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

by Edited By Isaac Asimov

  “Yes, I’m familiar with them and some others,” Duane commented.

  “No doubt. But nebulae and dark spots from the thirty-first to fortieth magnitudes do not exist, though they should. That may mean any of several possible explanations. Perhaps the universe has stopped expanding. Perhaps it is stationary, or even contracting now. Or if Einstein was right, perhaps the outer star-clusters have swerved through the curvature of space so that they are now approaching us instead of receding. That would account for the surprising number of aggregates in the twenty-ninth to thirty-first magnitudes. Possibly the oldest theory is correct, but some unknown set of factors prevents us from seeing galaxies beyond the thirty-first order. There are other possibilities.”

  “What’s your guess?”

  “I don’t know,” Dowell replied querulously. “But there is a fourth alternative that has almost driven me mad just to think about.”

  “So? What’s this one?”

  Dowell polished his glasses. “I don’t know whether I can explain it, the concept is so gigantic. Well, here goes: You are familiar with the atomic theories. Has it ever occurred to you that all the billions of stars that form all the millions of nebulae and galaxies of our whole universe might be only the electrons of a superatom upon which vast beings might exist as we dwell upon the surface of Earth? That concept would explain the absence of nebulae beyond the thirty-first magnitude.

  “From there on would be an outer shell, or an invisible plane of energy and tension that incloses our universe but is substantial enough for beings to live on. There is no such thing as solid earth. The apparently solid matter we are standing on is, ultimately, atoms, electrons, vibration, with spaces between each particle comparatively as great as those between the stars and galaxies.”

  The voice of the astronomer trembled in presenting this tremendous theme. “Think what might happen if some one from Earth could burst through that superatom!”

  Duane pondered. “It’s a staggering conception. If you carry it out to its limit, that giant atom might be only one of billions of other atom-worlds on a scale we can’t even begin to imagine, and all that super-universe forming—what?”

  “A molecule! And there might be on that still vaster universe still more tremendous beings! And that molecule might be only one of billions of other molecules sown through trillions of trillions of light-years of space and forming even--”

  “Don’t!” Duane cried. “It’s too big! I can hardly grasp it!”

  He stared at the reflector. When sunset came, its vast disk would gather the light of stars from far places, light that had been traveling since land boiled out of steaming seas and formed continents on young Earth. Lights of infinity, the stars would record their being upon plates for men like Dowell to analyze.

  * * * *

  In the old days, the prophets had looked at the night sky and bowed to God who made Earth the center of the universe of fixed stars. Then the scientists had come to prove that the Sun was the center only of a planetary system that moved in a universe. Then the astronomers had shown that a spiral haze in Andromeda was a galactic universe 800,000 light-years away, and that the whole Milky Way was only a galaxy among thousands.

  So the roll of star-fields mounted, and the boundaries swept outward, and men’s imaginations, roving afar, found new glory while the universe expanded and its depth staggered understanding. Beyond the stars lay nebulae, gaseous and spiral and helical, with vast voids between; until by 1933, some 30,000,000 galaxies were identified in a range of 200,000,000 light-years; and by Duane’s time, with the Mount Everest telescope, the range had risen to over 800,000,000 light-years, comprising 150,000,000 galaxies, each composed of millions of stars.

  “Tell me,” Dowell requested, “how is the White Bird coming along? Is she about ready? It was stupid of me to bore you with my guesswork.”

  “Don’t mention it,” Duane answered. “It wasn’t dull. The mere idea of limitless space is as exciting as life itself. As for the White Bird, she’ll be done by October. The power-converters are being installed now. I think that a preliminary test can be made in September.”

  “I see. Perhaps you’ll have the honor of informing us astronomers what the other universe really is like!”

  Duane retorted: “Long before then, you’ll have worked out the one theory that my voyage will only prove to be true. I still wonder if the theory you mentioned a while ago could be right. And what would happen if the White Bird could carry us through?”

  “If there were beings on that giant atom, they would never see you, so infinitesimal would you be. We have never seen an electron, let alone anything that might be on an electron. And you could never get there in a million lifetimes even at the speed of light.”

  “True,” Duane answered thoughtfully, “but I haven’t told you the whole story. The White Bird draws on intra-spatial emanations and radiations. It has unlimited power. It should be able to reach a maximum velocity of thousands of light-years, per second!”

  “What!” shrilled Dowell, his face shining with excitement. “Do you realize what that means? You and the White Bird would extend in the direction of flight until you were as tenuous as a gas and elongated to thousands or even millions of times your first proportion! The ship would swell sidewise as well from the transverse energy-pull of the universe! You might become huger than Earth, or the solar system, or even our galaxy! You would be Colossus himself! And you would never realize any change because you would have nothing for comparison! Duane, if you do it, you may burst through to that giant atom, and you would be visible to, and you could perceive, whatever was on it!”

