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

by Edited By Isaac Asimov

Then the skipper came to. He roared orders. The big ship heeled as it came around. It plunged forward at vastly more than its normal cruising speed The guns on the other ship doubled and redoubled their rate of fire. Then the black ship tried to dodge. But it had not time.

  The City of Baltimore rammed it. But at the very last moment the skipper felt certain of his own insanity. It was too late to save the other ship then. The City of Baltimore cut it in two.

  * * * *

  XII.

  The pale gray light of dawn filtered down through an incredible thickness of foliage. It was a subdued, a feeble twilight when it reached the earth where a tiny camp fire burned. That fire gave off thick smoke from watersoaked wood. Hunter tended it, clad in ill-assorted remnants of a gray uniform.

  Harris worked patiently at a rifle, trying to understand exactly how it worked. It was unlike any rifle with which he was familiar. The bolt action was not really a bolt action at all, and he’d noticed that there was no rifling in the barrel. He was trying to understand how the long bullet was made to revolve. Harris, too, had substituted Confederate gray for the loin cloth flung him for sole covering when with the others he was thrust into the slave pen of the Roman villa. Minott sat with his head in his hands, staring at the opposite side of the stream. On his face was all bitterness.

  Blake listened. Maida Haynes sat and looked at him. Lucy Blair darted furtive, somehow wistful, glances at Minott. Presently she moved to sit beside him. She asked him an anxious question. The other two girls sat by the fire. Bertha Ketterling was slouched back against a tree-fern trunk. Her head had fallen back. She snored. With the exception of Blake, all of them were barefoot.

  Blake came back to the fire. He nodded across the little stream. “We seem to have come to the edge of a time fault,” he observed. “This side of the stream is definitely Carboniferous-period vegetation. The other side isn’t as primitive, but it isn’t of our time, anyhow. Professor Minott!”

  Minott lifted his head. “Well?” he demanded bitterly.

  “We need some information,” said Blake. “We’ve been here for hours, and there’s been no further change in time paths that we’ve noticed. Is, it likely that the scrambling of time and space is ended, sir? If it has, and the time paths stay jumbled, we’ll never find our world intact, of course, but we can hunt for colonies, perhaps even cities of our own kind of people.”

  “If we do,” said Minott bitterly, “how far will we get? We’re practically unarmed. We can’t—”

  Blake pointed to the salvaged rifles. “Harris is working on the arms problem now,” he said dryly. “Besides, the girls didn’t take the revolvers from their saddlebags. We’ve still two revolvers for each man and an extra pair. Those Romans thought the saddlebags were decorations, perhaps, or they intended to examine the saddles as a whole. We’ll make out. What I want to know is, has the time-scrambling process stopped?”

  Lucy Blair said something in a low tone. But Minott glanced at Maida Haynes, She was regarding Blake worshipfully.

  Minott’s eyes burned. He scowled in surpassing bitterness. “It probably hasn’t,” he said harshly. I expect it to keep up for probably two weeks or more of duration. I use that term to mean time elapsed in all the time paths simultaneously. We can’t help thinking of time as passing on our particular time path only. Yes, I expect disturbances to continue for two weeks or more, if everything in time and space is not annihilated.”

  Blake sat down.

  Insensibly Maida Haynes moved closer to him. “Could you explain, sir? We can only wait here. As nearly as I can tell from the topography, there’s a village across this litle stream in our time. It ought to be in sight if our time path ever turns up in view, here.”

  Minott unconsciously reassumed some of his former authoritative manner. Their capture and scornful dismissal to the status of slaves had shaken all his self-confidence. Before, he had felt himself not only a member of a superior race, but a superior member of that race. In being enslaved he had been both degraded and scorned. His vanity was still gnawed at by that memory, and his self-confidence shattered by the fact that he had been able to kill only two utterly brutalized slaves, without in the least contributing to his own freedom. Now, for the first time, his voice took on a semblance of its old ring.

  “We know that gravity warps space,” he said precisely. “From observation we have been able to discover the amount of warping produced by a given mass. We can calculate the mass necessary to warp space so that it will close in completely, making a closed universe, which is unreachable and undetectable in any of the dimensions. We know, for example, that if two gigantic star masses of a certain combined mass were to rush together, at the instant of their collision there would not be a great cataclysm. They would simply vanish. But they would not cease to exist. They would merely cease to exist in our space and time, They would have created a space and time of their own.”

  Harris said apologetically, “Like crawling in a hole and pulling the hole in after you. I read something like that in a Sunday supplement once, sir.”

  Minott nodded. He went on in a near approach to a classroom manner. “Now, imagine that two such universes have been formed. They are both invisible from the space and time in which they were formed. Each exists in its own space and time, just as our universe does. But each must also exist in a certain, well, hyper-space, because if closed spaces are separated, there must be some sort of something in between them, else they would be together.”

  “Really,” said Blake, “you’re talking about something we can infer, but ordinarily can’t possibly learn anything about by observation.”

  “Just so.” Minott nodded. “Still, if our space is closed, we must assume that there are other closed spaces. And don’t forget that other closed spaces would be as real, are as real, as our closed space is.”

