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

by Edited By Isaac Asimov

  All in all, then, the poor man who had to face me and decide if I was Columbia material didn’t have a difficult job at all. I have never held it against him (whoever he was, for I don’t remember) that he decided against me.

  As far as Columbia College was concerned, that is. I was so naive in those days that I knew nothing beyond the mere name “Columbia.” I did not realize that Columbia University was a huge establishment of which Columbia College, the elite undergraduate school, was but a small part. However, I found this out in the course of the interview.

  My interviewer may have been impressed by my scholastic record and (I hope) by the intelligence that must have been apparent even through my obvious adolescent uneasiness. He therefore suggested I attend Seth Low Junior College. [It was named for the president of Columbia University in the 1890s, who before that had been mayor of the independent city of Brooklyn and after that the mayor of the conglomerated city of Greater New York.] This was another undergraduate college of Columbia University and was by no means elite. I had never heard of it at the time, and, in my entire life since, I have never met anyone who had heard of it (unless he had been a student there).

  It was in Brooklyn and had the same scholastic standards as Columbia College (the interviewer said), and in the third and fourth years I would be allowed to take courses with the Columbia College students. What he didn’t say, but what I eventually found to be the case, was that the Seth Low student body was heavily Jewish and Italian, so the school served to give bright youngsters a Columbia education without too badly contaminating the elite young men of the College itself. Those were the days when racial quotas were as American as apple pie.

  Seth Low Junior College was not what I wanted, but what could I do? I nodded as cheerfully as I could manage and said, “All right.”

  I tried to put a good face on it to my father when I came out of the building and stoutly maintained that Seth Low “was just as good” and my father stoutly said it was. I didn’t believe it, though, and neither did he.

  We went home glumly, and my father took advantage of one of his rare absences from the store to stop in to see a movie with me. I even remember what it was: Richelieu, with George Arliss, Edward Arnold, and Cesar Romero.

  We also stopped in at a museum (I think it was the Metropolitan Museum of Art but it may not have been). There we saw Albert Einstein, who happened to be looking at the exhibits also. He was unmistakable, and everywhere he went a small crowd of the curious followed, my father and I among them, all maintaining a respectful distance. Einstein, undoubtedly used to this, paid no attention. It was the only time I ever saw him, and it is for his sake more than for my Columbia interview that I remember the day.

  My failure at Columbia rather cast a damper on my high school graduation, but there was always science fiction, and about that time I even made a trifling advance in the direction of involving myself in the field beyond the stage of my role as a merely passive reader.

  In the mid-1930s, science fiction clubs were springing up around the country, and Wonder Stories, at least, was sponsoring them as one way of drumming up circulation, I suppose. There were clubs in the New York area, too, in which Sam Moskowitz was active, for instance, and in which great science fiction writers and editors of the future, such as Frederik Pohl and Donald A. Wollheim, spent their teen years.

  It was not in that direction that my own activities tended. I had no knowledge of such things, and if I had known, it would probably have done me no good. To have been active in a science fiction club would have required an investment of several hours a week, and between school and the candy store, I didn’t have those hours.

  Yet there was a more modest advance I could make. The various science fiction magazines, in those days, had long letters columns in microscopic print at the back of each issue. They represented pages they could fill without payment, and the readers found them fascinating. (So did the writers, who valued the readers’ comments—especially when those comments were enthusiastic.)

  In 1935, I tried, for the first time, to write to one of the magazines— Astounding Stories, of course. It must have been a handwritten letter, for in 1935 I didn’t know how to type and, for that matter, I had no access to a typewriter. Just the same, the letter was published. It was a perfectly ordinary letter. I commented on the most recent issue of Astounding Stories I had read, praising and denouncing stories and authors with the usual lordly condescension of the critic, and asked for trimmed edges.

  Despite my success in achieving a published letter and seeing my name in print, I did not try again for three years. In fact, I forgot I had ever written the letter.

  When, many years later, however, “First Fandom” was being organized, with membership extended to those who had been active in the field before the Campbell era opened, in 1938, the organizers approached me. Sadly, I said that although I had read science fiction avidly for years before 1938, I had not been active. And at once they came up with that 1935 letter in Astounding Stories and said that in my case that was qualification enough. [This book is dedicated to First Fandom, you may have noticed, and I hope it qualifies me, ex post facto, for membership more than that letter ever did.]

  And there were stories, too. I could console myself, for instance, with Edmond Hamilton’s “The Accursed Galaxy,” in the July 1935 Astounding Stories.

  * * * *

  THE ACCURSED GALAXY

  by Edmond Hamilton

  A thin, tearing sound like the ripping of thousands of sheets of paper grew with lightning speed to a vibrant roar that brought Garry Adams to his feet in a jump.

