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

by Edited By Isaac Asimov

  It didn’t fire, and immediately the portico stank with his smoke.

  “That’s one,” said the next Penton. He raised his ion-gun and fired.. Then his violet-gun. Then he raised it and fired again, at a rapidly dissolving Blake. “That makes two. That one evidently found, when we fired at the first one, that his didn’t work. We have one more to eliminate. Next?”

  Presently another Blake vanished. “Well, well,” said Penton pleasantly, “the Blake-Penton odds are even. Any suggestions?”

  “Yes,” said Blake tensely. “I’ve been thinking of a patch I put in one suit that I ripped on Venus.” Another Blake vanished under the mutual fire.

  “There’s one more thing I want to know. Why in blazes are those phonies so blasted willing to kill each other, and though they know which is which, don’t kill us? And how did they enter the ship?” Rod demanded. Or at least a Rod.

  “They,” said two Pentons at once. Another one looked at them. “Bad timing, boys. Rodney, my son, we used a combination lock. These gentlemen are professional mind-readers. Does that explain their possession of the guns? I’ve been thinking right along of one way to eliminate these excessive excrescences, consisting of you going into a huddle with your tribe, and eliminating all but the one you know to be yourself, and I doing the same. Unfortunately, while they’re perfectly willing to kill each other so long as they don’t die, they will prevent their own deaths by adequate, unfortunately adequate defense.

  “Now since these little gun tests and others have been made I think it fairly evident that we are not going to leave this planet until the two right men are chosen and only two go into that ship with us. Fortunately they can’t go without us, because while they can read minds, it takes more than knowledge to navigate a space ship, at least such knowledge as they can get from us. It takes understanding, which mere memory will not supply. They need us.

  “We will, therefore, march dutifully to the ship, and each of us will replace his guns carefully in the prepared racks. I know that I’m the right Penton -- but you don’t. So no movement will be made without the unanimous agreement of all Pentons and Blakes.”

  Blake looked up, white-faced.

  “If this wasn’t so world-shakingly serious, it would be the damnedest comic opera that ever happened. I’m afraid to give up my gun.”

  “If we all give them up, I think it puts us even. We have some advantage in that they don’t want to kill us, and if worst comes to worst, we could take them to Earth, making damned sure that they didn’t get away. On Earth we could have protoplasmic tests made that would tell the story. By the way, that suggests something. Yes indeed, I think we can make tests here. Let us repair to this ship.”

  * * * *

  Chapter 4 - Penton’s Strategy

  The Blakes sat down and stayed down. “Ted, what in blazes can we do?” His voice was almost tearful. “You can’t tell one of these ghastly things from another. You can’t tell one from me. We can’t -- “

  “Oh, God,” said another Blake, “that’s not me. That’s just another one of those damned mind stealers.”

  Another one groaned hopelessly.

  “That wasn’t either.” They all looked helplessly at the line of Pentons. “I don’t even know who’s my friend.”

  Penton nodded. All the Pentons nodded, like a grotesquely solemn chorus preparing to recite some blessing. They smiled in superhuman unity. “That’s all right,” they said in perfect harmony. “Well, well. A new stunt. Now we all talk together. That makes things easier. I think there may be a way to tell the difference. But you must absolutely trust me, Blake. You must give up your guns, putting all faith in my ability to detect the right one, and if I’m wrong, realize that I will not know. We can try such simple tests as alcohol, whiskey, to see if it makes them drunk, and pepper to see if it bums their tongues -- “

  “It won’t work,” said Blake tensely. “Lord, Penton, I can’t give up my guns -- I won’t -- “

  Penton, all the Pentons smiled gently. “I’m half again as fast as you are, Blake, and no Martian-born imitation of you is going to be faster. Maybe these Martian imitations of me are as fast as I am. But you know perfectly well that I could ray the whole gang of you, all ten of you, out of existence before any one of you could move a finger. You know that, don’t you, Rod?”

  “Lord, yes, but Ted, Ted, don’t do that -- don’t make me give up my guns -- I’ve got to keep them. Why should I give up mine, if you keep yours?”

  “That probably was not you speaking, Rod, but it doesn’t matter. If it wasn’t what you thought, we could do something about it. Therefore, that is what you wanted to say, just as this is what I wanted to say, whether I said it or not. Oh, Lord preserve us. It talks with my voice! But anyway, the situation is this; one of us has to have unquestioned superiority over the other gang. Then, the one with the whip hand can develop proof of identity, and enforce his decisions. As it is, we can’t.”

  “Let me be that one, then,” snapped one Blake.

  “I didn’t mean that,” sighed another. “That wasn’t me.”

  “Yes it was,” said the first. “I spoke without thinking. Go ahead. But how are you going to make the others give up their guns? I’m willing. You can’t make them?”

  “Oh, yes I can. I have my faithful friends, here,” said Penton grimly, his eleven hands waving to his eleven counterparts. “They agree with me this far, being quite utterly selfish.”

  “But what’s your system. Before I put my neck in the noose, I have to know that noose isn’t going to tighten on it.”

