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

by Edited By Isaac Asimov

  The flame-machines moved on to another building, and on a slope near the outskirts two more of the air machines waited …

  Sickened at the purposeless vandalism of it all, I turned inland; and everywhere I strode were the machines, destroying and building, levelling to the ground the deserted cities of the bird people and building up their own meaningless civilisation of metal.

  At last I came to a long range of mountains which towered up past the level of my eyes as I stood before them. In two steps I stood on the top of these mountains and looked out upon a vast plain dotted everywhere with the grotesque machine-made cities. The machines had made good progress. About two hundred miles to the left a great metal dome rose from the level of the plain, and I made my way toward it, striding unconcerned and recklessly amidst the machines that moved everywhere around my feet.

  As I neared the domed structure, a row of formidable looking mechanisms, armed with long spikes, rose up to bar my path. I kicked out viciously at them and in a few minutes they were reduced to tangled scrap, though I received a number of minor scratches in the skirmish. Others of the spiked machines rose up to confront me with each step I took, but I strode through them, kicking them to one side, and at last I stood before an entrance-way in the side of the huge dome. Stooping, I entered, and once inside my head almost touched the roof.

  I had hoped to find here what I sought, and I was not disappointed. There in the centre of the single spacious room was The Machine of all Machines; the Cause of it All; the Central Force, the Ruler, the Controlling Power of all the diabolism running riot over the face of the planet. It was roughly circular, large and ponderous. It was bewilderingly complicated, a maze of gears, wheels, switchboards, lights, levers, buttons, tubing, and intricacies beyond my comprehension. There were circular tiers, and on each tier smaller separate units moved, performing various tasks, attending switchboards, pressing buttons, pulling levers. The result was a throbbing, rhythmic, purposeful unit. I could imagine invisible waves going out in every direction.

  I wondered what part of this great machine was vulnerable. Silly thought. No part. Only it – itself. It was The Brain.

  The Brain. The Intelligence. I had searched for it, and I had found it. There it was before me. Well, I was going to smash it. I looked around for some kind of weapon, but finding none, I strode forward bare-handed.

  Immediately a square panel lighted up with a green glow, and I knew that The Brain was aware of my intent. I stopped. An odd sensation swept over me, a feeling of hate, of menace. It came from the machine, pervaded the air in invisible waves.

  “Nonsense,” I thought; “it is but a machine after all. A very complicated one, yes, perhaps even possessed of intelligence; but it only has control over other machines, it cannot harm me.” Again I took a resolute step forward.

  The feeling of menace became stronger, but I fought back my apprehension and advanced recklessly. I had almost reached the machine when a wall of crackling blue flame leaped from floor to roof. If I had taken one more step I would have been caught in it.

  The menace, and hate, and imagined rage at my escape rolled out from the machine in ponderous, almost tangible waves, engulfing me, and I retreated hastily.

  I walked back toward the mountains. After all, this was not my world – not my universe. I would soon be so small that my presence amid the machines would be extremely dangerous, and the top of the mountains was the only safe place. I would have liked to smash The Brain and put an end to it all, but anyway, I thought, the bird people were now safe on the satellite, so why not leave this lifeless world to the machines?

  It was twilight when I reached the mountains, and from a high, grassy slope – the only peaceful place on the entire planet, I imagined – I looked out upon the plain. Tiny lights appeared as the machines moved about, carrying on their work, never resting. The clattering and clanking of them floated faintly up to me and made me glad that I was a safe distance from it all.

  As I stood out toward the dome that housed The Brain, I saw what I had failed to see before. A large globe rested there on a framework, and there seemed to be unusual activity around it.

  A vague apprehension tightened around my brain as I saw machines enter this globe, and I was half prepared for what happened next. The globe rose lightly as a feather, sped upward with increasing speed, out of the atmosphere and into space where, as a tiny speck, it darted and manoeuvred with perfect ease. Soon it reappeared, floated gracefully down upon the framework again, and the machines that had mechanically directed its flight disembarked from it.

  The machines had achieved space travel! My heart sickened with sudden realisation of what that meant. They would build others – were already building them. They would go to other worlds, and the nearest one was the satellite … encased in its protective metal shell …

  But then I thought of the white-flame machines that I had seen cut through stone and metal in a few seconds …

  The bird people would no doubt put up a valiant fight. But as I compared their rocket projectiles against the efficiency of the globe I had just seen, I had little doubt as to the outcome. They would eventually be driven out into space again to seek a new world, and the machines would take over the satellite, running riot as they had done here. They would remain there just as long as The Brain so desired, or until there was no more land for conquest. Already this planet was over-run, so they were preparing to leave.

