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

by Edited By Isaac Asimov

  Yvonne Waters had bounded out of her bunk and had rushed to a window. It was still very dark, but outlined against the stars she saw a vague shape that swayed and moved. The girl’s hand groped quickly into the drawer of a small stand beside her and drew out a heavy automatic pistol. Then she hurried to the door and across the hallway.

  “Dad! Jack!” she called in a husky whisper. “I’ve seen something big. It’s coming toward the house!”

  The young man responded quickly, his unshod feet thudding across the floor. His eyes narrowed when he leaned out of the window. There the thing stood, statuesquely now, not fifty paces away. It was not clearly defined in the darkness, but Jack Cantrill knew at once that it was something completely out of his experience. It seemed to have an upright, cylindrical body that rose perhaps fifteen feet above the ground. Leverlike limbs projected grotesquely from the upper end of this torso, and at the lower end there were shadowy suggestions of other limbs, long and spidery. An angular object surmounted the cylinder, and in its present position it was an outlandish travesty of the head of a man, cocked to one side, listening.

  A minute passed. Obeying what must have been an automatic impulse, Yvonne Waters drew on her boots. About the camp she always dressed like the men, and during the last few nights, anticipating sudden developments, they had all slept in their clothing.

  Jack Cantrill, crouching by the window, felt the short hairs at the nape of his neck stiffen. Doctor Waters’ hand was on the young man’s shoulder. The fingers were trembling slightly.

  It was Jack who first put into words what they were all sure was the truth: “Old Faithful, I think,” he whispered, without any apparent excitement.

  He paused for a moment, during which neither of his companions made any comment, for even a slight sound, as far as they knew, might be heard, with disastrous consequences.

  The young man was thinking fast. Something had to be done and done quickly, and it was perhaps very easy to do the wrong thing.

  “Flashlight!” he whispered presently, taking command of the situation, and the girl, responding quickly to his leadership, slipped her big electric torch into his hand.

  “Now out into the open—all of us,” he ordered. “Armed?”

  Each carried a pistol. They slipped around to the side of the house, with Cantrill in the lead. The weird giant stood as before, rigid and perfectly still.

  Jack raised the flashlight. Working the flash button with his thumb, he proceeded to signal out in the Morse code, a familiar message: “Hello, Man of Mars! Hello, Man of Mars! Hello, Man of Mars!”

  And the answer came immediately, flickering from a small spot of green light on the angular “head” of the automaton: “Hello, Man of Earth! Hello, Man of Earth! Comet. Comet. Comet. Comet.” The message was clear enough, but there was an unusual halting, stumbling hesitancy in the way it was given. Old Faithful had always been precise and quick in the messages he had flashed from Mars.

  As the three watchers stood spellbound, the great quasi-human machine started forward toward the house. Its movements were powerful, but drunken and unsteady. It seemed to be little more than an insensate mechanism running amuk. The intelligence that was guiding it was losing its hold. Nothing could avert an accident.

  The robot struck the side of the house with a heavy thud, lurched forward, stumbled, and fell with a clatter and clang of metal across the low roof that collapsed under its weight and the force of its overthrow. Prostrate though it was, its lower limbs continued to simulate the movements of walking.

  Its arms sprawled wide, and from a metal knob at the tip of one a torrent of blue sparks began to pour into the earth, causing the patch of sand it struck to turn molten and boil away in a cloud of incandescent vapor. A minute must have passed before the sparks burned out and the appendages of the machine ceased their ponderous thrashing.

  Meanwhile the three watchers had been staring at the weird and inspiring sight, not knowing just what to do. But now, when quiet was restored, they edged cautiously toward the fallen machine. Jack Cantrill’s flashlight beam played over the wreckage and halted upon the flattened “head” of the robot. It was pyramidal in form and had been supported by a flexible pillar of pointed metal. There was an opening in one side, and from it something had tumbled. A shadow veiled it, so that the watchers could not immediately see what it was. Then Jack leaped to a different position and poured the beam of the flashlight full upon it.

  The effect of its strangeness did not come upon them right away, for they did not at once realize its true nature. It seemed at first only a sprawling mass of drab gray, as large, perhaps, as the open top of an ordinary umbrella. It might have been nothing more than a large lump of wet mud, flattened out by being dropped.

  Then, after a moment, the three took note of the ragged tendrils that radiated out from the oblate form somewhat in the manner of the arms of a starfish. The ends of some of those tendrils were slender and stalklike and were terminated by incredibly fine filaments of coral pink. Those filaments were twitching convulsively.

  Yvonne Waters was the first to find her voice. It was choking and tremulous: “The thing’s alive!” she cried. “Dad! Jack! It’s alive!”

  Obscure primal instincts had taken possession of them. Like wary alley curs they inched their way forward, craning their necks to look closer at the creature, in which, for them, both fascination and fear were combined.

  It was then they saw that the central lump of the thing was contracting in painful, jerky spasms. It was breathing, or gasping, rather. Feathery pink palps around a cone-shaped orifice that resembled the inside of a funnel coiled in agony. They could hear the monster’s breath whistle through the opening in long, rasping sighs.

