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

by Edited By Isaac Asimov

  “The water is rising,” Foster told him. “I must hurry.”

  And he went down to close the valve.

  The tidal wave had come, as he lay unconscious—the same racing wall of the advancing ocean, gray, dreadful, that had drowned the coastal cities. It had routed the triumphant mob, at the very moment of victory, before they had plundered the ship; it had overcome them as they fled.

  A tremendous blow, it had struck the gray, steel side of the Planet; a stormy sea still crashed against the concrete pier beneath the space machine. The green surrounding hills of yesterday now were barren, rocky islets, drenched with spray.

  The huge steel entrance valve had been torn open with a charge of high explosive. The hinges were twisted, the lock demolished.

  Grimly, Foster surveyed the damage. The massive steel disk of the door itself, he decided, was not much injured. If he could straighten the hinges, to allow it to fit, and then find some way to fasten it--

  He dragged himself to the machine shops and staggered back with hammers and wrenches and lifting tackle; he went again for a portable welding torch. Grimly deliberate, he set about heating the massive hinges and straightening them, so that the valve could close.

  The massive concrete pier trembled constantly beneath him, as the whole Earth trembled. At thirty-minute intervals, it rocked and swayed dizzily beneath him—as the whole planet yielded to the ever-stronger pulse of the awakening thing within.

  The mad waves of the conquering sea thundered endlessly against the great pier. Spray kept Foster drenched; sometimes it put out his torches. The wild waters came up, as he worked—he was sick with fear that the valve would be covered before he could close it.

  Paroxysms of a tortured, outraged nature threatened his life, moment by moment. A weary, naked pygmy, wounded, scalded, blistered. Foster worked doggedly on, pitting his puny efforts against the convulsions of a dying giant.

  A pall of dreadful gloom had covered the sky, that did not change when day should have come. It was crimson with dull volcanic light. Gray cinders showered out of it intermittently; and huge drops of boiling volcanic mud. Hot winds parched his skin, suffocated him with the reek of sulphur.

  Thunder boomed endlessly above the chaos of a world in the agony of death; blue lightning stabbed in an endless blinding torrent against the top of the sphere, as if the heavens themselves had conspired against mankind.

  Sometimes Foster left his tools a moment, to look down into the black, crashing waves, that were always higher. Under the red, uncanny gloom that did not change between night and day, in the violet, sudden glare of lightning, he saw the debris of a lost world. Remains of men were flung past him, shattered, twisted. Sometimes he shuddered to the horror of a drowned face, gray and bloated and pulped.

  Despair, then, would overcome him. He would drop wearily upon the brine-drenched pier and gaze hopelessly into the red, mad gloom of the disintegrating world.

  But then a picture would always come to him—a picture of June Trevor, tall and grave-eyed and beautiful, about to die on an altar before an image of the Earth and an obscene monstrosity emerging. That picture always banished his sense of helpless futility and brought back that strange, impersonal, self-forgetful resolution that had come to him first in the fight in the garage, so long ago.

  Moved by a purpose that was racial, above anything of himself, he would pick up his tools again.

  * * * *

  Numb with exhaustion, dull-brained for want of sleep, Foster came at last into the little bridge room again.

  “The valve is sealed,” he announced in a voice heavy and faint with unutterable weariness. “Now I can start the generators, and see if the motor-tube will work—”

  He stopped, for his haggard, bloodshot eyes had seen that Barron Kane was sleeping. He tried a little to wake him, and make him eat—he had paused, on the way up, to snatch a little food from the storerooms, oranges, a can of broth, and crackers. But the frail little man did not stir. He had fever, Foster decided, and his pulse was fluttering irregularly.

  “He wanted so to live to see us win,” Foster breathed to himself. “But I think he won’t wake up. Anyhow, he still—hoped—”

  Then, moving in his great weariness like a slow mechanism, he turned to the half-wrecked instruments. His first glance at a chronometer shocked him with horror and despair.

  Twenty-two hours had passed, while he labored with the valve. The second day had almost gone. In hours, now, would come—ultimate cataclysm--

  He reeled drunkenly, as if from a blow, and stumbled back to the wall.

  For a time he leaned there, lifeless with the shock of it. His red-rimmed eyes, dull and stupid, gazed fixedly out through the heavy quartz panels. The sky was a sullen mask of crimson gloom. Lightning ripped out of it in a fearful cascade of violet fire. Brown, boiling liquid mud fell against the steel hull of the Planet with a continual booming roar that drowned the thunder. The tempestuous black sea had risen over the hills; now it covered the pier, and its gigantic breakers hammered against the Planet itself. Littered with tiny, pitiful fragments of human wreckage, its wild dark surface reached to horizons of red, chaotic gloom.

  Even as his blank eyes were staring aimlessly out, a fresh quake shook the space machine, so violent that it sent him staggering across the room. And a second tidal wave, a gray-crested, tremendous black wall, thundering with incredible velocity out of the advancing Atlantic, struck the Planet resistlessly.

