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

by Edited By Isaac Asimov

  Brett in the meantime ran his hand through his straggly beard as he waited his water ration, wishing for a razor to remove it. But he knew, or thought there wasn’t one in the crowd; that is until Forrest sidled over to him.

  “Want a razor, Mr. Rand?”

  Brett looked up and grinned.

  “I got one,” admitted the boy in a whisper as he ran a hand over his virgin chin. “Some older fellows were kidding me ‘bout not shaving yet—back home, you know. So the day the decapods came—I had bought a razor. I—I thought I’d shave and make the hair grow.

  “I never said anything about it before, ‘cause I thought I’d get laughed at, but if you told ‘em I bought it for my dad . . . .”

  The man could have hugged him. The razor, an ordinary safety affair was rusted, but he did not care. He almost shouted when Forrest brought out a tube of shaving cream that all this while had reposed in his pocket.

  The others crowded around, begging for next go. Forrest insisted his hero have the first shave, the others, he said with a negligent wave of his hand, could draw straws for it—or something.

  The backing of the power screen made a dim mirror of the ship’s walls, and Brett used that for his shave. After some difficulty in hacking away the hirsute growth, and nicking himself more than once he managed a fairly clean shave. Then he relinquished the razor to the next in turn. Luckily, the boy had likewise purchased a package of blades. Each man kept his blade for further use.

  Dell made her appearance with the other women. “I feel like a new woman,” she laughed. “One could scarcely believe that a little water could work such wonders . . . .”

  The effect of their ablutions was to give the Earthlings a new lease on life, an uplift in their morale. Their eyes had brightened, and their cheery voices filled the ship.

  When it came his turn at the controls Brett again threw off the power screen to ascertain if the decapods were still on their trail. No sooner was the screen replaced than a rocking shook the ship. The decapods were most assuredly on their tail.

  He conferred with George. Should they again attempt to rid themselves of the enemy? They decided to consult the others on the momentous question. The majority vote was for War!

  * * * *

  Once more the ship was swung out of its course, turned about so it could face the enemy, and Brett worked until the big ship lay centered in the vision-screen. Then with one finger he depressed the button that released their own screen, while almost immediately, he switched it on again. There followed a rocking of the ship as a pencil beam from the decapods’ machine flashed across the Void.

  Twice he used the same tactics, and twice the other struck; but the third time the decapods resorted to the same strategy, dropping their own screen. Instantly Brett shot out his ray. It worked.

  “A HIT! A Hit!” cried George, and they saw the big ship stagger, sideslip and try to right itself. Only it could not. It was careening wildly, from side to side. But the decapods were not done yet. A white beam cut the blackness, but the ray was wild, and did not come anywhere near their ship.

  Twice the decapods attempted to restore their protective screen, and though it flashed on each time, it faded almost instantly. Again Brett used his ray upon it, but now the other was quickly dwindling in size and the range was too great.

  For several minutes they followed it, but hurt though it was, the big ship could accelerate more quickly, and was swiftly moving away—back in the direction from which it had come—back to Mars ....

  Breathing a sigh of relief the pilot turned about, heading for Earth once again. Earth was still far, far away, and there was no way of computing how long the voyage would be.

  With no further interruptions the monotony of space began to tell upon the travelers, voices grew low, eyes lack-luster, bodies listless with nothing to occupy mind or body. They commenced to hate the sight of food, most of them suffering from cramps as well as from the colds they had brought from Mars.

  Brett commenced to wonder if they should reach home alive. He realized he was feeling pretty rotten himself, only the excitement of the escape and the fight with the decapods had taken his mind from it, but now that he had time to allow himself to dwell upon his condition, he knew that he was actually sick.

  Endless hours slipped by, and with them the sickness aboard grew apace. Clarice and Mrs. Burton were very sick, staying in the other room, not even coming out at meal time. Mattie who had taken to prayers again, calling upon God as witness to their sins, sometimes forgot to pray as she moaned instead. Miss Snowden sat slumped in a corner most of the time, and the Militant Matron, though she tried to help Dell cheer the others, was visibly sick. Several men were in the same condition, refusing food, and Forrest’s eyes were over-bright.

  Swung in the seat woven from the overhead straps facing the control panel or lying in his corner Brett found that there were long lapses of time in which his mind seemed away from his body. His body grew to be something unattached, his lucid moments becoming fewer and fewer. Sometimes he thought he was on Mars, sometimes at his desk in the Bureau of Standards back home. Sometimes he heard himself talking aloud, to no one in particular.

  “It’s the food,” he heard Dell mutter to George one time. “It’s rotting ----”

  That woke him up. He hurried to the open tub they were using, three of the others were empty. He tasted it, and only with effort kept from retching. It was rotted.

  He called George. “Let’s open the last barrel.” It too was rotting. “No more food,” he said.

  The next meal time, only water was doled out from the now half-empty barrel. No one seemed to notice the change, nor care. Brett crawled up to the control board to check the course. The green mantled Earth lay in dead-center of the screen, but it still seemed far away. He grew panicky. Perhaps they no longer moved!

