come from the Surface in this car! And now they were going back to the Sur­face in it. Had not the Esthett, whom the shelks named Lath
rumidor, told him that occasionally artists were called to live upon the Surface among the shelks? Yes, this car was certainly going to return to the Surface. And, with a sudden rush of inspired determination, Tumithak knew that he was going with it.

  He hastened forward and in a moment was clinging to the rear of the machine, clambering for a foothold on the few projections that he could find. He was not a moment too soon, for hardly had he gotten a firm grip on the machine than it leaped silently forward and sped at a vertiginous speed up the corridor!

  * * * *

  CHAPTER VI - The Slaying of the Shelk

  Tumithak’s memory of that ride was a wild kaleidoscopic jumble of incidents. So fast did the car speed, that it was only occasionally, as they slowed to turn a corner or passed through an exceptionally narrow hail, that he could lift his eyes and look about him.

  They passed through halls more brilliantly lighted than any he had yet seen. He saw halls of metal, pol­ished and gleaming, and corridors of unpolished rock where strange things fled wildly out of their path, howling mournfully. There were passages where the car rolled smoothly and swiftly over a polished glistening floor, and corridors where the vibration of passing over rough rock threatened to hurl him at any moment from his precarious position.

  Once they passed slowly through a marble passage­way where Esthetts were lined on either side, chanting a solemn and sonorous hymn as the car of the shelks passed through. Tumithak was certain that he would be discovered, but if any of the singers saw him they paid little heed, evidently believing him to be a captive of the shelks. There were no longer any pits or branching hallways now, the entire road to the surface was one broad main corridor, and along this corridor the car sped, carrying Tumithak ever nearer to his goal.

  Although the car’s speed was not great as measured by the speed of the cars we use today, it must be re­embered that the fastest speed the Loorian had ever conceived was a fast run. So it seemed to him now that he rode upon the very wings of the wind, and his thankfulness knew no bounds when the car at last slowed to a speed that enabled him to drop to the ground in a section of the corridor that had apparently been un­inhabited for many years. All thought of continuing the ride was abandoned, now, his only desire was to end the devil’s ride that he had so foolhardily undertaken.

  For a moment, Tumithak was inclined to lie where he had fallen, at least long enough to regain control of his dazed faculties, but the sudden realization that the car of the shelks had stopped, not a hundred yards away, brought him instantly to his feet, and he flung himself hurriedly through the nearest open door. The apartment in which he found himself was dust laden and bare of furniture; it was obvious that it had been long unused, and so, convinced that no danger awaited him there, Tumithak returned to the door and looked out at the car.

  He saw at once that the queer door or hatchway in the top of the car was open, but it was several moments before the occupants began to emerge. Then the fat head of one of the Esthetts appeared and its owner la­boriously dragged himself up and over the side of the car. He was followed by a shelk, who leaped nimbly to the ground, after which the car slowly emptied until all twelve of its occupants were in the corridor. They all turned, then, and entered an apartment, the only one visible that bore a curtain over the door.

  For a while, Tumithak remained in his hiding place debating his next move. I-us instinctive timidity urged him to remain in hiding, to wait—for days, if necessary—until the shelks had re-entered the car and departed. His curiosity demanded that he attempt to discover what the strangely allied party was doing beyond that great tapestry-covered door. And his wisdom told him that if he intended to continue on his quest, the best course was to keep on at once up the corridor, while the shelks were still within the apartment—for he knew that he was but a few short miles from the surface, toward which he had been traveling for so long.

  His better judgment conquered at last and he chose the latter course, determined to forget the party, and so emerged from the room and began to run lightly and silently on his way; but as he passed the great doorway and saw how voluminous were the folds of the draperies and how easily one might conceal himself in them, he determined to have one last look at the shelks and their strange friends before continuing. So, suiting the ac­tion to the thought, he stepped to the opening and, draw­ing the curtains around him, parted them slightly and looked into the room.

