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

by Edited By Isaac Asimov

  “But my vital force will prove stronger than your rude slaying machine, Adventurer,” she maintained.

  We set out almost immediately. She glided off along the strip of bare sand beside the wall of thorny yellow scrub. And began my instruction in the ways of life upon the moon, by informing me that there was always such a clear zone about a thicket of the thorn-brush, because its roots generated a poison in the soil which prevented the growth of other vegetation near them.

  When we had traveled two or three miles, we came to a crystal pool, where the abundant dew had collected at the bottom of a bare, rocky slope. We drank there. Then the Mother plunged into it joyously. With white mantles folded tight against her sides, she flashed through the water like a golden eel. I was glad to remove my own garments, and wash the grime and dried blood from my body.

  I was donning my tattered clothing again, and the Mother was lying beside me, at the edge of the pool, with eyes closed, drying her golden fur in the sunshine, when I saw the ghostly bars.

  Seven thin upright pillars of light, ringed about us. Straight bars of pale white radiance. They stood like phantom columns about us, enclosing a space ten yards across. They were not above two inches in diameter. And they were quite transparent, so I could see the green jungle and the yellow wall of thorn-brush quite plainly through them.

  I was not particularly alarmed. In fact, I thought the ghostly pillars only some trick of my vision. I rubbed my eyes, and said rather carelessly to the Mother:

  “Are the spirits building a fence around us? Or is it just my eyes?”

  She lifted her golden, blue-crested head quickly. Her violet eyes went wide. I saw alarm in them. Terror. And she moved with astonishing speed. Drew her slender length into a coil. Leaped. And seized my shoulder as she leaped, with one of her mantles.

  She jerked me between two of those strange columns of motionless light, out of the area they enclosed.

  I fell on the sand, got quickly to my feet.

  “What-” I began.

  “The Eternal Ones,” her sweet, whistling tones came swiftly. “They have found me. Even here, they reach me with their evil power. We must go on, quickly.”

  She glided swiftly away. Still buttoning my clothing, I followed, keeping pace with her easily, with my regular leaps of half a dozen yards. Followed, wondering vainly what danger there might have been in the pillars of ghostly light.

  * * * *

  CHAPTER VI

  Pursuit!

  We skirted a continuous wall of the spiky yellow scrub.

  The strip of clear ground we followed was usually fifty to one hundred yards wide. The mass of yellow thorn-brush, the poison from whose roots had killed the vegetation here, rose dense and impenetrable to our right.

  To the left of our open way limitless stretches covered with the green creeper. Undulating seas of feathery emerald foliage. Scattered with huge white blooms. Broken, here and there, with strange plants of various kinds. Beyond were other clumps of the yellow scrub. A red mountain wall rose in the distance. Huge purple balloons swayed here and there upon this weird, sunlit moonscape, anchored with their red cables.

  I suppose we followed that open strip for ten miles. I was beginning to breathe heavily, as violent exercise always made me do in the moon’s light atmosphere. The Mother showed no fatigue.

  Abruptly she paused ahead of me, and glided into a sort of tunnel through the forest of thorns. A passage five feet wide and six feet high, with the yellow spokes arching over it. The floor was worn smooth, hard-packed as if by constant use. It seemed almost perfectly straight, for I could see down it for a considerable distance. Twilight filled it, filtering down through the unbroken mass of cruel bayonets above.

  “I am not eager to use this path,” the Mother told me. “For they who made it are hostile things. And though not very intelligent, they are able to resist my vital force, so that I cannot control them. We shall be helpless if they discover us.

  “But there is no other way. We must cross this forest of thorns. And I am glad to be out of sight in this tunnel. Perhaps the Eternal Ones will lose us again. We must hasten, and hope that we encounter no rightful user of the path. If one appears, we must hide.”

  I was placed immediately at a disadvantage upon entering the tunnel, for I could no longer take the long leaps by which I had been traveling. My pace became a sort of trot. I had to hold my head down, to save it from the poisoned thorns above.

  The Mother glided easily before me, to my relief not in such haste as before. Slender and strong and trimly beautiful—for all her strangeness. I was glad she had let me come with her. Even if peril threatened.

  I found breath for speech.

  “Those ghostly bars,” I panted. “What were they?”

  “The Eternal Ones possess strange powers of science,” came the thin, whistling notes of her reply. “Something like the television you told me of. But more highly developed. They were able to see us, back by the pool.

  “And the shining bars were projected through space by their rays of force. They meant some harm to us. Just what, I do not know. It is apparently a new weapon, which they did not use in the war.”

  We must have gone many miles through the tunnel. It had been almost perfectly straight. There had been no branches or cross-passages. We had come through no open space. Roof and walls of yellow thorns had been unbroken. I was wondering what sort of creature it might be, that had made a path through the thorns so long and straight.

  The Mother stopped suddenly, turned back to face me.

