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

by Edited By Isaac Asimov

  My father said that he would see what he could do, and he did very well. One day he came back with a typewriter he had bought for ten dollars. It was secondhand, of course, and quite old, but it was a standard-size Underwood No. 5 in perfect working order.

  It is queer that I cannot remember the day, or even the month, on which I got my very first typewriter. It was surely a gala day, and a significant one, such as I can rarely have experienced, yet my memory is a blank in that respect.

  Need I say that I didn’t know how to type?

  I got to work experimentally, however, typing with one finger. My father, coming up one day for his afternoon nap, stopped to watch his college-boy son type, and frowned.

  He said, “Why do you type with one finger, instead of with all your fingers like on a piano?”

  I said, “I don’t know how to do it with all my fingers, Papa.”

  My father had an easy solution for that. “Learn!” he thundered. “If I catch you typing with one finger again, I will take away the typewriter.”

  I sighed, for I knew he would. Fortunately, there lived, just across the street, a young lady who was one year older than myself and for whom, for three years now, I had felt a pure and puppyish passion—the only love affair, if it could possibly be dignified by that title, of my teen years. She was taking a commercial course in high school and knew how to type.

  I asked her how to type and she showed me how to place my hands on the typewriter keys and which fingers controlled which keys. She watched me while, very slowly, I typed the word “the” with left-hand-first-finger, right-hand-first-finger, and left-hand-middle-finger. She then offered to give me periodic lessons.

  An excuse to be alone with her every once in a while was just what I was looking for, but I had my pride. No one was ever allowed to teach me any more than I required to begin teaching myself. “That’s all right,” I said, “I’ll practice.”

  And I did. I’ve been typing for thirty-seven years now, and I can do ninety words a minute for hours at a time. [To be perfectly truthful, I’ve sacrificed accuracy for speed, and don’t pretend that I don’t make errors. I just x out, however. My editors don’t mind, or, if they do, they maintain a discreet silence.] I’ve practiced a great deal!

  Naturally, when I began to type, I used both sides of the paper, single-spaced, and no margins. I had to save paper. Eventually, I learned to use one side and to double space, but to this very day I can’t bring myself to leave respectable margins. I also tend to use typewriter ribbons and carbon paper until they are deader than they should be. It is not a matter of economy; I have no reason to economize in that direction.

  It’s just that I’ve never recovered from having to extract money for paper and typewriter ribbons from the candy store.

  * * * *

  Yet even though I was now the owner of a typewriter, I still could not bring myself to write science fiction. I was beginning to edge toward it, though. I began, for the first time, to write fantasy.

  During the 1930s, there were fantasy magazines of a kind on the market. One was Weird Tales, which was actually older by a couple of years than Amazing Stories itself. Its stories were reminiscent of Edgar Allen Poe and were fearfully overwritten. The author most typical of Weird Tales was H. P. Lovecraft, whose style revolted me.

  There were also pulp magazines devoted to “terror stories,” containing as much sex and sadism as the times allowed. I could read them by now, for my father had abandoned any attempt to tell a college boy what to read and what not to read, but I found them dreadful.

  Consequently the fantasy I wrote was nothing like these, but rather something I made up entirely by myself. It involved (as I recall) a group of men wandering on some quest through a universe in which there were elves, dwarves, and wizards and in which magic worked. I had no idea that I was trying to anticipate Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings.

  Even though I was writing fantasy, I was still reading science fiction avidly. The coming of college did not dim my interest—perhaps because I entered so young. (I was still a teen-ager when I graduated from college.)

  Not only did I continue to read Astounding Stories with furious attention, issue by issue, but I also read Amazing Stories and Wonder Stories at times, finding a few gems now and then.

  There was, for instance, “He Who Shrank,” by Henry Hasse, which appeared in the August 1936 issue of Amazing Stories.

  * * * *

  HE WHO SHRANK

  by Henry Hasse

  Years, centuries, aeons have fled past me in endless parade, leaving me unscathed: for I am deathless, and in all the universe alone of my kind. Universe? Strange how that convenient word leaps instantly to my mind from force of old habit. Universe? The merest expression of a puny idea in the minds of those who cannot possibly conceive whereof they speak. The word is a mockery. Yet how glibly men utter it! How little do they realise the artificiality of the word!

  That night when the Professor called me to him he was standing close to the curved transparent wall of the astrono-laboratory looking out into the blackness. He heard me enter, but did not look around as he spoke. I do not know whether he was addressing me or not.

  “They call me the greatest scientist the world has had in all time.”