  The first thing to strike his attention was the immense size of the room. It must have been eighty feet long and half as many wide, truly an enormous room to the Loorian; and its ceiling was lost in gloom. So high was it that the lights, which were arranged around the room at the level of the shoulder, were not bright enough to show any of its detail. Tumithak had a queer idea that there was no ceiling, that perhaps the walls rose higher and higher until at last they reached the Surface. He had little time to speculate on this possibility, however, for he had hardly noticed it when his eyes fell upon the table. A great low table, it was, a long table covered with a cloth of snowy whiteness and piled high with strange articles that Tumithak saw were intended to be foods. But the Loorian looked at them in wonder, for they were foods such as he had never before heard of, such as his ancestors had not known for many a genera­tion, the thousand and one succulent viands of the Sur­face. And around the table were a dozen low divans, and on some of these divans the Esthetts were even now reclining, greedily partaking of the varied foods.

  The shelks, strangely enough, were not joining them in the feast. Behind each of the ponderous artists, a shelk had taken his place, and to Tumithak’s notion, there was something ominous in the way they stood, si­lently watching every move the Esthetts made. But the self-styled Chosen Ones were quite at ease, gobbling their food and grunting appreciative interjections to each other, until Tumithak turned from looking at them in disgust.

  And then, suddenly, there came a sharp command from the shelk at the head of the table. The Esthetts looked up in consternation, dismay and a pitiable incredulity in their faces. Ere they could move, how­ever, ere they could even cry out, on each a shelk had leaped, his thin-lipped mouth seeking, finding unerringly, the jugular vein beneath the folds of flesh in the fat one’s heavy throat.

  Vainly the artists struggled, their slow, helpless move­ments were unavailing, the nimble shelks easily avoid­ing their groping arms while all the time their teeth sank deeper into the flesh. Tumithak gasped in horror. As one in a trance, he watched the movements of the Esthetts become feebler and feebler until at last all motion ceased. The Loorian’s brain was in a daze. What— what on Venus could be the meaning of this? What connection could this grisly scene have with the lengthy explanation of the lives of these people that Lathrumi­dor had given him in the marble halls below? He gazed at the scene in horror, unable to move his eyes.

  The Esthetts were quiet now, and the shelks had raised themselves from them and were busy with some new occupation. From beneath the table they had drawn several huge, transparent jars and half a dozen small machines with long hoses attached. These hoses were fastened to the wounds in the necks of the Eshetts and as Tumithak looked on, he saw the blood swiftly pumped from the bodies and ejected into the jars.

  As the jars filled with the liquid, the bodies of the Esthetts collapsed like punctured balloons, and in a few moments they lay, pallid and wrinkled, on the floor about the table. The shelks showed no excitement in their work; apparently it was merely a routine duty with them, and their calm business-like methods served only to add to Tumithak’s terror; but at last he over­came the paralytic fear that held him, and he turned and sped frantically away. Up the corridor he ran, faster and faster, farther and farther, and at last, spent and breathless, unable to run another step, he darted into an open door, and flung himself gasping and pant­ing upon the floor of the apartment it led into.

  Slowly he regained control of himself, his breath re­turned, and with it some small measure of confidence. He berated himself harshly for his cowardice in so lo
sing control of himself, yet, even as he did so, he trembled at the thought of the terrible sight that he had witnessed. As he grew calmer, he began to wonder at the meaning of the events that he had seen. Lath­rumidor, the Esthett, had led him to believe that the shelks were the kindly masters of the immense artists. He had spoken of the journey to the Surface as being the culminating honor of an Esthett’s life. The shelk who had spoken in the great hail, too, had intimated as much. Yet for some strange reason, at the first opportunity after leaving the city, the shelks had slain their worshiping servants, and slain them in a way that seemed quite usual and commonplace to them. Strive as he might, Tumithak could not account for this appar­ent anomaly. And so, cowering in the rear room of the apartment, puzzling over the unnaturalness of the day’s adventures, the Loorian fell into a troubled sleep.

  It is not to be wondered that Tumithak was puzzled at the strange events of the day. He knew of no rela­tionship between animals, such as existed between the Esthetts and the shelks. There were no domestic animals in the pits and man had not known of them for centuries. Other centuries were to go by before they were to know of them again, so there was nothing in Tumithak’s life analogous to the status in which the shelks held the Esthetts.

  Today we know that they were—cattle! Lulled into a sense of false security by hypocritical lies, bred for centuries for the full-blooded, bovine stupidity that was characteristic of them, allowed no means of intellectual expression except the artistic impulse which the shelks scorned, they had become, after many generations, the willing creatures of the Beasts of Venus.