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

by Edited By Isaac Asimov

  Somehow, he clawed and dug his way to Anne, all the while cursing fate and the gods of war who had mocked him. A great dead quiet overhung the world. Only the endless rain dripped while riven oaks and blasted bushes gave the dreary, sloshy sound of wet vegetation.

  Anne was dying.

  The realization of that fact was the most heartbreaking moment in his life. He stared dumbly at the face, lovely and white and calming, with whose repose would go half the driving desire of his life. And with that love lost, the trip became as nothing.

  Anne’s eyes opened tiredly. Her lips moved. “Go,” she whispered. “I’ll be with you, darling. Remember what I said when we were coming back from Everest a few weeks ago? There is no beginning or end to anything. All goes on and on, and so will you and I.”

  A moody look misted her eyes, they grew ghostly with something that only a mystic could interpret. If this were death, then death were ecstasy. The effort to speak exhausted her. Duane bent over as her lips moved, and her voice came to him from infinite distances with a last command, faint and barely audible: “Go!” Longing and love, peace and dreams, were in her eyes.

  The embrace that she asked for, the kiss he gave, was the seal of death and the token that parted.

  Beginning, and end. End, or beginning? The words danced a monotonous refrain in his thoughts when he raised himself and stared bitterly ahead, a queer, hurt look warping his expression, as though he tried to understand some simple fact that continued to elude him.

  Why go? Where to? War ran a red smear around the globe. He would be needed. But war had taken Anne from him. Hatred of man and his savage works seethed through his mind, a crimson background to the black tapestry of his thoughts. Go—go—go—that was Anne’s request.

  In the distance, the eerie whine of radio projectiles shrilled anew. Earth shook with blasts and detonations. Fumes of acrid and pungent odor bit into his lungs.

  The air itself was now becoming poisoned.

  The glare of a great conflagration or explosion reddened the sky above New York City, turned the wall of rain into smoky scarlet. His mind was made up. He entered the White Bird.

  The door closed behind him. Burned energy shot from the three rear projectors. The craft swooshed away and up in a great arc and disappeared like a ghost amid rain and gloom, while giant flashes of flame roared up where cities had stood.

  * * * *

  IV.

  The sweep of infinity, so impressive, so implicative of mysteries that mind never had solved, helped to relieve Duane of his misery. He would never forget, wholly; but there were splendor and cosmic riddles all around, and beyond the end—would there be another beginning? What lay out there, past the ultimate stars? Was Dowell correct, and did the circling stars represent only vibrating electrons of a giant atom? And if the extension and expansion of the White Bird took place as predicted, would Dowell follow his progress, watching him grow ever larger and dimmer as he sundered space, until he became invisible because of distance and attenuation?

  Sunlight flooded the White Bird, and the Sun hung radiant and the Moon gleamed, but the skies were a blackness fretted with hordes of stars, not only above, but below, and in every direction; and the traveler felt again the overwhelming strangeness of things, the crushing magnitude of the universe, as Earth dropped away.

  Go he must. All his dreams lay buried upon Earth. As if to symbolize his flight—or was it pursuit?—he stepped up the cosmic-ray power in successive jerks that hurled the White Bird at ever-accelerating velocity toward the constellation Cygnus. Any constellation would serve, but Cygnus, the Swan, was overhead when he burst from the air blanket of Earth, and toward Cygnus he shot.

  Power he would never lack. Space was filled with more power than he could use. Light rays, cosmic rays, infra-red rays, radiations of countless lands were all picked up by his driving mechanism, much as a radio picks up waves, and were transformed into energy that bombarded all matter lying behind his line of flight with a force that hurtled him forward. There was only a theoretical limit to the speed he could attain—whatever limit the nature of things imposed.

  He had not yet, even in his experimental runs, tested the White Bird’s capacity, but he knew that she could exceed the velocity of light. He knew, too, that a metamorphosis would occur when he passed the speed of light rays. According to the law propounded decades ago by Einstein, the White Bird, all its contents, and he himself would undergo a change, lengthening in the direction of flight. How great that extension would be depended upon the velocity itself.

  He could estimate it in advance, but he could never realize it as an experience, simply because he could have nothing for comparison excepting the stars. And expansion would accompany that elongation; enlargement, to a degree beyond computation, along the planes of both the long and the short axes of the White Bird.

  The planets of Saturn, Uranus, Neptune, and Pluto passed behind. Ahead lay a great void of four light-years until the myriad stars of the solar system’s galaxy began with Alpha Centauri. The solar system diminished to a mere point. The bright illumination in the White Bird faded to a glow which was all that the stars provided. Duane did not turn on the interior lights. He preferred this shadowy and soft luminance.

  There was nothing to do, little to calculate, nothing to expect until he approached his goal. The danger of collision remained ever present, but automatic safeguards could be depended upon to swing the White Bird around any important mass that loomed ahead. Later, at the ultimate enormous speed he hoped to attain, scarcely any mass smaller than the Sun would disturb his cruiser. Its attenuation and expansion would be so great, its elongation and atomic separation so tremendous, that it would approximate the nature of a gas and literally pass through intervening bodies.