  He leaped to the door of his cabin and as he flung it open, he saw a sword of white fire cleave the night vertically and heard an abrupt ear-shattering crash from the distant darkness.

  Then all was dark and still again, but down in the dimly starlit valley he could see clouds of smoke slowly rising.

  “Good heavens, a meteorite!” Garry exclaimed. “And it’s fallen right into my lap.”

  His eyes suddenly lighted. ‘Will this make a story! Reporter Sole Witness of Meteor’s Fall-”

  He grabbed a flashlight from the shelf by the door and the next minute was hurrying down the rude path that twisted from his hilltop cabin down the wooded slope to the valley.

  Garry Adams was for fifty weeks of each year a reporter on one of the more sensational New York dailies. But two weeks each summer he spent in this lonely cabin in the northern Adirondacks and washed the taste of slayings, scandals and corruption out of his mind.

  “Hope there’s something left of it,” he muttered as he tripped over a root in the dark. “It would rate a three-column picture.”

  Stopping for a moment at a place where the rude path emerged from the trees, he scanned the darkness of the valley. He spotted the place where faint wisps of smoke were still rising and plunged unhesitatingly in that direction through the woods.

  Briers tore Garry’s trousers and scratched his hands, and boughs whipped and stung his face as he struggled ahead. He dropped the flashlight once and had a hard time getting it. But before long he heard a crackle of small flames and smelled smoke. He emerged a few minutes later into a hundred-foot circle crushed flat by the impact of the meteorite.

  Brush and grass, set afire by the heat of impact, were burning feebly, several places around the edge of this circle, and smoke got into Garry’s eyes. He stood blinking, then saw the meteorite.

  It was not an ordinary meteorite at all. He saw that at the first glance, even though the thing was half buried in the soft earth which it had flung up around itself. It was a glowing polyhedron ten feet in diameter, its surface a multitude of small flat facets, perfectly geometrical in shape. An artificial polyhedron that had fallen from outer space.

  Garry Adams stared, and as he stared the visioned news headings in his mind expanded into black headlines.

  “Meteorite Proves Shot from Space! Reporter Finds Shell from Space that Contains-”

  What did the th
ing contain? Garry took a step toward it, cautiously because of the heat the white glow of it betokened. To his surprise, he found that the polyhedron was not hot at all. The ground under his feet was hot from the impact but the faceted thing before him was not. Its glow, whatever it was, was not of heat.

  Garry stared, his black brows concentrated into a frown beneath which his brain worked excitedly. It must be, he argued, a thing made by intelligent beings, somewhere out in space.

  It could hardly contain living beings, for they could not have survived its fall. But there might be books, machines, models-

  Garry came to a sudden decision. This story was too big for him to handle alone. He knew the man he needed here. He turned around and struggled back through the woods to the path, then followed it, not back up to the cabin but on down the valley until it joined a narrow, rude dirt road.

  * * * *

  An hour of walking on this brought him to a somewhat better dirt road, and an hour more on this brought him, tired but still vibrant with excitement, into a dark, sleeping little village.

  Garry pounded on the door of the general store until a querulous, sleepy storekeeper came down in his nightshirt and let him in. He made straight for the telephone.

  “I want to call a Dr. Peters, Dr. Ferdinand Peters of Manhattan University Observatory, in New York,” he said to the operator. “And keep ringing until you get him.”

  Ten minutes later the astronomer’s sleepy, irritated voice greeted his ears. “Well, who’s this?”

  “It’s Garry Adams, doctor,” Garry said rapidly. “You remember, the reporter who wrote up your solar researches last month?”

  “I remember that your story contained no less than thirty errors,” Dr. Peters answered acidly. “What in the devil do you want at this time of night?”

  Garry talked steadily for five minutes, and when he had finished there was so long a silence that he shouted into the transmitter, “Did you hear me? Are you there?”

  “Of course I’m here—don’t yell so loud,” retorted the astronomer’s voice. “I was just considering.” He began to speak rapidly. “Adams, I’m coming up to that village of yours on the dot, by plane if possible. You wait there for me and we’ll go out and look at the thing together. If you’re telling me the truth, you’ve got a story that will make you famous forever. If you’re hoaxing me, I’ll flay you alive if I have to chase you around the world to do it.”

  “Don’t let anyone else know about it, whatever you do,” cautioned Garry. “I don’t want any other paper to get it.”

  “All right, all right,” said the scientist. “A lot of difference it makes to me whether any of your filthy rags get it.”

  Four hours later Garry Adams saw a plane buzzing earthward through the dawn mists east of the village. He waited, and in another half hour the astronomer tramped into the place.

  Dr. Peters saw Garry and came straight toward him. Peters’ keen, spectacled black eyes and ascetic, shaven face wore an expression in which were mixed doubt and repressed excitement.

  Characteristically, he wasted no time in greetings or preliminaries. “You’re sure the thing is a geometrical polyhedron? Not just a natural meteorite with some resemblance to that shape?” he queried.

