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

by Edited By Isaac Asimov

  “One of our exploring flyers reported that he thought he saw signs of life on a small planet of our system.” Here the consecutive pictures broke, and a sight of the giant globe Qthyalos flashed forth alone, then the image of its sun and hundreds of large and small planets that made a solar system upon a huge scale; then the great sweep of a galaxy, and beyond this island universe—nebula after nebula, star-field on star-field, flaming gas and black voids, soaring outward and deepening afar toward infinity, the eternal abyss.

  Duane, humble in the presence of this immensity so like his own universe but of so immeasurably a more stupendous range, watched with almost glazed eyes the resumption of the story.

  “Only recently have we controlled optical and intra-spatial laws to such a degree that we could bring any planet of our system into as close focus as we wished. We have been studying one planet or more nightly for the past year, but discovered no signs of life until the explorer reported today on Valadom, which we studied through a telescope a while ago.

  “We had intended to send scientists there to obtain specimens of these curious little creatures, who seem to be much like us, for laboratory study and analysis. There are several difficulties in the way. One is their tiny size. Judging by the one we saw, they can be no larger than you. Consequently, if we landed, they would probably be so paralyzed by fright that they would run away and hide. We might step on thousands of them without ever realizing it. Great pains would be needed to capture even one, and he would be likely to be badly damaged or fear-filled so as to be useless to us.

  “We could not camp there. It is doubtful if we could live on that small asteroid. The air blanket would extend, perhaps, no higher than our heads. Even if we took advantage of all our wisdom, conditions would be most unfavorable for observation. Our purpose would not be wholly answered by observation from here. We can watch actions, but we cannot discover their past, interpret their thoughts, examine their true nature, or obtain more than a general idea of their life.”

  This long sequence, much of it obscure and only guessed at by Duane because of the abstract quality of the pictures which resulted from the Titan’s attempt to visualize concepts, seemed to be leading up to a definite end.

  * * * *

  The five conferred among themselves, their miens dignified and stately with an austerity that ascetics would have envied. Like sculpture of gods, like the chiseled, enigmatic heads of Easter Island, like uncrowned rulers debating the fate of empires, and with expressions immobile to a degree that seemed stony, the Cyclopean beings conversed in voices that quaked like thunder, roaring in Duane’s ears, cataclysmic volumes of resonance. From this table top, now that the shining giants stood erect, they looked like figures of hewn marble slashed from mountains.

  Fleetingly, he thought of plunging into the White Bird and rocketing off, but he knew the gamble would not win. The heads in conclave miles above, the horizon-reaching sweep of floor and apparatus and devices, the seemingly boundless space overhead, offered no hope of escape. Then the stone-hard, mercury-glistening head of the astronomer bent toward him in a rush that sent violent currents of air whirling across the table, and the lordly entity spoke words that he could not understand, but whose import was translated by the mind panel.

  “Since it is unwise to explore Valadom, and difficult to obtain a little creature, we have decided to dissect you, instead, and discover how you work, what you are made of, and how you react.”

  The Titan enunciated doom as if he conferred an honor. His expression was imperturbable. Why he should have announced to the victim his purpose remained a riddle, unless he had access to power beyond Duane’s knowledge, or unless the fervor of scientific inquiry obsessed him, and he saw goals but forgot intermediaries.

  Whatever the reason, it mattered little to Duane. His life hung at stake. He was no more than a germ, an insect, a minute creature, a worm, to these Titans. There was neither cruelty, enmity, nor any other emotion in the statement. To them, it was a simple fact. Here stood a little creature who stimulated their curiosity. He would make a splendid laboratory specimen. They did not like him or resent him. They had no feeling about him. The cause of knowledge would be far advanced by the dissection and analysis of this specimen of a new species.

  The Earth exile, the chill of horror overcoming him at his prospective fate, strove to think. Was this to be the reward of his stellar Odyssey? This bitter death in foreign places to be the last goal? This going out, not in glory, but ignominiously, with not so much quickness and almost as little distinction as the lowliest insect?

  He would make a run for it at the end, a dash that at least would win him fast oblivion in a snap of those monstrous fingers. Better to be slapped into pulp than to linger under the knife. But these were Titans dominated wholly by mind and its pursuits. If he could only appeal to their rational nature!

  Upon the reflector appeared the ideas set up by his chain of thought, the appeal and defense that he mentally projected:

  “Titans! I am not one of the little creatures of Valadom! You may put me under the microscope and the knife, but you will still know nothing of how the little creatures work!”

  The master of the microscope lowered the mammoth and marmoreal sculpture of his flat-backed head, donned a metal cap, and with brooding visage replied through thought-presentation: “It does not matter. We find out how you work, and later how the little creatures work, as well.”

  Disheartened, Duane tried again. “My death will not serve you, Titans! You will discover what I am made of, but only that, and you know little of my life!”

  He had made a bad mistake, a tactical blunder, and he realized it the instant he spoke. Sweat oozed out on his forehead. The biologist-Titan destroyed his plea with: “We do not plan to end you for some time. We will keep you under observation for experiments in the laboratory for as long as may be necessary until we have exhausted your animate being. Then we will take you apart.”

