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

by Edited By Isaac Asimov

  Professor Minott nodded. “We’ll be careful. I’m Professor Minott of Robinson College. We’re going in after some botanical specimens. I have a revolver. We’re all right.”

  He rode ahead. The State policeman, without definite orders or authority, shrugged his shoulders and bent his efforts to the prevention of other attempts to explore. In minutes, the eight horses and their riders were out of sight.

  * * * *

  That was now three hours past. For three hours, Professor Minott had led his charges, a little south of northeast. In that time they saw no dangerous animals. They saw some many familiar plants. They saw rabbits in quantity, and once a slinking gray form which Tom Hunter, who was majoring in zoology, declared was a wolf. There are no wolves in the vicinity of Fredericksburg, but neither are there sequoias. And the party had seen no signs of human life, though Fredericksburg lies in farming country which is thickly settled.

  In three hours the horses must have covered between twelve and fifteen miles, even through the timber. It was just after sighting a shaggy beast which was unquestionably a woodland buffalo—extinct east of the Rockies as early as 1820—that young Blake protested uneasily against further travel.

  “There’s something awfully queer, sir,” he said awkwardly. “I don’t mind experimenting as much as you like, sir, but we’ve got the girls with us. If we don’t start back pretty soon, we’ll get in trouble with the dean.” And then Minott drew his two revolvers and very calmly announced that none of them would ever go back. That he knew what had happened and what could be expected. And he added that he would explain as soon as they were convinced he would use his revolvers in case of a mutiny.

  “Call us convinced now, sir,” said Blake.

  He was a bit pale about the lips, but he hadn’t flinched. In fact, he’d moved to be between Maida Haynes and the gun muzzle.

  “We’d like’ very much to know how all these trees and plants, which ought to be three thousand miles away, happen to be growing in Virginia without any warning. Especially, sir, we’d like to know how it is that the topography underneath all this brand-new forest is the same. The hills trend the same way they used to, but everything that ever was on them has vanished, and something else is in its place.”

  Minott nodded approvingly. “Splendid, Blake!” he said warmly. “Sound observation! I picked you because you’re well spoken of in geology, even though there were other reasons for leaving you behind. Let’s go on over the next rise. Unless I’m mistaken, we should find the Potomac in view. Then I’ll answer any questions you like. I’m afraid we’ve a good bit more of riding to do today.”

  Reluctantly, the eight horses breasted the slope. They scrambled among underbrush. It was queer that in three hours they had seen not a trace of a road leading anywhere. But up at the top of the hill there was a road. It was a narrow, wandering cart track. Without a word, every one of the eight riders turned their horses to follow it. It meandered onward for perhaps a quarter of a mile. It dipped suddenly. And the Potomac lay before and below them.

  Then seven of the eight riders exclaimed. There was a settlement upon. the banks of the river. There were boats in harbor. There were other boats in view beyond, two beating down from the long reaches upstream, and three others coming painfully up from the direction of Chesapeake Bay. But neither the village nor the boats should have been upon the Potomac River.

  The village was small and mud-walled. Tiny, blueclad figures moved about the fields outside. The buildings, the curving lines of the roofs, and more especially the unmistakable outline of a sort of temple near the center of the fortified hamlet, these were Chinese. The boats in sight were junks, save that their sails were cloth instead of slatted bamboo. The fields outside the squat mud walls were cultivated in a fashion altogether alien. Near the river, where marsh flats would be normal along the Potomac, rice fields intensely worked spread out instead.

  Then a figure appeared near by. Wide hat, wadded cotton-padded jacket, cotton trousers, and clogs, it was Chinese peasant incarnate, and all the more so when it turned a slant-eyed, terror-stricken face upon them and fled squawking. It left a monstrously heavy wooden yoke behind, from which dangled two buckets filled with berries it had gathered in the forest.

  The riders stared. There was the Potomac. But a Chinese village nestled, beside it, Chinese junks plied its waters.

  “I—I think,” said Maida Haynes unsteadily, “I—think I’ve—gone insane. Haven’t I?”

  Professor Minott shrugged. He looked disappointed but queerly resolute.

  “No,” he said shortly. “You’re not mad. It just happens that the Chinese happened to colonize America first. It’s been known that Chinese junks touched the American shore, the Pacific coast, of course, long before Columbus. Evidently they colonized it. They may have, come all the way overland to the Atlantic, or maybe around by Panama. In any case, this is a Chinese continent now. This isn’t what we want. We’ll ride some more.”

  The fleeing, squawking figure had been seen from the village. A huge, discordant gong began to sound. Figures fled toward the walls from the fields rounds about. The popping of firecrackers began, with a chorus of most intimidating yells.

  “Come on!” said Minott sharply. “We’d better move!”

  He wheeled his horse about and started off at a canter. By instinct, since he was the only one who seemed to have any definite idea what to do, the others flung after him.

  And as they rode, suddenly the horses staggered. The humans on them felt a queer, queasy vertigo. It lasted only for a second, but Minott paled a little.