  “One of the makers of the trail is approaching,” she piped. “I feel it coming. Wait for me a bit.”

  She sank in golden coils upon the trail. Her head was raised a little. The mantles were extended stiffly. Always before they had been white, except for their fine veining of red. But now soft, rosy colors flushed them. Her full red lips were parted a little, and her eyes had become strange, wide, staring. They seemed to look past me, to gaze upon scenes far-off, invisible to ordinary sight.

  For long seconds she remained motionless, violet eyes distant, staring.

  Then she stirred abruptly. Rose upon tawny, golden coils. Alarm was in her great eyes, in her thin, melodious tones.

  “The creature comes behind us. Upon this trail. We have scant time to reach the open. We must go swiftly.”

  She waited for me to begin my stumbling run, glided easily beside me. I moved awkwardly. With only the moon’s slight gravitational pull to hold me to the trail, I was in constant danger from the thorns.

  For tortured hours, it seemed to me, we raced down the straight passage, through the unbroken forest of yellow thorns. My heart was laboring painfully; my breath came in short gasps of agony. My body was not equipped for such prolonged exertions in the light air.

  The Mother, just ahead of me, glided along with effortless ease. I knew that she could easily have left me, had she wished.

  At last I stumbled, fell headlong, and did not have energy to get at once to my feet. My lungs burned, my heart was a great ache. Sweat was pouring from me; my temples throbbed; and a red mist obscured my sight.

  “Go—on,” I gasped, between panting breaths. “I’ll try—to stop—it.”

  I fumbled weakly for my gun.

  The Mother stopped, came back to me. Her piping notes were quick, insistent. “Come. We are near the open now. And the thing is close. You must come!”

  With a soft, flexible mantle she seized my arm. It seemed to me that a wave of new strength and energy came into me from it. At any rate, I staggered to my feet, lurched forward again. As I rose, I cast a glance backward.

  A dark, indistinguishable shape was in view. So large that it filled almost the whole width of the tunnel. A dim circle of the pale light of the thorn forest showed around it.

  I ran on . . . on . . . on.

  My legs rose and fell, rose and fell, like the insensate levers of an automaton. I felt no sensation from them. Even my lungs had ceased to burn, since the Mother
touched me. And my heart ached no longer. It seemed that I floated beside my body, and watched it run, run, run with the monotonously repeated movements of a machine.

  My eyes were upon the Mother before me.

  Gliding so swiftly through the twilight of the tunnel. Trim, round golden body. White mantles extended stiffly, wing-like, as if to help carry her. Delicate head raised, the blue plume upon it flashing.

  I watched that blue plume as I ran. It danced mockingly before me, always retreating. Always just beyond my grasp. I followed it through the blinding mists of fatigue, when all the rest of the world melted into a gray blue, streaked with bloody crimson.

  I was astonished when we came out into the sunlight. A strip of sand below the yellow wall of thorns. Cool green foliage beyond, a sea of green. Sinister purple balloons above it, straining on crimson cables. Far-off, a scarlet line of mountains, steep and rugged.

  The Mother turned to the left.

  I followed, automatically, mechanically. I was beyond feeling. I could see the bright moonscape, but it was strange no longer. Even the threat of the purple balloons was remote, without consequence.

  I do not know how far we ran, beside the forest of thorns, before the Mother turned again and led the way into a mass of creepers.

  “Lie still,” she piped. “The creature may not find us.”

  Gratefully, I flung myself down in the delicate fronds. I lay flat, with my eyes closed, my breath coming in great, painful, sobbing gasps. The Mother folded my hand in her soft mantle again, and immediately, it seemed, I felt relief, though I still breathed heavily.

  “Your reserve of vital energy is very low,” she commented.

  I took the automatic from my pocket, examined it to see that it was ready for action. I had cleaned and loaded it before we started. I saw the Mother raising her blue-crested head cautiously. I got to my knees, peered back along the bare strip of sand, down which we had come.

  I saw the thing advancing swiftly along the sand.

  A sphere of bright crimson. Nearly five feet in diameter. It rolled along, following the way we had come.

  “It has found us!” the Mother piped, very softly. “And my vital power cannot reach through its armor. It will suck the fluids from our bodies.”

  I looked down at her. She had drawn her slender body into a golden coil. Her head rose in the center, and the mantles were outspread, pure white, veined with fine lines of scarlet, and frail as the petals of a lily. Her great dark eyes were grave and calm; there was no trace of panic in them.

  I raised the automatic, determined to show no more fear than she, and to give my best to save her.

  Now the scarlet globe was no more than fifty yards away. I could distinguish the individual scales of its armor, looking like plates of horn covered with ruby lacquer. No limbs or external appendages were visible then. But I saw dark ovals upon the shell, appearing at the top and seeming to drop down, as the thing rolled.

  I began shooting.