  Duane, overwhelmed, looked dreamy-eyed. “Vast concepts!” he murmured. “They’re too much for my brain.”

  “Colossus!” Dowell half whispered, as though this vision, this apex of cosmic conjecture, dominated his mind and exerted a hypnotic fascination. “Colossus of time, space, and matter!”

  “Even the mention of such a journey appalls me.”

  “I wish I could go with you.”

  “Nothing would please me better.”

  “I know, but if Anne is along—by the way, I suppose you would like to see Anne?”

  Duane, the chain of cosmic theory broken, made gestures of mock deprecation, “Oh, my, no! Anne? Why, I merely came from America to make sure that Mount Everest was still standing.”

  “I like that!” A musical but at the moment sarcastic voice broke in. “So it’s Mount Everest you’re here to see and not me? Well, you can have Mount Everest.” With truly feminine pique, the girl who had entered banged the door as she went out.

  Anne was not a beauty in the sense of Mona Lisa or a movie star. She had above all animation of expression, clearness of thought, and more than average appeal. Her dynamic qualities were masculine wit, reason, energy, originality. Her aesthetic characteristics were feminine changeability, the figure of a patrician, Nordic features with mahogany-colored hair, a rhythmic stride and beauty of motion.

  Probably she was most effective when annoyed as at present, for the triumph of emotion over reason lent her face a kind of hectic charm, and she made a study of strength and weakness.

  Duane turned to Dowell. “If you will excuse me, I’ll try to make my peace. I-”

  “Go right ahead!”

  It took little time to find Anne. It required patience to pacify her. He need not have done so, but he found delight in playing up to her mood. The game of pursuit and the world of pretense would never change, however long Earth wore away to old age.

  * * * *

  II.

  The holidays of August drew to a close. September came in with a burst of riotous colors through forest and hills. Work on the White Bird came to an end. Professor Dowell knew of its imminent launching. So did Anne. The world did not. Duane figured that there would be ample time to tell the world after, of success or failure.

  It was a windless evening whose chill approached frost when he and Anne stood beside the White Bird at Haven
side, north of New York.

  “Almost anything can happen,” Duane said gravely. “The ship may not work, something might go wrong, or we might run into dangers beyond our knowledge. Do you know what you are letting yourself in for?”

  Anne looked at him with slightly disgusted eyes. “I’m not a child. Forget this protective business. Let’s go.”

  Duane sighed. Anne’s realism was disconcerting.

  The girl’s eyes sparkled as she looked at the White Bird. “Only you could have built such a thing of beauty,” she said and impulsively clung to Duane. She darted off as he made a futile grab and laughed at him, teasing, “That wasn’t an invitation, Duane!”

  “The devil it wasn’t!” Duane shouted in exasperation and dived after the fleet-footed girl. Breathless they came to the White Bird’s entrance.

  The ship lay long and low in the light of the full moon. It shone with a glow like phosphorus. A hundred feet in length, the cylinder, never more than ten feet thick, tapered to points. Crystalite composed its shell— crystalite, that strange element numbered ninety-nine. Invented by chemists, it had the transparency of glass, the color of platinum, and a higher tensile strength than any other metal, combined with a melting point above 6,0000 C.

  The White Bird’s interior contained only essentials: a pilot room; a cabin; a supply room; and the front and rear power compartments. The torpedo looked bizarre, for its shell was transparent, but the inner walls dividing room from room were of vanachrome, that thin, rubbery steel which was virtually indestructible.

  To look at the White Bird was to look into a house like a glass cylinder and see the rooms within, though, from within, no room could be seen from any other room.

  “I’ll never get over this funny arrangement,” Anne remarked as they entered. “The whole world can look inside, but I have to walk from room to room to see what’s there.”

  “Not a bad idea,” Duane answered cheerfully. Anne’s eyelids went down. Duane fidgeted. He suddenly stated, “Let’s go!” and pushed a button.

  The White Bird curved up from the ground like a real bird soaring after a dive.

  “Oh!” exclaimed Anne. “You should have warned me!” Her face sobered. The great adventure had begun. “Isn’t it strange”?” she asked in a very small voice and with very big eyes.

  “It’s a miracle,” Duane answered. His fingers caressed the dials as he spoke. “Just to think that a simple condenser-transformer picks up cosmic radiations all around us, turns them to power and drives us on. Power by radio, more power than we could ever use, out of thin air!”

  Anne emerged from her awe, but she seemed a different girl with more of the poetic about her. There was indeed a new luminous quality to her face while she took in the impressive spectacle of the skies.

  The White Bird, at steadily mounting speed, passed beyond the stratosphere.

  Above them, the sky darkened and blackened. Stars brightened to a brilliance that dazzled the eyes.

  Then the Sun of the solar system became visible beyond Earth, and the light of the Sun and its reflected glare from Earth and Moon bathed the White Bird in a flood of radiance so bright that Duane and Anne donned goggles, and the craft’s interior became perceptibly warmer in spite of the crystalite hull.

