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

by Edited By Isaac Asimov

  Ahead was the other bend, blocked by the doughpot. As he neared it, he turned suddenly sick. Three of the creatures were grouped against the mass of white, eating—actually eating!—the corruption. They whirled, hooting, as he came, he shot two of them, and as the third leaped for the wall, he dropped that one as well, and it fell with a dull gulping sound into the doughpot.

  Again he sickened; the doughpot drew away from it, leaving the thing lying in a hollow like the hole of a giant doughnut. Not even that monstrosity would eat these creatures.[1]

  [1 It was not known then that while the night-side life of Venus can eat and digest that of the day side, the reverse is not true. No day-side creature can absorb the dark life because of the presence of various metabolic alcohols, all poisonous.]

  But the thing’s leap had drawn Ham’s attention to a twelve-inch ledge. It might be—yes, it was possible that he could traverse that rugged trail and so circle the doughpot. Nearly hopeless, no doubt, to attempt it under the volley of stones, but he must. There was no alternative.

  He shifted the girl to free his right arm. He slipped a second clip in his automatic and then fired at random into the flitting shadows above. For a moment the hail of pebbles ceased, and with a convulsive, painful struggle, Ham dragged himself and Patricia to the ledge.

  Stones cracked about him once more. Step by step he edged along the way, poised just over the doomed doughpot. Death below and death above! And little by little he rounded the bend; above him both walls glowed in sunlight, and they were safe.

  At least, he was safe. The girl might be already dead, he thought frantically, as he slipped and slid through the slime of the doughpot’s passage. Out on the daylit slope he tore the mask from her face and gazed on white, marble-cold features.

  * * * *

  It was not death, however, but only drugged torpor. An hour later she was conscious, though weak and very badly frightened. Yet almost her first question was for her pack.

  “It’s here,” Ham said. “What’s so precious about that pack? Your notes?”

  “My notes? Oh, no!” A faint flush covered her features. “It’s—I kept trying to tell you—it’s your xixtchil.”

  “What?”

  “Yes. I—of course I didn’t throw it to the molds. It’s yours by rights, Ham. Lots of British traders go into the American Hotlands. I just slit the pouch and hid it here in my pack. The molds on the ground were only some twigs I threw there to—to make it look real.”

  “But—but—why?”

  The flush deepened. “I wanted to punish you,” Patricia whispered, “for being so—so cold and distant.”

  “I?” Ham was amazed. “It was you!”

  “Perhaps it was, at first. You forced your way into my house, you know. But—after you carried me across the mudspout, Ham—it was different.”

  Ham gulped. Suddenly he pulled her into his arms. “I’m not going to quarrel about whose fault it was,” he said. “But we’ll settle one thing immediately. We’re going to Erotia, and that’s where we’ll be married, in a good American church if they’ve put one up yet, or by a good American justice if they haven’t. There’s no more talk of Madman’s Pass and crossing the Mountains of Eternity. Is that clear?”

  She glanced at the vast, looming peaks and shuddered. “Quite clear!” she replied meekly.

  * * * *

  After Weinbaum’s coming, there was a period when it seemed that every writer was turning out stories of strange life-forms. Stories became extraterrestrial travelogues, though no one ever did it as well as Weinbaum. When I began writing science fiction, I was not immune either. Even though I concentrated on human beings for the most part, I occasionally ventured into the Weinbaum-like bit, as in “Christmas on Ganymede.”

  My most Weinbaum-like story and, in fact, a conscious imitation of the spirit of “The Parasite Planet” was my juvenile novel Lucky Starr and the Oceans of Venus, written twenty years after the story that inspired it. (Don’t worry. I hadn’t forgotten.) What a pity that increasing astronomical knowledge concerning Venus has completely eliminated the possibility of its being a tropical, watery world and has made both “The Parasite Planet” and Lucky Starr and the Oceans of Venus ludicrously obsolete.

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  * * * *

  Science-fiction stories were steadily paying more attention to science. In “Colossus” the speed-of-light limitation was ignored. In a later story, “Proxima Centauri,” by Murray Leinster, in the March 1935 Astounding Stories, it was not. The journey to the nearest star was described as a many-year trip.

  PROXIMA CENTAURI

  by Murray Leinster

  The Adastra, from a little distance, already shone in the light of the approaching sun. The vision disks which scanned the giant space ship’s outer skin relayed a faint illumination to the visiplates within. They showed the monstrous, rounded bulk of the metal globe, crisscrossed with girders too massive to be transported by any power less than that of the space ship itself. They showed the whole, five-thousand-foot globe as an ever so faintly glowing object, seemingly motionless in mid-space.

  In that seeming, they lied. Monstrous as the ship was, and apparently too huge to be stirred by any conceivable power, she was responding to power now. At a dozen points upon her faintly glowing side there were openings. From those openings there flowed out tenuous purple flames. They gave little light, those flames—less than the star ahead—but they were the disintegration blasts from the rockets which had lifted the Adastra from the surface of Earth and for seven years had hurled it on through interstellar space toward Proxima Centauri, nearest of the fixed stars to humanity’s solar system.

