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

by Edited By Isaac Asimov

  He ceased his story, and again the crowd broke into cheers. The cheers increased, echoed back against the walls until the great hall range like a bell. “Great is Tumithak of the Loorians!” they cried, “Great is Tumithak, slayer of shelks!” And Tumithak folded his arms and drank in the praise, forgetful for the moment that his entire mission had been to prove that it did not take a great man to kill a shelk.

  After a while, the tumult began to die and the voice of Datto was heard again.

  “Loorians,” he shouted. “For many, many years, the men of Yakra have fought unending war with the men of Loor. Today that war ceases. Today we have found a Loorian who is greater than all Yakrans, and so we fight with Loor no more. And to prove that I speak truth, Datto bows in allegiance to Tumithak

  Again the cheers, and at last Nennapuss arose.

  “It is a good thing that you have clone, O Datto,” he said, “and truly Tumithak is a chief of chiefs if there ever was one. Now there has been little enmity between Loor and Nonone in the past, and so our cases are different. For it is said that in the olden clays, the people of Loor and Nonone were one. Thus, we hear of the days of the great chief, Ampithat, who ruled—” here Datto whispered something fiercely into his ear, and the Nononese flushed and went on, “But enough of that. Suffice it that Nennapuss, too, bows to Tumithak, chief of chiefs and chief of Nonone.”

  Again there was a great demonstration and after a while, Datto began to speak again. Would it not be a seemly thing, he asked frowning fiercely, for the Loor­ians to recognize Tumithak as their chief also, thus mak­ing him king of all the lower corridors? The Loorians raised a cheer, and then Tagivos, the eldest of the doctors, arose to speak.

  “The people of Loor have a government somewhat different from that of Nonone and Yakra,” he said. “We have not had a chief for many years. However, it might be a good thing for the three towns to be united and so I will call a meeting of the council to decide on it.”

  The council was soon grouped together; Tagivos, Tumlook and old Sidango leading them, and after a while they announced that they were agreed to recog­nize Tumithak as their chief also. And so, amid wild cheering, that made it utterly impossible to distinguish a word that was said, Tumithak became chief of all the lower corridors.

  Datto and his huge nephew, Thopf, the foremost of the Yakrans, were the first to swear allegiance to him, then he accepted the fealty of Sidango, Tagivos and the other Loorians. It gave Tumithak a queer feeling to touch the sword of his father and to hear his oath, but he maintained his dignified bearing, and treated Tumlook in just the same fashion as the others, until the ceremony was over. Then he called for attention.

  “Friends of the lower corridors,” he said. “A new day dawns for man today. It has been over thirty years since war has visited these corridors and in all those years men have almost forgotten the arts of war. We have lived in a spirit of slothful peace, while above us the enemies of all mankind have grown stronger and stronger. But in making me your chief, you have ended that era of peace and brought upon yourselves new lives of action. I will not be a peaceful ruler, for I, who have seen so much of the world, will not be content to skulk idly in the deepest corridor. Already I plan to lead you against the savages of the dark corridors, to claim those halls as our own, and to fill them with the lights that still gleam in the deserted corridors that we no longer use.

  “And if we conquer those savages, I shall take you against the huge Esthetts to show you what beauty can do for the life of man. And the time will surely come, if the High One be willing, when I shall lead you against the shelks themselves, for what I have done, every one of you can do, and shall do.

  “And if anyone feels that the task I call upon you to do is too great, let him speak now for I will not rule over man against his will.”

  Again the cheers broke out, and gathered volume, and rang from wall to wall of the great square. In the excitement and enthusiasm of the moment, there was not a man in all the crowd that did not feel that he, too, might become a slayer of shelks.

  And while they cheered and sang, and worked themselves into a frenzy, Tumithak stepped down from the stone and strode off in the direction of his home.

  * * * *

  “Tumithak of the Corridors” was far and away the best and most exciting story I had ever read up to that time.

  I must admit that when I reread these ancient stories, I don’t, in my early fifties, get nearly the same charge I got when in my preteens. I am far more aware now than I was then of the structural and stylistic flaws. And what was new and astonishing then is not new and astonishing now.

  Yet let it be said that the gap proved surprisingly small when I read “Tumithak of the Corridors.” Even now, though my hair is graying, I found myself stirred very much as I had been once in junior high school.

  I found the characters human and the hero all the more admirable because he could feel fear. I found the plot exciting and found a deep humanity in the sentence “Tumithak had to learn that in no matter what nation or age one finds oneself, he will find gentleness, if he looks, as well as savagery.” This was an amazing viewpoint at a time when popular literature accepted racial stereotypes as a matter of course.

  Most of all, though, there was (and is) something fascinating to me in the thought of endless corridors burrowing underground.

