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

by Edited By Isaac Asimov

  Garry felt sudden panic as the world seemed suddenly to vanish from around him. Dr. Peters, the polyhedron, the whole noonday sunlit scene, disappeared in an instant. Instead of standing in the sunlight, Garry seemed now to himself to be hanging suspended in the black vault of the cosmos—a lightless, airless void.

  Everywhere about him was only that empty blackness, save below him. Below him, far, far below, there floated a colossal cloud of stars shaped like a flattened globe. Its stars could be counted only by the millions of millions.

  Garry knew that he looked on the universe as it was two billion years ago. He knew that this below him was the giant supergalaxy in which were all the stars in the cosmos. Now he seemed to rocket down toward the mighty swarm with the swiftness of thought, and now he saw that the worlds of its swarming suns were inhabited.

  Their inhabitants were volitient beings of force, each one like a tall, disk-crowned pillar of blue-brilliant light. They were immortal; they needed no nourishment; they passed through space and matter at will. They were the only volitient beings in the whole supergalaxy and its inert matter was almost entirely at their command.

  Now Garry’s viewpoint shifted to a world near the center of the supergalaxy. There he saw a single force creature who was engaged in a new experiment upon matter. He was seeking to build new forms of it, combining and re-combining atoms in infinite permutations.

  Suddenly he came upon a combination of atoms that gave strange results. The matter so formed moved of its own accord. It was able to receive a stimulus and to remember it and act upon it. It was able also to assimilate other matter into itself; and so to grow.

  The force creature experimenter was fascinated by this strange disease of matter. He tried it on a larger scale and the diseased matter spread out and assimilated more and more ordinary matter. He named this disease of matter by a name that reproduced itself in Garry’s mind as “life.”

  This strange disease of life escaped from the experimenter’s laboratory and began to spread over all that planet. Everywhere it spread, it infected other matter. The experimenter tried to extirpate it but the infection was too widely spread. At last he and his fellows abandoned that diseased world.

  But the disease got loose from that world to other worlds. Spores of it, driven by the push of light beams to other suns and planets, spread out in every direction. The life disease was adaptable, took different forms on different worlds, but always it grew and propagated, infected more and more matter.

  The force creatures assembled their forces to wipe out this loathsome infection but could not. While they stamped it out on one world, it spread on two others. Always, too, some hidden spore escaped them. Soon nearly all the worlds of the central portion of the supergalaxy were leprous with the life plague.

  Garry saw the force creatures make a last great attempt to stamp out this pathology infecting their universe. The attempt failed; the plague continued its resistless spread. The force creatures then saw that it would spread until it had infected all the worlds in the supergalaxy.

  They determined to prevent this at all costs. They resolved to break up the supergalaxy, to detach the uninfected outer parts of it from the diseased central portion. It would be a stupendous task but the force creatures were not daunted by it.

  Their plan entailed giving to the supergalaxy a rotatory movement of great speed. This they accomplished by generating tremendous waves of continuous force through the ether, waves so directed that gradually they started the supergalaxy rotating on its center.

  Faster and faster the giant star swarm turned as time went on. The life disease was still spreading at its center but now the force creatures had hope. They continued their work until the supergalaxy was turning so fast that it could no longer hold together against its own centrifugal force. It broke up like a bursting flywheel.

  * * * *

  Garry saw that break-up, as though from high above. He saw the colossal, spinning star cloud disintegrating, swarm after swarm of stars breaking from it and flying away through space. Countless numbers of these smaller new galaxies broke from the parent supergalaxy until at last only the inmost core of the supergalaxy was left.

  It was still rotating, and still had the spiral form caused by its rotation. On it now the life plague had spread to nearly every world. The last swarm of clean, uninfected stars had broken away from it and was flying away like the others.

  But as this last swarm departed, there took place a ceremony and a punishment. The force creatures had passed judgment upon that one of their number whose experiments had loosed the life plague upon them and had made necessary this great break-up.

  They decreed that he should remain forever in this diseased galaxy that all the others were leaving. They imprisoned him in a shell of frozen force so constructed that never could he open it from within. They set that polyhedronal shell floating in the diseased galaxy they left behind.

  Garry Adams saw that glowing polyhedron floating in aimless orbits in the galaxy, as the years passed in millions. The other galaxies sped farther and farther away from this infected one in which the life disease now covered every possible world. Only this one force creature remained here, prisoned eternally in the polyhedron.

  Garry dimly saw the polyhedron, in its endless orbit through the suns, chance to strike upon a world. He saw—

  He saw only mists, gray mists. The vision was passing and suddenly Garry was aware that he stood in hot sunlight. He stood by the glowing polyhedron, dazed, rapt.

  And Dr. Peters, dazed and rapt, too, was working mechanically on something beside him, a triangular thing of copper and ebonite pointed at the polyhedron.

  Garry understood instantly and cried out in horror as he leaped toward the astronomer. “Peters, don’t!”

  Peters, only partly awakened, looked dazedly down at the thing which his hands were busy finishing.