  “Now we’ll see what’s happened,” he said composedly. “The odds are still fair, but I’d rather have had things stay as they were until we’d tried a few more places.”

  * * * *

  IV

  That same queasy vertigo affected the staring crowd at the end of the road leading north from Fredericksburg. For perhaps a second they felt an unearthly illness, which even blurred their vision. Then they saw clearly again. And in an instant they were babbling in panic, starting their motor cars in terror, some of them fleeing on foot.

  The sequoia forest had vanished. In its place was a dreary waste of glittering white; stumpy trees buried under snow; rolling ground covered with a powdery, glittering stuff.

  In minutes dense fog shut off the view, as the warm air of a Virginia June morning was chilled by that frigid coating. But in minutes, too, the heavy snow began to melt. The cars fled away along the concrete road, and behind them an expanding belt of fog spread out and the little streams and runlets filled with a sudden surplus of water, and ran more swiftly, and rose.

  The eight riders were every one very pale. Even Minott seemed shaken but no less resolute when he drew rein.

  “I imagine you will all be satisfied now,” he said composedly. “Blake, you’re the geologist of the party. Doesn’t the shore line there look familiar?”

  Blake nodded. He was very white indeed. He pointed to the stream. “Yes. The falls, too. This is the site of Fredericksburg, sir, where we were this morning. There is where the main bridge was, or will be. The main highway to Richmond should run”, he licked his lips, “it should run where that very big oak tree is standing. The Princess Anne Hotel should be on the side of that hill. I—I would say, sir, that somehow we’ve gone back in time or else forward into the future. It sounds insane, but I’ve been trying to figure it out”

  Minott nodded coolly. “Very good! This is the site of Fredericksburg, to be sure. But we have not traveled forward or back in time. I hope that you noticed where we came out of the sequoia forest. There seems to be a sort of fault along that line, which it may be useful to remember.” He paused. “We’re not in the past or the future, Blake. We’ve traveled sidewise, in a sort of oscillation from one time path to another. We happen to be in a, well, in a part of time where Fredericksburg has never been built, just as a little while since we were where the Chinese occupy the American continent. I think we better have lun
ch.”

  He dismounted. The four girls tended to huddle together. Lucy Blair’s teeth chattered.

  Blake moved to their horses’ heads. “Don’t get rattled,” he said urgently. “We’re here, wherever it is. Professor Minott is going to explain things in a minute. Since he knows what’s what, we’re in no danger. Climb off your horses and let’s eat. I’m hungry as a bear. Come on, Maida!”

  Maida Haynes dismounted. She managed a rather shaky smile. “I’m afraid of him,” she said in a whisper. “More than anything else. Stay close to me, please!”

  Blake frowned. Minott said dryly: “Look in your saddlebags and you’ll find sandwiches. Also you’ll find firearms. You young men had better arm yourselves. Since there’s now no conceivable hope of getting back to the world we know, I think you can be trusted with weapons.”

  Blake stared at him, then silently investigated his own saddlebags. He found two revolvers, with what seemed an abnormally large supply of cartridges. He found a mass of paper, which turned out to be books with their cardboard backs torn off. He glanced professionally at the revolvers, and slipped them in his pockets. He put back the books.

  “I appoint you second in command, Blake,” said Minott, more dryly than before. “You understand nothing, but you wait to understand. I made no mistake in choosing you despite my reasons for leaving you behind. Sit down and I’ll tell you what happened.”

  * * * *

  With a grunt and a puffing noise, a small black bear broke cover and fled across a place where only that morning a highly elaborate filling station had stood. The party started, then relaxed. The girls suddenly started to giggle foolishly, almost hysterically. Minott bit calmly into a sandwich and said pleasantly,

  “I shall have to talk mathematics to you, but I’ll try to make it more palatable than my classroom lectures have been. You see, everything that has happened can only be explained in terms of mathematics, and more especially certain concepts in mathematical physics. You young ladies and gentlemen being college men and women, I shall have to phrase things very simply, as for ten-year-old children. Hunter, you’re staring. If you actually see something, such as an Indian, shoot at him and he’ll run away. The probabilities are that he never heard the report of a firearm. We’re not on the Chinese continent now.”

  Hunter gasped, and fumbled at his saddlebags. While he got out the revolvers, Minott went on imperturbably,

  “There has been an upheaval of nature, which still continues. But instead of a shaking and jumbling of earth and rocks, there has been a shaking and jumbling of space and time. I go back to first principles. Time is a dimension. The past is one extension of it, the future is the other, just as east is one extension of a more familiar dimension and west is its opposite.

  “But we ordinarily think of time as a line, a sort of tunnel, perhaps. We do not make that error in the dimensions about which we think daily. For example, we know that Annapolis, King George courthouse, and, say, Norfolk are all to the eastward of us. But we know that in order to reach any of them, as a destination, we would have to go not only cast but north or south in addition. In imaginative travels into the future, however, we never think in such a common-sense fashion. We assume that the future is a line instead of a coordinate, a path instead of a direction. We assume that if we travel to futureward there is but one possible destination. And that is as absurd as it would be to ignore the possibility of traveling to eastward in any other line than due east, forgetting that there is northeast and, southeast and a large number of intermediate points.”