  Now they hurled it forward no more. The mighty ship was decelerating. Thirty-two and two-tenths feet per second, losing velocity at the exact rate to maintain the effect of Earth’s gravity within its bulk, the huge globe showed. For months braking had been going on. From a peak-speed measurably near the velocity of light, the first of all vessels to span the distance between two solar systems had slowed and slowed, and would reach a speed of maneuver some sixty million miles from the surface of the star.

  Far, far ahead, Proxima Centauri glittered invitingly. The vision disks that showed its faint glow upon the space ship’s hull had counterparts which carried its image within the hull, and in the main control room it appeared enlarged very many times. An old, white-bearded man in uniform regarded it meditatively. He said slowly, as if he had said the same thing often before:

  “Quaint, that ring. It is double, like Saturn’s. And Saturn has nine moons. One wonders how many planets this sun will have.”

  The girl said restlessly: “We’ll find out soon, won’t we? We’re almost there. And we already know the rotation period of one of them! Jack said that-”

  Her father turned deliberately to her. “Jack?”

  “Gary,” said the girl. “Jack Gary.”

  “My dear,” said the old man mildly, “he seems well-disposed, and his abilities are good, but he is a Mut. Remember!”

  The girl bit her lip.

  The old man went on, quite slowly and without rancor: “It is unfortunate that we have had this division among the crew of what should have been a scientific expedition conducted in the spirit of a crusade. You hardly remember how it began. But we officers know only too well how many efforts have been made by the Muts to wreck the whole purpose of our voyage. This Jack Gary is a Mut. He is brilliant, in his way. I would have brought him into the officers’ quarters, but Alstair investigated and found undesirable facts which made it impossible.”

  “I don’t believe Alstair!” said the girl evenly. “And, anyhow, it was Jack who caught the signals. And he’s the one who’s working with them, officer or Mut! And he’s human, anyhow. It’s time for the signals to come again and you depend on him to handle them.”

  The old man frowned. He walked with a careful steadiness to a seat. He sat down with an old man’s habitual and rather pathetic caution. The Adastra, of course, requi
red no such constant vigilance at the controls as the interplanetary space ships require. Out here in emptiness there was no need to watch for meteors, for traffic, or for those queer and yet inexplicable force fields which at first made interplanetary flights so hazardous.

  The ship was so monstrous a structure, in any case, that the tinier meteorites could not have harmed her. And at the speed she was now making greater ones would be notified by the induction fields in time for observation and if necessary the changing of her course.

  * * * *

  A door at the side of the control room opened briskly and a man stepped in. He glanced with conscious professionalism at the banks of indicators. A relay clicked, and his eyes darted to the spot. He turned and saluted the old man with meticulous precision. He smiled at the girl.

  “Ah, Alstair,” said the old man. “You are curious about the signals, too?”

  “Yes, sir. Of course! And as second in command I rather like to keep an eye on signals. Gary is a Mut, and I would not like him to gather information that might be kept from the officers.”

  “That’s nonsense!” said the girl hotly.

  “Probably,” agreed Alstair. “I hope so. I even think so. But I prefer to leave out no precaution.”

  A buzzer sounded. Alstair pressed a button and a vision plate lighted. A dark, rather grim young face stared out of it.

  “Very well, Gary,” said Alstair curtly.

  He pressed another button. The vision plate darkened and lighted again to show a long corridor down which a solitary figure came. It came close and the same face looked impassively out. Alstair said even more curtly:

  “The other doors are open, Gary. You can come straight through.”

  “I think that’s monstrous!” said the girl angrily as the plate clicked off. “You know you trust him! You have to! Yet every time he comes into officers’ quarters you act as if you thought he had bombs in each hand and all the rest of the men behind him!”

  Alstair shrugged and glanced at the old man, who said tiredly:

  “Alstair is second in command, my dear, and he will be commander on the way back to Earth. I could wish you would be less offensive.”

  But the girl deliberately withdrew her eyes from the brisk figure of Alstair with its smart uniform, and rested her chin in her hands to gaze broodingly at the farther wall. Alstair went to the banks of indicators, surveying them in detail. The ventilator hummed softly. A relay clicked with a curiously smug, self-satisfied note. Otherwise there was no sound.

  The Adastra, mightiest work of the human race, hurtled on through space with the light of a strange sun shining faintly upon her enormous hull. Twelve lambent purple flames glowed from holes in her forward part. She was decelerating, lessening her speed by thirty-two point two feet per second per second, maintaining the effect of Earth’s gravity within her bulk.

  Earth was seven years behind and uncounted millions of billions of miles. Interplanetary travel was a commonplace in the solar system now, and a thriving colony on Venus and a precariously maintained outpost on the largest of Jupiter’s moons promised to make space commerce thrive even after the dead cities of Mars had ceased to give up their incredibly rich loot. But only the Adastra had ever essayed space beyond Pluto.

