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

by Edited By Isaac Asimov

  Foster hurried to him and lifted his head higher on the pillow so that he could see the room and look out through the crystal panels. And he spoke to the sick man of food, but Barron Kane did not seem to notice him. The small whisper ran on:

  “The planets were the seed of the Sun. Strange life developed in them, through the ages, under solar radiation. The Sun will die, now; its work is done. And the new creatures have gone forth, to feed themselves upon the star dust, to absorb diffuse radiation and the cosmic rays, to consume, perhaps, fragments of old suns, until they themselves are suns, spawning planets, and the cycle of their life is complete.

  “And there you have the answer, Foster, to many a problem that has baffled science. We’ve won, Foster!” There was a vague triumph in the muted whisper. “Even if we die to-day—we’re on our own!”

  “What’s the good of it?” muttered Foster, too weary, too hopeless to be bitter. “We’re—alone,” he went on dully. “Soon we’ll be—dead. The Planet will drift on, perhaps forever. A little world, with all that life needs, but dead-

  “Listen!”

  * * * *

  Foster stopped speaking, suddenly, and a fearful silence hung in the room, grimly deep, haunted only with the sounds of their breath.

  “Listen!” A wild, strange ring of madness had come into his voice. “There’s no sound—no other voice! We’re alone, Barron; we’re the last men. There can’t be another voice anywhere! Think what it means—not ever to hear any one speak again! When we are dead--”

  His voice dropped again abruptly, for his straining ears had caught the pad of human footsteps.

  He rushed, trembling with incredulous hope and a fear born with it, down the steps to the door of the bridge room. He flung it open and stood swaying in it, gazing wildly, unbelievingly, at June Trevor.

  She was grimy, bedraggled; her clothing was black with something thick and viscid and dripping; her hair was plastered against her head with it; her face was scratched, and a blue bruise was on her forehead. Yet he saw still a beauty in her tall, straight form; in her clear brown eyes was a dawning, luminous joy.

  They stood a moment face to face.

  Foster wet his lips. “June?” he whispered. “June--”

  She reeled a little, and he started forward to catch her.

  “Don’t touch me,” she gasped weakly and swayed back from him. “I’m all soaked with oil—I was in a tank. You’ll get covered with it.”

  “You poor kid!” he breathed, and something made him laugh a little.

  He slipped his arm around her grimy shoulders, held her up. And she clung to him suddenly, ignoring the oil. In turn, she laughed—a shaky, happy little laugh of relief.

  “Oh, Foster!” she cried. “I’m so—so glad—that you’re here. I thought I was the only person alive. And I was so miserably soaked with oil.”

  “How did you get here?” Foster asked as he helped her into the bridge room and made her sit down beside him. “When you were gone, we thought that L’ao Ku must have taken you—to his temple.”

  “L’ao Ku?” she breathed, in weary surprise. “No; I didn’t see him. You see, I went to look for you, Foster, when the mob was coming. I asked the men where to find you. They sent me from one place to another, until I was down in the generator rooms. I couldn’t find you anywhere.”

  She had relaxed, happily, against his great shoulder; unconsciously her hand had caught his arm, as if she feared that something might take him from her.

  “What then?” Foster asked. “How’d you get away from the mob?”

  “I was down in the generator room,” her tired voice went on. “I couldn’t find you. All of a sudden, there were shots and screams. The mob was killing the enginemen.

  “One of the enginemen ran to me. ‘The damn’ chinks have come, miss,’ he said. ‘But I’ll put you where they won’t find you.’ And he made me come to a tank, and opened a lid, and made me climb down a ladder in it. It was full of oil—it came up to my chin. And he let the lid back down on me.

  “I waited. It was dark in the tank. And the fumes of the oil made me sick. I nearly fell off the ladder. For a while I could hear shots and roaring voices. Then—silence.

  “Nobody came to lift the lid, and I tried to get out. I was faint. And the lid was so heavy I couldn’t lift it. I worked until I couldn’t move. Then I rested, and tried again. At last I found a way, standing on the top of the ladder, and using my back.”

  “You poor, game kid!” whispered Foster, and patted her shoulder.

  She shuddered; her brown eyes seemed not to see him—they were dull with remembered horror.

  “I came out,” she went on grimly. “And every one was—was dead. The floors were all covered with blood and—bodies. And the quiet—it was terrible. You know how still it was, Foster. I couldn’t hear a voice. Not a sound! I thought I was the only one alive.”

  “Why didn’t you come back here?” asked Foster. “Barron was here.”

  “I did,” she whispered. “I looked in and saw him lying there—so still. I spoke, and he didn’t move. I thought he was dead, like all the rest. I thought I was the only one still living-”

  “You must forget all that,” Foster urged her. “But where have you been?”

  “I was—looking,”—she paused, shuddering—”looking—among—the bodies for—for you, Foster.”

  He held her trembling body close; for a moment she did not speak.

