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

by Edited By Isaac Asimov

  CHAPTER VIII

  An Earth Man Fights

  Climbing to the top of the rocky slope, we came out upon a vast plateau, covered with green moss. The level surface was broken here and there by low hills; but no other vegetation was in view before us. At a distance, the plain resembled a weird desert covered with green snow.

  It took six days to cross the moss-grown table-land. We finished the white powder we had carried with us on the fourth day; and we found no water on the fifth or sixth. Though, of course, those days were of only eighteen hours each, we were in a sorry plight when we descended into a valley green with the creepers, watered with a crystal stream whose water seemed the sweetest I had ever tasted.

  We ate and rested for two nights and a day, before we went on—though the Mother insisted that the Eternal Ones still followed.

  Then, for seventeen days, we followed down the stream, which was joined by countless tributaries until it became a majestic river. On the seventeenth day, the river flowed into a still greater one, which came down a valley many miles wide, covered with yellow thorn-brush and green creepers, and infested with thousands of the purple balloon-creatures, which I had learned to avoid by keeping to the green jungle, where they could not throw their webs with accuracy.

  We swam the river, and continued down the eastern bank—it was flowing generally south. Five days later we came in view of a triple peak I well remembered.

  Next morning we left the jungle, and climbed up to the little moss-carpeted plateau where I had left the machine. I had feared that it somehow would be gone, or wrecked. But it lay just as I had left it on the day after I landed on the moon. Bright, polished, window-studded wall of armor, between two projecting plates of gleaming copper.

  We reached the door, the Mother gliding beside me.

  Trembling with a great eagerness, I turned the knob and opened it. Everything was in order, just as I had left it. The oxygen cylinders, the batteries, the food refrigerator, the central control table, with the chart lying upon it.

  In a week—if the mechanism worked as I hoped it would—I should be back upon the earth. Back on Long Island. Ready to report to my uncle, and collect the first payment of my fifty thousand a year.

  Still standing on the narrow deck outside the door, I looked down at the Mother.

  She was coiled at my feet. The blue plume upon her golden head seemed to droop. The white mantles were limp, dragging. Her violet eyes, staring up at me, somehow seemed wistful and sad.

  Abruptly an ache sprang into my heart, and my eyes dimmed, so that the bright golden image of her swam before me. I had hardly realized what her companionship had come to mean to me, in our long days together. Strange as her body was, the Mother had come to be almost human in my thoughts. Loyal, courageous, kind—a comrade.

  “You must go with me,” I stammered, in a voice gone oddly husky. “Don’t know whether the machine will ever get back to earth or not. But at least it will carry us out of reach of the Eternal Ones.”

  For the first time, the musical pipings of the Mother seemed broken and uneven, as if with emotion.

  “No. We have been together long, Adventurer. And parting is not easy. But I have a great work. The seed of my kind is in me, and it must not die. The Eternal Ones are near. But I will not give up the battle until I am dead.”

  Abruptly she lifted her tawny length beside me. The limp, pallid mantles were suddenly bright and strong again. They seized my hands in a grasp convulsively tight. The Mother gazed up at my face, for a little time, with deep violet eyes—earnest and lonely and wistful, with the tragedy of her race in them.

  Then she dropped, and glided swiftly away.

  I looked after her with misty eyes, until she was half across the plateau. On her way to the sea, to find a home for the new race she was to rear. With a leaden heart, and an aching constriction in my throat, I climbed through the oval door, into the machine, and fastened it.

  But I did not approach the control table. I stood at the little round windows, watching the Mother gliding away, across the carpet of moss. Going ahead alone . . . the last of her race. . . .

  Then I looked in the other direction, and saw the Eternal Ones. She had said the machines were near. I saw five of them. They were moving swiftly across the plateau, the way we had come.

  Five grotesque machines. Their bright metal cases were larger than those of the ones we had encountered in the city. And their limbs were longer. They stalked like moving towers of metal, each upon four jointed stilts. And long, flail-like limbs dangled from the case of each. Crystal domes crowned them, sparkling in the sunlight—covering, I knew, the feeble gray brains that controlled them. The Eternal Ones.

  Almost at the edge of the plateau they were when I first saw them. I had time easily to finish sealing the door, to close the valve through which I had let out the excess air upon landing, and to drive up through the moon’s atmosphere, toward the white planet.

  But I did not move to do those things. I stood at the window watching, hands clenched so that nails cut into my palms, set teeth biting through my lip.

  * * * *

  Then, as they came on, I moved suddenly, governed not by reason but by an impulse that I could not resist. I opened the door and clambered hastily out, picking up the great copper mace that I had left lying outside.

  And I crouched beside the machine, waiting.

  Looking across the way the Mother had gone, I saw her at the edge of the plateau. A tiny, distant form, upon the green moss. I think she had already seen the machines, and realizing the futility of flight had turned back to face them.

