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

by Edited By Isaac Asimov

  Another day still. Then Alstair was semihysterical. There were only three men left alive on the ship. He had instructions to give Jack in the landing of the egg-shaped vessel on the uninhabited world. Jack was supposed to help. His destination was close now. The disk of the planet which was to be his and Helen’s prison filled half the heavens. And the other planet toward which the Adastra was bound was a full-sized disk to Alstair.

  Beyond the rings of Proxima Centauri there were six planets in all, and the prison planet was next outward from the home of the plant men. It was colder than was congenial to them, though for a thousand years their flesh-hunting expeditions had searched its surface until not a mammal or a bird, no fish or even a crustacean was left upon it. Beyond it again an ice-covered world lay, and still beyond there were frozen shapes whirling in emptiness.

  “You know, now, how to take over when the beam releases the atmospheric controls,” said Alstair’s voice. It wavered as if he spoke through teeth which chattered from pure nerve strain. “You’ll have quiet. Trees and flowers and something like grass, if the pictures they’ve made mean anything. We’re running into the greatest celebration in the history of all hell. Every space ship called home. There won’t be a Centaurian on the planet who won’t have a tiny shred of some sort of animal matter to consume. Enough to give him that beastly delight they feel when they get hold of something of animal origin.

  “Damn them! Every member of the race! We’re the greatest store of treasure ever dreamed of! They make no bones of talking before me, and I’m mad enough to understand a good bit of what they say to each other. Their most high panjandrum is planning bigger space ships than were ever grown before. He’ll start out for Earth with three hundred space ships, and most of the crews asleep or hibernating. There’ll be three million devils straight from hell on those ships, and they’ve those damned beams that will fuse an earthly ship at ten million miles.”

  Talking helped to keep Alstair sane, apparently. The next day Jack’s and Helen’s egg-shaped vessel dropped like a plummet from empty space into an atmosphere which screamed wildly past its smooth sides. Then Jack got the ship under control and it descended slowly and ever more slowly and at last came to a cushioned stop in a green glade hard by a forest of strange but wholly reassuring trees. It was close to sunset on this planet, and darkness fell before they could attempt exploration.

  They did little exploring, however, either the next day or the day after. Alstair talked almost continuously.

  “Another ship coming from Earth,” he said, and his voice cracked. “Another ship! She started at least four years ago. She’ll get here in four years more. You two may see her, but I’ll be dead or mad by to-morrow night! And here’s the humorous thing! It seems to me that madness is nearest when I think of you, Helen, letting Jack kiss you! I loved you, you know, Helen, when I was a man, before I became a corpse watching my ship being piloted into hell. I loved you very much. I was jealous, and when you looked at Gary with shining eyes I hated him. I still hate him, Helen! Ah, how I hate him!” But Alstair’s voice was the voice of a ghost, now, a ghost in purgatory. “And I’ve been a fool, giving him that order.”

  Jack walked about with abstracted, burning eyes. Helen put her hands on his shoulders and he spoke absently to her, his voice thick with hatred. A desperate, passionate lust to kill Centaurians filled him. He began to hunt among the machines. He became absorbed, assembling a ten-kilowatt vortex gun from odd contrivances. He worked at it for many hours. Then he heard Helen at work, somewhere. She seemed to be struggling. It disturbed him. He went to see.

  She had just dragged the last of the cages from the Adastra out into the open. She was releasing the little creatures within. Pigeons soared eagerly above her. Rabbits, hardly hopping out of her reach, munched delightedly upon the unfamiliar but satisfactory leafed vegetation underfoot.

  She browsed. There were six of them besides a tiny, wabbly-legged lamb. Chickens pecked and scratched. But there were no insects on this world. They would find only seeds and green stuff. Four puppies rolled ecstatically on scratchy green things in the sunlight.

  “Anyhow,” said Helen defiantly. “They can be happy for a while! They’re not like us! We have to worry! And this world could be a paradise for humans!”

  Jack looked somberly out across the green and beautiful world. No noxious animals. No harmful insects. There could be no diseases on this planet, unless men introduced them of set purpose. It would be a paradise.

  * * * *

  The murmur of a human voice came from within the space ship. He went bitterly to listen. Helen came after him. They stood in the strangely shaped cubby-hole which was the control room. Walls, floors, ceiling, instrument cases—all were made of the lusterless dark-brown stuff which had grown into the shapes the Centaurians desired. Alstair’s voice was strangely more calm, less hysterical, wholly steady.

  “I hope you’re not off exploring somewhere, Helen and Gary,” it said from the speaker. “They’ve had a celebration here to-day. The Adastra’s landed. I landed it. I’m the only man left alive. We came down in the center of a city of these devils, in the middle of buildings fit to form the headquarters of hell. The high panjandrum has a sort of palace right next to the open space where I am now.

  “And to-day they celebrated. It’s strange how much animal matter there was on the Adastra. They even found horsehair stiffening in the coats of our uniforms. Woolen blankets. Shoes. Even some of the soaps had an animal origin, and they ‘refined’ it. They can recover any scrap of animal matter as cleverly as our chemists can recover gold and radium. Queer, eh?”