  * * * *

  CHAPTER XII

  For a long time he stared at that far away globe. For a time he forgot what it actually was; it had revolved into a symbol, a symbol of attainment, but outside that he could not remember. It seemed that the Void had always been, all that he had ever known. Only he could not put out of his mind that deep longing he felt for that greenish half-globe with its diminutive moon alongside, for Luna had since detached itself slightly from the side of Earth and rode the darkness, shedding its light on the mother planet.

  Once someone aroused him to tell him that Clarice was dead, and Mattie was fast sinking, but the words scarcely meant anything. He knew that Kent had already passed away, and that several others were in a deep coma from which they could not be aroused.

  The next time his brain roused itself he became aware of a distinctly unpleasant odor around him. He puzzled over it a while before he realized that it came from their fouled food supply. Something snapped within him, and he was more fully alert than he had been for some time. He realized the need of ridding the ship of the stuff. Before this, he had puzzled about their air-supply, afraid that that might also give out on them, but he had come to know that one of the ship’s two motors was designed to keep it clean and pure. Only with that putrefaction rising from the tubs, the air would soon grow stale. They had to be emptied.

  Glancing about for help he saw George sleeping, making vague stirrings that bespoke a troubled body. Moore, the merchant, lay supine, snoring spasmodically, the little rolls of fat gone from his face, his skin an unhealthy yellow. Howell lay in a strange unnatural position. Leaning over him Brett realized he was dead. The mulatto, Harris, was doubled in a knot, sweat streaking from his face. Jeff the big negro and Jerry the reporter seemed the only two that looked normal. Forrest was breathing with difficulty, and McCarthy lay with an arm around the dog, mumbling in a delirium. Shaking Jeff and Jerry awake Brett told them what had to be done. None of them were strong enough for the task, but together they managed to push the pair of casks to the air-lock, tip them over so their contents spilled into the small receptacle. When it filled up, they closed and dumped it. This procedure ha
d to be repeated many times, the three of them suffering time and time again over their ugly task as the evil smell of the mass affected them. They were forced to scoop out the bottoms, but at last it was finished, the casks tightly closed.

  * * * *

  The dead presented another problem, but they did not like the thought of consigning them to space. Dragging the bodies to one side they covered them with a few coats taken from the screen shielding the women.

  On, on drifted the ship of death, moving slowly toward its objective. From his place on the floor Brett raised his eyes from time to time to the body of George slumped within the straps above his head, eyes closed. But those facts scarcely registered upon his brain as he drifted again into the unreal realm of a deathlike sleep. Several times he sought to drag himself out of his lethargy, but each time the effort was too great. He did not know that like a sleep-walker he had gotten up a number of times to wander among the others, putting a hand to a forehead here and there. When next he awoke, he found his arms wrapped around a thin though warm body.

  Focusing eyes with some difficulty he found that it was Dell Wayne who lay within his grasp. He was startled by her appearance, her sunken cheeks, the depths of her eye sockets. He grew frightened, fearing that she was dead, and laid his head upon her heart. It beat. The movement awakened her. Somehow she managed a smile. “Brett—good Brett,” she murmured in a scarcely audible voice. “I—I guess this is the end—isn’t it? It’s been nice knowing you—Brett . . . .”

  The import of her words fell upon him, and suddenly he knew he did not want to die. “NO—No .... we shan’t die—we can’t. We’ve come too far together for that—I can’t let you die—you understand? Why, Dell—I love you—I love you. We can’t die—yet . . . .”

  She did not answer, smiling at him instead, an enigmatical smile. Then, they both were silent, drifting again into that half-way death of sleep.

  The first shout did not rouse them, nor the second. It took a heavy shaking on the part of the boy, Forrest, to awaken them. “Earth—” he was shrieking .... “Earth—in our path. Can’t you understand? We’re almost—home-HOME!”

  The last word did it. Brett woke, staring wildly into the wilder eyes of the boy. “Home?” he asked querulously, “HOME?”

  Then he was struggling to his feet, dragging Dell with him. He glanced out the ship’s side (the power screen had long since been down, after they had ascertained that the decapod ship was really gone). It was true. Before them, filling most of their sky, loomed the broad green globe of Earth. To one side shone a thin sliver of the moon. They were already within Luna’s orbit.

  Weak though he was Brett managed to climb up to the control panel, staring with yearning eyes at the great body before him, picking out the familiar features of the continents as the globe was turning slowly, half in darkness, half in light.

  How long he hung there in the straps, he did not know. Below him he could hear the stirrings of his fellows, almost all aroused now by Forrest. He knew it must have taken hours, that slow approach to the globe, but it did not matter, nothing mattered as the lineaments of Earth grew before his eyes, sometimes blotted by that line of darkness. Gradually it lost its globular form, horizons straightened out, and with a suddenness that startled him, he found that the sky around them was no longer dead black—that it was taking on color—pale blue at first, then deeper and deeper. They were well within the atmosphere blanket!