  Only the aims of high endeavor lightened the black, enormous eyes. No feeling marred their serenity and repose as the sentence of death remained.

  Discouraged, but with will indomitable while life lasted, and with wits sharpened by this intellectual battle for preservation, Duane made a new shift in the game. “Titans! I am like you. I think, I feel, I am as you are! Why then dissect me? I differ principally in size from you! Would you dismember one of your own race?”

  “We have taken apart enough beings among ourselves to find out what causes us to be what we are,” came the unexpected and disillusioning response. “You resemble us, but exact study of everything in you will be necessary to prove the similarities and differences between us. Your head has a strange shape. Thus your brain cannot function quite like ours.”

  The web tightened. They closed each argument as quickly as he advanced it. His sole comfort was their consent to listen, dispassionately, detached, impersonal, weighing his reasons for their intrinsic validity. He had one chance left, short of a fatal dash, and he put all his persuasive mental resources into the gamble.

  “Titans! I will make a bargain with you! Let me enter my cosmocraft and depart. I will go to Valadom! I will live among the little people. I will stay there for a year. I will learn their language, study their customs and history, interpret their life. At the end of a year, I will return and give you all the knowledge I have obtained. Furthermore, I will bring back at least one dead specimen of the little people for you to examine. All this I promise, Titans, in return for two conditions—you will agree not to harm me when I return, and you will agree not to harm the little people of Valadom.”

  * * * *

  The five grave giants, like judges studying evidence, considered his proposal. He sensed the biologist arguing against him, and in favor of immediate experimentation, since specimens of the little creatures might be obtained later. The astronomer favored his case, for he would enable them without trouble to obtain a complete record of Valadom, and in the year intervening they could pursue researches in
to other parts of the universe. The three remaining giants appeared to show little preference which way the discussion ended.

  Duane, tense and drawn, waited for their decision. There was a grotesque quality to this situation, something both superhuman and supernormal, something both familiar and foreign, something gigantically dissimilar between these Cyclopean conquerors with their minds that thirsted for knowledge alone, and he himself, a mite to them, but pleading for his existence—he, who in his own search for the answer to the mystery of things had performed the feat of bursting through a universe and leaving it but an atom behind. Colossus though he had become, he was only an insect to them! Titanic though they seemed, were they only submicroscopic, submeasurable motes in the fathomless molecule beyond?

  The astronomer prepared to reply, and Duane’s eyes hovered on the reflector; a lone, small figure against fate and the gods, he watched judgment.

  “Little creature, we have decided that the cause of knowledge will be furthered better and quicker by your going to Valadom and returning here, than by our analyzing you now. We will allow you to proceed on your way, but you must return according to your agreement in a year. Go!”

  Shaking in the nervous let-down that followed reprieve, he said: “I thank you, Titans. What pledge will you have?”

  “Pledge? Truth showed in your thoughts. If it had not, we would not let you depart. Do you know the way to Valadom?”

  “No.”

  The astronomer flashed upon the screen picture after picture of the skies, the principal stars, Valadom and Qthyalos and their system, until Duane had the necessary directions. Then he bowed to those great beings, who, incalculable, thinking thoughts beyond his grasp, and preserving a silence more stately than the repose of a deserted cathedral, watched him depart.

  Neither well-wishing nor friendly farewell attended his going. The flat-backed heads of sloping brow, the stern lips, the chins and noses of deific disdain, the cheek bones of godlike pride, the faces of sexless radiance, the black, tremendous eyes from whose wells shone the vision of destroying angels, these betrayed unhuman, abstract interest, and nothing more.

  The White Bird soared skyward in a beautiful arc. The heads of the Titans dropped away. The horizon-sweeping immensity of the observatory fell behind, and became like an ordinary room, with beings of generally anthropomorphic nature standing amid devices and structures of puzzling design. The austere faces of the giants blurred to points as the wanderer of infinity rocketed outward through the open roof in a trajectory that followed the league-long telescope.

  It gave him a queazy sensation to realize that he himself, could he see himself with the eyes of man, must be Colossus multi-magnified as a result of the transmutation that had occurred when he annihilated space and sundered his universe, yet only a thumbnail pygmy to them, who were nothing compared with the molecule beyond!

  His last impression of the lordly dwellers on Qthyalos was one of profound reverence mingled with fruitless speculation. Who they were and what their nature remained almost as insoluble conjectures as when he first saw them. Then darkness enfolded him and he burst through the dome where it lay open for the telescope.

  * * * *

  VII.

  Now there were star-fields again, and the ceaseless throngs shone above, and the skies hung strange and alien, ablaze with infinite brilliant jewels. On the rim of the northern horizon sank a pale-gray moon, and on the edge of a southern sea sank a moon of orange.

