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

by Edited By Isaac Asimov

  His guide, the former captive, exchanged incomprehensible noises with the newcomers. Again a ripple of excitement in the ranks of the plant men.

  “Come,” said Jack curtly.

  * * * *

  He led the way to the main control room. Once they heard someone screaming monotonously. A woman cracked under the coming of doom. A hooting babble broke the silence among the ungainly Things which followed Jack. Again an authoritative note silenced it.

  The control room. Alstair looked like a man of stone, of marble, save that his eyes burned with a fierce and almost maniacal flame. A visiplate beside him showed a steady stream of Centaurians entering through a second air lock. There were hundreds of them, apparently. The dictawriter came in, under Helen’s care. She cried out in instinctive horror at sight of so many of the monstrous creatures at once in the control room.

  “Set up the dictawriter,” said Alstair in a voice so harsh, so brittle that it seemed pure ice.

  Trembling, Helen essayed to obey.

  “I am ready to talk,” said Alstair harshly into the dictawriter microphone.

  The machine, rustling softly, translated. The leader of the new party hooted in reply. An order for all officers to report here at once, after setting all controls for automatic operation of the ship. There was some difficulty with the translation of the Centaurian equivalent of “automatic.” It was not in the vocabulary file. It took time.

  Alstair gave the order. Cold sweat stood out upon his face, but his self-control was iron.

  A second order, also understood with a certain amount of difficulty. Copies of all technical records, and all—again it took time to understand —all books bearing on the construction of this ship were to be taken to the air lock by which these plant men had entered. Samples of machinery, generators, and weapons to the same destination.

  Again Alstair gave the order. His voice was brittle, was even thin, but it did not falter or break.

  The Centaurian leader hooted an order over which the dictawriter rustled in vain. His followers swept swiftly to the doors of the control room. They passed out, leaving but four of their number behind. And Jack went swiftly to Alstair. His force gun snapped out and pressed deep into the commander’s middle. The Centaurians made no movement of protest.

  “Damn you!” said Jack, his voice thick with rage. “You’ve let them take the ship! You plan to bargain for your life! Damn you, I’m going to kill you and fight my way to a rocket tube and send this ship up in a flare of clean flame that’ll kill these devils with us!”

  But Helen cried swiftly: “Jack! Don’t! I know!”

  Like an echo her words—because she was near the dictawriter microphone—were repeated in the hooting sounds of the Centaurian language. And Alstair, livid and near to madness, nevertheless said harshly in the lowest of tones:

  “You fool! These devils can reach Earth, now they know it’s worth reaching! So even if they kill every man on the ship but the officers— and they may—we’ve got to navigate to their planet and land there.” His voice dropped to a rasping whisper and he raged almost soundlessly: “And if you think I want to live through what’s coming, shoot!”

  Jack stood rigid for an instant. Then he stepped back. He saluted with an elaborate, mechanical precision.

  “I beg your pardon, sir,” he said unsteadily. “You can count on me hereafter.”

  One of the officers of the Adastra stumbled into the control room. Another. Still another. They trickled in. Six officers out of thirty.

  A Centaurian entered with the curious rolling gait of his race. He went impatiently to the dictawriter and made noises.

  “These—all—officers?” asked the machine tonelessly.

  “The air officer shot his family and himself,” gasped a subaltern of the air department. “A bunch of Muts charged a rocket tube and the rocket chief fought them off. Then he bled to death from a knife in his throat. The stores officer was--”

  “Stop!” said Alstair in a thin, high voice. He tore at his collar. He went to the microphone and said thinly: “These are all the officers still alive. But we can navigate the ship.”

  The Centaurian—he wore a wide band of leather about each of his arms and another about his middle—waddled to the G. C. phone. The tendrils at the end of one arm manipulated the switch expertly. He emitted strange, formless sounds—and hell broke loose!

  * * * *

  The visiplates all over the room emitted high-pitched, squealing sounds. They were horrible. They were ghastly. They were more terrible than the sounds of a wolf pack hard on the heels of a fear-mad deer. They were the sounds Jack had heard when one of the first invaders of the Adastra saw a human being and killed him instantly. And other sounds came out of the visiplates, too. There were human screams. There were even one or two explosions.

  But then there was silence. The five Centaurians in the control room quivered and trembled. A desperate bloodlust filled them, the unreasoning, blind, instinctive craving which came of evolution from some race of carnivorous plants become capable of movement through the desperate need for food.

  The Centaurian with the leather ornaments went to the dictawriter again. He hooted in it:

  “Want—two—men—go—from—ship—learn—from—them—now.”

  There was an infinitely tiny sound in the main control room. It was a drop of cold sweat, falling from Alstair’s face to the floor. He seemed to have shriveled. His face was an ashy gray. His eyes were closed. But Jack looked steadily from one to the other of the surviving officers.

  “That will mean vivisection, I suppose,” he said harshly. “It’s certain they plan to visit Earth, else—intelligent as they are—they wouldn’t have wiped out everybody but us. Even for treasure. They’ll want to try out weapons on a human body, and so on. Communications is about the most useless of all the departments now, sir, I volunteer.”