  “Smash it!” Garry yelled. “The thing inside the polyhedron kept us occupied with that vision so it could keep you working unconsciously to set it free. Don’t—oh, Lord!”

  For as Garry yelled, the dazed scientist’s hands had clicked together the last parts of the copper and ebonite triangle, and from its apex leaped a yellow beam that smote the glowing polyhedron.

  The yellow flash spread instantly over the faceted, glowing bulk, and as Garry and the waking Peters stared petrifiedly, they saw the polyhedron dissolving in that saffron flare.

  The faceted sides of frozen force melted and vanished in a moment. Up out of the dissolved prison cage burst and towered the Thing that had been in it.

  A forty-foot pillar of blazing, blue light, crowned by a disk of light, it loomed supernally splendid in sudden darkness, for with its bursting forth the noonday sunlight had snapped out like turned-off electricity. It swirled and spun in awful, alien glory as Peters and Garry cried out and threw their hands before their blinded eyes.

  From the brilliant pillar there beat into their minds a colossal wave of exultation, triumph beyond triumph, joy vaster than any human joy. It was the mighty paean of the Thing, that went out from it not in sound but in thought.

  It had been prisoned, cut away from the wide universe, for age after slow-crawling age, and now at last it was free and rejoicing in its freedom. In unbearable madness of cosmic rapture it loomed in the noonday darkness.

  Then it flashed up into the heavens like a giant lightning bolt of blue. And as it did so, Garry’s darkening brain failed and he staggered into unconsciousness.

  * * * *

  He opened his eyes to bright noonday sunlight, which was streaming through the window beside him. He was lying in the cabin and the day was again brilliant outside, and somewhere near by a metallic voice was speaking.

  He recognized that the voice was coming from his own little battery radio. Garry lay unmoving, unremembering for the moment, as the excited voice hurried on.

  “—far out as we can make out, the area affected extended from Montreal as far south as Scranton, and from Buffalo i
n the West to some miles in the Atlantic beyond Boston, in the East.

  “It lasted less than two minutes, and in the whole area was a complete blotting out of the sun’s light and heat in that time. Also, practically all electrical machinery ceased to function and the telegraph and telephone lines went completely dead.

  “People living in certain Adirondack and Northwest Vermont sections have reported also some physical effects. They consisted of a sudden sensation of extreme joy, coincident with the darkness, and followed by brief unconsciousness.

  “No one yet knows the cause of this amazing phenomenon though it may be due to a freak of solar forces. Scientists are now being consulted on the matter, and as soon as they--”

  Garry Adams by this time was struggling weakly up to a sitting position in the bunk, clutching at its post.

  “Peters!” he called over the metallic voice of the radio. “Peters-”

  “I’m here,” said the astronomer, coming across the cabin.

  The scientist’s face was pale and his movements a little unsteady, but he, too, was unhurt.

  “I came back to consciousness a little sooner than you did and carried you up here,” he said.

  “That—that Thing caused all the darkness and other things I’ve just been hearing of?” Garry cried.

  Dr. Peters nodded. “It was a creature of force, force so terrific that its bursting forth here damped the heat and light radiations of the sun, the electrical currents of machines, even the electro-nervous impulses of our brains.”

  “And it’s gone; it’s really gone?” the reporter cried.

  “It’s gone after its fellows, out into the void of intergalactic space after the galaxies that are receding from our own,” said Dr. Peters solemnly. “We know now why all the galaxies in the cosmos are fleeing from our own, know that ours is held an accursed galaxy, leprous with the disease of life. But I don’t think we’ll ever tell the world.”

  Garry Adams shook his head weakly. “We won’t tell; no. And I think we’ll try to forget it ourselves. I think we’ll try.”

  * * * *

  I am positive I knew of the expanding universe and of the receding galaxies before I read “The Accursed Galaxy.” After all, I read the enormously popular books by Arthur S. Eddington and James Jeans on relativity and astronomy. Nevertheless, nothing made the receding galaxies so vivid to me as Hamilton did, and I have never read an explanation of that recession more dramatic or compelling than the one in this story. Every once in a while, I can feel myself almost believing it.

  I never used Hamilton’s view of life as a cosmic disease in my science fiction, but in a science article I once wrote named “Recipe for a Planet,” in the July 1961 issue of The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, I ended with an imaginary recipe for a planet from “Mother Stellar’s Planetary Cook-book.”

  Part of it went, “Cool slowly till the crust hardens and a thin film of adhering gas and moisture appears. (If it does not appear, you have overheated.) Place in an orbit at a comfortable distance from a star and set to spinning. Then wait. In several billion years, it will ferment at the surface. The fermented portion, which is called life, is considered the best part by connoisseurs.”

  This may not seem like much, but here there is no unconscious influence. When I spoke of the surface fermenting, I thought, very consciously, of Hamilton’s “The Accursed Galaxy,” which I had read twenty-six years before.

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  * * * *

  As the summer wore on, I became increasingly aware that I would have to go to the tuition-free College of the City of New York (which everyone called City College). I didn’t want to, but there was no choice. My father might somehow have managed to find the money for tuition at Columbia College, but he did not have the heart to try for Seth Low Junior College and I didn’t see my way clear to putting pressure on him to do so.