  The speaker was silent a moment.

  “I’m sane, now,” the voice said steadily. “I think I was mad for a while. But what I saw to-day cleared my brain. I saw millions of these devils dipping their arms into great tanks, great troughs, in which solutions of all the animal tissues from the Adastra were dissolved. The high panjandrum kept plenty for himself! I saw the things they carried into his palace, through lines of guards. Some of those things had been my friends. I saw a city gone crazy with beastly joy, the devils swaying back and forth in ecstasy as they absorbed the loot from Earth. I heard the high panjandrum hoot a sort of imperial address from the throne. And I’ve learned to understand quite a lot of those hootings.

  “He was telling them that Earth is packed with animals. Men. Beasts. Birds. Fish in the oceans. And he told them that the greatest space fleet in history will soon be grown, which will use the propulsion methods of men, our rockets, Gary, and the first fleet will carry uncountable swarms of them to occupy Earth. They’ll send back treasure, too, so that every one of his subjects will have such ecstasy, frequently, as they had to-day. And the devils, swaying crazily back and forth, gave out that squealing noise of theirs. Millions of them at once.”

  Jack groaned softly. Helen covered her eyes as if to shut out the sight her imagination pictured.

  “Now, here’s the situation from your standpoint,” said Alstair steadily, millions of miles away and the only human being upon a planet of blood-lusting plant men. “They’re coming here now, their scientists, to have me show them the inside workings of the rockets. Some others will come over to question you two tomorrow. But I’m going to show these devils our rockets. I’m sure—perfectly sure—that every space ship of the race is back on this planet.

  “They came to share the celebration when every one of them got as a free gift from the grand panjandrum as much animal tissue as he could hope to acquire in a lifetime of toil. Flesh is a good bit more precious than gold, here. It rates, on a comparative scale, somewhere between platinum and radium. So they all came home. Every one of them! And there’s a space ship on the way here from Earth. It’ll arrive in four years more. Remember that!”

  An impatient, distant hooting came from the speaker.

  “They’re here,” said Alstair steadily. “I’m going to show them the rockets. Maybe you’ll see the fun. It depends on the time of day where you are. But
remember, there’s a sister ship to the Adastra on the way! And Gary, that order I gave you last thing was the act of a madman, but I’m glad I did it. Good-by, you two!”

  * * * *

  Small hooting sounds, growing fainter, came from the speaker. Far, far away, amid the city of fiends, Alstair was going with the plant men to show them the rockets’ inner workings. They wished to understand every aspect of the big ship’s propulsion, so that they could build—or grow— ships as large and carry multitudes of their swarming myriads to a solar system where animals were to be found.

  “Let’s go outside,” said Jack harshly. “He said he’d do it, since he couldn’t get a bit of a machine made that could be depended on to do it. But I believed he’d go mad. It didn’t seem possible to live to their planet. We’ll go outside and look at the sky.”

  Helen stumbled. They stood upon the green grass, looking up at the firmament above them. They waited, staring. And Jack’s mind pictured the great rocket chambers of the Adastra. He seemed to see the strange procession enter it; a horde of the ghastly plant men and then Alstair, his face like marble and his hands as steady.

  He’d open up the breech of one of the rockets. He’d explain the disintegration field, which collapses the electrons of hydrogen so that it rises in atomic weight to helium, and the helium to lithium, while the oxygen of the water is split literally into neutronium and pure force. Alstair would answer hooted questions. The supersonic generators he would explain as controls of force and direction. He would not speak of the fact that only the material of the rocket tubes, when filled with exactly the frequency those generators produced, could withstand the effect of the distintegration field.

  He would not explain that a tube started without those generators in action would catch from the fuel and disintegrate, and that any other substance save one, under any other condition save that one rate of vibration, would catch also and that tubes, ship, and planet alike would vanish in a lambent purple flame.

  No; Alstair would not explain that. He would show the Centaurians how to start the Caldwell field.

  The man and the girl looked at the sky. And suddenly there was a fierce purple light. It dwarfed the reddish tinge of the ringed sun overhead. For one second, for two, for three, the purple light persisted. There was no sound. There was a momentary blast of intolerable heat. Then all was as before.

  The ringed sun shone brightly. Clouds like those of Earth floated serenely in a sky but a little less blue than that of home. The small animals from the Adastra munched contentedly at the leafy stuff underfoot. The pigeons soared joyously, exercising their wings in full freedom.

  “He did it,” said Jack. “And every space ship was home. There aren’t any more plant men. There’s nothing left of their planet, their civilization, or their plans to harm our Earth.”

  * * * *

  Even out in space, there was nothing where the planet of the Centaurians had been. Not even steam or cooling gases. It was gone as if it had never existed. And the man and woman of Earth stood upon a planet which could be a paradise for human beings, and another ship was coming presently, with more of their kind.

  “He did it!” repeated Jack quietly. “Rest his soul! And we—we can think of living, now, instead of death.”