  There was a glory to the skies, a spacious sweep, an infinite majesty of stars that ranged from brilliant white to faint and far-away orange, from pale blue to flame red and emerald green, which silenced the voyagers by its cosmic beauty.

  * * * *

  It was long before either traveler spoke, and steadily the White Bird fled outward, erasing the way to the Moon in ever faster time.

  Anne broke the reverie. She waved her hand toward the universe. “If all this affects us so much,” she said simply, “what would we feel out there?” She pointed toward the faintest star, out where the spiral nebulae began in Andromeda.

  “When I go there, perhaps I can answer then,” Duane replied.

  A dreamy look entered Anne’s eyes, and they shone with an almost mystical fervor. “I have a queer idea, Duane. Maybe it wouldn’t be so different from Earth. Back home, everything is related to something else. The same trees grow every spring. The same Sun rises and the days are always alike. Don’t look so skeptical—you know what I mean. Of course they aren’t the same trees, and the days are separated by time, and there aren’t any two persons alike, but, just the same, nature repeats herself, and there seems to be some sort of pattern to everything, a pattern that unites everything and recurs again and again.” She ended with a breathless rush of words.

  “I think you’re right,” Duane mused, “but who knows? I don’t. I don’t suppose any one will ever know, unless he can go out there, where the stars end.”

  “Why don’t we?” A hectic note heightened Anne’s voice, and her cheeks flushed with excitement.

  “Why don’t we?” Duane echoed. “Why—I mentioned it to Professor Dowell and we joked about it, but I never really expected to go beyond the planets.”

  Mysterious raptures burned in Anne’s eyes. “I wonder what’s beyond the stars?”

  That question which the wisest philosophers never have been able to answer, and the most learned astronomers have fretted in vain to solve, brought only reflective silence from Duane for a long period.

  “I don’t know,” he said at last. “Professor Dowell thinks I might break through and discover that our whole universe is just an atom, and the great atom might be only one world among billions forming a still more gigantic molecule. Why, Anne, if he’s right-”

  Anne looked dazed. “What an idea! You’ll go mad thinking about it. Why, it gives me the creeps!”

  “I don’t wonder!”

  “I once took a course in biology. If we are essentially like matter, then electrons make atoms that form cells that compose organs which are part of a body. If that’s so, Duane, and you got on the giant atom-world, and could go still farther, you might eventually come out on a vast living organism of which Earth is merely part of a single cell.”

  “Now you’re giving me the creeps! Don’t think about it. The idea is maddening. It’s all I can do just to picture the giant atom!”

  Anne went on recklessly, with morbid mischief, “Darling, maybe some one like you on one of those invisible particles inside you is traveling outward now on a space ship and is going to burst through on a cell-”

  “Anne!”

  “—and you’ll feel just a little twitch in your side, and maybe he’ll keep on going and pop out of your brain finally and-”

  Duane stopped this merciless and all-too-vivid description by the simple process of kissing Anne’s inviting lips.

  “Oh!” She broke away. “What a man! Is that all you think about?”

  “Sure, when I’m with you!” he answered candidly; and then, serious again: “But don’t forget, Anne, that the world is a powder mine right now. If war comes, all trips are off.”

  “War!” she blazed. “You would agree to murder and give up the pursuit of something that will mean more than all the wars in history? I will never love you for that!”

  Duane kept a thoughtful silence.

  * * * *

  Visions beyond infinity and past eternity changed gradually to speculation about the Moon, which loomed ever larger overhead. The buoyant feeling that Duane and Anne should have experienced as they drew away from the attraction of gravitation did not materialize, since the speed of the White Bird counteracted it.

  The Moon swelled, cut off a fiftieth, a tenth, a fifth of the sky above. Their viewpoint modified. Instead of flying upward, they found themselves falling. The new perspectives of space gave rise to new experiences and unfamiliar sensations. They had been shooting upward from Earth. Now they were descending toward the Moon.

  Duane cut off their power. The White Bird fell at furious speed. He turned on the forward repellers, unloosing upon the Moon’s surface an invisible bombardment of energy that almost counterbalanced their speed.

  The Whit
e Bird plunged less rapidly, slowed, and finally hung a few thousand feet above the Moon.

  “Only Doré could have dreamed it!” exclaimed Anne.

  Great craters pitted its surface. Masses of slag and lava flowed down the sides of extinct mountains, and fissures like the marks of giants’ swords marred its lowlands.

  Dead sea bottoms and barren continents alone suggested life of long ago; these, and certain clusters that might have been cities; masses of granite, blocks of marble and basalt, quartz, and silica, arranged in geometric formations. Were these ruinous heaps the remains of cities? Had a civilization flourished here, of a race that had perished, leaving only its works to crumble beneath the everlasting encroachments of time? What legends and records, achievements and histories might lie beneath those shards?