  Like a chip, it tossed the million tons of the space machine away from her cradle; she was carried away upon the mad sea.

  The impact stirred Foster from his daze. He remembered June Trevor. And that lofty purpose, that was a thing not of himself but of the race, came back.

  With a weary patience, he set to work to repair the controls and then to start the generators and transformers and otherwise prepare the Planet for flight. Her machinery was automatic, so that one man could drive her from the bridge. But the mob had broken half the instruments.

  The space machine, as he worked, was tossed and battered by the maddened elements. Terrific waves thundered against her steel sides; floating wreckage hammered her; she floated at last against a new reef and was driven against it, crushingly, again and again, until Foster was despairingly certain that her hull must yield.

  He toiled on.

  And at last the thing was done, and still she floated. Foster turned the current into the motor-tube, his aching hands trembling with anxiety. He stepped it quickly up. Then he stumbled back—waiting—waiting-

  The Planet lay on the black, terrible sea, beside the gray fury of the menacing reef. Out of the crimson gloom of the sky poured livid lightning and clattering fragments of volcanic rock. Furious winds drove at her with a force that rivaled that of the insurgent sea.

  She was swinging back toward the hidden fangs of the reef; and Foster knew her hull could not endure another blow. Would the motor-tube lift her? Would it—

  He ceased to breathe. His teeth ground together. He reeled heavily against a chair, and his bruised hands fixed themselves upon it with a grip like that of a dying man. His glaring, dark-rimmed eyes alternately watched the instruments and looked out into the fearful red gloom of the dying world.

  The Planet lifted! She rose off the dark, furious sea, into the scarlet darkness of the sky. She rose, through mighty winds, through rain of volcanic mud and cinders, through blazing sheets of purple lightning. At a great altitude, the rain gave way to thundering hail.

  And the space machine, at last, came through the clouds; and Foster saw the stars.

  He was full of a great serenity. A kind of lofty elation had come with the rising of the space machine. It was a sense of triumphant power that lifted him far above any human concern.

  His great weariness had slipped from him. He felt, no longer, his mind-deadening want of sleep, or even the dull throbbing of the wound in his temple. For a moment he attained the supreme tranquillity of a god.

  It was sublime, awful Nir
vana. He had forgotten even June.

  * * * *

  It was night, and the stars flamed at Foster. As the Planet came above the turbulent atmosphere, they burst into a greater splendor than any man had ever seen. In an emptiness that was utterly black, they burned motionless and ghostly, more brilliant than jewels. They were infinitely tiny, infinitely bright. Mysterious and eternal, they flamed in the black void.

  Foster stared at them, transfixed with the strange wonder that came from the knowledge that each of them was a sentient thing.

  And still the Planet rose, on a high, swift arc, toward the living stars. Foster felt himself one with them; he was no more a puny man, but a serene and deathless entity, of supernal power and supernal vision.

  Then Barron Kane’s frail body moved, uneasily, in its feverish sleep. And Foster was abruptly a man again and filled with pity. He tried again to wake his uncle—once more in vain. He smoothed the pillow under his head and drew the blanket close about him.

  He went back, then, to the controls. He remembered June again and her frightful danger. His purpose had come back, even stronger for its lapse as he first soared toward the stars. He was moved as if by some vast power without, as if he were simply a puppet in the hands of a racial will, itself as sublime and eternal as the undying stars he had looked upon.

  Still, he grimly realized the multiplied odds against him. In the universal, cataclysmic storm that raged about the whole Earth, he might be unable to find the lost oasis in the Gobi—in time. If he did, he would be only one man, battling hundreds. He might, the fear pierced him like a cold blade, find the sacrifice already consummated. Or he might—to judge from what he had seen, it was even probable—find that the temple and all in it had already been overwhelmed by storm or earthquake or volcano or the terror of the rising sea.

  Yes, bitter realization came, the chances against him were hopelessly great. It was useless to go. But that blind, sublime purpose, that was like an external force, moved him to drop the Planet back into the dark, furiously agitated clouds that totally obscured the face of the disintegrating globe.

  Down sank the space machine, through terrible crimson gloom, through the furious chaos of a tortured, disrupting world. Hurricanes tore at the steel ball; it was bombarded with volcanic debris, struck with flaming lightning, sluiced with boiling mud.

  Foster, watching through mudstained crystal panels, at last saw the surface of the earth where the Gobi had been—and it was a black and fearful sea.

  The temple of the fanatic cult was gone, and June Trevor—And with the girl, all the meaning was gone out of his life and out of his superhuman struggle to live. The sublime purpose that had so long sustained him flowed out of him utterly; it left him a lonely, weary, haggard wreck. He had been more than human; now he was less—sick and old and useless.

  June was gone. The thought beat through his tired, dull brain, a refrain of despair. June, gone! Only he and Barron Kane were left, two useless, aimless men, with nothing to live for; and nothing to hope for but death.

  And Barron Kane was obviously dying. Soon he, Foster, would be alone —more alone than a human being had ever been. He would be alone in the void of space. He would know that the Earth was gone, that there was no other man or woman anywhere.

