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

by Edited By Isaac Asimov

  Finally, when I decided at last, quite deliberately, to go all out on the extraterrestrial theme (partly out of annoyance at suggestions that I avoided them because I couldn’t handle them), I produced the second part of my novel The Gods Themselves. There I treated them on their own terms and viewed through their own eyes, as Gallun had done in “Old Faithful,” and Dua, my heroine, may even have traced back in my mind to Williamson’s “Mother” in “The Moon Era.”

  It was chiefly because of this second part, I think, that The Gods Themselves was awarded a Nebula as the “Best Science Fiction Novel of 1972” by the Science Fiction Writers of America and a Hugo at the 31st World Science Fiction Convention at Toronto, on September 3, 1973.

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  * * * *

  Part Six

  1935

  * * * *

  IN THE SPRING of 1935, I completed my high school education, and in June I graduated. The Boys High librarian who hunted successfully for the Boys High Recorder of Spring 1934 also came up with a copy of the Senior Recorder for the class of June 1935, and it is now one of my proud possessions.

  You might ask me why I didn’t have my own copy (and also a copy of the Recorder), saved these last nearly forty years—but I told you I don’t have that kind of sentimentality. I started keeping a diary on January 1, 1938, and I save that for reference. I also save the various publications in which my material appears (one of each), also as reference. Anything else —no.

  Back in 1966, when Boston University decided to collect all my papers and got in touch with me for that purpose (and went to considerable trouble to convince me that they, or anyone, could indeed possibly want those papers), I gave them what I had, which was very little.

  “Is this all?” they asked.

  “Yes,” I answered indifferently.

  “Where is the rest?” they asked.

  “I’ve been burning it,” I said—creating the utmost despondency in the poor gentlemen of the library.

  Of course, they now get everything. It doesn’t matter to me whether I get rid of it by way of a fireplace or of a library vault, as long as I’m not expected to keep it.

  If they had asked for my papers back in 1935, they would have gotten my copy of the yearbook; as it is, it doesn’t exist.

  At any rate, when I looked at the yearbook, I found the photograph of an incredibly young (fifteen), incredibly skinny (150 pounds), incredibly toothy Isaac Asimov staring back at me. Actually, I remembered the picture, because my father saved a print for some reason and had it in the mirror over the bureau in his bedroom. Otherwise, I simply wouldn’t have recognized it.

  The small caption appended to the photo recorded that I was planning to go to Columbia, which was true, and that I intended to be a surgeon. Well, as I said, my parents expected me to go to medical school and I had accepted their ambitions for me since I had never had it made clear to me that children were allowed to have ambitions for themselves. But surgeon? Where the devil did I get the idea that I wanted to be a surgeon? I cannot think of any profession more repellent, except possibly that of a professional literary critic.

  Each photograph of each student had something written underneath in italics by some anonymous wit who probably did not survive the strain and who perished to universal applause. Underneath mine, the villain had written: “When he looked at the clock, not only did it stop, but it started going backwards.” This is an allegation I repel with the scorn and contumely it deserves.

  Incidentally, you yourself will have the chance to see the photograph, since I persuaded Doubleday & Company to use it on the book jacket.

  Alas, the photograph and its accompanying caption are the only indication anywhere in the Senior Recorder that I attended Boys High. I am not mentioned in any of the listings of Halls of Fame, in any of the historical items, in any of the statistics. Nowhere.

  On page 54 of the Senior Recorder is a list headed “Class Statistics,” which includes the best this and the best that. The Best Literary Man is listed as Martin Lichterman.

  Oh, well.

  Unlike my junior high school graduation, which I remember, I do not remember my high school graduation at all. I’m not sure what that proves, if anything.

  Have I ever gone back to Boys High since my graduation in June 1935? You know the answer to that: I haven’t. I understand that it is now a ghetto school, almost entirely Black and Puerto Rican, as far as its student body is concerned.

  * * * *

  During my last months in Boys High I discovered Stanley G. Weinbaum and his science fiction stories—a half year too late.

  The trouble was, you see, that Wonder Stories and Amazing Stories were declining steadily in 1934, and neither was received regularly at my father’s newsstand. On the other hand, Astounding Stories grew so great in 1934 that it had begun to absorb me utterly. I made no effort to get any copies of Wonder Stories and Amazing Stories that I might miss as long as I got every single copy of Astounding Stories.

  The result was that I missed the July 1934 Wonder Stories and did not read Stanley G. Weinbaum’s “A Martian Odyssey” when it came out. Some years later I read it, of course, but by that time I lost the chance to participate in the effect it (and several other stories of his that appeared in later issues of Wonder Stories) had on everyone.

  Weinbaum was the most tragic figure in the history of magazine science fiction. “A Martian Odyssey” was his first science fiction story to be published (he was then thirty-four years old) and it established him at once (at once!) as a leading writer. His easy style and his realistic description of extraterrestrial scenes and life-forms were better than anything yet seen, and the science fiction reading public went mad over him.