  Stars paraded. Constellations swung behind. Cygnus vanished, the Big Dipper changed its outlines, the evening star became faint, Betelgeuse and Antares flamed away, second and third-brilliance suns loomed as bright as the old first-magnitude stars. His speed pyramided. He achieved the velocity of light and outdid it. The White Bird swept onward with cyclonic fury. It tore outward in tens, hundreds, and thousands of times the speed of light.

  It streamed beyond the eighth, ninth, and tenth-magnitude stars. Always its velocity increased. The man who watched the controls had a demon’s set expression. He seemed to take a bitter pleasure in increasing the White Bird’s velocity to a pitch that imagination itself could hardly grasp.

  Eight hundred million light-years formed the distance to the farthest nebula. Even if he hurtled at a million times the rate of light, it would require eight hundred years for him to reach the outpost. Even at a light-year per second, more than twenty years would lapse before he achieved the goal. So he continued to draw on universal energy in a steady acceleration that ripped the White Bird through space at a blasting and frightful velocity now mounting toward dozens and hundreds of light-years per second.

  Duane, exhausted, dropped into a dreamless slumber at some point of his journey. The automatic controls were set. Whether they worked he hardly cared. His accumulated hopes, tragedy, and undertaking of the day were above rational analysis.

  The eternal procession continued. He wakened to find stars and suns hurtling past in linear streaks. All the heavens were strange. Not one body did he recognize. Star-point far ahead, streaks parallel with his plane, dwarfing maze of light flecks remotely to his rear—these were intangible realities.

  Blackness deepened ahead. The Milky Way and its spectacular infinitude of suns became as a dream. He bored out of this galaxy in a haze of vaporous extension, burst through eternal voids. Now space was a misty immensity where the nebulae, the island universes, sown afar on a lavish scale, rushed toward him out of the cosmic depth, with glow of birth and procession of star-field units, and blaze of youth and parade of creation. He was a star treader, a traveler who used the starry galaxies for fleet stepping points toward the outer blackness.

  * * * *

  Days and nights pass
ed, but there were no days and nights, only the ceaseless gyration of stars, passing of constellations, traversing of nebulae and clusters and great gaseous patches, in whose center cosmic birth or death might be taking place.

  The White Bird’s speed still increased. That vast gap between the solar system and Alpha Centauri, a distance so enormous that light required four years to cross it, represented a fraction of a second at his present velocity. The fastest lens, the quickest eye, could not have seen his passing. The White Bird fled swifter than a dream, winged through infinity almost as instantly as the mind itself could think of the spaces outward.

  A cyclone stood still compared to the White Bird. The flight of bullets, the flight of meteors, the flight of light, were snails in relation to him. He annihilated the far reaches of the universe at hundreds and thousands of light-years per second. A flash in infinity, a silvery bolt through the black, a ghost that was gone more quickly than the messengers of death, the White Bird bored the known universe, and went on.

  Great constellations, Cygnus itself, which had loomed large ahead, had resolved themselves into streaks shooting by all around him, and had then faded behind to a cluster, a point, a mote, were now nothingness. He hurtled stars and clusters and nebulas, plunged wildly across voids, leaped infinitudes. His galaxy had utterly disappeared.

  And all the while, according to theory, the White Bird underwent a transformation, became longer, stretched away farther and farther as the speed mounted, but Duane would never know, for he was part of that change.

  The White Bird by Earth measurements must be hundreds, perhaps thousands, of miles in length, so attenuated as to be almost vaporous, so nebulous and distorted as to appear like a mist. According to calculation, he must also be annihilating time, for his whole relation to the cosmos had been profoundly altered, and what he perceived as a thousand miles was in reality a thousand light-years, and what seemed to him a second must actually be centuries of Earth time.

  If Dowell were watching, he must have seen the White Bird become as a meteor, a vaporous fog, a gigantic haze, hurtling and expanding toward infinity, until it vanished, since it exceeded the speed of light, and light-rays from it would require hours or years to reach Dowell’s reflector.

  Now it mattered not whether he pierced suns or struck planets. Automatic controls veered the White Bird; but, in theory, at this frightful velocity, and with this vaporous extension, he should pass through apparent solids, much as air blows through a sponge. Power? All space held invisible power. He had not begun to tap the inexhaustible store, but greater speed he feared to achieve lest the White Bird pass completely out of control.

  The crystalite cruiser traversed voids and eons in moments. Nebulae of the twentieth magnitude streaked past. White suns and blue, pale-orange and apple-green stars, colossal tapestry of night blazing with eternal jewels, the procession approached and receded. Blackness deepened ahead. The hordes of star systems grew fewer. The spiral nebulae and the black gas clouds, the island universes and the chaoses of flaming birth decreased. He was nearing the end.

  By only one comparison could he sense the change that was occurring. At first, the galaxies had seemed gigantic, flaming constellations and aggregates of billions of stars. Now they looked like dim and hazy disks of mist; and, by that diminution alone, Duane guessed that his extension and expansion had progressed on an unbelievable scale of magnitude. Had the White Bird surpassed in size the Earth or the solar system or even his galaxy? He would never accurately know, though he were Colossus beyond measurement.