  The grimness of his face relaxed slowly. He looked down at Helen. Gently, he put his arm about her shoulders.

  She pressed close, gladly, thrusting away all thoughts of what had been. Presently she asked softly: “What was that last order Alstair gave you?”

  “I never looked,” said Jack.

  He fumbled in his pocket. Pocketworn and frayed, the order slip came out. He read it and showed it to Helen. By statutes passed before the Adastra left Earth, laws and law enforcement on the artificial planet were intrusted to the huge ship’s commander. It had been specially provided that a legal marriage on the Adastra would be constituted by an official order of marriage signed by the commander. And the slip handed to Jack by Alstair, as Jack went to what he’d thought would be an agonizing death, was such an order. It was, in effect, a marriage certificate.

  They smiled at each other, those two.

  “It—wouldn’t have mattered,” said Helen uncertainly. “I love you. But I’m glad!”

  One of the freed pigeons found a straw upon the ground. He tugged at it. His mate inspected it solemnly. They made pigeon noises to each other. They flew away with the straw. After due discussion, they had decided that it was an eminently suitable straw with which to begin the building of a nest.

  * * * *

  The thing I remember most clearly over the years about “Proxima Centauri” is the peculiar horror I felt at the thought of a race of intelligent plants that lusted after animal food. It is almost an unfailing recipe for a startling science fiction story to begin by inverting some thoroughly accepted situation, something so ordinary as to be almost disregarded. Of course, animals eat plants, and of course, animals are quick and more or less intelligent, while plants are motionless and utterly passive (except for a few insect-eating plants, which can be disregarded). But what if intelligent and carnivorous plants fed on animals, eh?

  I did not forget the lesson, and sometimes I tried to make use of it. In my first full-length novel, Pebble in the Sky, I pitted Earth against the galaxy—but made Earth the villain. (John Campbell, to whom Earth was always the hero, rejected Pebble in the Sky in an early version, though I wouldn’t say that was his only reason for rejecting it.)

  I can’t, by the way, speak for influences on other authors. I, myself, can judge whether in my own story creations I remembered and was influenced, either consciously or unconsciously, by the stories of other authors I had read and admired.

  How can I say, however, on the basis of some superficial resemblance, that some other author has been influenced by an earlier story, which, for all I know, he has never read?

  Yet, this one time, I cannot resist. As I reread “Proxima Centauri” in the course of the preparation of this anthology, I was forcibly reminded of Robert A. Heinlein’s “Universe,” which appeared six years later, in the May 1941 Astounding Stories. So aware was I of the similarities between the two that when Jack Gary, in “Proxima Centauri,” was described as a “Mut,” I instantly assumed that he was a “Mutant,” as he would have been in “Universe,” and was astonished to find that it stood for “Mutineer.”

  As I said, however, the similarities may be coincidence. Heinlein may never have read “Proxima Centauri.”

  Yet I had better point out that, when speaking of “influences,” I mean only that. If Heinlein was indeed inspired by some of the notions in “Proxima Centauri,” he clearly developed those notions in his own fashion and in his own direction and produced “Universe,” which, in my opinion (and probably in that of most science fiction readers), was clearly and considerably superior to “Proxima Centauri.”

  In the same way, I must warn readers that although I am carefully and liberally pointing out influences on my own writing in this book, I carried all influences outward in my own particular fashion and in my own particular direction and made out of them something entirely my own.

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  * * * *

  As I said earlier, I had decided to go to Columbia for my college education. It was, after all, in Manhattan, and there was no question of leaving the city. College or not, I had to continue working in the candy store.

  Wanting to go to Columbia was the least of it, however. The important questions were, first, whether the family could afford the tuition, and second, whether Columbia wanted me.

  About the tuition, there was no way of being certain. If we had to, we would find some way. As to the question of Columbia’s wishes, that would be determined. I had applied for entrance, and a date had been fixed for an interview. It was April 10, 1935. (This was nearly three years before I started the diary that helped me so with The Early Asimov, but I remember that day for a reason I will explain later.)

  I was still only fiftee
n at the time and had never gone to Manhattan alone. My father, I think, had visions of me ruining my chance of getting into Columbia by getting lost in the confusing subway system and arriving late for the interview—or not arriving at all. He therefore actually abandoned the store to my mother and came with me. Naturally, he waited outside the building I was supposed to enter, because he didn’t want to ruin my chances by having me appear to be a baby who could not be trusted to travel on his own.

  He might have saved himself the trouble. I ruined my chances entirely on my own. I made a very poor impression. I was bound to. I don’t think that I ever made a good first impression on anyone in my life until such time as my name had become impressive on its own. After that, of course, there is no such thing as a first impression.

  The trouble is, and always has been, that at any first interview, I am too eager, too talkative, too lacking in poise and self-assurance, too obviously immature (even now). And in my teens, to add to it all, I suffered from acne. This is a common complaint and it is no great crime to be pimply, but it is no great honor either and doesn’t improve the impression you make.