  I had been his only assistant for years, and was accustomed to his moods, so I did not speak. Neither did he for several moments and then he continued:

  “Only half a year ago I discovered a principle that will be the means of utterly annihilating every kind of disease germ. And only recently I turned over to others the principles of a new toxin which stimulates the worn-out protoplasmic life-cells, causing almost complete rejuvenation. The combined results should nearly double the ordinary life span. Yet these two things are only incidental in the long list of discoveries I have made to the great benefit of the race.”

  He turned then and faced me, and I was surprised at a new peculiar glow that lurked deep in his eyes.

  “And for those things they call me great! For these puny discoveries they heap honours on me and call me the benefactor of the race. They disgust me, the fools! Do they think I did it for them? Do they think I care about the race, what it does or what happens to it or how long it lives? They do not suspect that all the things I have given them were but accidental discoveries on my part – to which I gave hardly a thought. Oh, you seem amazed. Yet not even you, who have assisted me here for ten years, ever suspected that all my labours and experiments were pointed toward one end, and one end alone.”

  He went over to a locked compartment which in earlier years I had wondered about and then ceased to wonder about, as I became engrossed in my work. The Professor opened it now, and I glimpsed but the usual array of bottles and test-tubes and vials. One of these vials he lifted gingerly from a rack.

  “And at last I have attained the end,” he almost whispered, holding the tube aloft. A pale liquid scintillated eerily against the artificial light in the ceiling. “Thirty years, long years, of ceaseless experimenting, and now, here in my hand – success!”

  The Professor’s manner, the glow deep in his dark eyes, the submerged enthusiasm that seemed at every instant about to leap out, all served to impress me deeply. It must indeed be an immense thing he had done, and I ventured to say as much.

  “Immense!” he exclaimed. “Immense! Why – why it’s so immense that – . But wait. Wait. You shall see for yourself.”

  At that time how little did I suspect the significance of his words. I was indeed to see for myself.

  * * * *

  Carefully he replaced the vial, then walked over to the transparent wall again.

  “Look!” he gestured toward the night sky. “The unknown! Does it not fascinate you? The other fools dream of some day travelling out there among the stars. They think they will go out there and learn the secret of the universe. But as yet they have been baffled by the problem of a sufficiently powerful fuel or force for their ships. And they are blind. Within a month I could solve the pu
ny difficulty that confronts them; could, but I won’t. Let them search, let them experiment, let them waste their lives away, what do I care about them?”

  I wondered what he was driving at, but realised that he would come to the point in his own way. He went on:

  “And suppose they do solve the problem, suppose they do leave the planet, go to other worlds in their hollow ships, what will it profit them? Suppose that they travel with the speed of light for their own life time, and then land on a star at that point, the farthest point away from here that is possible for them? They would no doubt say: ‘We can now realise as never before the truly staggering expanse of the universe. It is indeed a great structure, the universe. We have travelled a far distance; we must be on the fringe of it.’

  “Thus they would believe. Only I would know how wrong they were, for I can sit here and look through this telescope and see stars that are fifty and sixty times as distant as that upon which they landed. Comparatively, their star would be infinitely close to us. The poor deluded fools and their dreams of space travel!”

  “But, Professor,” I interposed, “just think –”

  “Wait! Now listen. I, too, have long desired to fathom the universe, to determine what it is, the manner and the purpose and the secret of its creation. Have you ever stopped to wonder what the universe is? For thirty years I have worked for the answer to those questions. Unknowing, you helped me with your efficiency on the strange experiments I assigned to you at various times. Now I have the answer in that vial, and you shall be the only one to share the secret with me.”

  Incredulous, I again tried to interrupt.

  “Wait!” he said. “Let me finish. There was the time when I also looked to the stars for the answer. I built my telescope, on a new principle of my own. I searched the depths of the void. I made vast calculations. And I proved conclusively to my own mind what had heretofore been only a theory. I know now without doubt that this our planet, and other planets revolving about the sun, are but electrons of an atom, of which the sun is the nucleus. And our sun is but one of millions of others, each with its allotted number of planets, each system being an atom just as our own is in reality.

  “And all these millions of solar systems, or atoms, taken together in one group, form a galaxy. As you know, there are countless numbers of these galaxies throughout space, with tremendous stretches of space between them. And what are these galaxies? Molecules! They extend through space even beyond the farthest range of my telescope! But having penetrated that far, it is not difficult to make the final step.

  “All of these far-flung galaxies, or molecules, taken together as a whole, form – what? Some indeterminable element or substance on a great, ultramacroscopic world! Perhaps a minute drop of water, or a grain of sand, or wisp of smoke, or – Good God! – an eyelash of some creature living on that world!”