  Now it seemed they were falling, falling too swiftly as land and water rushed up to meet them. “Do something, do something,” his brain commanded, “do something before we crash.”

  The knobs—three of them must be turned. With both hands he tugged and pulled; then someone was helping him, and he found it was George. The ship leveled off, and now the same speed that had seemed so incredibly slow out in space swung them rapidly through the air, five miles or so above the landscape. Again the acceleration was lessened and Brett jiggled the “stick.” They had reached Earth at its most southern point, and he turned the ship northward.

  Those who had the power to do so had risen to their feet, crowding to the walls to stare hungrily at the twilighted land beneath. Night came upon them, and still they moved on, on. Brett knew when they crossed the equator by the constellations; steered his course by the pole-star. Dawn was breaking when he realized they lay off the Virginian coast. There was that great arm of land that was the eastern shore of Chesapeake Bay. He headed the ship over the bay, followed it, trying to name the rivers emptying into it.

  He found the river he sought, the lordly Potomac and followed its course. Soon they saw the beautiful pattern that was Washington, the tiny sliver of stone that was the Monument. A few minutes later the ship hovered above Haines Point, and Brett halted the oscillating stick.

  Instantly the ship nosed down, dropping evenly to the ground, forward motion halted. As the land came up to meet them, George and he twisted the three dials to neutral. The journey was at end.

  Like a feather the ship settled upon the grass of the municipal golf-links, not far from the spot, where, on that memorial day, five weeks since, the great drum-ship of the decapods had rested.

  Again Washington had witnessed the early morning arrival, but there were only police, and soldiers to receive the travelers. Boiling Field and the Naval Airdrome had dispatched planes to the scene, machine-guns pointed downward menacingly. A shout of wonder greeted the first of the emaciated passengers to disembark. Willing hands helped them while those unable to walk were carried out tenderly.

  A week later Brett Rand with an arm around his wife received the news-reporters in his brother’s home. Still thin and wan from their experience the pair expressed their joy of being “home.”

  “I’m going to make a life work of freeing every animal pet in the land!” declared Mrs. Rand when asked if she was going to follow a “career.”

  “After our honeymoon,” Brett said, “George and I are going to study the decapod ship. There are great things to be learned there, mechanisms entirely new to science . . . .”

  “And that, boys, is one tall order!” It was George, speaking from the shadows.

  * * * *

  This story, “The Human Pets of Mars,” does not hold up on rereading as well as many of the other stories in this book did, and I am keenly embarrassed by the simple-minded portrayal of the Blacks in the tale. Yet I well remember thinking the story was absolutely great when I read it for the first time. [Stone was one of the few women writing science fiction in the 1930s. There are many of them now. They compete on equal terms with the men and win more than their share of the honors—but Stone was a pioneer.]

  I admit that even when I read the story I was dubious as to the possibility of Earthmen taking over completely alien vessels and learning to handle them so well as to be able to outrace, outmaneuver, and outfight those to the manner born.

  Still, the story of indomitable men winning out over immense odds is always popular, and such situations appealed to me both in my reading and in my writing. A great many of my stories will pit one man against a world, though for sheer derring-do, my novel The Currents of Space springs first to mind.

  It was sometime in late 1936, encouraged, I believe, by my pleasure in “The Human Pets of Mars,” that I could finally resist no more. I had grown tired of the endless pages of my fantasy, which was getting nowhere, and I decided to try, for the very first time, science fiction!

  I don’t remember the details of that first piece of science fiction I ever tried to write, but, of course, it was a novel. Once again, as though incapable of learning, I began a long, incoherent, invertebrate tale, like the fantasy that had just died, and (for that matter) like “The Greenville Chums at College” five years earlier. I made it up as I went along and I never knew on one page what the next page would hold.

  That, in itself, is not so bad. Even today when I write a novel, I don’t know the details to come and tend to make it up as I go along. Nowadays, though, I know the ending at all
times; I know where I am heading. Up through the age of seventeen, I apparently had never realized that this was fundamental—that it was important to know the direction at least.

  I was bound to get weary of such endless, meandering efforts, and, therefore, as soon as I found myself mired in literary quicksand, which sooner or later I always did, I quit. The science fiction novel died just as my previous attempts did.

  What I now remember about my science fiction epic is that there was a great deal of talk about the fifth dimension at the start and that later on there was some catastrophe that destroyed photosynthesis (though not on Earth, I think). I remember one sentence word for word: “Whole forests stood sere and brown in midsummer.” Why I remember that, I don’t know.

  The manuscript still existed sometime after I had actually begun to publish my stories. I remember looking at it once (perhaps as late as 1940) and noting that, on the whole, my vocabulary was more complex in that story than in the later stories I published. I was still naive enough at that time to think that this spoke poorly for the stories I published—as though I had declined in literary ability because my style had grown more direct.