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

by Edited By Isaac Asimov

  Maida Haynes said: “But again, what for?”

  “To conquer it!” said Minott in sudden fierceness. “To conquer it! We eight shall rule a world as no world has been ruled since time began! I promise you that when we find the environment I seek, you will have wealth by millions, slaves by thousands, every luxury, and all the power human beings could desire!” Blake said evenly: “And you, sir? What will you have?”

  “Most power of all,” said Minott steadily. “I shall be the emperor of the world! And also his tone changed indescribably as he glanced at Maida, “also I shall have a certain other possession that I wish.”

  He turned his back to them and rode off to lead the way. Maida Haynes was deathly pale as she rode close to Blake Her hand closed convulsively upon his arm.

  “Jerry!” she whispered. “I’m frightened!”

  And Blake said steadily, “Don’t worry! I’ll kill him first!”

  * * * *

  V

  The ferryboat from Berkeley plowed valorously through the fog. Its whistle howled mournfully at the regulation intervals.

  Up in the pilot house, the skipper said confidentially, “I tell you, I had the funniest feelin’ of my life, just now. I was dizzy and sick all over, like I was seasick and drunk all at the same time.”

  The mate said abstractedly: “I had somethin’ like that a little while ago. Somethin’ we ate, prob’ly. Say, that’s funny!”

  “Say what?”

  “Was a lot o’ traffic in the harbor just now, whistlin’. I ain’t heard a whistle for minutes. Listen!” Both men strained their ears. There was the rhythmic shudder of the vessel, itself a sound produced by the engines. There were fragmentary voice noises from the passenger deck below. There was the wash of water by the ferryboat’s bow. There was nothing else. Nothing at all.

  “Funny!” said the skipper.

  “Damn funny!” agreed the mate.

  The ferryboat went on. The fog cut down all visibility to a radius of perhaps two hundred feet.

  “Funniest thing I ever saw!” said the skipper worriedly. He reached for the whistle cord and the mournful bellow of the horn resounded. “We’re near our slip, though. I wish.”

  With a little chugging, swishing sound a steam launch came out of the mist. It sheered off, the men in it staring blankly at the huge bulk of the ferry. It made a complete circuit of the big, clumsy craft. Then someone stood up and bellowed unintelligibly in the launch. He bellowed again. He was giving an order. He pointed to the flag at the stern of the launch, it was an unfamiliar flag, and roared furiously.

  “What the hell’s the matter of that guy?” wondered the mate.

  A little breeze blew suddenly. The fog began to thin. The faintly brighter spot which was the sun overhead grew bright indeed. Faint sunshine struggled through the fog bank. The wind drove the fog back before it, and the bellowing man in the steam launch grew purple with rage as his orders went unheeded.

  Then, quite abruptly, the last wisps of vapor blew away. San Francisco stood revealed. But, San Francisco? This was not San Francisco! It was a wooden city, a small city, a dirty city with narrow streets and gas street lamps and four monstrous, barracklike edifice fronting the harbor. Nob Hill stood, but it was barren of dwellings. And, “Damn!” said the mate of the ferryboat.

  He was staring at a colossal mass of masonry, foursquare and huge, which rose to a gigantic spiral fluted dome. A strange and alien flag fluttered in the breeze above certain buildings. Figures moved in the streets. There were motor cars, but they were clumsy and huge.

  The mate’s eyes rested upon a horse-drawn carriage. It was drawn by three horses abreast, and they were either so trained or so check-reined that the two outer horses’ heads were arched outward in the fashion of Tsarist Russia.

  But that was natural enough. When an interpreter could be found, the mate and skipper were savagely abused for entering the harbor of Novo Skevsky without paying due heed to the ordinances in force by the ukase of the Tsar Alexis of all the Russias. These rules, they learned, were enforced with special rigor in all the Russian territory in America, from Alaska on south.

  * * * *

  The boy ran shouting up to the village. “Hey, grandpa! Hey, grandpa! Lookit the birds!” He pointed as he ran.

  A man looked idly, and stood transfixed. A woman stopped, and stared. Lake Superior glowed bluely off to westward, and the little village most often turned its eyes in that direction. Now, though, as the small boy ran shouting of what he had seen, men stared, women marveled, and children ran and shouted and whooped in the instinctive excitement of childhood at anything which entrances grown-ups.

  Over the straggly pine forests birds were coming. They came in great dark masses. Not by dozens, or by hundreds, or even by thousands. They came in millions, in huge dark clouds which obscured the sky. There were two huge flights in sight at the boy’s first shouting. There were six in view before he had reached his home and was panting a demand that his elders come and look. And there were others, incredible numbers of others, sweeping onward straight over the village.

  Dusk fell abruptly as the first flock passed overhead. The whirring of wings was loud. It made people raise their voices as they asked each other what such birds could possibly be. Daylight again, and again darkness as the flocks poured on. The size of each flock was to be measured not in feet or yards, but in miles of front. Two, three miles of birds, flying steadily in a single enormous mass some four miles deep. Another such mass, and another, and another.