  Nothing as unanimously and instantly enthusiastic had taken place since the first story by E. E. Smith, six years earlier. Nothing like it was to take place again till the first stories of Robert A. Heinlein, six years later.

  Weinbaum, though we didn’t know it at the time, was a Campbell author before Campbell had begun to mold a whole group of them. He was the one author to achieve Campbell stature without Campbell. Had he continued to write in the field (as, for instance, Smith and Heinlein did) for decades, there might have been less need of Campbell.

  But he didn’t live. For a year and a half he continued to publish stories in rapid succession and with steadily rising enthusiasm on the part of the readers. Then, in early 1936, he died of cancer, and it was all over.

  But he has never been forgotten. In the myriads of science fiction anthologies that have appeared since World War II, relatively few stories published prior to 1938 (that is, before the Coming of Campbell) are to be found. “A Martian Odyssey” is the most important exception.

  In 1970, thirty-six years after publication, the Science Fiction Writers of America voted on the best short science fiction stories of all time, and “A Martian Odyssey” finished in second place. In all the time since, only one story had been written that was considered to have surpassed it. [My cheerful self-appreciation simply won’t let me pass up this chance. That one story that was considered to have surpassed it was “Nightfall,” by Isaac Asimov.]

  Had I read “A Martian Odyssey” when it first appeared, its effect on me would surely have been such that I would have had to include it in this anthology. However, I did not read Weinbaum till his first appearance in Astounding Stories, with his “Flight on Titan,” in the January 1935 issue.

  I liked it, of course, but “The Parasite Planet,” in the very next issue, was what hit me with the force of a pile driver and turned me instantly into a Weinbaum idolater.

  * * * *

  THE PARASITE PLANET

  by Stanley G. Weinbaum

  I

  Luckily for “Ham” Hammond it was mid-winter when the mud-spout came. Mid-winter, that is, in the Venusian sense, which is nothing at all like the conception of the season generally entertained on Earth, except possibly, by dwellers in the hotter regions of the Amazon basin, or the
Congo.

  They, perhaps, might form a vague mental picture of winter on Venus by visualizing their hottest summer days, multiplying the heat, discomfort and unpleasant denizens of the jungle by ten or twelve.

  On Venus, as is now well known, the seasons occur alternately in opposite hemispheres, as on the Earth, but with a very important difference. Here, when North America and Europe swelter in summer, it is winter in Australia and Cape Colony and Argentina. It is the northern and southern hemispheres which alternate their seasons.

  But on Venus, very strangely, it is the eastern and western hemispheres, because the seasons of Venus depend, not on inclination to the plane of the ecliptic, but on libration. Venus does not rotate, but keeps the same face always toward the Sun, just as the Moon does toward the earth. One face is forever daylight, and the other forever night, and only along the twilight zone, a strip five hundred miles wide, is human habitation possible, a thin ring of territory circling the planet.

  Toward the sunlit side it verges into the blasting heat of a desert where only a few Venusian creatures live, and on the night edge the strip ends abruptly in the colossal ice barrier produced by the condensation of the upper winds that sweep endlessly from the rising air of the hot hemisphere to cool and sink and rush back again from the cold one.

  The chilling of warm air always produces rain, and at the edge of the darkness the rain freezes to form these great ramparts. What lies beyond, what fantastic forms of life may live in the starless darkness of the frozen face, or whether that region is as dead as the airless Moon—those are mysteries.

  But the slow libration, a ponderous wabbling of the planet from side to side, does produce the effect of seasons. On the lands of the twilight zone, first in one hemisphere and then the other, the cloud-hidden Sun seems to rise gradually for fifteen days, then sink for the same period. It never ascends far, and only near the ice barrier does it seem to touch the horizon; for the libration is only seven degrees, but it is sufficient to produce noticeable fifteen-day seasons.

  But such seasons! In the winter the temperature drops sometimes to a humid but bearable ninety, but, two weeks later, a hundred and forty is a cool day near the torrid edge of the zone. And always, winter and summer, the intermittent rains drip sullenly down to be absorbed by the spongy soil and given back again as sticky, unpleasant, unhealthy steam.

  And that, the vast amount of moisture on Venus, was the greatest surprise of the first human visitors; the clouds had been seen, of course, but the spectroscope denied the presence of water, naturally, since it was analyzing light reflected from the upper cloud surfaces, fifty miles above the planet’s face.

  That abundance of water has strange consequences. There are no seas or oceans on Venus, if we except the probability of vast, silent, and eternally frozen oceans on the sunless side. On the hot hemisphere evaporation is too rapid, and the rivers that flow out of the ice mountains simply diminish and finally vanish, dried up.

  A further consequence is the curiously unstable nature of the land of the twilight zone. Enormous subterranean rivers course invisibly through it, some boiling, some cold as the ice from which they flow. These are the cause of the mud eruptions that make human habitation in the Hotlands such a gamble; a perfectly solid and apparently safe area of soil may be changed suddenly into a boiling sea of mud in which buildings sink and vanish, together, frequently, with their occupants.

