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

by Edited By Isaac Asimov

  * * * *

  Morning had broken. The sun stood high, Qthyalos a sphere of misty beauty beside it. A soft wind blew, and he breathed deeply of that fresh, fragrant elixir. Sounds came from the forest, strange songs of unknown birds and cries of hidden beasts. Moths of brilliant coloring made splashes of cerise and green-gold, lemon and indigo and ebony; one long-beaked bird, imperial purple with markings of pomegranate red, flew past, a lovely thing until it croaked harshly.

  Everywhere rose curious vegetation; flower-capped stalks; ferns of feathery grace; lichens and great single leaves; coniferous trees; weird trunks and stems from which clusters of berries, fruit, nuts, and blossoms hung; buds like bursting seed pods; thick moss. The ground was a carpet where green grew the grasses, and over them wealth of blooms; orchids that lifted hot faces to the sun; petals of silver freaked with black, and of turquoise, of cinnamon, of pistachio, and blood; a hectic riot wherein colors of fever and tones of coolness splashed the landscape.

  The wanderer, amid this drowsy paradise, where dreams faded and aspirations vanished in the presence of nature’s extravagance, trod his way toward the pool. Through foliage and frondage and leafy patch, with sunlight fretting arabesques of light and shadow athwart his path, he sauntered on, wearily, hesitantly, but with active curiosity.

  There was never so exquisite a peace as this, so ineffable a haven, and the rising music of birds became a choir that only deepened the repose. Then a voice caroled, a rich, glad hymn to the sun, soaring and falling, deepening with ecstasy and dreamful of rapture. His mood responded to the song and the invisible singer. As he wove his way through the forest, the recollection of Anne rose like a specter hovering behind the lyrical and golden-throated phrases.

  Then he came to the edge of the glade and saw the girl. She stood beside the pool. She laughed at the sky and the sun, the land and the waters. Her young face flushed in the bloom of youth. Her emerald hair hung silken around her throat and shoulders. She sang for the glory of living, the breathless adoration of being, and her voice warbled gladness. She whirled in light abandon, and the hair rippled across her back and shimmered against the glow of her skin.

  For a long minute, Duane dwelt on the beauty of her figure and her dance, the grace of her rhythm, before he stepped out.

  Exile from Earth and child of Valadom, they faced each other. The dance came to an abrupt end. Her amber eyes grew wide and startled, questioning the intruder. Hesitantly, he stepped a pace forward and greeted the girl with hands spread in token of peace.

  Her lips parted and her eyes, showing neither the fear nor the mistrust that he might have expected, shone of something secret, as if to greet some dimly remembered and half-forgotten friend of long ago.

  * * * *

  What made “Colossus” a thought-variant was its reversal of a cliché. Plots had frequently involved the shrinking of a hero to the level where ordinary atoms became solar systems, but here the hero rose to the level where the whole Universe was an atom (inspired by the Eddington quotation with which the story begins).

  The story was very successful, [“Colossus” has, as I look back on it now, an interestingly distorted preview of World War II, which was to start five and a half years after its appearance. Japan was the aggressor, launching war with a sneak attack—after all, it was already invading China at the time the story was written—and there is a curious mention of Stalingrad. There is, however, no reference at all to Germany, and Great Britain is on Japan’s side—as, indeed, it seemed to be in the early 1930s.] and the readers demanded a sequel. Wandrei had clearly planned for one in writing the story, and the sequel appeared as “Colossus Eternal,” in the December 1934 issue of Astounding Stories.

  Yet, although I liked “Colossus” and remembered it well enough to want to include it here, I had begun to refuse to accept stories that did not meet my stiffening standards of scientific accuracy. I knew that, according to Einstein’s theory of relativity, the speed of light could not be surpassed, and already, by the age of fourteen, I was not ready to accept the vast speeds so easily attained by the hero’s vessel. I also knew that while the mass of any object increased with speed relative to the Universe generally, the volume did not. In fact, by the Lorentz-Fitzgerald contraction, the volume actually decreased.

  “Colossus,” “Colossus Eternal,” and additional stories are to be included (in revised versions) in a book now being planned, Wandrei tells me. Such a book should help call back to the public mind an unjustly neglected author.

  Nevertheless, the thought-variants (however noticeable their errors in science to my increasingly hypercritical self) affected me profoundly. They struck me as science fiction par excellence, and by the time I began to write science fiction myself, I yearned to write thought-variants, even though the use of the term vanished with Tremaine.

  My story “Nightfall” was consciously written as a thought-variant, and so was my story “The Last Question.” Even my recent novel The Gods Themselves had thought-variant qualities.

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  * * * *

  Donald Wandrei was a Tremaine author. He had never appeared in Amazing Stories or Wonder Stories, and only once in a late issue of the Clayton Astounding. He appeared about seventeen times in the Tremaine Astounding, however, then faded out when Tremaine left.