  I’m a claustrophile. I enjoy the feeling of being closed in. I like tunnels and corridors and never mind the absence of windows. The office I work in I chose because it faces a court. I keep the shades pulled down and I work under perpetual artificial light.

  I’ve always been that way. I remember that, in my younger days, when I took the subway to school I was always fascinated by the small newsstands there used to be on the stations. Late at night I would see them closed, and inside, I knew, were all those lovely pulps I never got a chance to read. And I would fantasize being shut into one of those things, with the lights on, of course, and, safely enclosed and with the sound of subway trains rushing past periodically, reading and reading and reading.

  But don’t get me wrong. I am not psychotic about it. The apartment I live in is on the twenty-third floor with wide windows overlooking Central Park, and the sunlight comes in steadily.

  Well, I’m off the point. The corridors pleased me, and I never forgot them. When I wrote The Caves of Steel, in 1953, and lovingly described the underground city of the future, I did not forget “Tumithak of the Corridors.”

  One thing I noted, in rereading the story, that I had forgotten. It is told in the form of history. The narrator is in the far future looking back on events that took place in what was, to him, the legendary past. Apparently, that didn’t impress me, for I did not remember.

  Yet does one ever really forget? Eventually, when I wrote my Foundation Trilogy in the form of historical novels of the future, was there a dim unconscious memory of the manner of telling of “Tumithak of the Corridors?”

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  * * * *

  In my last months at junior high school, I decided to apply for entrance into Boys High School of Brooklyn. In the ordinary course of events I should have gone to Thomas Jefferson High School, which was closest to where I lived. The graduating body of J.H.S. 149 usually transferred to Jefferson en masse and did so this time too. I think I was one of only three boys who opted for Boys High.

  You see, by this time I had ambitions of vague higher things, and Boys High School had a reputation for scholastic excellence. My parents, who wanted me to go to medical school eventually, thought this was a good move.

  I have often pondered the consequences of that decision. Jefferson High was coeducational. Had I spent my early teens there, I would undoubtedly have discovered girls. Automatically, I would have had a strong motivation to broaden my interests, learn to dance, for instance, learn to handle myself easily and well with the opposite sex. On the other hand, my school-work might have suffered disastrously.

  At Boys High, with its purely masculine stud
ent body, I was plunged into a monastic existence in which there was little to distract me from schoolwork or to encourage me to broaden out.

  In consequence, throughout my teens and very early twenties I remained ill at ease in the presence of girls. I got over it, to be sure, married at the age of twenty-two, and have, for many years, been noted for my suavity with the ladies. (I have even written a book called The Sensuous Dirty Old Man, and no one has ever cast doubt on my qualifications for undertaking that task.)

  Nevertheless, what would have happened if I had gone to Jefferson High instead of Boys High?

  But what’s the use of dwelling upon it? Things might have turned out much worse. After all, the girls in my class would have been, for the most part, two and a half years older than I. Not only would I have seemed ludicrously young in their eyes, but I would also have been found to be lacking in the social graces and in worldly knowledge. I would undoubtedly have suffered rejection of all sorts, and who can tell how badly that might have affected me.

  Nor was the monasticism of my early teens disturbed (or relieved, if you prefer) by the science fiction I was reading. In the 1930s, science fiction was almost entirely masculine. The readership was almost entirely masculine, after all, and so were the writers.

  Of course, there were women in the stories, but they were there only to be caught and then rescued, only to be fought over by hero and villain (as in “Awlo of Ulm”). They had no life of their own and left no impression.

  Once, in those early years, however, I recall being really moved by the relationship between a man and a woman as pictured in a science fiction story. It is perhaps inevitable that the woman involved wasn’t really a woman.

  The story in question was Jack Williamson’s “The Moon Era,” published in the February 1932 Wonder Stories, and I fell in love with the Moon woman whom Williamson called the “Mother.”

  * * * *

  THE MOON ERA

  by Jack Williamson

  CHAPTER I

  We were seated at dinner in the long dining room of my uncle’s Long Island mansion. There was glistening silver plate, and the meal had been served with a formality to which I was unaccustomed. I was ill at ease, though my uncle and I sat alone at the table. The business of eating, without committing an egregious blunder before the several servants, took all my attention.

  It was the first time I had ever seen my uncle, Enfield Conway. A tall man, stiffly erect, dressed severely in black. His face, though lean, was not emaciated as is usual at his age of seventy years. His hair, though almost perfectly white, was abundant, parted on the side. His eyes were blue, and strong; he wore no glasses.

  A uniformed chauffeur had met me at the station, in the afternoon. The butler had sent an entirely unnecessary valet to my luxurious room. I had not met my uncle until he came down to the dining room.

  “I suppose, Stephen, you are wondering why I sent for you,” he said in his precise manner, when the servants had carried away the last course, leaving cigars, and a bottle of mineral water for him.