  As the White Bird soared, Duane looked back. The surface of Qthyalos, in the shadow of night and under the canopy of stars, stretched vast, dim, and mysterious. There were mountain ranges striking stark and bold five thousand miles and more into the citadels of space, peaks of terrific bleakness until their ice-crowns of naked and blue-white grandeur blocked the skies beyond them.

  The observatory itself stood on a precipice whose sides were chasms plunging sheer through sooty gulfs. There were cities on the plains and in the valleys, monstrous metropolises, dark towers out of fable, erections on titanic scale that tortured vision with illusions of a new geometry, dream cities as unreal as the domes of Xanadu, and assaulting the skies themselves with their topmost and almost topless towers.

  There were lakes as large as seas, and seas that curved like the arc of heaven. There were islands the size of continents, and continents of un-guessable extent.

  Colossal lords of a colossal planet! Qthyalos, a single planet huger than the universe, faded, with all its mysteries and all its visionary wonder, farther and ever farther behind. Its mass became a dark puzzle, but its rim brightened sharply and the edge of a dazzling sun crept out.

  The White Bird sped on, and the central sun emerged into the radiant glory, a white-hot orb that compared with Qthyalos as a balloon to a ballbearing. There were great planets and multiple moons and a host of asteroids behind, on the opposite side of this system; and ahead shone other planets and moons against the tapestry of space; and among them glimmered Valadom, a mere asteroid to Titan, a sphere as big as Earth to Duane’s sense of values.

  The White Bird winged onward in accelerating tempo that shot her toward her goal. Scarcely an hour could have lapsed as his senses recorded time before Valadom became discernible as a tiny globe. Beyond it, the enormous sweep of constellations sprinkled infinity; and beyond the riotous blaze glowed the haze of nebulae where the celestial parade began of outward-flung galaxies in the remote depths and recesses of this cosmos. Twin stars and suns of purple and white and gold, myriad moons and planets of silvery splendor, space and night held unrivaled beauty, majesty, and glory, a spectacular display that challenged the scope of imagination, and the White Bird only a streaming blur amid the immensities and infinitudes.

  He felt tempted to trick the Titans; to blast his way outward and discover the final organism or farthest megacosmos, to test Dowell’s theory in its ultimate scope. His pledge to the Titans prevailed.

  Yet it was with a sense of cosmic weariness that Duane approached Valadom. The everlasting procession of stars and galactic universes began to pall. Who could say what lay beyond the utmost outpost? Beyond this cosmos—another atom on a larger scale? A cell or molecule? Or night eternal? Or mysterious limitations where space finally ceased? His mind withdrew from visions too vast, speculations where madness lay.

  Oddly, he felt a gladness as Valadom loomed large, the gladness of the wanderer homeward bound from voyages afar. The blinding sun shone remotely behind, yet still far larger than the Sun of Earth; and to one side hung Qthyalos, abode of Titans; and, in relation to them, Valadom seemed hardly so much as a pin point, but it loomed fully the size of Earth.

  Duane’s thoughts recurred to Anne with a kind of sad longing for her companionship. So well she would have changed the loneliness of his travels! So sweet a comfort she would have been! But irrecoverable years in a universe more distant than Carcosa and Hali divided him from the dead dream of love.

  Valadom swept close. Moody, the expression of an old man in his youthful eyes, Duane watched the harbor draw nigh. He could not rid himself of the feeling that the Titans watched his progress through their telescopic and ultra-optical equipment; and the sense of their invisible presence billions of miles behind was a depressant only partly relieved by his impression of another presence, ghostly, intangible, elusive.

  But over Valadom lay quiet; the quiet of dawn above the seas and continents toward which he dropped; and peace became part of his mood. His thoughts drifted to the lovely and forlorn creature he had watched make her obeisance to the morning. Did she still recline beside the pool? Or had she danced her way back to lover or family or mate? Duane was startled by his interest and resentment. Preposterous! He did not even know the nature of this child of Valadom, and might never find her, yet he dreamed while the planet rushed near.

  Seas outlined themselves against land masses. He recognized the topography as he recalled it in the Titans’ reflector. Swiftly the White Bird settled, too swiftly. He unloosed the triple fore project
ors to break his fall. The White Bird leveled away high over a tossing sea, and headed westward until the coasts of a continent swam out of azure mist.

  There were dots on the ocean below—atolls or flotsam or small craft? He could not tell and did not pause. The ramparts of a village or city rose on a bay. Civilization? Or savagery? Did it indicate rising culture and progress, or decline from a peak surpassed? Time might answer; now, he had only a desire, curiously compelling, to reach the glade he had seen. The village flowed underneath, its architecture analogous to that of the Greeks—temple and dwelling, shrine and inn, lying white and pagan in the dawn.

  The White Bird dipped toward the surrounding forest, for here should lie the haven he sought. The dark thread of a river wound its way seaward in the distance. The forest rushed up. The White Bird settled toward a greensward between two ridges, which he recognized immediately as the vista he had scrutinized from Qthyalos. Here lay the pool, a disk of emerald.

  The White Bird came to rest upon grasses and lush flowers amid trees of fantastic shape. The loose-jointed figure of the Earth man slouched out.