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

by Edited By Isaac Asimov

  “While your mind seems of an exceptionally low order, it seems possible that it can appreciate enough of what we wish to convey to understand us.

  “Before beginning, however, I warn you again that it is quite impossible for you to escape or to harm any of us and that attempts to do so will result disastrously for you. It is apparent you know nothing of mental energy, so I will inform you that your two fellow-creatures were killed by the sheer power of our wills, and that your muscles were held unresponsive to your brain’s commands by the same power. By our mental energy we could completely annihilate your body, if we chose.”

  * * * *

  There was a pause, and in that little space of silence, Woodin’s dazed brain clutched desperately for sanity, for steadiness.

  Then came again that mental voice that seemed so like a real voice speaking in his brain.

  “We are children of a galaxy whose name, as nearly as it can be approximated in your tongue, is Arctar. The galaxy of Arctar lies so many million light-years from this galaxy that it is far around the curve of the sphere of the three-dimensional cosmos.

  “We came to dominance in that galaxy long ages ago. For we were creatures who could utilize our mental energy for transport, for physical power, for producing almost any effect we required. Because of this we rapidly conquered and colonized that galaxy, traveling from sun to sun without need of any vehicle.

  “Having brought all the matter of the galaxy Arctar under our control, we looked out upon the realms beyond. There are approximately a thousand million galaxies in the three-dimensional cosmos, and it seemed fitting to us that we should colonize them all so that all the matter in the cosmos should in time be brought under our control.

  “Our first step was to proliferate our numbers so as to multiply our number to that required for the great task of colonization of the cosmos. This was not difficult since, of course, reproduction with us is a matter of mere fission. When the requisite number of us were ready, they were divided into four forces.

  “Then the whole sphere of the three-dimensional cosmos was quartered out among those four forces. Each was to colonize its division of the cosmos and so in their tremendous hosts they set out from Arctar, in four different directions.

  “A part of one of these forces came to this galaxy of yours eons ago and spread out deliberately to colonize all its habitable worlds. All this took great lengths of time, of course, but our lives are of length vastly exceeding yours, and we comprehend that racial achievement is everything and individual achievement is nothing. In the colo­nization of this galaxy, a force of several million Arctarians came to this particular son and, finding but this one planet of its nine nearer worlds habitable, settled here.

  “Now it has been the rule that the colonists of all these worlds throughout the cosmos have kept in communication with the original home of our race, the galaxy Arctar. In that way, our people, who now hold the whole cosmos, are able to con­centrate at one point all their knowledge and power, and from that point go forth commands that shape great projects for the cosmos.

  “But from this world no communications have ever been received since shortly after the force of colonizing Arctarians came here. When this was first noted the matter was deferred, it being thought that within a few more million years reports would surely be made from this world, too. But still no word came, until after more than a thousand million years of this silence the directing council at Arctar ordered an expedition sent to this world to ascertain the reason for such silence on the part of its colonists.

  “We ten form that expedition and we started from one of the worlds of the sun you call Sirius, a short distance from your own sun, where we too are colonists. We were ordered to come with full speed to this world and ascertain why its colonists had made no report. So, wafting ourselves by mental energy through the void, we crossed the span from sun to sun and a few days ago arrived on your world.

  “Imagine our perplexity when we floated down here on your world! Instead of a world peopled in every square mile by Arctarians like ourselves, descended from the original colonists, a world completely under their mental control, we find a planet that is largely a wilderness of weird forms of life!

  “We remained at this spot where we had landed and for some time sent our vision forth and scanned this whole globe mentally. And our perplexity increased, for never had we seen such grotesque and degraded forms of life as presented themselves to us. And not one Arctarian was to be seen on this whole planet.

  “This has sorely perplexed us, for what could have done away with the Arctarians who colonized this world? Our mighty colonists and their descendants surely could never have been overcome and destroyed by the pitifully weak mentalities that now inhabit this globe. Yet where, when, are they?

  “That is why we sought to seize you and your companions. Low as we knew your mentalities must be, it seemed that surely even such as you would know what had become of our colonists who once inhabited this world.”

  The thought-stream paused a moment, then raced into Woodin’s mind with a clear question.

  “Have you not some knowledge of what became of our colonists? Some clue as to their strange disappearance?”

  The numbed biologist found himself shaking his head slowly. “I never-I never heard before of such creatures as you, such minds. They never existed on earth that we know of, and we now know almost all of the history of earth.”

  “Impossible!” exclaimed the thought of the Arctarian leader. “Surely you must have some knowledge of our mighty people if you know all the history of this planet.”