  “What are they, grandpa? There must be millions of ‘em!”

  Somewhere, a shotgun went off. Small things dropped from the sky. Another gunshot, and another. A rain of bird shot went up from the village into the mass of whirring wings. And crazily careening small bodies fell down among the houses.

  Grandpa examined one of them, smoothing its rumpled plumage. He exclaimed. He gasped in excitement. “It’s a wild pigeon! What they used to call passenger pigeons! Back in ‘78 there was these birds by billions. Folks said a billion was killed in Michigan that one year! But they’re gone now. They’re gone like the buffalo. There ain’t any more.”

  The sky was dark with birds above him. A flock four miles wide and three miles long made lights necessary in the village. The air was filled with the sound of wings. The passenger pigeon had returned to a continent from which it had been absent for almost fifty years.

  Flocks of passenger pigeons flew overhead in thick, dark masses equaling those seen by Audubon in 1813, when he computed the pigeons in flight above Kentucky at hundreds of billions in number. In flocks that were innumerable they flew to westward. The sun set, and still the air was filled with the sound of their flying. For hours after darkness fell, the whirring of wings continued without ceasing.

  * * * *

  VI

  A great open fire licked at the rocks against which it had been built. The horses cropped uneasily at herbage near by. The smell of fat meat cooking was undeniably savory, but one of the girls blubbered gustily on a bed of leaves. Harris tended the cookery. Tom Hunter brought wood. Blake stood guard a little beyond the firelight, revolvers ready, staring off into the blackness. Professor Minott pored over a topographical map of Virginia. Maida Haynes tried to comfort the blubbering girl.

  “Supper’s ready,” said Harris. He made even that announcement seem somehow shy and apologetic.

  Minott put down his map. Tom Hunter began to cut great chunks of steaming meat from the haunch of venison. He put them on slabs of bark and began to pass them around. Minott reached out his hand and took one of them. He ate with obvious appetite. He seemed to have abandoned his preoccupation the instant he laid down his map. He was displaying the qualities of a capable leader.

  “Hunter,” he observed, “After you’ve eaten that stuff, you might relieve Blake. ‘We’ll arrange reliefs for the rest of the night. By the way, you men mustn’t forget to wind your watches. We’ll need to rate them, ultimately.”

  Hunter gulped
down his food and moved out to Blake’s hiding place. They exchanged low-toned words. Blake came back to the fire. He took the food Harris handed him and began to eat it. He looked at the blubbering girl on the bed of leaves.

  “She’s just scared,” said Minott. “Barely slit the skin on her arm. But it is upsetting for a senior at Robinson College to be wounded by a flint arrowhead.”

  Blake nodded. “I heard some noises off in the darkness,” he said curtly “I’m not sure, but my impression was that I was being stalked. And I thought I heard a human voice.”

  “We may be watched,” admitted Minott. “But we’re out of the path of time in which those Indians tried to ambush us. If any of them follow, they’re too bewildered to be very dangerouus.”

  “I hope so,” said Blake.

  His manner was devoid of cordiality, yet there was no exception to be taken to it. Professor Minott had deliberately got the party into a predicament from which there seemed to be no possibility of escape. He had organized it to get it into just that predicament. He was unquestionably the leader of the party, despite his action. Blake made no attempt to undermine his leadership.

  But Blake himself had some qualifications as a leader, young as he was. Perhaps the most promising of them was the fact that he made no attempt to exercise his talents until he knew as much as Minott of what was to be looked for, what was to be expected.

  He listened sharply and then said: “I think we’ve digested your lesson of this morning, sir. But how long is this scrambling of space and time to continue? We left Fredericksburg and rode to the Potomac. It was Chinese territory. We rode back to Fredericksburg, and it wasn’t there. Instead, we encountered Indians who let loose a flight of arrows at us and wounded Bertha Ketterling in the arm. We were nearly out of range at the time, though.”

  “They were scared,” said Minott. “They’d never seen horses before. Our white skins probably upset them, too. And then our guns, and the fact that I killed one, should have chased them off.”

  “But, what happened to Fredericksburg? We rode away from it. Why couldn’t we ride back?”

  “The scrambling process has kept up,” said Minott dryly. “You remember that queer vertigo? We’ve had it several times today, and every time, as I see it, there’s been an oscillation of the earth we happened to be on. Hm! Look!” He got up and secured the map over which he had been poring. He brought it back and pointed to a heavy penciled line. “Here’s a map of Virginia, in our time. The Chinese continent appeared just about three miles north of Fredericksburg. The line of democration was, I consider, the line along which the giant sequoias appeared. While in the Chinese time we felt that giddiness and rode back toward Fredericksburg. We came out of the sequoia forest at the same spot as before. I made sure of it. But the continent of our time was no longer there.

  “We rode east and, whether you noticed it or not, before we reached the border of King George County there was another abrupt change in the vegetation from a pine country to oaks and firs, which are not exactly characteristic of this part of the world in our time.