  * * * *

  The Brain. An intricate, intelligent, mechanical brain, glorying in its power, drunk with conquest. Where had it originated? The bird people must have been the indirect cause, and no doubt they were beginning to realise the terrible menace they had loosed on the universe.

  I tried to picture their civilisation as it had been long ago before this thing had come about. I pictured a civilisation in which machinery played a very important part. I pictured the development of this machinery until the time when it relieved them of many tasks. I imagined how they must have designed their machines with more and more intricacy, more and more finesse, until only a few persons were needed in control. And then the great day would come, the supreme day, when mechanical parts would take the place of those few.

  That must indeed have been a day of triumph. Machines supplying their every necessity, attending to their every want, obeying their every whim at the touch of a button. That must have been Utopia achieved!

  But it had proven to be a bitter Utopia. They had gone forward blindly and recklessly to achieve it, and unknowingly they had gone a step too far. Somewhere, amid the machines they supposed they had under their control, they were imbued with a spark of intelligence. One of the machines added unto itself – perhaps secretly; built and evolved itself into a terribly efficient unit of inspired intelligence. And guided by that intelligence, other machines were built and came under its control. The rest must have been a matter of course. Revolt and easy victory.

  So I pictured the evolution of the mechanical brain that even now was directing activities from down there under its metal dome.

  And the metal shell around the satellite – did not that mean that the bird people were expecting an invasion? Perhaps, after all, this was not the original planet of the bird people; perhaps space travel was not an innovation among the machines. Perhaps it was on one of the far inner planets near the sun that the bird people had achieved the Utopia that proved to be such a terrible nemesis; perhaps they had moved to the next planet, never dreaming that the machines could follow; but the machines had followed after a number of years, the bird people being always driven outward, the machines always following at leisure in search of new spheres of conquest. And finally the bird people had fled to this planet, and from it to the satellite; and realising that in a few years the machines would come again in all their invincibility, they had then ensconced themselves beneath the shell of metal.

  At any rate: they did not flee to a far-away safe spot in the universe as they could have very easily done. Instead, they stayed;
always one sphere ahead of the marauding machines, they must always be planning a means of wiping out the spreading evil they had loosed.

  It might be that the shell around the satellite was in some way a clever trap! But so thinking, I remembered again the white-flame machines and the deadly efficiency of the globe I had seen, and then my hopes faded away.

  Perhaps some day they would eventually find a way to check the spreading menace. But on some other extreme, the machines might spread out to other solar systems, other galaxies, until some day, a billion years hence, they would occupy every sphere in this universe …

  Such were my thoughts as I lay prone there upon the grassy slope and looked down into the plain, down upon the ceaseless clatter and the ceaseless moving of lights in the dark. I was very small now; soon, very soon, I would leave this world.

  My last impression was of a number of the space globes, barely discernible in the dusk below; and among them, towering up high and round, was one much larger than the others, and I could guess which machine would occupy that globe.

  And my last thought was a regret that I hadn’t made a more determined effort to destroy that malicious mechanism, The Brain.

  So I passed from this world of machines – the world that was an electron on a grain of sand that existed on a prehistoric world that was but an electron on a microscope slide that existed on a world that was but an electron in a piece of Rehyllium-X on the Professor’s laboratory table.

  * * * *

  VIII

  It is useless to go on. I have neither the time nor the desire to relate in detail all the adventures that have befallen me, the universes I have passed into, the things I have seen and experienced and learned on all the worlds since I left the planet of the machines.

  Ever smaller cycles … infinite universes … never ending … each presenting something new … some queer variation of life or intelligence … Life? Intelligence? Terms I once associated with things animate, things protoplasmic and understandable. I find it hard to apply them to all the divergencies of shape and form and construction I have encountered …

  Worlds young … warm … volcanic and steaming … the single cell emerging from the slime of warm oceans to propagate on primordial continents … other worlds, innumerable … life divergent in all branches from the single cell … amorphous globules … amphibian … crustacean … reptilian … plant … insect … bird … mammal … all possible variations of combinations … biological monstrosities indescribable …

  Other forms beyond any attempt at classification … beyond all reason or comprehension of my puny mind … essences of pure flame … others gaseous, incandescent and quiescent alike … plant forms encompassing an entire globe … crystalline beings sentient and reasoning … great shimmering columnar forms, seemingly liquid, defying gravity by some strange power of cohesion … a world of sound-vibrations, throbbing, expanding, reverberating in unbroken echoes that nearly drove me crazy … globular brain-like masses utterly dissociated from any material substance … intra-dimensional beings, all shapes and shapeless … entities utterly incapable of registration upon any of my senses except the sixth, that of instinct …

  Suns dying … planets cold and dark and airless … last vestiges of once proud races struggling for a few more meagre years of sustenance … great cavities … beds of evaporated seas … small furry animals scurrying to cover at my approach … desolation … ruins crumbling surely into the sands of barren deserts, the last mute evidence of vanished civilisations …