  What would he find? Some scientists held that the universe was expanding and that space was created with this expansion. What would happen if this were true, and if the White Bird at its present velocity passed beyond the limit? Other astronomers held that space was infinite in all directions. Must he go on till death overtook him while he tried to find an end when there was no end?

  Still other prophets suggested that all the bodies of the universe might be only the myriad components of a superatom, beyond which lay a greater universe; and if these proved true, would that superuniverse be only a stepping-stone, only a larger atom in a yet more gigantic cosmos? Where did the end lie? And if those speculative mathematicians were correct who thought that space was subject to a curvature which made it return to its beginnings--

  * * * *

  Duane’s head ached. So vast the possibilities, and so limited his ability to understand! Life so short, and truth so hard to learn! And this the attempt to solve a problem above even the deepest inquiries of mind, exceeding the oldest attempts that thought had made to fathom!

  “Thus far shall ye go, and no farther.” A phrase from dimly remembered teachings drifted through his brain. “Seek, and ye shall find.” What? He wondered. “Men are deceived in their conceits beneath the Moon, and have sought in vain for any patent from oblivion above the Sun!” So a mystic had said.

  Who had guessed closest to truth? Dowell, with his theory about a giant atom-world composed of electronic vibrations represented by all the stars of all the galaxies of all the universe known to man? Einstein? Jeans? Or some obscure prophet? Duane shook his head as though to free it of oppressive weight. These were thoughts too complex and inconceivable for mortal mind, too dangerous for sanity.

  Now the last stars shone close, and streaked by, and one emerald sun marked the outpost of space.

  Remotely ahead came blackness, solid, absolute blackness. Behind lay Earth and Sun, stars and constellations, galaxies and star-fields, a hundred million strong, billions of billions of stars, trillions of trillions of miles, enormity comprehensible solely in terms of the stellar mathematics of astrophysics. The young emerald sun, flaming in the radiant beauty of birth, swirled by and became one with the billions of billions of stars behind. Duane looked back. There was a vast and dwindling conglomeration of points of light that receded to haze, to a vague luminousness, and that mysteriously was blotted out. The phenomenon puzzled him until he thought of one explanation—light rays had not yet penetrated thus far!

  No loneliness, no fear of darkness, no feeling of utter helplessness in the grip of frightful forces and in the presence of far places and alien lands, no longing for the sweet companionship of Anne, such as now overwhelmed him, had ever before combined to appall in such magnitude any mortal creature. The blackness everywhere was solid, so complete that his eyes ached, and not one part of his ship could he discern, not one object, not even the hand that he held before his eyes.

  A horror of that infinite blackness, that absolute void, gripped him, and he stumbled about with something akin to blind panic in an effort to find the interior-lighting controls. The glow comforted him, until he looked at his velocity dial. The speed of the White Bird was falling off swiftly!

  Was this immensity so vacant that there were not even cosmic radiations to supply him with power? Or was some unknown but terrific drag slowing him down? Would the White Bird come to inertia and he to death in this black void? What forces prevailed here?

  And what was the nature of that dim and shadowy glow, like a pale fog, that gradually appeared in place of a void blacker than coal?

  Hope surged anew through the voyager, an uncontrollable excitement gripped him, he stared with painful intensity at the far-away mist. Had he followed a curvature of space and did he now approach his own universe? Had the White Bird leaped some titanic chasm to a new universe? Did he plunge toward that enormous atom imagined by Dowell? Was he now Colossus, exceeding man’s deepest dream of giantism?

  Colossal speculations of a colossal journey!

  The mist drew closer. The White Bird’s velocity fell to thousands, hundreds, and now only tens of light-years per second. Duane experienced a curious buoyancy and dizziness. He felt as if unfamiliar power and forces were gathering him in. Weakness overcame him. The play of foreign laws inclosed him. His sensations baffled analysis. His mind, governed still by Earth principles, could not understand what was happening. A whirling confusion as though his
brain were an eddying mist enveloped him. Darkness and light divided his course. He sensed a shudder and a trembling of the White Bird as if it were a deep-sea creature caught in tides and forced toward the surface.

  A shock followed by a violent jolt stunned him.

  He had literally burst space.

  * * * *

  V.

  When Duane’s dazed faculties began to function again, it was with a feeling of the deepest awe that he stared around and tried to comprehend what had happened. Realization came slowly, and he found it difficult even to decipher his surroundings.

  Light flooded his compartment, bright white light that was curiously restful and soothing to his eyes, unlike the glare of the Sun. The White Bird rested on a flat plain of what looked like glass, perhaps a hundred yards long and ten wide. Far below him he saw a second plain, mahogany-colored, which swept away in the distance, then stopped at a sheer cliff that fell an unknown distance down toward the blur of what seemed to be solid ground. From the second level rose two brasslike towers that supported the glassy oblong upon which the White Bird rested.