  He would be alone, with the living, mocking stars!

  A frantic terror grasped Foster’s throat, at the thought, with icy fingers that choked him; he was faint with the most dreadful fear he had ever known.

  Sick with it, trembling convulsively, he tried desperately to wake Barron Kane. He shook the little mans shrunken shoulder and dashed water into his face. He wanted terribly to speak to a human being again, to listen again to a human voice not his own—even the voiceless whisper of the dying man.

  Barron Kane gasped in his sleep, he breathed strangely, a sudden spasmodic trembling disturbed his thin limbs. But he would not wake. Aching with a pity deeper than he had ever known, Foster covered the slight, drawn body again.

  He looked out again at the scarlet, lightning-split darkness of the sky, at the black, wildly heaving plain of the sea that had swept away the secret temple and all the essence of his life.

  * * * *

  VI.

  The sea was riven, as Foster looked. It was cleft, as if by a Titan’s blade. The two dark halves of it were thrust miles apart. Stupendous, unthinkable, an abysmal gulf yawned between them, with black water plunging into it from either side, like a million Niagaras.

  The world had parted.

  Hanging in that dark storm sky of lurid and dreadful red, Foster stared with horror-glazed eyes down into the new gulf. Mile upon mile, incredibly, fell the jagged walls of the broken Earth crust, crumbling, splashed with dark sheets of the oceanic cataracts.

  Below—scores of miles below—was a smooth, shimmering surface of green, bright as flame, marked strangely with silver and black. It was moving with weird paroxysms. It was the body of the Earth entity, struggling in the agony of birth.

  Foster watched it, dazed with astounded horror.

  The two halves of the split sea were thrust back, with a fearful quickness, until they were lost under the dark sky, which now was changing from dull red to a terrible, ominous, reflected green. The space machine hung between the menacing pall of the sky and the bright surface of that dreadful body that was struggling to life within the Earth.

  Foster’s mind perceived the new danger. But in the lifeless, purposeless, hopeless apathy that had settled upon him he felt no alarm; he didn’t care, nothing mattered, now, since June was gone.

  The wind struck. The atmosphere, disturbed by the movements of the waking thing, drove against the Planet with the solid, battering impact of an avalanche. With a force no hurricane had ever equaled, it hurled the steel globe down toward the green body, helpless as a toy balloon.

  Foster’s blue eyes, sick with an agony unutterable, looked dully, without panic and without hope, at the eldritch doom ahead. All aim and direction had left him. His life had become a bitter joke, fantastic as the fate of humanity.

  It was only the blind instinct to live that kept him wearily at the controls. His mind sat back, a weary, disinterested spectator, as his bruised, aching fingers moved automatically, and the Planet battled to survive.

  The steel ball was drawn down, resistlessly, toward the fantastic markings on the side of that unbelievable body. Foster watched with lackluster eyes that held no fear, while his automatic fingers flung on the full power of the motor-tube to fight that freakish, fiendish wind.

  He felt no triumph when the machine broke free; he had no elation as it drove upward through mad, torn cloud masses that were fearfully illuminated with green. He stared out, through the heavy crystal panels, still beyond panic and beyond hope.

  Above the green clouds, he came; above the air and into the freedom of space. The sky was a hollow globe of darkness, pierced with a million, many-hued points of light—each of them, he knew, a thing alive.

  The earth hung below—a huge, swollen globe, dark and fantastically patched with green.

  A wing broke through the clouds—a stupendous sheet of supernal fire; a shield of green flame, wondrous as the aurora of the solar corona, and veined with bright silver. With its first, uncertain unfolding, it brushed close to the Planet—a blade of amazing death.

  Foster’s instinctive fingers flung the space machine away, and the glorious, dreadful wing passed beneath, harmlessly. And the Planet drove on away into space, on her voyage that had no destination.

  The Earth fell away behind.

  And a thing emerged from the shattered crust of it that was like the creature that had come from the Moon. The beaked head was crested with a spray of crimson flame; it was marked with two ovoid patches, glowing lividly purple, that were like dread eyes. Flame-green, its body was slender and tapering and marked weirdly with black and silver. Slow, shining waves shimmered through its wings, that were like green fans of the aurora and veined with burning white.

  It m
oved uncertainly in the void, as if to test its members. It preened itself with thin blue appendages that were thrust from the head. Then, with a beat of strange luminous force in its wings, it wheeled away from the Sun, and drove outward into the void of space.

  Mercury and Venus, the two inner planets, Foster saw, had also changed; they had become winged, greenish motes, drifting away from the Sun. And the light of the Sun itself, he fancied, was already dimming, fading slowly toward crimson, toward ultimate darkness.

  “The Sun is dying,” his dry lips muttered the thought from his disinterested, dully observant brain. “It’s the end! The mad finish of man’s universe-”

  “You see?” Foster was startled to hear the faint whisper of Barron Kane, awake again on his invalid chair. “We are seeing the solution of the last riddle, Foster—the riddle of the suns! We are watching one die. We have seen many born.”