  Other worlds … a-flourished with life … blessed with light and heat … staggering cities … vast populations … ships plying the surface of oceans, and others in the air … huge observatories … tremendous strides in the sciences …

  Space flight … battles for the supremacy of worlds … blasting rays of super-destruction … collision of planets … disruption of solar systems … cosmic annihilation …

  Light space … a universe with a tenuous, filmy something around it, which I burst through … all around me not the customary blackness of outer space I had known, but light … filled with tiny dots that were globes of darkness … that were burnt-out suns and lifeless planets … nowhere a shimmering planet, nowhere a flaming sun … only remote specks of black amid the light-satiated emptiness …

  * * * *

  How many of the infinitely smaller atomic cycles I have passed into, I do not know. I tried to keep count of them at first, but somewhere between twenty and thirty I gave it up; and that was long ago.

  Each time I would think: “This cannot go on forever – it cannot; surely this next time I must reach the end.”

  But I have not reached the end.

  Good God – how can there be an end? Worlds composed of atoms … each atom similarly composed … The end would have to be an indestructible solid, and that cannot be; all matter divisible into smaller matter …

  What keeps me from going insane? I want to go insane!

  I am tired … a strange tiredness neither of mind nor body. Death would be a welcome release from the endless fate that is mine.

  But even death is denied me. I have sought it … I have prayed for it and begged for it … But it is not to be.

  On all the countless worlds I have contacted, the inhabitants were of two distinctions: they were either so low in the state of intelligence that they fled and barricaded themselves against me in superstitious terror – or were so highly intellectual that they recognised me for what I was and welcomed me among them. On all but a few worlds the latter was the case, and it is on these types that I will dwell briefly.

  These beings – or shapes or monstrosities or essences – were in every case mentally and scientifically far above me. In most cases they had observed me for years as a dark shadow looming beyond the farthest stars, blotting out certain star-fields and nebulae … and always when I came to their world they welcomed me with scientific enthusiasm.

  Always they were puzzled as to my steady shrinking, and always when they learned of my origin and the manner of my being there, they were surprised and excited.

  In most cases gratification was apparent when they learned definitely that there were indeed great ultramacrocosmic universes. It seemed that all of them had long held the theory that such was the case.

  On most of the worlds, too, the beings – or entities – or whatever the case might be – were surprised that the Professor, one of my fellow creatures, had invented such a marvellous vitalised element as ‘Shrinx’.

  ‘Almost unbelievable’ was the general consensus of opinion; ‘scientifically he must be centuries ahead of the time on his own planet, if we are to judge the majority of the race by this creature here’ – meaning me.

  In spite of the fact that on nearly every world I was looked upon as mentally inferior, they conversed with me and I with them, by various of their methods, in most cases different variations of telepathy. They learned in minute detail and with much interest all of my past experiences in other universes. They answered all of my questions and explained many things besides, about their own universe and world and civilisation and scientific achievements, most of which were completely beyond my comprehension, so alien were they in nature.

  And of all the intra-universal beings I have had converse with, the strangest were those essences who dwelt in outer space as well as on various planets; identifiable to me only as vague blobs of emptiness, total absences of light or colour or substance; who impressed upon me the fact that they were Pure Intelligences, far above and superior to any material plane; but who professed an interest in me, bearing me with them to various planets, revealing many things and treating me very kindly. During my sojourn with them I learned from experience the total subservience of matter to influences of mind. On a giant mountainous world I stepped out upon a thin beam of light stretched between two crags, and willed with all my consciousness that I would not fall. And I did not.

  I have learned many things. I know that my mind is much sharper, more
penetrative, more grasping than ever before. And vast fields of wonder and knowledge lie before me in other universes yet to come.

  But in spite of this, I am ready for it all to end. This strange tiredness that is upon me – I cannot understand it. Perhaps some invisible radiation in empty space is satiating me with this tiredness.

  Perhaps it is only that I am very lonely. How very far away I am from my own tiny sphere! Millions upon millions … trillions upon trillions … of light-years … Light years! Light cannot measure the distance. And yet it is no distance: I am in a block of metal on the Professor’s laboratory table …

  Yet how far away into space and time I have gone! Years have passed, years far beyond my normal span of life. I am eternal.

  Yes, eternal life … that men have dreamed of … prayed for … sought after … is mine – and I dream and pray and seek for death!

  Death. All the strange beings I have seen and conversed with have denied it. I have implored many of them to release me painlessly and for all time – but to no avail. Many of them were possessed of the scientific means to stop my steady shrinkage – but they would not stop it. None of them would hinder me, none of them would tamper with the things that were. Why? Always I asked them why, and they would not answer.