  Tremaine, however, did more than develop new writers. The fact that he paid higher fees more promptly attracted the older writers to him. Jack Williamson, one of the best of them (consider his “The Moon Era”), now switched to Astounding Stories and, indeed, even survived Tremaine and continued to be a major contributor to Astounding in the Golden Age itself.

  Williamson contributed one of the most startling of the thought-variants, “Born of the Sun,” in the March 1934 Astounding Stories.

  * * * *

  BORN OF THE SUN

  by Jack Williamson

  The deep song of a wide-open motor throbbed into the huge mahogany library—the first faint note of rising menace. Foster Ross, busy over a great table in the end of the room, glanced up abstractedly at a frost-rimed window. Gaunt trees, outside, flung bare, skeletal branches against the gray gloom of an early December dusk; the moaning wind carried a few flakes of snow.

  Listening, Foster Ross wondered briefly the reason for such suicidal haste over the icy highways, before his attention went back to the experiment that had engrossed him for two hard years.

  He was alone in the great, rambling stone mansion his father had left him, secluded upon a lonely, wooded Pennsylvania hilltop. No visitors were expected—the house was being closed for the winter. The few servants had departed that afternoon. Foster, himself, planned to leave at midnight for sunny Palm Beach to meet June Trevor.

  A lean, muscular giant, he was whistling absently as he bent over the immense mahogany table. It was littered with electrical apparatus. In the center of it, shimmering under brilliant light, was a little aluminum sphere, trailing two fine platinum wires.

  Foster tightened a last connection. He stepped back a little eagerly brushing a wisp of copper-colored hair out of his eyes.

  “Now!” he whispered. “It should go up. As the first space ship will go up toward the Moon! It should be-”

  Nervously watching the toylike sphere, he snapped down a key. Anxiously, he waited, as coils whined angrily, and violet discharges flickered about bright contacts.

  The tiny globe did not move. A moment he stared at it, sighing wearily. Then he shrugged, grinned at himself.

  “Fifty thousand, that makes,” he muttered to himself. “Fifty thousand dollars, for a pipe dream! I could have sowed a lot of wild oats for that. What a fool I am, to be fussing with this infernal thing like an old crank, when I might be lounging on the beach with June!”

  But something flashed, then, in his level blue eyes; his wide shoulders squared.

  “It can be done!” he insisted under his breath. “I might try a conegrid. Or alloy the cathode element with titanium. The motor-tube-”

>   He heard, then, the insistent doorbell and frantic knocking at the front door. Foster hurried down the gloomy hall.

  Still he could hear the racing car, a deep-toned, ominous roll, that grew swiftly louder. It slackened momentarily, was renewed.

  “It has turned in the drive,” he thought. “Two unexpected guests, and both in a hurry!”

  He flung the door open upon wintry gloom; the bitter wind whirled snow into his face.

  A cab was standing in front of the door, yellow lights stabbing feebly into the swirling snow. It glided away as he appeared. And Foster saw the man who had rung, a small figure, muffled in an enormous gray coat, crouching against the wall.

  He sprang toward the opening door, gasping: “Quick! Inside! The other car—”

  Powerful lights probed through the snow; the second machine came roaring up the drive, behind the departing cab. Skidding recklessly, it swerved toward the door.

  Terrific reports crashed in Foster’s ears; yellow flame jetted from a black automatic in the little man’s hand. He was shooting into the skidding sedan.

  A thin sword of blinding orange light stabbed back from the machine, as it thundered past. The ray seemed to touch the little man. He whirled, as his gun exploded a last time, fell inside the door.

  The black car paused, plunged forward again. Its headlights rested a moment on the cab, swept past it. It vanished down the drive.

  * * * *

  Bewildered, Foster slammed the door, locked it. He bent over the little man on the floor. A gasping breath greeted him, then a faint chuckle.

  A low voice spoke, oddly calm: “We score one, Foster!”

  “You aren’t hurt, sir? You fell, when the orange light-”

  “No. I dropped in time.”

  Foster was helping him to rise.

  “But it’s a deadly thing. The poison flame, they call it. It’s an actinic radiation, I believe, that splits proteins. It forms poison in the blood.”

  The little man bent for his automatic. Deliberately, he removed the empty cartridge clip, snapped another into place, slipped the heavy weapon back into the pocket of his gray coat.

  “Won’t you come in where it’s warmer?” Foster invited. “And if you don’t mind explaining-”

  “Of course, Foster.”

  His strange guest followed him through the shadowy hall, into the brightly lighted library. Foster turned, when they came into the light, to survey the other.

  “You seem to know my name,” he remarked. Recognition flashed then, in his level blue eyes. “Uncle Barron!” he exclaimed. “I hadn’t recognized you!” He offered his hand cordially.

  Barron Kane was a small man. His chest was flat; his drooping shoulders were thin as a boy’s; his arms were lean and stringy. Yet the serene patience of the scientist lighted his weary face with a radiance of power. In his calm gray eyes was confidence, and beside it, strangely, the shadow of a devouring dread.

  “You surprised me,” said Foster. “I thought, you know, that you must be—dead. It’s years since any one has heard from you. My father tried to locate you.”