  She was the greatest of ships, the most colossal structure ever attempted by men. In the beginning, indeed, her design was derided as impossible of achievement by the very men who later made her building a fact. Her framework beams were so huge that, once cast, they could not be moved by any lifting contrivance at her builders’ disposal. Therefore the molds for them were built and the metal poured in their final position as a part of the ship. Her rocket tubes were so colossal that the necessary supersonic vibrations—to neutralize the disintegration effect of the Caldwell field—had to be generated at thirty separate points on each tube, else the disintegration of her fuel would have spread to the tubes themselves and the big ship afterward, with even the mother planet following in a burst of lambent purple flame. At full acceleration a set of twelve tubes disintegrated five cubic centimeters of water per second.

  Her diameter was a shade over five thousand feet. Her air tanks carried a reserve supply which could run her crew of three hundred for ten months without purification. Her stores, her shops, her supplies of raw and finished materials, were in such vast quantities that to enumerate them would be merely to recite meaningless figures.

  There were even four hundred acres of food-growing space within her, where crops were grown under sun lamps. Those crops used waste organic matter as fertilizer and restored exhaled carbon dioxide to use, in part as oxygen and in part as carbohydrate foodstuffs.

  The Adastra was a world in herself. Given power, she could subsist her crew forever, growing her food supplies, purifying her own internal atmosphere without loss and without fail, and containing space within which every human need could be provided, even solitude.

  And starting out upon the most stupendous journey in human history, she had formally been given the status of a world, with her commander empowered to make and enforce all needed laws. Bound for a destination four light-years distant, the minimum time for her return was considered to be fourteen years. No crew could possibly survive so long a voyage un-decimated. Therefore the enlistments for the voyage had not been by men, but by families.

  There were fifty children on board when the Adastra lifted from Earth’s surface. In the first year of her voyage ten more were born. It had seemed to the people of Earth that not only could the mighty ship subsist her crew forever, but that the crew itself, well-nourished and with more than adequate facilities both for amusement and education, could so far perpetuate itself as to make a voyage of a thousand years as practicable as the mere journey to Proxima Centauri.

  * * * *

  And so it could, but for a fact at once so needless and so human that nobody anticipated it. The fact was tedium. In less than six months the journey had ceased to become a great adventure. To the women in particular, the voyage of the big ship became deadly routine.

  The Adastra itself took on the semblance of a gigantic apartment house without newspapers, department stores, new film plays, new faces, or even the relieving annoyances of changeable weather. The sheer completeness of all preparations for the voyage made the voyage itself uneventful. That meant tedium.

  Tedium meant restlessness. And restlessness, with women on board who had envisioned high adventure, meant the devil to pay. Their husbands no longer appeared as glamorous heroes. They were merely human beings. The men encountered similar disillusionments. Pleas for divorce flooded the commander’s desk, he being legally the fount of all legal action. During the eighth month there was one murder, and in the three months following, two more.

  A year and a half out from Earth, and the crew was in a state of semi-mutiny originating in sheer boredom. By two years out, the officers’ quarters were sealed off from the greater part of the Adastra’s interior, the crew was disarmed, and what work was demanded of the mutineers was enforced by force guns in the hands of the officers. By three years out, the crew was demanding a return to Earth. But by the time the Adastra could be slowed and stopped from her then incredible velocity, she would be so near her destination as to make no appreciable difference in the length of her total voyage. For the rest of the time the members of the crew strove to relieve utter monotony by such vices and such pastimes as could be improvised in the absence of any actual need to work.

  The officers’ quarters referred to the underlings by a term become habitual, a contraction of the word “mutineers.” The crew came to have a queer distaste for all dealing with the officers. But, despite Alstair, there was no longer much danger of an uprising. A certain mental equilibrium had—very late—developed.

  From the nerve-racked psychology of dwellers in an isolated apartment house, the greater number of the Adastra’s complement came to have the psychology of dwellers in an isolated village. The difference was profound. In particular the children who ha
d come to maturity during the long journey through space were well-adjusted to the conditions of isolation and of routine.

  Jack Gary was one of them. He had been sixteen when the trip began, son of a rocket-tube engineer whose death took place the second year out. Helen Bradley was another. She had been fourteen when her father, as designer and commanding officer of the mighty globe, pressed the control key that set the huge rockets into action.

  Her father had been past maturity at the beginning. Aged by responsibility for seven uninterrupted years, he was an old man now. And he knew, and even Helen knew without admitting it, that he would never survive the long trip back. Alstair would take his place and the despotic authority inherent in it, and he wanted to marry Helen.

  She thought of these things, with her chin cupped in her hand, brooding in the control room. There was no sound save the humming of the ventilator and the infrequent smug click of a relay operating the automatic machinery to keep the Adastra a world in which nothing ever happened.