  “I thought I was the—the last,” she went on jerkily, with an effort. “I thought I was—alone—alone with all the dead. I was looking for you, Foster, so that we could be together. And then-”

  The sick horror ebbed slowly from her brown eyes; she smiled a little, wearily.

  “Then I felt the machine moving, Foster. I had been asleep—I was so weary from searching and so grimy with oil. I woke and felt that we were moving. I knew, then, there was some one-”

  Her brown eyes shone bravely into Foster’s blue ones, alight with hope and joy and new confidence. Then they closed; her body relaxed in his arms; she had gone to sleep. Her lips parted, and she smiled a weary little smile, in her sleep.

  “She’s worn out, the nervy little kid,” Foster told Barron Kane. “I’m going to take her down to her room, where she can rest. I’ll come back in a minute, to help you down-”

  “No, Foster,” the little man whispered. “I want to look out—at the stars.”

  Foster lifted him a little, propped up his head with the pillow. “Men can carry on, now, Barron,” he said. “We can make a new beginning.”

  Foster took up the girl’s quietly breathing body and started toward the door.

  “Yes, Foster,” the sick man whispered after him, “we’ve really won.”

  * * * *

  The scientist’s gray calm eyes watched Foster until he had vanished down the little stairs. Then he looked back at the motionless, splendid stars. They were tiny and unmoving and many-colored, swung eternal in black space.

  “We’ve won,” he whispered again to himself. “I had hoped to live— for this. Men will now be small parasites no longer, to be crushed like vermin by any chance tremor of the beast that bears them. In the Planet, men are free, on their own.”

  He seemed to like the phrase, for he whispered it again: “On their own.”

  He lay still for a time, musing.

  “We’re off in the Planet, to a new beginning. And it’s just a beginning.”

  His serene quiet eyes stared at the mocking points of the stars, and he whispered to them:

  “You’re alive, all of you. We owe our lives to you—we’ve been parasites on your kind. But we aren’t any longer. We’re beginning all over again, on our own.”

  His dying breath whispered a last prophecy:

  “There will be many Planets, and greater ones. The new, free race will be greater than the old. The children of Foster and June will conquer space, to the farthermost one of you!”

  A joy seemed to linger in his tranquil eyes, that s
till looked out at the stars.

  * * * *

  For me, the story holds up. I read it for the first time in nearly forty years in preparing this anthology, and it is still exciting to me, even though I remembered the point of the plot. The love interest is a little clumsy perhaps, and the Fu Manchu attitude toward the Chinese is now dated, but, by and large, it moves quickly, and Williamson keeps the wild plot plausible.

  As I read it, however, I was uncomfortably struck by the scene in which religious cultists attack the scientific center that was trying to save a fragment of the human race. I had forgotten that. The question is, though, had I forgotten it at the time I wrote Nightfall, only seven years later? Even if I had, surely the influence of “Born of the Sun” must have been there just under the surface, for Nightfall had a similar scene.

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  * * * *

  Even longer in the field than Williamson was Murray Leinster (the pseudonym of Will F. Jenkins). He had a story, “The Runaway Skyscraper,” in the June 1926 Amazing Stories, the third issue of that magazine, and he had been publishing for some years before that. [He remained active for decades afterward and is still alive today, the acknowledged dean of science fiction writers.] Tremaine added him to his stable and Leinster contributed the thought-variant “Sidewise in Time,” in the June 1934 Astounding Stories.

  * * * *

  SIDEWISE IN TIME

  by Murray Leinster

  Foreword

  Looking back, it seems strange that no one but Professor Minott figured the thing out in advance. The indications were more than plain, In early December of 1934 Professor Michaelson announced his finding that the speed of light was not an absolute could not be considered invariable. That, of course, was one of the first indications of what was to happen.

  A second indication came on February 15th, when at 12:40 p.m., Greenwich mean time, the sun suddenly shone blue-white and the enormously increased rate of radiation raised the temperature of the earth’s surface by twenty-two degrees Fahrenheit in five minutes. At the end of the five minutes, the sun went back to its normal rate of radiation without any other symptom of disturbance.

  A great many bids for scientific fame followed, of course, but no plausible explanation of the phenomenon accounted for a total lack of after disturbances in the sun’s photosphere.

  For a third clear forerunner of the events of June, on March 10th the male giraffe in the Bronx Zoological Park, in New York, ceased to eat. In the nine days following, it changed its form, absorbing all its extremities, even its neck and head, into an extraordinary, eggshaped mass of still-living flesh and bone which on the tenth day began to divide spontaneously and on the twelfth was two slightly pulsating fleshy masses.

  A day later still, bumps appeared on the two masses. They grew, took form and design, and twenty days after the beginning of the phenomenon were legs, necks, and heads. Then two giraffes, both male, moved about the giraffe enclosure. Each was slightly less than half the weight of the original animal. They were identically marked. And they ate and moved and in every way seemed normal though immature animals.

  An exactly similar occurrence was reported from the Argentine Republic, in which a steer from the pampas was going through the same extraordinary method of reproduction under the critical eyes of Argentine scientists.