  “I’ve been in Asia,” said the little sun-browned man, “at an oasis in the Gobi, that you won’t find on the maps. I was completely cut off from civilization. And there’s a power, you see, that would cut me off forever.”

  He nodded in the direction the racing car had gone.

  “I remember when you were fitting out your last expedition,” recalled Foster. “Twelve years ago—I was in high school. You were so mysterious about where you were headed. And I was wild to go along, for the adventure of it, trying to talk dad out of the idea that I was destined to run the steel business.

  “But sit down. Do you care for a drink?”

  Barron Kane shook a brown, bald head—he had arrived without a hat. “But I must talk to you, Foster.”

  “I’m keen to know all about it,” Foster assured him. “All this is—well, interesting.”

  “We might be interrupted,” said Barron Kane. “Do you mind fastening the doors and windows and drawing the blinds?”

  “Of course not. Do you think—they will come back?”

  “There is a power,” said Barron Kane, his low voice still oddly calm, “that will not rest without positive proof that I am dead.”

  Foster locked the door, went to secure the windows. He came back to find his uncle curiously examining the little silver model on the table.

  “I read your monograph last month in the Science Review,” he said. “About the omicron-effect and your motor-tube. That’s why I’ve come to you, Foster. You’ve hit on a tremendous thing-”

  “Not yet,” denied Foster, with a weary little smile. “I’ve spent two years of time and a good deal of money on the motor-tube. And still it won’t lift its own weight.”

  “But you’re still trying?” The low voice was edged with a strange anxiety.

  “I was working to-day.” Foster touched the little aluminum globe. “This is a model of the space machine. The motor-tube is inside, connected with these platinum wires. The real ship, of course, would have all this other apparatus aboard. The living accommodations and she--”

  He stopped himself, shook his head bitterly.

  “But it’s just a dream!” he muttered. “A crazy dream—I’m not going to waste my life on it.” His blue eyes flashed at Barron Kane defiantly. “I’m leaving for Palm Beach, to-night, to meet June Trevor.” He explained: “We’re engaged. We’ll be married New Year’s. Barron, June’s simply-wonderful!”

  “You can’t do that!” protested Barron Kane. Gripping Foster’s arm, he spoke with a puzzling urgency. “You must stick to the space machine. You must finish it, Foster, to save the human race.”

  “Eh!” Grunting with astonishment, Foster stepped back from him. “What do you mean?”

  “Just that,” Barron Kane told him, in the same quiet voice that was emphatic for its very lack of emphasis. “I’ve come to tell you a dreadful thing, Foster. A thing I learned in Asia. A thing that a terrible power is bent upon keeping me from telling.”

  Foster stared at him, demanded: “What’s that?”

  “The planet is doomed to destruction,” said Barron Kane, still grimly calm. “And the human race with it—unless you can save a handful of humanity. You are the one man who has even the ghost of a chance, Foster, with your steel mills and your invention of the motor-tube.”

  * * * *

  Amazed, a little shaken, despite himself, at the chill touch of alien fear, Foster watched his uncle.

  Had the man gone mad in the twelve years since he vanished? He always had been famous for an eccentricity of character no less than his ability as geologist and astrophysicist. No, Foster decided, his manner was sane enough. And the car from which the orange ray had flamed had been no mad delusion. It had been very real.

  Foster took Barron Kane by the shoulder, marched him to a great leather chair and seated him in it. Standing over him, he demanded:

  “Now tell me exactly what this is all about?”

  Grave humor momentarily banished the haunting shadow of dread from those calm gray eyes.

  “No, Foster,” the quiet voice said; ‘I’m afraid that I’m perfectly sane.”

  Barron Kane laced his thin brown fingers together, stared at them meditatively.

  “You cannot have heard of the Cult of the Great Egg,” he began. “You can’t, because even the name of it is almost completely unknown outside. But it is a fanatical religious sect, whose temple is hidden in an unknown oasis in the Gobi.

  “Nearly ten years ago, Foster, I became a member of that sect. It was not easily done. And afterward I had to endure ordeals that were—well, trying. After seven years I was fully initiated. From the lips of the head of the order—a human demon named L’ao Ku—I heard the dreadful secret that I had gone to Asia to learn.

  “That was three years ago. L’ao Ku must have suspected me. I was very closely watched. Two years I had to wait, even for the chance to escape. Since,
I’ve been hunted across the world by the agents of L’ao Ku. It’s almost another year.

  “I thought I’d given them the slip in Panama. I saw your article about the motor-tube and came to you, Foster. You, as I say, are the only man— But they’ve somehow picked up the trail again. I’m afraid I’ve sentenced you to death.”

  “Sentenced me?” asked Foster. “How?”

  “L’ao Ku wants his secret kept. Three men have died very soon after talking with me, mysteriously.”

  Foster was still planted in front of Barron Kane, wonder and incredulity struggling in his mind. His chin tightened with determination to find some rational order in these bewildering incidents.