  There is no way of predicting these catastrophes; only on the rare outcroppings of bed rock is a structure safe, and so all permanent human settlements cluster about the mountains.

  * * * *

  Ham Hammond was a trader. He was one of those adventurous individuals who always appear on the frontiers and fringes of habitable regions. Most of these fall into two classes; they are either reckless daredevils pursuing danger, or outcasts, criminal or otherwise, pursuing either solitude or forgetfulness.

  Ham Hammond was neither. He was pursuing no such abstractions, but the good, solid lure of wealth. He was, in fact, trading with the natives for the spore-pods of the Venusian plant xixtchil, from which terrestrial chemists would extract trihydroxyl-tertiary-tolunitrile-beta-anthraquinone, the xixtline or triple-T-B-A that was so effective in rejuvenation treatments.

  Ham was young and sometimes wondered why rich old men—and women—would pay such tremendous prices for a few more years of virility, especially as the treatments didn’t actually increase the span of life, but just produced a sort of temporary and synthetic youth.

  Gray hair darkened, wrinkles filled out, bald heads grew fuzzy, and then, in a few years, the rejuvenated person was just as dead as he would have been, anyway. But as long as triple-T-B-A commanded a price about equal to its weight in radium, why, Ham was willing to take the gamble to obtain it.

  He had never really expected the mudspout. Of course it was an ever-present danger, but when, staring idly through the window of his shack over the writhing and steaming Venusian plain, he had seen the sudden boiling pools erupting all around, it had come as a shocking surprise.

  For a moment he was paralyzed; then he sprang into immediate and frantic action. He pulled on his enveloping suit of rubberlike transkin; he strapped the great bowls of mudshoes to his feet; he tied the precious bag of spore-pods to his shoulders, packed some food, and then burst into the open.

  The ground was still semisolid, but even as he watched, the black soil boiled out around the metal walls of the shack, the cube tilted a trifle, and then sank deliberately from sight, and the mud sucked and gurgled as it closed gently above the spot.

  Ham caught himself. One couldn’t stand still in the midst of a mudspout, even with the bowllike mudshoes as support. Once let the viscous stuff flow over the rim and the luckless victim was trapped; he couldn’t raise his foot against the suction, and first slowly, then more quickly, he’d follow the shack.

  So Ham started off over the boiling swamp, walking with the peculiar sliding motion he had learned by much practice, never raising the mudshoes above the surface, but sliding them along, careful that no mud topped the curving rim.

  It was a tiresome motion, but absolutely necessary. He slid along as if on snowshoes, bearing west because that was the direction of the dark side, and if he had to walk to safety, he might as well do it in coolness. The area of swamp was unusually large; he covered at least a mile before he attained a slight rise in the ground, and the mudshoes clumped on solid, or nearly solid, soil.

  He was bathed in perspiration; and his transkin suit was hot as a boiler room, but one grows accustomed to that on Venus. He’d have given half his supply of xixtchil pods for the opportunity to open the mask of the suit, to draw a breath of even the steamy and humid Venusian air, but that was impossible; impossible, at least, if he had any inclination to continue living.

  One breath of unfiltered air anywhere near the warm edge of the twilight zone was quick and very painful death; Ham would have drawn in uncounted millions of the spores of those fierce Venusian molds, and they’d have sprouted in furry and nauseating masses in his nostrils, his mouth, his lungs, and eventually in his ears and eyes.

  Breathing them wasn’t even a necessary requirement; once he’d come upon a trader’s body with the molds springing from his flesh. The poor fellow had somehow torn a rip in his transkin suit, and that was enough.

  The situation made eating and drinking in the open a problem on Venus; one had to wait until a rain had precipitated the spores, when it was safe for half an hour or so. Even then the water must have been recently boiled and the food just removed from its can; otherwise, as had happened to Ham more than once, the food was apt to turn abruptly into a fuzzy mass of molds that grew about as fast as the minute hand moved on a clock. A disgusting sight! A disgusting planet!

  * * * *

  That last reflection was induced by Ham’s view of the quagmire that had engulfed his shack. The heavier vegetation had gone with it, but already avid and greedy life was emerging, wriggling mud grass and the bulbous fungi called
“walking balls.” And all around a million little slimy creatures slithered across the mud, eating each other rapaciously, being torn to bits, and each fragment re-forming to a complete creature.

  A thousand different species, but all the same in one respect; each of them was all appetite. In common with most Venusian beings, they had a multiplicity of both legs and mouths; in fact some of them were little more than blobs of skin split into dozens of hungry mouths, and crawling on a hundred spidery legs.

  All life on Venus is more or less parasitic. Even the plants that draw their nourishment directly from soil and air have also the ability to absorb and digest—and, often enough, to trap—animal food. So fierce is the competition on that humid strip of land between the fire and the ice that one who has never seen it must fail even to imagine it.

  The animal kingdom wars incessantly on itself and the plant world; the vegetable kingdom retaliates, and frequently outdoes the other in the production of monstrous predatory horrors that one would even hesitate to call plant life. A terrible world!