  “But what does it mean?” asked Blake.

  “If there are other closed spaces like ours, and they exist in a common medium, the hyper, space from which they and we alike are sealed off, they might be likened to, say, stars and planets in our space, which are separated by space and yet affect each other through space. Since these various closed spaces are separated by a logically necessary hyper-space, it is at least probable that they should affect each other through that hyper-space.”

  Blake said slowly, “Then the shiftings of time paths, well, they’re the result of something on the order of tidal strains. If another star got close to the sun, our planets would crack up from tidal strains alone. You’re suggesting that another closed space has got close to our closed space in hyper-space. It’s awfully confused, sir.”

  “I have calculated it,” said Minott harshly. “The odds are four to one that space and time and universe, every star and every galaxy in the skies, will be obliterated in one monstrous cataclysm when even the past will never have been. But there is one chance in four, and I planned to take full advantage of it. I planned—”

  * * * *

  Then he stood up suddenly. His figure straightened. He struck his hands together savagely. “By Heaven, I still plan! We have arms. We have books, technical knowledge, formulas, the cream of the technical knowledge of earth packed in our saddlebags! Listen to me! We cross this stream now. When the next change comes, we strike across whatever time path takes the place of this. We make for the Potomac, where that aviator saw Norse ships drawn up! I have Anglo-Saxon and early Norse vocabularies in the saddlebags. We’ll make friends with them. We’ll teach them. We’ll lead them. We’ll make ourselves masters of the world and—”

  Harris said apologetically: “I’m sorry, sir, but I promised Bertha I’d take her home, if it was humanly possible. I have to do it. I can’t join you in becoming an emperor, even if the breaks are right.”

  Minott scowled at him. “Hunter?”

  “I—I’ll do as the others do,” said Hunter uneasily. “I—I’d rather go home.”

  “Fool!” snarled Minott.

  Lucy Blair said loyally: “I—I’d
like to be an empress, Professor Minott.”

  Maida Haynes stared at her. She opened her mouth to speak. Blake absently pulled a revolver from his pocket and looked at it meditatively as Minott clenched and unclenched his hands. The veins stood out on his forehead. He began to breathe heavily.

  “Fools!” he roared. “Fools! You’ll never get back! Yet you throw away…”

  Swift, sharp, agonizing vertigo smote them all. The revolver fell from Blake’s hands. He looked up. A dead silence fell upon all of them.

  Blake stood shakily upon his feet. He looked, and looked again. “That—” He swallowed. “That is King George courthouse, in King George County, in Virginia, in our time I think. Hell! Let’s get across that stream.”

  He picked up Maida in his arms. He started.

  Minott moved quickly and croaked, “Wait!”

  He had Blake’s dropped revolver in his hand. He was desperate, hunted, gray with rage and despair. “I—I offer you, for the last time, I offer you riches, power, women, and—”

  Harris stood up, the Confederate rifle still in his hands. He brought the barrel down smartly upon Minott’s wrist.

  Blake waded across and put Maida safely down upon the shore. Hunter was splashing frantically through the shallow water. Harris was shaking Bertha Ketterling to wake her. Blake splashed back. He rounded up the horses. He loaded the salvaged weapons over a saddle. He shepherded the three remaining girls over. Hunter was out of sight. He had fled toward the painted buildings of the courthouse. Blake led the horses across the stream. Minott nursed his numbed wrist. His eyes blazed with the fury of utter despair.

  “Better come along,” said Blake quietly.

  “And be a professor of mathematics?” Minott laughed savagely. “No! I stay here!”

  Blake considered. Minott was a strange, an unprepossessing figure. He was haggard. He was desperate. Standing against the background of a Carboniferous jungle, in the misfitting uniform he had stripped from a dead man in some other path of time, he was even pitiable. Shoeless, unshaven, desperate, he was utterly defiant.

  “Wait!” said Blake.

  He stripped off the saddlebags from six of the horses. He heaped them on the remaining two. He led those two back across the stream and tethered them.

  Minott regarded him with an implacable hatred. “If I hadn’t chosen you,” he said harshly, “I’d have carried my original plan through. I knew I shouldn’t choose you. Maida liked you too well. And I wanted her for myself. It was my mistake, my only one.”

  Blake shrugged. He went back across the stream and remounted.

  Lucy Blair looked doubtfully back at the solitary, savage figure. “He’s brave, anyhow,” she said unhappily.

  A faint, almost imperceptible, dizziness affected all of them. It passed. By instinct they looked back at the tall jungle. It still stood. Minott looked bitterly after them.

  “I’ve something I want to say!” said Lucy Blair breathlessly. “D—don’t wait for me!”

  She wheeled her horse about and rode for the stream. Again that faint, nearly imperceptible, dizziness. Lucy slapped her horse’s flank frantically.

  Maida cried out, “Wait, Lucy! It’s going to shift—” And Lucy cried over her shoulder, “That’s what I want! I’m going to stay.”

  She was halfway across the stream more than halfway. Then the vertigo struck all of them.