  * * * *

  I could not speak. I felt myself grow faint at the thought he had propounded. I tried to think it could not be – yet what did I or anyone know about the infinite stretches of space that must exist beyond the ranges of our most powerful telescope?

  “It can’t be!” I burst out. “It’s incredible, it’s – monstrous!”

  “Monstrous? Carry it a step further. May not that ultra-world also be an electron whirling around the nucleus of an atom? And that atom only one of millions forming a molecule? And that molecule only one of millions forming –”

  “For God’s sake, stop!” I cried. “I refuse to believe that such a thing can be! Where would it all lead? Where would it end? It might go on – forever! And besides,” I added lamely, “what has all this to do with – your discovery, the fluid you showed me?”

  “Just this. I soon learned that it was useless to look to the infinitely large; so I turned to the infinitely small. For does it not follow that if such a state of creation exists in the stars above us, it must exist identically in the atoms below us?”

  I saw his line of reasoning, but still did not understand. His next words fully enlightened me, but made me suspect that I was facing one who had gone insane from his theorising. He went on eagerly, his voice the voice of a fanatic:

  “If I could not pierce the stars above, that were so far, then I would pierce the atoms below, that were so near. They are everywhere. In every object I touch and in the very air I breathe. But they are minute, and to reach them I must find a way to make myself as minute as they are, and more so! This I have done. The solution I showed you will cause every individual atom in my body to contract, but each electron and proton will also decrease in size, or diameter, in direct proportion to my own shrinkage! Thus will I not only be able to become the size of an atom, but can go down, down into infinite smallness!”

  * * * *

  II

  When he had stopped speaking I said calmly: “You are mad.”

  He was unperturbed. “I expected you to say that,” he answered. “It is only natural that that should be your reaction to all that I have said. But no, I am not mad, it is merely that you are unacquainted with the marvellous propensities of ‘Shrinx’. But I promised that you should see for yourself, and that you shall. You shall be the first to go down into the atomic universe.”

  My original opinion in regard to his state of mind remained unshaken.

  “I am sure you mean well, Professor,” I said, “but I must decline your offer.”

  He went on as though I hadn’t spoken:

  “There are several reasons why I want to send you before I myself make the trip. In the first place, once you make the trip there can be no returning, and there are a number of points I want to be quite clear on. You will serve as my advance guard, so to speak.”

  “Professor, listen. I do not doubt that the stuff you call ‘Shrinx’ has very remarkable properties. I will even admit that it will do all you say it will do. But for the past month you have worked day and night, with scarcely enough time out for food and hardly any sleep at all. You should take a rest, get away from the laboratory for a while.”

  “I shall keep in contact with your consciousness,” he said, “through a very ingenious device I have perfected. I will explain it to you later. The ‘Shrinx’ is introduced directly into the blood stream. Shortly thereafter your shrinkage should begin, and continue at moderate speed, never diminishing in the least degree so long as the blood continues to flow in your body. At least, I hope it never diminishes. Should it, I shall have to make the necessary alterations in the formula. All this is theoretical of course, but I am sure it will all work according to schedule, and quite without harm.”

  I had now lost all patience. “See here, Professor,” I said crossly, “I refuse to be the object of any of your wild-sounding experiments. You should realise that what you propose to do is scientifically impossible. Go home and rest – or go away for a while –”

  Without the slightest warning he leaped at me, snatching an object from the table. Before I could take a backward step I felt a needle plunge deep into my arm, and cried out with the pain of it. Things became hazy, distorted. A wave of vertigo swept over me. Then it passed, and my vision cleared. The Professor stood leering before me.

  “Yes, I’ve worked hard and I’m tired. I’ve worked thirty years, but I’m not tired enough nor fool enough to quit this thing now, right on the verge of the climax!”

  His leer of triumph gave way to an expression almost of sympathy.

  “I am sorry it had to come about this way,” he said, “but I saw that you would never submit otherwise. I really am ashamed of you. I didn’t think you would doubt the truth of my statements to the extent of really believing me insane. But to be safe I prepared your allotment of the ‘Shrinx’ in advance, and had it ready; it is now coursing through your veins, and it should be but a short time before we observe the effects. What you saw in the vial is for myself when I am ready to make the trip. Forgive me for having to administer yours in such an undignified manner.”

  So angered was I at the utter disregard he had
shown for my personal feelings, that I hardly heard his words. My arm throbbed fiercely where the needle had plunged in. I tried to take a step toward him, but not a muscle would move. I struggled hard to break the paralysis that was upon me, but could not move a fraction of an inch from where I stood.