  “If I had a sound system in mind -- I’m carefully refraining from developing one -- they’d read it, weigh it, and wouldn’t agree at all. They still have hopes. You see that pepper and alcohol system won’t work perfectly because they can read in my mind the proper reaction, and be drunk, or have an inflamed tongue at will, being perfect actors. I’m going to try just the same. Rod, if you ever trusted me, trust me now.”

  “All right, come on. We’ll go to the ship, and any one of these things that doesn’t part with its gun is not me. Ray it.”

  Blake rose jerkily, all ten of him, and went down to the ship.

  The Pentons followed faithfully after. Abruptly Penton rayed one Blake. His shoulder blades had humped curiously and swiftly. Wings were developing. “That helps,” said Penton, holstering his guns.

  The Blakes went on, white-faced. They put the weapons in the racks in the lock stoically. The Martians had seen the, to them, inconceivably swift movements of Penton’s gun hands, and Penton knew that he, himself, had done the raying that time. But he still didn’t know a way to prove it without causing a general mêlée which would bring about their own deaths. That wasn’t so important. The trouble was that given fifty years, the rest of the world would descend on this planet unwarned. Then all Earth would be destroyed. Not with flame and sword and horrible casualty lists, but silently and undetectably.

  The Blakes came out, unarmed. They shuffled and moved about uneasily, tensely, under the watchful eyes of eleven Pentons armed with terrifically deadly weapons.

  Several Pentons went into the ship, to come out bearing pepper, saccharine tablets, alcohol, the medicine chest. One of them gathered them together and looked them over. “We’ll try pepper,” he said, rather unhappily. “Line up!”

  The Blakes lined up, hesitantly. “I’m putting my life in your hands, Ted,” said two of them in identical, plaintive tones.

  Four Pentons laughed shortly. “I know it. Line up. Come and get it.”

  “First,” he sighed, after a moment, “stick out the tongue, patient.”

  With unsteady hands he put a bit of pepper from the shaker on the fellow’s tongue. The tongue snapped in instantly, the Blake clapped his hands to his mouth, gurgling unpleasantly. “Waaaar!” he gasped. “Waar -- achooo -- damnt!”

  With hands like flashing light, Penton pulled his own, and a neighbor’s ion-gun. In a fiftieth of a second all but the single gagging, choking, cough
ing Blake were stinking, smoking, swiftly dissolving and flowing rubbish. The other Penton methodically helped destroy them.

  Blake stopped gagging in surprise.

  “My God, it might not have been the right one!” he gasped.

  The ten Pentons sighed softly. “That finally proves it. Thank God. Definitely. That leaves me to find. And it won’t work again, because while you can’t read my mind to find the trick that told, these brothers of mine have. The very fact that you don’t know how I knew, proves that I was right.”

  Blake stared at him dumbly. “I was the first one -- “ he managed between a cough and a sneeze.

  “Exactly. Go on inside. Do something intelligent. Use your head. See what you can think of to locate me. You have to use your head in some such way that they don’t mind-read it first, though. Go ahead.”

  Blake went, slow-footed. The first thing he did was to close the lockdoor, so that he was safely alone in the ship. Blake went into the control room, donned an air-suit complete with helmet, and pushed a control handle over. Then a second. Presently he heard curious bumpings and thumpings, and strange floppings and whimperings. He went back rapidly, and rayed a supply chest and two crates of Venusian specimens that had sprouted legs and were rapidly growing arms to grasp ray pistols. The air in the ship began to look thick and greenish; it was colder.

  Contentedly Blake watched, and opened all the room doors. Another slithering, thumping noise attracted him, and with careful violet-gun work he removed an unnoticed, extra pipe that was crawling from the crossbrace hangers. It broke up into lengths that rolled about unpleasantly. Rod rayed them till the smallest only, the size of golf balls with curious blue-veined legs, staggered about uncertainly. Finally even they stopped wriggling.

  Half an hour Rod waited, while the air grew very green and thick. Finally, to make sure, he started some other apparatus, and watched the thermometer go down, down till moisture grew on the walls and became frost, and no more changes took place. Then he went around with an opened ion-gun with a needle beam and poked everything visible with it.

  The suction fans cleared out the chlorine-fouled atmosphere in two minutes, and Blake sat down wearily. He flipped over the microphone switch and spoke into the little disc. “I’ve got my hand on the main ion-gun control. Penton, I love you like a brother, but I love Earth more. If you can induce your boy friends to drop their guns in a neat pile and retire -- O.K. If not, and I mean if not within thirty seconds, this ion-gun is going into action and there won’t be any more Pentons. Now, drop!”

  Grinning broadly, with evident satisfaction, ten Pentons deposited twenty heart-cores of ultra-essence of destruction, and moved off. “Way off,” said Blake grimly. They moved.

  Blake collected twenty guns. Then he went back into the ship. There was a fine laboratory at one end, and with grim satisfaction, he took down three cotton-stoppered tubes, being very careful to handle them with rubber gloves. “You never did man a good turn before, tetanus, but I hope you spread high, wide and handsome here -- “

  He dumped them into a beaker of water, and took beaker and glass down to the lock and out. The ten waited at a distance.