  * * * *

  XIII.

  Everyone knows the rest of the story. For two weeks longer there were still occasional shiftings of the time paths. But gradually it became noticeable that the number of time faults in Professor Minott’s phrase were decreasing in number. At the most drastic period, it has been estimated that no less than twenty-five per cent of the whole earth’s surface was at a given moment in some other time path than its own. We do not know of any portion of the earth which did not vary from its own time path at some period of the disturbance.

  That means, of course, that practically one hundred per cent of the earth’s population encountered the conditions caused by the earth’s extraordinary oscillations sidewise in time. Our scientists are no longer quite as dogmatic as they used to be. The dialectics of philosophy have received a serious jolt. Basic ideas in botany, zoology, and even philology have been altered by the new facts made available by our travels sidewise in time.

  Because, of course, it was the fourth chance which happened, and the earth survived. In our time path, at any rate. The survivors of Minott’s exploring party reached King George courthouse barely a quarter of an hour after the time shift which carried Minott and Lucy Blair out of our space and time forever. Blake and Harris searched for a means of transmitting the information they possessed to the world at large. Through a lonely radio amateur a mile from the village, they sent out Minott’s theory on short waves. Shorn of Minott’s pessimistic analysis of the probabilities of survival, it went swiftly to every part of the world then in its proper relative position. It was valuable, in that it checked explorations in force which in some places had been planned. It prevented, for example, a punitive military expedition from going past a time fault in Georgia, past which a scalping party of Indians from an uncivilized America had retreated. It prevented the dispatch of a squadron of destroyers to find and seize Leifsholm, from, which a viking foray had been made upon North Centerville, Massachusetts. A squadron of mapping planes was recalled from reconnaissance work above a Carboniferous swamp in West Virginia, just before the time shift which would have isolated them forever.

  Some things, though, no knowledge could prevent. It has been estimated that no less than five thousand persons in the United States are missing from their own space and time, through having adventured into the strange landscapes which appeared so suddenly. Many must have perished. Some, we feel sure, have come in contact with one or another of the distinct civilizations we now know exist.

  Conversely, we have gained inhabitants from other time paths. Two cohorts of the twenty-second Roman Legion were left upon our soil near Ithaca, New York. Four families of Chinese peasants essayed to pick berries in what they considered a miraculous strawberry patch in Virginia, and remained there when that section of ground returned to its proper milieu.

  A Russian village remains in Colorado. A French settlement, in their time, undeveloped Middle West. A part of the northern herd of buffalo has returned to us, two hundred thousand strong, together with a village of Cheyenne Indians who had never seen either horses or firearms. The passenger pigeon, to the number of a billion and a half birds, has returned to North America.

  But our losses are heavy. Besides those daring individuals who were carried away upon the strange territories they were exploring, there are the overwhelming disasters affecting Tokyo and Rio de Janeiro and Detroit. The first two we understand. When the causes of oscillation sidewise in time were removed, most of the earth sections returned to their proper positions in their own time paths. But not all. There is a section of PostCambrian jungle left in eastern Tennessee. The Russian village in Colorado has been mentioned, and the French trading post in the Middle West. In some cases sections of the oscillating time paths remained in new positions, remote from their points of origin.

  That is the cause of the utter disappearance of Rio and of Tokyo. Where Rio stood, an untouched jungle remains. It is of our own geological period, but it is simply from a path in time in which Rio de Janeiro never happened to be built. On the site of Tokyo stands a forest of extraordinarily primitive type, about which botanists and paleontologists still debate. Somewhere, in some space and time, Tokyo and Rio yet exist and their people still live on. But Detroit, we still do not understand what happened to Detroit.

  It was upon an oscillating segment of earth. It vanished from our time, and it returned to our time. But its inhabitants did not come back with it. The city was empty, deserted as if the hundreds of thousands of human beings who lived in it had simply evaporated into the air. There have been some few signs of struggle seen, but they may have been the r
esult of panic. The city of Detroit returned to its own space and time untouched, unharmed, unlooted, and undisturbed. But no living thing, not even a domestic animal or a caged bird, was in it when it came back. We do not understand that at all.

  Perhaps if Professor Minott had returned to us, he could have guessed at the answer to the riddle. What fragmentary papers of his have been shown to refer to the time upheaval have been of inestimable value. Our whole theory of what happened depends on the papers Minott left behind as too unimportant to bother with, in addition, of course, to Blake’s and Harris account of his explanation to them. Tom Hunter can remember little that is useful. Maida Haynes has given some worthwhile data, but it covers ground we have other observers for. Bertha Ketterling also reports very little.

  The answers to myriad problems yet elude us, but in the saddlebags given to Minott by Blake as equipment for his desperate journey through space and time, the answers to many must remain. Our scientists labor diligently to understand and to elaborate the figures Minott thought of trivial significance. And throughout the world many minds turn longingly to certain saddlebags, loaded on a led horse, following Minott and Lucy Blair through unguessable landscapes, to unimaginable adventures, with revolvers and textbooks as their armament for the conquest of a world.