  At such a distance there was no possibility of missing. I knelt in the leaves of the green creeper, and emptied the magazine into the globe.

  It continued to roll on toward us, without change of speed. But a deep, angry drumming sound came from within it. A reverberating roar of astonishing volume. After a few moments, I heard it repeated from several points about us. Low and distant rumblings, almost like thunder.

  In desperate haste, I was filling the clip with fresh cartridges. Before I could snap it back into the gun, the creature was upon us.

  Until it stopped, it had presented a sphere of unbroken surface. But suddenly six long, glistening black tentacles reached out of it, one from each of the black ovals I had seen evenly spaced about the red shell. They were a dozen feet long, slender, covered with thin black skin corrugated with innumerable wrinkles, and glistening with tiny drops of moisture. At the base of each was a single, staring, black-lidded eye.

  One of those black tentacles was thrust toward me. It reeked with an overpowering, fetid odor. At its extremity was a sharp, hooked claw, beside a black opening. I think the creature sucked its food through those hideous, retractable tentacles.

  I got the loaded clip into the gun, hastily snapped a cartridge into the chamber. Shrinking back from the writhing tentacular arm, I fired seven shots, as rapidly as I could press the trigger, into the black-lidded eye.

  The deep drumming notes came from within the red shell again. The black tentacles writhed, thrashed about, and became suddenly stiff and rigid. The sound of it died to a curious rattle, and then ceased.

  “You have killed it,” the Mother whistled musically. “You use your machine well, and it is more powerful than I thought. Perhaps, after all, we may yet live.”

  As if in ominous answer, a reverberating roll of distant drumming came from the tangle of yellow thorns. She listened, and the white mantles were stiffened in her alarm.

  “But it has called to its kind. Soon many will be here. We must hasten away.”

  * * * *

  Though I was still so tired that movement was torture, I rose and followed the Mother, as she glided on along the sand.

  Only a moment did I pause to examine the very interesting creature I had killed. It seemed unique, both in shape and in means of locomotion. It must have developed the spherical shell of red armor through ages of life in the spiky scrub. By drawing its limbs inside, it was able to crash through the thorns without suffering any hurt. I supposed it contrived to roll along by some rhythmic muscular contraction, inside the shell-such movement being much easier on the moon than it would be on earth, because of the lesser gravity. Where it could not roll, it dragged or lifted itself with the long, muscular appendages that I have called tentacles.

  Since we were in the open air again, I was able to resume my progression by deliberate, measured leaps, which carried me forward as fast as the Mother could move, and with much less effort than I had spent in running. I had a few moments of rest as I glided through the air between leaps, which compensated for the fiercer effort of each spring.

  From time to time I looked back, nervously. At first I could see only the scarlet shell of the dead creature, there by the green vines where we had killed it. Always smaller, until it was hardly visible.

  Then I saw other spheres. Emerging from the tangle of yellow thorn-brush. Rolling along the strip of bare soil, to congregate about the dead being. Finally I saw that they had started in our direction, rolling along rather faster than we could move.

  “They are coming,” I told the Mother. “And more of them than I can kill.”

  “They are implacable,” came her piping reply. “When one of them sets out upon the trail of some luckless creature, it never stops until it has sucked the body fluids from it—or until it is dead.”

  “Anything we can do?” I questioned.

  “There is a rock ahead of us, beyond that thicket. A small hill, whose sides are so steep they will not be able to climb it. If we can reach it in time, we may be able to scramble to the top.

  “It will be only temporary escape, since the creatures will never leave so long as we are alive upon it. But we shall delay our fate, at least— if we can reach it in time.”

  Again I looked back. Our pursuers were rolling along like a group of red marbles, at the edge of the yellow forest. Gaining upon us—swiftly.

  The Mother glided along more rapidly. The white mantles were stiffly extended from her golden sides, and aglow with rosy colors. The muscles beneath her furry skin rippled evenly, gracefully.

  I increased the force of my own leaps.

  We rounded an arm of the tangle of scrub, came in sight of the rock. A jutting mass of black granite. Its sides leaped up steep and bare from a mass of green creepers. Green moss crowned it. Thirty feet high it was. Perhaps a hundred in length.

  Our pursuers were no longer merely marbles when we saw the rock. They had grown to the size of baseballs. Rolling swiftly after us.

  The Mother glided on, a tireless strength in her
graceful tawny body. And I leaped desperately, straining to drive myself as fast as possible.

  We turned. Broke through the thick masses of verdure to the rock. Stood beneath its sheer wall, grim and black.

  The red spheres were no more than a hundred yards behind. A sudden rumble of drums came from them, when we halted by the rock. I could see the dark ovals on their glistening red armor, that marked their eyes and the ends of their concealed tentacles.

  “I can never climb that,” the Mother was piping.

  “I can leap up!” I cried. “Earth muscles. I’ll carry you up.”