  “All right, Penton. I happen to know you took a shot of tetanus antivaccine some while ago, and are immune. Let’s see if those blasted brain stealers can steal the secret of something we know how to make, but don’t know anything about. They can gain safety by turning into a chicken, which is immune, but not as human creatures. That’s a concentrated dose of tetanus. Go drink it. We can wait ten days if we have to.”

  Ten Pentons marched boldly up to the beaker, resting beside the ship. One stepped forward to the glass -- and nine kept right on stepping. They stepped into the lee of the ship where the ion-gun could not reach.

  Blake helped Penton into the ship with a broad grin.

  “Am I right?”

  “You’re right,” sighed Penton, “but God knows why. You can’t get tetanus by swallowing it, and lockjaw doesn’t develop so quickly as ten days.”

  “I didn’t know for sure,” grinned Blake. “They were too busy trying to find out what I was doing to follow your mind. Ah -- there they go. Will you ray them or shall I?” asked Blake politely, sighting the ion-gun at the nine flapping, rapidly vanishing things scuttling across the red, rusty planet. The ship dipped sharply in pursuit. “There’s one thing -- ahhh -- “ he straightened as the incredible glare died in thin air. “I want to know. How in blazes did you pick me out?”

  “To do what you did requires some five hundred different sets of muscles in a beautifully coordinated neuromuscular hookup, which I didn’t believe those things could imitate without a complete dissection. I took the chance it was you.”

  “Five hundred sets of muscles! What the heck did I do?”

  “You sneezed.”

  Rod Blake blinked slowly, and slowly his jaw tested again its supports and their flexibility.

  * * * *

  John Campbell is, of course, the most unusual personality in all the history of magazine science fiction. He sold a story to Amazing Stories when he was only seventeen, but the editor lost it and Campbell had no carbon copy. His first published story, “When the Atoms Failed,” appeared in the January 1930 issue of that magazine. He was not quite twenty then.

  At the time, Edward E. Smith was the outstanding science fiction writer, thanks to his Skylark of Space. Its sequel, Skylark Three, a three-part serial appearing in the August, September, and October 1930 Amazing Stories, made his position secure as the champion of the “super-science epic.” (In later times, such stories were referred to as “space opera” by the increasingly sophisticated science fiction readers.)

  No sooner had Skylark Three concluded, when Campbell’s story “Solarite” appeared in the November 1930 Amazing Stories. It was the second story in what was eventually called the “Arcot, Wade and Morey” series. In these, Campbell challenged Smith’s position and managed to share the throne with him.

  I was fascinated by the super-science epic, as most science fiction readers of the thirties were. I never wrote anything that could be considered one in the strict sense of the term, but the Foundation trilogy was my own version of the form, with the accent on politics and sociology rather than on physical science.

  But though Smith remained with the super-science epic throughout his career, Campbell did not. In the November 1934 Astounding Stories, Campbell published a story called “Twilight.” For it, he used the pen name Don A. Stuart (a form of his then wife’s maiden name), in order, deliberately, to dissociate it from the super-science associations of his name. “Twilight” was the second story (a half year after Weinbaum’s “A Martian Odyssey,” which was the first) to point the way to another and better level of science fiction. The accent was on people, on emotion, and on good, understated writing.

  I did not miss it as I missed “A Martian Odyssey.” I read it when it first appeared—and I didn’t like it. Indeed, I liked none of the dozen stories Campbell wrote under the Stuart pseudonym in the next three years.

  The fault was mine. I have reread some of them since, and I am ashamed of myself for having remained stuck at the lower level. I had found them too quiet, too downbeat, too moving. I wanted action and adventure, and I was simply incapable of following Campbell up to the Stuart level. I eventually did, but it took a few years. I was not as good a man as Campbell was. [I did not, by the way, know that Stuart was really Campbell until after I met John for the first time, in 1938. See The Early Asimov.]

  But Campbell was not content to be Don A. Stuart alone. He had tackled Smith when Smith was king, in 1930. Now, in 1936, he tackled Weinbaum when Weinbaum was king. “The Brain Stealers of Mars” was the first of five “Penton and Blake stories.” In each one, the two men were up against the dangerous life-forms of another planet.

  It impressed me, and for quite a while I tried to write Penton and Blake stories. An early example, which was a complete failure, was “Ring Around the Sun.” Then I wrote “Reason,�
�� which involved Gregory Powell and Michael Donovan. I wrote and published four of what I called in my own mind “Powell and Donovan stories” in conscious and deliberate imitation of Penton and Blake.

  However, the Powell and Donovan stories involved my positronic robots and the three laws of robotics, and eventually Susan Calvin took over. As often happened in my case (and I suppose in the case of other writers, too), no matter how I tried to shape my stories, they ended up shaping me.

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  * * * *

  Toward the end of 1936, one more short story in Amazing Stories impressed me. It was “Devolution,” again by Edmond Hamilton, in the December issue. It’s the third story by him I couldn’t forget from my teen-age years, and all three had to do, one way or another, with the origin or development of life, and all took a sardonic view of mankind.