  Young Blake said slowly: “I follow you, sir, but it doesn’t seem to bear—”

  “On our problem? But it does!” Minott smiled, showing his teeth. He bit into his sandwich again. “Imagine that I come to a fork in a road. I flip a coin to determine which fork I shall take. Whichever route I follow, I shall encounter certain landmarks and certain adventures. But they will not be the same, whether landmarks or adventures.

  “In choosing between the forks of the road I choose not only between two sets of landmarks I could encounter, but between two sets of events. I choose between paths, not only on the surface of the earth, but in time. And as those paths upon earth may lead to two different cities, so those paths in the future may lead to two entirely different fates. On one of them may lie opportunities for riches. On the other may lie the most prosaic of hit-and-run accidents which will leave me a mangled corpse, not only upon one fork of a highway in the State of Virginia, but upon, one fork of a highway in time.”

  “In short, I am pointing out that there is more than one future we can encounter, and with more or less absence of deliberation we choose among them. But the futures we fail to encounter, upon the roads we do not take, are just as real as the landmarks upon those roads. We never see them, but we freely admit their existence.”

  Again it was Blake who protested: “All this is interesting enough, sir, but still I don’t see how it applies to our present situation.”

  Minott said impatiently: “Don’t you see that if such a state of things exists in the future, that it must also have existed in the past? We talk of three dimensions and one present and one future. There is a theoretic necesssity, a mathematical necessity, for assuming more than one future. There are an indefinite number of possible futures, any one of which we would encounter if we took the proper ‘forks’ in time.

  “There are any number of destinations to eastward. There are any number to futureward. Start a hundred miles west and come eastward, choosing your paths on earth at random, as you do in time. You may arrive here. You may arrive to the north or south of this spot, and still be east of your starting point. Now start a hundred years back instead of a hundred miles west.”

  Groping, Blake said fumbilingly: “I think you’re saying, sir, that, well, as there must be any number of futures, there must have been any number of pasts besides those written down in our histories. And—and it would follow that there are any number of what you might call ‘presents’. “

  Minott gulped down the last of his sandwich and nodded. “Precisely. And today’s convulsion of nature has jumbled them and still upsets them from time to time. The Northmen once colonized America. In the sequence of events which mark the pathway of our own ancestors through time, that colony failed. But along another path through time that colony throve and flourished. The Chinese reached the shores of California. In the path our ancestors followed through time, nothing developed from the fact. But this morning we touched upon the pathway in which they colonized and conquered the continent, though from the fear that one peasant we saw displayed, they have not wiped out the Indians.

  “Somewhere the Roman Empire still exists, and may not improbably rule America as it once ruled Britain. Somewhere, not impossibly, the conditions causing the glacial period still obtain and Virginia is buried under a mass of snow. Somewhere even the Carboniferous period may exist. Or to come more closely to the present we know, somewhere there is a path through time in which Pickett’s charge at Gettysburg went desperately home, and the Confederate States of America is now an independent nation with a heavily fortified border and a chip-on-the-shoulder attitude toward the United States.”

  * * * *

  Blake alone had asked questions, but the entire party had been listening open-mouthed.

  Now Maida Haynes said: “But—Professor Minott, where are we now?”

  “We are probably,” said Minott, smiling, “in a path of time in which America has never been discovered by white men. That isn’t a very satisfactory state of things. We’re going to look for something better. We wouldn’t be comfortable in wigwams, with skins for clothing. So we shall hunt for a more congenial environment. We will have some weeks in which to do our searching, I think. Unless, of course, all space and time are wiped out by the cause of our predicament.”

  Tom Hunter stirred uncomfortably. “We haven’t traveled backward or forward in time, then?”

  “No,” repeated Minott. He got to his feet. “
That odd nausea we felt seems to be caused by travel sidewise in time. It’s the symptom of a time oscillation. We’ll ride on and see what other worlds await us. We’re a rather well-qualified party for this sort of exploration. I chose you for your trainings. Hunter, zoology. Blake, engineering and geology. Harris, he nodded to the rather undersized young man, who flushed at being noticed, “Harris is quite a competent chemist, I understand. Miss Ketterling is a capable botanist. Miss Blair…”

  Maida Haynes rose slowly. “You anticipated all this, Professor Minott, and yet you brought us into it. You, you said we’ll never get back home. Yet you deliberately arranged it. What, what was your motive? What did you do it for?”

  Minott climbed into the saddle. He smiled, but there was bitterness in his smile. “In the world we know,” he told her, “I was a professor of mathematics in a small and unconsidered college. I had absolutely no chance of ever being more than a professor of mathematics in a small and unconsidered college. In this world I am, at least, the leader of a group of reasonably intelligent young people. In our saddlebags are arms and ammunition and more important, books of reference for our future activities. We shall hunt for and find a world in which our technical knowledge is at a premium. We shall live in that world, if all time and space is not destroyed, and use our knowledge.”