  As the machine-things came by, I was appalled at their size. The metal stilts were fully six feet long, the vulnerable crystal domes eight feet above the ground.

  I leaped up, and struck at the brain of the nearest, as it passed. My blow crushed the transparent shell and the soft brain within it. But the machine toppled toward me, and I fell with it to the ground, cruelly bruised beneath its angular levers.

  One leg was fast beneath it, pinned against the ground, and its weight was so great that I could not immediately extricate myself. But I had clung to the copper bar, and when another machine bent down, as if to examine the fallen one, I seized the weapon with both hands, and placed another fatal blow.

  The second machine fell stiffly beside me, an odd humming sound continuing within it, in such a position that it almost concealed me from the others. I struggled furiously to free my leg, while the other Eternal Ones gathered about, producing curious buzzing sounds.

  At last I was free, and on my knees. Always slow in such an unexpected emergency, the machine-beings had taken no action, though they continued the buzzing.

  One of them sprang toward me as I moved, striking a flailing blow at me with a metal arm. I leaped up at it, avoiding the sweeping blow, and struck its crystal case with the end of the copper bar.

  The bar smashed through the crystal dome, and crushed the frail brain-thing within it. But the machine still moved. It went leaping away across the plateau, its metal limbs still going through the same motions as before I had killed the ruling brain.

  I fell back to the ground, rolling over quickly to avoid its stalking limbs, and struggling to my feet, still holding grimly to the copper bar.

  The remaining machine-beings rushed upon me, flailing out with metal limbs. Desperately, I leaped into the air, rising ten feet above their glistening cases. I came down upon the case of one, beside the crystal dome that housed its brain. I braced my feet and struck, before it could snatch at me with its hooked levers.

  As it fell to the moss, humming, buzzing, and threshing about with bright metal limbs, I leaped from it toward the other, holding the bar before me. But I struck only the metal case, without harming it, and fell from it into the moss.

  Before I could stir, the thing drove its metal limb down upon my body. It struck my chest with a force that was agonizing . . . For a moment, I think, I was unconscious. Then I was coughing up bloody
foam.

  I lay on the red moss, unable to move, the grim realization that I would die breaking over me in a black wave, that swept away even my pain. The metal limb had been lifted from me.

  Then the Mother was beside me. She had come back.

  Her warm smooth furry body was pressed against my side. I saw her violet eyes, misty, appealing. She laid the rose-flushed mantles over my side. The pain went suddenly from it. And I felt new strength, so I could get to my feet, though red mist still came from my nostrils, and I felt a hot stream of blood down my side.

  The remaining machine-monster was bending, reaching for the Mother. I seized the copper mace again, struck a furious blow at the crystal shell that housed its brain. As it crashed down, beating about blindly and madly with its great metal limbs, my new strength went suddenly from me and I fell again, coughing once more.

  A flailing limb struck the Mother a terrific blow, flinging her against the moss many yards away. She crept back to me, brokenly, slowly. Her golden fur was stained with crimson. Her mantles were limp and pale. There was agony in her eyes.

  She came to where I lay, collapsed against my side. Very low, her musical tones reached my ears and died abruptly with a choking sound. She had tried to tell me something, and could not.

  The last of the Eternal Ones that had followed was dead, and presently the machines ceased their humming and buzzing and threshing about upon the moss.

  Through the rest of the day we lay there, side by side, both unable to move. And through the strange night, when the huge white disk of the earth bathed us in silver splendor, and in my delirium I dreamed alternately of my life upon it, and of my adventures upon this weird moon-world, with the Mother.

  When the argent earth was low, and we were cold and drenched with dew, lying very close together to benefit from each other’s warmth, the wild dreams passed. For a few minutes I was coldly sane. I looked back upon a life that had never had any great purpose, that had been lived carelessly, and impulsively. And I was not sorry that I had come to the moon.

  I remained with the Mother until she stirred no more, and no effort on my part could rouse her to life. With tears in my eyes, I buried her beneath the green moss. Then stumbling to the ship I climbed in. Sealing the door and starting the machinery, I felt the ship lift quickly toward the distant beckoning earth.

  * * * *

  When I began writing science fiction myself, I still had had no dates with girls and I made very little effort to deal with women in my stories (see The Early Asimov). I had, however, learned the power of the understated romance from “The Moon Era” and other, less remarkable stories.

  There came a time when I used the device of an implicit love developed across an impossible gap, either social or biological, and underplayed it every time. “The Moon Era,” even if unconsciously, influenced me in my short stories “Sally,” “Lennie,” and “The Ugly Little Boy,” to say nothing of my novel The Naked Sun.

  <>

  * * * *

  In September 1932, I entered Boys High School, but spent the first half of the tenth grade (or as we called it, “the third term,” since my last year at junior high had embraced the first and second terms of high school) at Waverley Annex. This was a small, ramshackle school that served as a reservoir, intended to keep the student body at Boys High itself from overflowing its bounds.