  Nowadays it seems incredible that the scientists of 1935 should not have understood the meaning of these oddities. We now know something of the type of strain which produced them, though they no longer occur. But between January and June of 1935 the news service’s of the nation were flooded with items of similar import.

  For two days the Ohio River flowed upstream. For six hours the trees in Euclid Park, in Cleveland, lashed their branches madly as if in a terrific storm, though not a breath of wind was stirring. And in New Orleans, near the last of May, fishes swam up out of the Mississippi River through the air, proceeded to “drown” in the air which inexplicably upheld them, and then turned belly up and floated placidly at an imaginary water level some fifteen feet above the pavements of the city.

  But it seems clear that Professor Minott was the only man in the world who even guessed the meaning of these—to us—clear-cut indications of the later events. Professor Minott was instructor in mathematics on the faculty of Robinson College in Fredericksburg, Va. We know that he anticipated very nearly every one of the things which later startled and frightened the world, and not only our world. But he kept his mouth shut.

  Robinson College was small. It had even been termed a “jerkwater” college without offending anybody but the faculty and certain sensitive alumni. For a mere professor of mathematics to make public the theory Minott had formed would not even be news. It would be taken as stark insanity. Moreover, those who believed it would be scared. So he kept his mouth shut.

  Professor Minott possessed courage, bitterness, and a certain cold-blooded daring, but neither wealth nor influence. He had more than a little knowledge of mathematical physics and his calculations show extraordinary knowledge of the laws of probability, but he had very little patience with problems in ethics. And he was possessed by a particularly fierce passion for Maida Hayns, daughter of the professor of Romance languages, and had practically no chance to win even her attention over the competition of most of the student body. So much of explanation is necessary, because no one but just such a person as Professor Minott would have forecast what was to happen and then prepare for it in the fashion in which he did.

  We know from his notes that he considered the probability of disaster as a shade better than four to one. It is a very great pity that we do not have his calculations. There is much that our scientists do not understand even yet. The notes Professor Minott left behind have been invaluable, but there are obvious gaps in them. He must have taken most of his notes—and those the most valuable—into that unguessed at place where he conceivably now lives and very probably works.

  He would be amused, no doubt, at the diligence with which his most unconsidered scribble is now examined and inspected and discussed by the greatest minds of our time and space. And perhaps it is quite probable he may have invented a word for the scope of the catastrophe we escaped. We have none as yet.

  There is no word to describe a disaster in which not only the earth but our whole solar system might have been destroyed; not only our solar system but our galaxy; not only our galaxy but every other island universe in all of the space we know; more than that, the destruction of all space as we know it; and even beyond that the destruction of time, meaning not only the obliteration of present and future but even the annihilation of the past so that it would never have been. And then, besides, those other strange states of existence we learned of, those other universes, those other pasts and futures all to be shattered into nothingness. There is no word for such a catastrophe.

  It would be interesting to know what Professor Minott termed it to himself, as he coolly prepared to take advantage of the one chance in four of survival, if that should be the one to eventuate. But it is easier to wonder how he felt on the evening before the fifth of June, in 1935. We do not know. We cannot know. All we can be certain of is how we felt and what happened.

  * * * *

  I

  It was half past seven a.m. of June 5, 1935. The city of Joplin, Missouri, awaked from, a comfortable, summer-night sleep. Dew glistened upon grass blades and leaves and the filmy webs of morning spiders glittered like diamond dust in the early sunshine. In the most easternly suburb, a high-school boy, yawning, came somnolently out of his house to mow the lawn before schooltime. A rather rickety family car roared, a block away. It backfired, stopped, roared again, and throttled down to a steady, waiting hum. Then, voices of children sounded among the houses. A colored washerwoman appeared, striding beneath the trees which lined this strictly residential street.

  From an upper window a radio blatted: “one, two, three, four! Higher, now three, four! Put your weight into it! two, three, four!” The radio sudd
enly squawked and began to emit an insistent, mechanical shriek which changed again to a squawk and then a terrific sound as of all the static of ten thousand thunderstorms on the air at once. Then it was silent.

  The high-school boy leaned mournfully on the pushbar of the lawn mower. At the instant the static ended, the boy sat down suddenly on the dew-wet grass. The colored woman reeled and grabbed frantically at the nearest tree trunk. The basket of wash toppled and spilled in a snowstorm of starched, varicolored clothing. Howls of terror from children. Sharp shrieks from women. “Earthquake! Earthquake!” Figures appeared running, pouring out of houses. Someone fled out to a sleeping porch, slid down a supporting column, and tripped over a rosebush in his pajamas. In seconds, it seemed, the entire population of the street was out of doors.And then there was a queer, blank silence. There was no earthquake. No house had fallen. No chimney had cracked. Not so much as a dish or windowpane had made a sound in smashing. The sensation every human being had felt was not an actual shaking of the ground. There had been moyement, yes, and of the earth, but no such movement as any human being had ever dreamed of before. These people were to learn of that movement much lafer. Now they stared blankly at each other.