  I didn’t want to go to City College, because everyone told me that City graduates could not get into medical school, and I still saw no reasonable future for myself that didn’t involve medical school. However, not-wanting-to wasn’t going to help me. I had applied to City College just in case I couldn’t get into Columbia, and they had accepted.

  Came September, then, I went to City College and stayed there three days. I remember only two things about those three days. We had a physical examination and since I was still as skinny as a stick, I was put down as PD where everyone else had WD. I asked what PD meant and I was told “poorly developed.” Everyone else, obviously, was “well developed.”

  The other thing I remember was that we were all given an intelligence test, and about a month later, when the tests were scored, I received a letter asking me to come in for further testing because I had astonished them. By that time I wasn’t in City College any more, however, and I was glad they would have no opportunity to test me further. “Poorly developed” indeed!!

  In any case, on the third day at City College a letter arrived from Seth Low Junior College. I was away at school, and my father, sensing something urgent, opened it and found they were inquiring as to why I had not showed up for registration. He called them up and explained we lacked the money for tuition. They at once offered a one-hundred-dollar scholarship.

  This my father could not resist, and off I went to Seth Low Junior College, but not before I had objected very vehemently to my father’s opening my mail. He kept saying, “But if I hadn’t, you might have missed this opportunity,” while I kept answering to the effect that I was almost sixteen and mustn’t be treated like a baby.

  I decided to major in zoology and took a general course in that subject in my freshman year. It is hard to believe it as I look back on it, but I actually dissected animals in that course. My most horrifying memory is the dissection of a cat in the second semester. I had to find a homeless alley cat and chloroform it. Unbelievable! In later years, when I was working at a medical school, I refused to do any animal experiments and invariably walked out of the lab when animals were brought in for the purpose. (I recognize the necessity of animal experimentation—but for other people.)

  My sharpest memory is, as you might expect, of a trifle. Our zoology lectures were given in an old-fashioned room with a tile floor. At one point during one of those lectures, I needed a handkerchief and pulled one out of my pocket. In the same pocket was a glass “shooter” I had there for some reason (because it looked pretty, I think, and I enjoyed looking at the light through it). It came out with the handkerchief and went bouncety-bouncety-bounce over the tile floor.

  The professor waited patiently while the class held its breath and I, red-faced, struggled to retrieve the shooter. When I had done so, and silence had fallen, the professor said, contemptuously, “Well, this is a junior college,” and the dam broke and the laughter from the other students began and continued—and continued—

  A small thing, and not worth remembering, except that it soured me on zoology. I ended the course with good marks, but the incident of the dropped shooter, even more than killing the cat, made it easy for me to consider switching majors, and that, in turn, deflected the current of my life.

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  * * * *

  Part Seven

  1936

  * * * *

  IN EARLY 1936, I recognized a great desire within myself that could no longer be repressed. I wanted a typewriter.

  I had frequently seen typewriters, but always in business offices, where they were outside my world. They might as well have been in jewelry-store windows.

  My closest approach to a typewriter had come in 1928, when my father had bought his second candy store. We moved in upstairs above the store, and there was an overlap of a few days before the previous proprietors moved out.

  There was a typewriter in the apartment. I was eight years old at the time, had not yet discovered science fiction, and certainly did not dream of writing. Nevertheless, there was a strange attraction between it and myself—a kind of dim love-at-first-sight. I remember
touching it and looking at it curiously and half depressing the keys and wondering how it worked and hoping that somehow it would remain there when the previous owners moved out.

  It didn’t. They took it away.

  And, of course, there was no chance at all that we ourselves might get one. So I wrote The Greenville Chums at College in pencil, and over the course of the next five years graduated to nothing better than a fountain pen.

  By 1936, though, I knew I had to have a typewriter. It was simply too onerous to write by hand, and I wanted to get down to serious labors in literary endeavor. My best talking point, of course, was that I was in college now and would have to write themes and term papers, so surely a typewriter was necessary. Armed with that talking point, I approached my father. [As I write that, it sounds awful. Why should I put pressure on my poor father? If I wanted a typewriter so badly, why didn’t I go out, earn money somehow, and buy one for myself? Right! The only trouble is that I was already working every day in the candy store, and, alas, it was unpaid labor. Nor did I ever get an allowance I could save up. My first allowance came at the age of nine, when I was told I could have ten cents a week. I asked if I could do whatever I wanted with that money. Told that I could, I went out and bought three Spanish stamps and started a stamp collection. The allowance was at once withdrawn on the grounds that I was spending it frivolously. I think my mother had a vague notion that I should have bought clothes with that dime. In my early teens I was given another allowance: a dollar a week this time. Precautions were taken, however, against my penchant for frivolity. I never saw the money. It was put aside toward payment of the premiums on an insurance policy that had been bought in my name. It was for a thousand dollars and when it finally came due and I was given the money, I didn’t need it particularly. I would rather have had the dollar a week.]