  I nodded. I had been instructor of history in a small high school in Texas, where his telegram had reached me. There had been no explanation; merely a summons to Long Island.

  “You are aware that some of my patents have been quite profitable.” Again I nodded.

  “The evidence surrounds me.”

  “Stephen, my fortune amounts to upwards of three and a half million. How should you like to be my heir?”

  “Why, sir—I should not refuse. I’d like very much to be.”

  “You can, if you wish, earn that fortune. And fifty thousand a year while I live.”

  I pushed back the chair and rose to my feet in excitement. Such riches were beyond my dreams! I felt myself trembling.

  “Anything—’ I stammered. “I’ll do anything you say, to earn that! It means—”

  “Wait,” he said, looking at me calmly. “You don’t know yet what I require. Don’t commit yourself too soon.”

  “What is it?” I asked, in a quivering voice.

  “Stephen, I have been working in my private laboratory here for eleven years. I have been building a machine. The best of my brains have gone into that machine. Hundreds of thousands of dollars. The efforts of able engineers and skilled mechanics.

  “Now the machine is finished. It is to be tested. The engineers who worked with me refused to try the machine. They insist that it is very dangerous.

  “And I am too old to make the trial. It will take a young man, with strength, endurance, and courage.

  “You are young, Stephen. You look vigorous enough. I suppose your health is good? A sound heart? That’s the main thing.”

  “I think so,” I told him. “I’ve been coaching the Midland football team. And it isn’t many years since I was playing college football, myself.”

  “And you have no dependents?”

  “None.—But what is this machine?”

  “I will show you. Come.”

  He rose, agilely enough for one of his seventy years, and led the way from the long room. Through several magnificent rooms of the big house. Out into the wide, landscaped grounds, beautiful and still in the moonlight.

  I followed silently. My brain was confusion. A whirl of mad thought. All this wealth whose evidence surrounded me might be my own! I cared nothing for luxury, for money itself. But the fortune would mean freedom from the thankless toil of pedagogy. Books. Travel. Why I could see with my own eyes the scenes of history’s dramatic moments! Finance research expeditions of my own! Delve with my own hands for the secrets of Egypt’s sands, uncover the age-old enigmas of ruined mounds that once were proud cities of the East!

  We approached a rough building,—resembling an airplane hangar,—of galvanized iron, which glistened like silver in the rays of the full moon.

  Without speaking, Uncle Enfield produced a key from his pocket, unlocked the heavy padlock on the door. He entered the building, switching on electric lights inside it.

  “Come in,” he said. “Here it is. I’ll explain it as well as I can.”

  I walked through the narrow doorway and uttered an involuntary exclamation of surprise at sight of the huge machine that rested upon the clean concrete floor.

  Two huge disks of copper, with a cylinder of bright, chromium-plated metal between them. Its shape vaguely suggested that of an ordinary spool of adhesive plaster, from which a little has been used—the polished cylinder, which was of smaller diameter than the disks, took the place of the roll of plaster.

  The lower of the massive disks rested on the concrete floor. Its diameter was about twenty feet. The cylinder above it was about sixteen feet in diameter, and eight feet high. The copper disk above was the same size as the lower one.

  Small round windows stared from the riveted metal plates forming the cylinder. The whole was like a building, it burst on me. A circular room with bright metal walls. Copper floor and copper roof projecting beyond those walls.

  My uncle walked to the other side of this astounding mechanism. He turned a projecting knob. An oval door, four feet high, swung inward in the curving wall. Four inches thick. Of plated steel. Fitting very tightly against cushions of rubber.

  My uncle climbed through the door, into the dark interior. I followed with a growing sense of wonder and excitement. I groped toward him through the darkness. Then I heard the click of a switch, and lights flashed on within the round chamber.

  I gazed about me in astonishment.

  Walls, floor, and ceiling were covered with soft, white fiber. The little room was crowded with apparatus. Clamped against one white wall was a row of the tall steel flasks in which commercial oxygen is compressed. Across the room was a bank of storage batteries. The walls were hung with numerous instruments, all clamped neatly in place. Sextants. Compasses. Pressure gauges. Numerous dials whose functions were not apparent. Cooking utensils. An automatic pistol. Cameras. Telescopes. Binoculars.

  In the center of the room stood a table or cabinet, with s
witches, dials, and levers upon its top. A heavy cable, apparently of aluminum, ran from it to the ceiling.

  I was gazing about in bewilderment. “I don’t understand all this—” I began.

  “Naturally,” said my uncle. “It is quite a novel invention. Even the engineers who built it did not understand it. I confess that the theory of it is yet beyond me. But what happens is quite simple.

  “Eleven years ago, Stephen, I discovered a new phenomenon. I had happened to charge two parallel copper plates, whose distances apart had a certain very definite relation to their combined masses, with a high tension current at a certain frequency.