  Helen gasped: “No, Jack! No!”

  Alstair opened his eyes. “Gary has volunteered. One more man to volunteer for vivisection.” He said it in the choked voice of one holding to sanity by the most terrible of efforts. “They’ll want to find out how to kill men. Their thirty-centimeter waves didn’t work. They know the beams that melted our hull wouldn’t kill men. I can’t volunteer! I’ve got to stay with the ship!” There was despair in his voice. “One more man to volunteer for these devils to kill slowly!”

  Silence. The happenings of the past little while, and the knowledge of what still went on within the Adastra’s innumerable compartments, had literally stunned most of the six. They could not think. They were mentally dazed, emotionally paralyzed by the sheer horrors they had encountered.

  Then Helen stumbled into Jack’s arms. “I’m—going, too!” she gasped. “We’re—all going to die! I’m not needed! And I can—die with Jack.”

  Alstair groaned. “Please!”

  “I’m—going!” she panted. “You can’t stop me! With Jack! Whither thou goest--”

  Then she choked. She pressed close. The Centaurian of the leather belts hooted impatiently into the dictawriter.

  “These—two—come.”

  Alstair said in a strange voice: “Wait!” Like an automaton, he moved to his desk. He took up an electropen. He wrote, his hands shaking. “I am mad,” he said thinly. “We are all mad. I think we are dead and in hell. But take this.”

  * * * *

  Jack stuffed the official order slip in his pocket. The Centaurian of the leather bands hooted impatiently. He led them, with his queer, rolling gait, toward the air lock by which the plant men had entered. Three times they were seen by roving Things, which emitted that triply horrible shrill squeal. And each time the Centaurian of the leather bands hooted authoritatively and the plant men withdrew.

  Once, too, Jack saw four creatures swaying backward and forward about something on the floor. He reached out his hands and covered Helen’s eyes until they were past.

  They came to the air lock. Their guide pointed through it. The man and the girl obe
yed. Long, rubbery tentacles seized them and Helen gasped and was still. Jack fought fiercely, shouting her name. Then something struck him savagely. He collapsed.

  He came back to consciousness with a feeling of tremendous weight upon him. He stirred, and with his movement some of the oppression left him. A light burned, not a light such as men know on Earth, but a writhing flare which beat restlessly at the confines of a transparent globe which contained it. There was a queer smell in the air, too, an animal smell. Jack sat up. Helen lay beside him, unconfined and apparently unhurt. None of the Centaurians seemed to be near.

  He chafted her wrists helplessly. He heard a stuttering sound and with each of the throbs of noise felt a momentary acceleration. Rockets, fuel rockets.

  “We’re on one of their damned ships!” said Jack coldly. He felt for his force gun. It was gone.

  Helen opened her eyes. She stared vaguely about. Her eyes fell upon Jack. She shuddered suddenly and pressed close to him,

  “What—what happened?”

  “We’ll have to find out,” replied Jack grimly.

  The floor beneath his feet careened suddenly. Instinctively, he glanced at a porthole which until then he had only subconsciously noted. He gazed out into the utterly familiar blackness of space, illumined by very many tiny points of light which were stars. He saw a ringed sun and points of light which were planets.

  One of those points of light was very near. Its disk was perceptible, and polar snow caps, and the misty alternation of greenish areas which would be continents with the indescribable tint which is ocean bottom when viewed from beyond a planet’s atmosphere.

  Silence. No hootings of that strange language without vowels or consonants which the Centaurians used. No sound of any kind for a moment.

  “We’re heading for that planet, I suppose,” said Jack quietly. “We’ll have to see if we can’t manage to get ourselves killed before we land.”

  Then a murmur in the distance. It was a strange, muted murmur, in nothing resembling the queer notes of the plant men. With Helen clinging to him, Jack explored cautiously, out of the cubby-hole in which they had awakened. Silence save for that distant murmur. No movement anywhere. Another faint stutter of the rockets, with a distinct accelerative movement of the whole ship. The animal smell grew stronger. They passed through a strangely shaped opening and Helen cried out:

  “The animals!”

  Heaped higgledy-piggledy were cages from the Adastra, little compartments containing specimens of each of the animals which had been bred from for food, and which it had been planned to release if a planet suitable for colonization revolved about Proxima Centauri. Farther on was an indescribable mass of books, machines, cases of all sorts—the materials ordered to be carried to the air lock by the leader of the plant men. Still no sign of any Centaurian.

  But the muted murmur, quite incredibly sounding like a human voice, came from still farther ahead. Bewildered, now, Helen followed as Jack went still cautiously toward the source of the sound.

  * * * *

  They found it. It came from a bit of mechanism cased in with the same lusterless, dull-brown stuff which composed the floor and walls and every part of the ship about them. And it was a human voice. More, it was Alstair’s, racked and harsh and half hysterical.