  We saw no signs of any civilization. We turned south, and ran into that heavy fog and the snow beyond it. Evidently, there’s a section of a time path in which Virginia is still subject to a glacial climate.”

  Blake nodded. He listened again. Then be said, “You’ve three sides of an—an island of time marked there.”

  “Just so,” agreed Minott. “Exactly! In the scrambling process, the oscillating process, there seem to be natural ‘faults’ in the surface of the earth. Relatively large areas seem to shift back and forth as units from one time path to another. In my own mind, I’ve likened them to elevators with many stories.

  “We were on the Fredericksburg ‘elevator’, or that section of our time path, when it shifted to another time. We rode off it onto the Chinese continent. While there, the section we started from shifted again, to another time altogether. When we rode back to where it had been—well, the town of Fredericksburg was in another time path altogether.”

  Blake said sharply, “Listen!”

  A dull mutter sounded far to the north. It lasted for an instant and died away. There was a crashing of bushes near by and a monstrous animal stepped alertly into the firelight. It was, an elk, but such an elk! It was a giant, a colossal creature. One of the girls cried out aifrightedly, and it turned and crashed away into the underbrush.

  “There are no elk in Virginia,” said Minott dryly.

  Blake said sharply again, “Listen!”

  * * * *

  Again that dull muttering to the north. It grew louder, now. It was an airplane motor. It increased in volume from a dull mutter to a growl, from a growl to a roar. Then the plane shot overhead, the navigation lights on its wings glowing brightly. It banked steeper and returned. It circled overhead, with a queer effect of helplessness. And then suddenly it dived down.

  “An aviator from our time,” said Blake, staring toward the sound. “He saw our fire. He’s going to try to make a crash landing in the dark.”

  The motor cut off. An instant in which there was only the crackling, of the fire and the whistling of wind around gliding surfaces off there in the night. Then a terrific thrashing of branches. A crash Then a flare of flame, a roaring noise, and the lurid yellow of gasoline flames spouting skyward.

  “Stay here!” snapped Blake. He was on his feet in an instant. “Harris, Professor Minott! Somebody has to stay with the girls! I’ll get Hunter and go help!”

  He plunged off into the darkness, calling to Hunter. The two of them forced their way through the underbrush. Minott scowled and got out his revolvers. Still scowling, he slipped out of the firelight and took up the guard duty Hunter had abandoned.

  A gasoline tank exploded, off there in the darkness. The glare of the fire grew intolerably vivid. The sound of the two young men racing through undergrowth became fainter and died away.

  A long time passed a very long time. Then, very far away, the sound of thrashing bushes could be heard again. The gasoline flare dulled and dimmed. Figures came slowly back. They moved as if they were carrying something very heavy. They stopped beyond the glow of light from the camp fire. Then Blake and Hunter reappeared, alone.

  “He’d dead,” said Blake curtly. “Luckily, he was flung clear of the crash before the gas tanks caught. He came back to consciousness for a couple of minutes before he died. Our fire was the only sign of human life he’d seen in hours. We brought him over here. We’ll bury him in the morning.”

  There was silence. Minott’s scowl was deep and savage as he came back to the firelight.

  “What—what did he say?” asked Maida Haynes.

  “He left Washington at five this afternoon,” said Blake shortly. “By our time, or something like it. All of Virginia across the Potomac vanished at four thirty, and virgin forest took its place He went out to explore. At the end of an hour he came back, and Washington was gone. In its place was a fog bank, with snow underneath. He followed the Potomac down and saw palisaded homesteads with long, oared ships drawn up on shore.”

  “Vikings, Norsemen!” said Minott in satisfaction.

  “He didn’t land. He swept on down, following the edge of the bay. He looked for Baltimore. Gone! Once, he’s sure, he saw a city, but he was taken sick at about that time and when he recovered, it had vanished. He was heading north again and his gasoline was getting low when he saw our fire. He tried for a crash landing. He’d no flares with him. He crashed, and died.”

  “Poor fellow!” said Maida shakenly.

  “The point is,” said Blake, “that Washington was in our present time at about four thirty today. We’ve got a chance, though a slim one, of getting back! We’ve got to get to the edge of one of these blocks that go swinging through time, the edge of what Professor Minott calls a ‘time fault’, and watch it! When the shifts come, we explore as quickly as we can. We’ve no great likelihood, perhaps, of getting back exactly to our own period, but we can get nearer to it than we
are now! Professor Minott said that somewhere the Confederacy exists. Even that, among people of our own race and speaking our own language, would be better than to be marooned forever among Indians, or among Chinese or Norsemen.”

  Minott said harshly, “Blake, we’d better have this out right now! I give the orders in this party! You jumped quickly when that plane crashed, and you gave orders to Harris and to me. I let you get away with it, but we can have but one leader. I am that leader! See you remember it!”

  Blake swung about. Minott had a revolver bearing on his body.

  “And you are making plans for a return to our time!” he went on savagely. “I won’t have it! The odds are still that we’ll all be killed. But if I do live, I mean to take advantage of it. And my plans do not include a return to a professorship of mathematics at Robinson College.”