  The Annex contributed a column to the high school newspaper (a “news from Waverley” thing), and I volunteered to write it. I don’t remember how many columns I did, but I do remember that on one occasion there was a mini-stir occasioned by the fact that I had naively reported that we had been let out early one day, when that had been done against the rules. (The head of the Annex found he had to do some explaining, and from then on he read my column before I was allowed to pass it on to the newspaper office.)

  This column was the first occasion on which I had written anything for publication. It was the first time I had ever seen any words of my own in actual print with my own name on them. (In The Early Asimov, I said that an essay I had written in 1934 was my first published piece. That was wrong. I had forgotten about this earlier material, and it is only now, when I am rummaging about in the ancient lumber of my mental attic, that I have come across it.)

  I had assumed when I was in the Annex that once I went to Boys High School itself, I would join the staff of the school paper. It seemed natural to me to do so, since I had no doubt of my writing ability at all. That, however, was never to come to pass.

  For one thing, I found that working on the paper meant all lands of after-school activity, and I couldn’t work after school. I had to get back to the candy store. For another thing, the students on the staff of the paper were all considerably older than myself and seemed to my frightened self to be very cynical and worldly-wise. I was overawed and backed away.

  The result is that I never worked on a school paper, either in high school or in college. My brother, Stanley, however, when it was his turn to be in his teens, was a much more self-possessed youngster. He worked on the papers, was eventually editor of a school paper, made newspapers his life-work, and is now Assistant Publisher of the Long Island Newsday. He is very highly thought of in the field.

  I’m not sorry. I’d have made a rotten reporter and a rottener editor.

  * * * *

  Part Four

  1933

  * * * *

  IN FEBRUARY 1933, I finally went to the main campus of Boys High. I had just passed my thirteenth birthday and was now in the “fourth term.”

  The main campus came, in one way, as a kind of shock. I had been the “smartest kid in class” and very probably the “smartest kid in school” all my school life, right down to and including the Waverley Annex. Now this was no longer so.

  Boys High’s reputation for scholastic excellence was deserved, and there were easily a dozen students there who consistently got higher marks than I did. One student averaged 98 per cent each term, whereas I was pleased if I got as much as a 93.

  After the initial shock, however, I shrugged it off. All the rest were much older than I was, and besides, I had grown old enough to realize that “smartness” is not exactly or entirely equivalent to high marks. It was quite clear to me that some of the youngsters who did very well did so only at the cost of a great deal of sweating over their books. I, of course, continued to depend on what I could get by understanding-at-once and remembering-forever. I had to, as long as so much of my out-of-school time had to be spent in the candy store.

  My cheerful self-appreciation (or my role as “monster of arrogance and conceit” if you’d rather) therefore continued undisturbed.

  My father was far more annoyed than I was at my failure to be at the tiptop of the class. He was particularly irritated at my failure to be elected to the Arista, which was the school’s honor society. Apparently, my school marks qualified me, but—very rightly—this was not enough. You had also to engage in extracurricular activity in order to show yourself a well-rounded person. This I could not do, because extracurricular activity meant staying after school and I couldn’t stay after school. I had to go home and get behind that darned candy-store counter.

  This I never explained to the school authorities, because I didn’t want to seem to be begging to get in. I also never explained it to my father, since it would have saddened him without helping the situation in the least. The candy store had to come first.

  In the course of the year, my father gave up his second candy store. It had seen us through the Hoover administration, and now he found a new, third candy store, at 1312 Decatur Street, in the Ridgewood section of Brooklyn, only a block and a half from the border of Queens. (This meant I could belong to both the Brooklyn Public Library and the Queens Public Library, and you can bet I made use of both.)

  For the first time since we came to the United States ten years before, we moved out of the East New York section. We never returned, even for a visit.

  I am sometimes asked wheth
er I have ever gone back to visit this or that early scene in my life (even, sometimes, whether I have ever visited Petrovichi again), and the answer is always that I have not. I sometimes pass near the place out of business necessity but never out of sentimentality. I don’t have that particular variety.

  In any case, it is far too late to speak of returning to East New York on a nostalgia pilgrimage. The area is now depressed, I understand (though it wasn’t terribly exalted in my day either), and is entirely unrecognizable.

  * * * *

  In high school, I grew even lonelier as a science fiction reader. I continued to find no one else who shared my interest, of course, but in junior high school I had at least created an interest by retelling the stories I read. That didn’t seem possible in the older and soberer atmosphere of a high school with scholastic pretensions.

  (In those days, of course, there was no academic interest whatever in science fiction, and to study it in school would have been in the highest degree unthinkable. It would have been like taking a course in baseball cards. My daughter, however, when she was in high school, took a course in science fiction and was a celebrity because of her last name. Hah!)