  “—you must have recovered consciousness by now, dammit, and these devils want some sign of it! They cut down your acceleration when I told them the rate they were using would keep you unconscious! Gary! Helen! Set off that signal!”

  A pause. The voice again:

  “I’ll tell it again. You’re in a space ship these fiends are guiding by a tight beam which handles the controls. You’re going to be set down on one of the planets which once contained animal life. It’s empty now, unoccupied except by plants. And you and the space ship’s cargo of animals and books and so on are the reserved, special property of the high arch-fiend of all these devils. He had you sent in an outside-controlled ship because none of his kind could be trusted with such treasure as you and the other animals!

  “You’re a reserve of knowledge, to translate our books, explain our science, and so on. It’s forbidden for any other space ship than his own to land on your planet. Now will you send that signal? It’s a knob right above the speaker my voice is coming out of. Pull it three times, and they’ll know you’re all right and won’t send another ship with preservatives for your flesh lest a priceless treasure go to waste!”

  The tinny voice—Centaurian receptors were not designed to reproduce the elaborate phonetics of the human voice—laughed hysterically.

  Jack reached up and pulled the knob, three times. Alstair’s voice went on:

  “This ship is hell, now. It isn’t a ship any more, but a sort of brimstone pit. There are seven of us alive, and we’re instructing Centaurians in the operation of the controls. But we’ve told them that we can’t turn off the rockets to show their inner workings, because to be started they have to have a planet’s mass near by, for deformation of space so the reaction can be started. They’re keeping us alive until we’ve shown them that. They’ve got some method of writing, too, and they write down everything we say, when it’s translated by a dictawriter. Very scientific-”

  The voice broke off.

  “Your signal just came,” it said an instant later. “You’ll find food somewhere about. The air ought to last you till you land. You’ve got four more days of travel. I’ll call back later. Don’t worry about navigation. It’s attended to.”

  The voice died again, definitely.

  The two of them, man and girl, explored the Centaurian space ship. Compared to the Adastra, it was miniature. A hundred feet long, or more, by perhaps sixty feet at its greatest diameter. They found cubby-holes in which there was now nothing at all, but which undoubtedly at times contained the plant men packed tightly.

  These rooms could be refrigerated, and it was probable that at a low temperature the Centaurians reacted like vegetation on Earth in winter and passed into a dormant, hibernating state. Such an arrangement would allow of an enormous crew being carried, to be revived for landing or battle.

  “If they refitted the Adastra for a trip back to Earth on that basis,” said Jack grimly, “they’d carry a hundred and fifty thousand Centaurians at least. Probably more.”

  The thought of an assault upon mankind by these creatures was an obsession. Jack was tormented by it. Womanlike, Helen tried to cheer him by their own present safety.

  “We volunteered for vivisection,” she told him pitifully, the day after their recovery of consciousness, “and we’re safe for a while, anyhow. And —we’ve got each other--”

  “It’s time for Alstair to communicate again,” said Jack harshly. It was nearly thirty hours after the last signing off. Centaurian routine, like Earth discipline on terrestrial space ships, maintained a period equal to a planet’s daily rotation as the unit of time. “We’d better go listen to him.”

  They did. And Alstair’s racked voice came from the queerly shaped speaker. It was more strained, less sane, than the day before. He told them of the progress of the Things in the navigation of the Adastra. The six surviving officers already were not needed to keep the ship’s apparatus functioning. The air-purifying apparatus in particular was shut off, since in clearing the air of carbon dioxide it tended to make the air unbreathable for the Centaurians.

  The six men were now permitted to live that they might satisfy the insatiable desire of the plant men for information. They lived a perpetual third degree, with every resource of their brains demanded for record in the weird notation of their captors. The youngest of the six, a subaltern of the air department, went mad under the strain alike of memory and of anticipation. He screamed senselessly for hours, and was killed and his body promptly mummified by the strange, drying chemicals of the Centaurians. The rest were living shadows, starting at a sound.

  “Our deceleration’s been changed,” said Alstair, his voice brittle. “You’ll land just two days before we sett
le down, on the planet these devils call home. Queer they’ve no colonizing instinct. Another one of us is about to break, I think. They’ve taken away our shoes and belts now, by the way. They’re leather. We’d take a gold band from about a watermelon, wouldn’t we? Consistent, these--”

  And he raged once, in sudden hysteria:

  “I’m a fool! I sent you two off together while I’m living in hell! Gary, I order you to have nothing to do with Helen! I order that the two of you shan’t speak to each other! I order that-”

  * * * *

  Another day passed. And another. Alstair called twice more. Each time, by his voice, he was more desperate, more nerve-racked, closer to the bounds of madness. The second time he wept, the while he cursed Jack for being where there were none of the plant men.

  “We’re not interesting to the devils, now, except as animals. Our brains don’t count! They’re gutting the ship systematically. Yesterday they got the earthworms from the growing area where we grew crops! There’s a guard on each of us now. Mine pulled out some of my hair this morning and ate it, rocking back and forth in ecstasy. We’ve no woolen shirts. They’re animal!”