  “Wait till you see it for yourself,” Garry told him. “I’ve rented a car that will take us almost there.”

  “Drive out to my plane first,” the doctor ordered. “I’ve brought some equipment that may prove useful.”

  The equipment consisted of bars, tools and wrenches of fine steel and a complete oxy-acetylene torch outfit, with the necessary tanks. They stowed it into the back of the car and then bumped and rattled over the uncertain mountain roads until they reached the beginning of the path.

  When Dr. Peters emerged with the reporter into the clearing where lay the half-buried, glowing polyhedron, he stared at it for some moments in silence.

  “Well?” asked Garry impatiently.

  “It’s not a natural meteorite, that’s sure.”

  “But what is it?” Garry exclaimed. “A projectile from another world? What’s in it?”

  “We’ll know that when we’ve opened it,” Peters answered coolly. “The first thing is to dig away the dirt so that we can examine it.”

  Despite the astronomer’s calmness, Adams saw a glitter in his eyes as they lugged the heavy equipment from the automobile to the clearing. And the driving energy with which Dr. Peters worked was further index of the intensity of his interest.

  They started at once digging away the earth around the thing. Two hours of hard work did it, and the whole polyhedron stood naked before them, still glowing whitely in the morning sunlight. The scientist then made minute examination of the substance of the glowing thing. He shook his head.

  “It’s not like any terrestrial substance ever heard of. Is there any sign of a door or opening?”

  “Not a trace of one,” Garry answered, then added suddenly, “But here’s something on one of the facets, a sort of diagram.”

  Dr. Peters hurried quickly to his side. The reporter pointed to what he had discovered, a curious and complex sign graven deep on a facet halfway up the side of the polyhedron.

  The diagram represented a small, spiral-shaped swarm of densely crowded dots. A little out from this central swarm were other little swarms of graven dots, mostly spiral-shaped also. Above this curious diagram was a row of grotesque, interlinked symbols.

  “By heaven, it’s writing of some sort, an inscription!” Garry cried. “I wish we had a photographer here.”

  “And a pretty girl to sit with her knees crossed and give the picture sex-appeal,” Peters observed caustically. “You can think of your dirty sheet in the presence of—this.”

  His eyes were brilliant with controlled excitement. “The symbols, we can’t guess what they mean, of course. Undoubtedly they tell something about this thing’s contents. But the diagram--”

  “What do you think the diagram means?” Garry asked excitedly as the astronomer paused.

  “Well, those swarms of dots seem intended to represent galaxies of stars,” Peters said slowly. “The central one, no doubt, symbolizes our own galaxy, which has just such a spiral shape, and the other swarms stand for the other galaxies of the cosmos.

  “But they’re too close to ours, those others—too close. If they were actually that close when this thing was made, it means that the thing was made back when the universe first started to expand!”

  He shook off his abstracted ponderings and turned briskly toward the pile of tools and equipment.

  “Come on, Adams, we’ll try to open it up on the side opposite the inscription. If the bars won’t do it, the torch will.”

  * * * *

  Two hours later Garry and Dr. Peters, exhausted, sweating and baffled, stood back and gazed at each other in wordless futility. All of their efforts to open the mysterious polyhedron had utterly failed.

  Their sharpest tools made not the slightest scratch on the glowing walls. The oxy-acetylene torch had not the least bit more effect, its flame not even seeming to heat the substance. And even a variety of acids which Dr. Peters had brought with him had no effect.

  “Whatever it is,” Garry panted, “I’ll say it’s the hardest and most intractable matter I ever heard of.”

  The astronomer nodded slowly. “If it is matter at all,” he said.

  Garry stared. “If it is matter? Why, we can see the thing’s matter; it’s solid and real as we are.”

  “It’s solid and real,” Peters agreed, “but that does not prove that it is matter. Adams, I think that it is force of some kind, crystallized in some superhuman and unknown way into a solid-seeming polyhedron. Frozen force!

  “And I don’t think we’ll ever open it with ordinary tools. They would work with ordinary matter, but not with this thing.”

  The reporter looked perplexedly from him to the glowing mystery. “Frozen force? Then what are we going to do?”

  Peters shook his head. “The thin
g’s beyond me. There isn’t a way in the world that I can think of to--”

  He stopped suddenly. Garry, looking up sharply at the interruption in his words, saw that an odd listening expression had fallen upon the scientist’s face.

  It was at the same time an expression of surprise, as though some part of his mind were surprised at something another part told it.

  Dr. Peters spoke in a moment, and with the same surprise in his voice.

  “Why, what am I talking about? Of course we can open the thing. A way just occurred to me--The thing is made of crystallized force. Well, all we need to do is to de-crystallize that force, to melt it away by the application of other forces.”