  But the creature’s eyes, fixed to the ends of two tentacular appendages that protruded from beneath the outer folds of its flattened body, regarded them with what seemed to be an interest which could not be dimmed by physical pain and suffering. They were very large eyes, three inches across, and there was in their alien, brooding intensity, slightly veiled now by the film of approaching death, a suggestion of an intelligence in this monstrous, inhuman body that was more than human.

  Yvonne Waters had taken note of these things almost in the space of a moment. She saw the hideous festering gashes of wounds that must have been several days old on the body of the visiting being, and she saw that several of its limbs were shattered. Some of them seemed to be partly knit, but others were evidently recent injuries. From the fresh wounds bright red blood oozed, giving evidence of a very high hemoglobin content, which would be necessary for a creature accustomed to breathing an atmosphere much more rarefied than that of Earth.

  Maybe it was because Yvonne Waters was a woman that she bridged the gap between Earthman and Martian more quickly than her companions.

  “He’s hurt!” she gasped suddenly. “We’ve got to help him some way! We ought to—ought to—get a doctor.” She halted a little in expressing this last idea. It seemed so totally wild and fantastic.

  “A doctor for that horror?” Jack Cantrill asked, a trifle dazed.

  “Yes! Well, maybe no,” the girl amended. “But still we must do something. We’ve got to! He’s human, Jack—human in everything but form. He has brains; he can feel pain like any human being. Besides, he has courage of the same kind that we all worship. Think of the pluck it took to make the first plunge across fifty million miles of cold, airless void! That’s something to bow down to, isn’t it? And, besides, this is our friend, Old Faithful!”

  “By the gods, Yvonne, you’re right!” the young man exploded with sudden realization. “And here I am, wasting time like a dumb fool!”

  He dropped to his knees beside the injured Martian, and his big hands poised, ready and willing, but still uncertain how to help this bizarre entity of another world.

  Doctor Waters had by this time shaken the fog of sleep from his older and less agile faculties, and he was now able to grasp the situation. With a brief and crisp, “I’ll get
the first-aid kit!” he hurried into the partially wrecked house, across the roof of which sprawled Old Faithful’s automaton.

  Conquering her natural revulsion, Yvonne brought herself to touch the dry, cold flesh of the Martian, and to try as best she might to ease its suffering. Presently the three of them were working over their weird patient, disinfecting and bandaging its wounds. But there was small hope that their efforts would be of any avail.

  At their first touch, Old Faithful had started convulsively, as though in fear and repugnance of these, to him, horrid monsters; and a low, thick cry came from the opening in his body. But he must have realized that their intentions were harmless, for he had relaxed immediately. His breath, however, was rapidly growing weaker and more convulsive, and his eyes were glazing.

  “We’re dumb!” Jack stated with sudden vehemence. “He’s badly hurt, but that’s not all. This atmosphere is six times too dense for him. He’s smothering in it—drowning! We’ve got to get him somewhere where the pressure won’t be crushing him!”

  “We’ll rig up a vacuum tank down in the engine shed,” said Doctor Waters. “It won’t take but a minute.”

  It was done. However, when they were lifting Old Faithful onto the litter they had improvised, his body stiffened, shuddered, and grew suddenly limp. They knew that Old Faithful—Number 774—was gone. Still, to aid the remote possibility that he would revive, they placed him in the vacuum tank and exhausted most of the air so that the pressure inside duplicated that of the rarefied Martian atmosphere. Fresh air was admitted slowly through the pet cock. But within an hour Old Faithful’s flesh had become stiff with rigor mortis. He was dead.

  Much must have passed through the devious channels of his Martian mind during those brief hours on Planet Three. He must have felt satisfied that his eagerness to penetrate the unknown was partly rewarded, his ambition partly fulfilled. He had learned what lay back of, and what had guided, the flickerings of the light. He had seen the people of Planet Three. Perhaps, at the last, he had thought of Mars, his home, and the sorry plight of his race.

  Maybe he thought of his growing offspring in that buried nursery chamber, fifty million miles away. Maybe the possibilities of Earth, as a means of aiding dying Mars, occurred to him, if it had not come into his mind before, and it is quite likely that his ideas in that direction were not altogether altruistic toward mankind.

  Certainly he hoped that his friend of the light would find his space car and what it contained, out there in the desert, and that they would study and understand.

  Dawn came, with the eastern sky sprinkled with a few pink feathery clouds that the bright sun would soon dissipate.

  In one of the various corrugated iron sheds of the camp, Yvonne, Jack, and the doctor were bending over the body of Old Faithful, which lay stiff and lifeless on a long table.

  “Kind of heartless to be preparing this intelligent being for immersion in a preservative spirit bath so that a lot of curious museum-goers can have a thrill, don’t you think, folks?” Jack was complaining with make-believe gruffness. “How would you like it if the situation was reversed—if we were stiffs with the curious of Mars looking at us?”

  “I wouldn’t mind if I was dead.” The girl laughed. “It would be an honor. Oh, look, Jack—the funny little mark on Old Faithful’s skin—it’s tattooed with red ink. What do you suppose it means?”

  Jack had already seen the mark. It was a circle with a bar through the center and was, as the girl had said, an artificial decoration or symbol. Jack shrugged. “Search me, honey!” He chuckled. “Say, doc, do you suppose that space car is around here somewhere?”

  The doctor nodded. “It must be.”

  “Well, come on! Let’s look for it, then! This can wait.”

  After a very hasty and sketchy breakfast, they made their way on horseback out into the desert, following the tracks the Martian robot had made.

  At the summit of a rocky ridge they found what they sought—a long cylinder of metal deeply imbedded in sand that seemed literally to have splashed like soft mud around it. The long fins of the space car were crumpled and broken and covered with the blue-gray ash of oxidation. Here and there a fragment had peeled away, revealing bright metal beneath.

  The nose of the shell had become unscrewed, exposing burnished threads that glistened in the sun. Into the shadowed interior they made their way, rummaging gingerly among the bewildering maze of Martian instruments. The place reeked with a scorched, pungent odor.

  At the rear of the cylindrical compartment they found a great round drum of metal, fitting snugly into the interior of the shell. Sleepily they wondered what was in it and made several weary attempts to move it. At nine o’clock the police guard that Doctor Waters had sent for arrived.

  “Tell those damned reporters who are trying to crash in on us to go to hell,” Jack Cantrill told the lieutenant in charge, as he and his two companions were starting wearily back toward camp. “We’ve got to snooze.”

  Several weeks had passed. In a hotel room in Phoenix, Arizona, Doctor Waters was speaking to Mr. and Mrs. Cantrill, who had just arrived.

  “I’m turning the camp and the signaling apparatus over to Radeau and his associates,” he was saying. “No more signals from Mars, somehow, and I don’t feel very much like continuing there anyway. There are a lot more interesting things on the horizon.

  “That drum which Old Faithful brought us—it contained models and many charts and sheets of parchment with drawings on them. I’m beginning to see light through the mystery at last. There are suggestions there for constructing a spaceship. I’m going to work on that problem as long as I live.

  “Maybe I’ll succeed with the help of Old Faithful. Human ingenuity will have to be called on, too, of course. I don’t think that the Martians have the problem completely solved themselves. Old Faithful used the comet, you know.”

  The doctor’s smile broadened as he went on: “Children, how would you like to go to Mars with me some day?”

  “Don’t ask silly questions, dad,” said Yvonne. “We’d go in a minute!”

  The young man nodded seriously. “What a honeymoon that would make, if we could have it now!” he enthused.

  “A million times better than going to Seattle,” the girl agreed.

  The doctor grinned faintly. “Even if you were treated like poor Old Faithful—pickled and put in a museum?”

  “Even if!”

  Jack Cantrill’s eyes narrowed and seemed to stare far away into nothing. His lips and his gaunt sunburned cheeks were stern. Perhaps he was looking into the future toward adventures that might or might not come.

  Something of the same rugged spirit seemed suddenly to have infused itself into the strong, bronzed beauty of the girl at his side. They both loved adventure; they both knew life in the rough.

  At the door Yvonne kissed her father good-bye. “Just a little run up to Seattle, dad,” she explained cheerily, “two or three weeks, maybe. Then both of us back with you—to work.”

  * * * *

  “Old Faithful” made a deep impression on the readers. One demonstration of that showed itself, inevitably, in the fact that Gallun was pushed into writing a sequel, “The Son of Old Faithful,” which appeared in the July 1935 issue of Astounding Stories.

  More important was the fact that sympathetic portraits of extraterrestrials became common after “Old Faithful,” particularly among the more sophisticated writers. The old picture of extraterrestrial as mindless villain receded into the more primitive byways.

  One might say, of course, that Gallun was not fundamentally responsible for this, but that he, and everyone else, were unavoidably affected by trends and events of the times. In January 1933, Adolf Hitler had come to power in Germany, and, in the United States at least, he was making racism unpopular. Whatever the private feelings of individual Americans, it became difficult to express anything in print that might resemble the Nazi doctrine.

  The easy assumption of early science fiction writers that
Nordic whites were the natural heroes and the darker the complexion the more villainous the character, had to disappear. And inasmuch as the easy assumption of villainous extraterrestrials was a kind of reflection of terrestrial racism, that, too, began to fade.

  But if the trend was inevitable, Gallun nevertheless was the first to take advantage of it in a really effective manner.

  I eventually wrote stories in which I had a rather primitive view of extraterrestrials bent single-mindedly on conquest, as in “The Black Friar of the Flame,” “C-Chute,” and “In a Good Cause . . . ,” though in each case I believe I made some small attempt at presenting their side.

  On the whole, though, I avoided extraterrestrials, because I did not want to be more or less forced into treating them as simple villains (see The Early Asimov). When they did appear, I sometimes applied the example of such writers as Gallun and treated them sympathetically, as in my stories “Hostess” and “Blind Alley.”