  From another Arctarian’s mind came a thought, directed at the leader but im­pinging indirectly on Woodin’s brain.

  “Why not examine the past of the planet through this creature’s brain and see what we can see for ourselves!”

  “An excellent idea!” exclaimed the leader. “His mentality will be easy enough to probe.”

  “What are you going to do?” cried Woodin shrilly, panic edging his voice.

  The answering thoughts were calming, reassuring. “Nothing that will harm you in the least. We are simply going to probe your racial past by unlocking the inherited memories of your brain.

  “In the unused cells of your brain lie impressed inherited racial memories that go back to your remotest ancestors. By our mental power of command we shall make those buried memories temporarily dominant and vivid in your mind.

  “You will experience the same sensations, see the same scenes, that your remote ancestors of millions of years ago saw. And we, here around you, can read your mind as we now do, and so see what you are seeing, looking into the past of this planet.

  “There is no danger. Physically you will remain standing here, but mentally you will leap back across the ages. We shall first push your mind back to a time approx­imating that when our colonists came to this world, to see what happened to them.”

  No sooner had this thought impinged on Woodin’s mind than the starlit scene around him, the humped masses of the Arctarians, suddenly vanished and his con­sciousness seemed whirling through gray mist.

  He knew that physically he was not moving, yet mentally he had a sense of terrific velocity of motion. It was as though his mind was whirling across unthinkable gulfs, his brain expanding.

  Then abruptly the gray mists cleared. A strange new scene took hazy form inside Woodin’s mind.

  It was a scene that he sensed, not saw. By other senses than sight did it present itself to his mind, yet it was none the less real and vivid.

  He looked with those strange senses upon a strange earth, a world of gray seas and harsh continents of rock without any speck of life upon them. The skies were heavily clouded and rain fell continually.

  Down upon that world Woodin felt himself dropping, with a host of weird com­panions. They were each an amorphous, glistening, single-celled mass, with a dark nucleus at its center. They were Arctarians and Woodin knew that he was an Arctarian, and that he had come with the ot
hers a long way through space toward this world.

  They landed in hosts upon the harsh and lifeless planet. They exerted their men­talities and by sheer telekinetic force of mental energy they altered the material world to suit them. They reared great structures and cities, cities that were not of matter but of thought. He realized a vast ordered mass of inquiry, investigation, experiment, and communication, but all beyond his present human mind in motives and achieve­ment. Abruptly all dissolved in gray mists again.

  The mists cleared almost at once and now Woodin looked on another scene. It was later in time, this one. And now Woodin saw that time had worked strange changes upon the hosts of Arctarians, of which he still was one. They had changed from unicellular to multicellular beings. And they were no longer all the same. Some were sessile, fixed in one spot, others mobile. Some betrayed a tendency toward the water, others toward the land. Something had changed the bodily form of the Arc­tarians as generations passed, branching them out in different lines.

  This strange degeneration of their bodies had been accompanied by a kindred degeneration of their minds. Woodin sensed that. In the thought-cities the ordered process of search for knowledge and power had become confused, chaotic. And the thought-cities themselves were vanishing, the Arctarians having no longer sufficient mental energy to maintain them.

  The Arctarians were trying to ascertain what was causing this strange bodily and mental degeneration in them. They thought it was something that was affecting the genes of their bodies, but what it was they could not guess. On no other world had they ever degenerated so!

  That scene passed rapidly into another much later. Woodin now saw the scene, for by then the ancestor, whose mind he looked through, had developed eyes. And he saw that the degeneration had now gone far, the Arctarians’ multicellular bodies more and more stricken by the diseases of complexity and diversification.

  * * * *

  The last of the thought-cities now were gone. The once mighty Arctarians had become hideous, complex organisms degenerating ever further, some of them creep­ing and swimming in the waters, others fixed upon the land.

  They still had left some of the great original mentality of their ancestors. These monstrously degenerated creatures of land and sea, living in what Woodin’s mind recognized as the late Paleozoic age, still made frantic and futile attempts to halt the terrible progress of their degradation.

  Woodin’s mind flashed into a scene later still, in the Mesozoic. Now the spreading degeneration had made of the descendants of the colonists a still more horrible group of races. Great webbed and scaled and taloned creatures they were now, reptiles living in land and water.

  Even these incredibly changed creatures possessed a faint remnant of their an­cestors’ mental power. They made vain attempts to communicate with Arctarians far on other worlds of distant suns, to apprise them of their plight. But their minds were now too weak.

  There followed a scene in the Cenozoic. The reptiles had become mammals; the downward progress of the Arctarians had gone further. Now only the merest shreds of the original mentality remained in these degraded descendants. And now this pitiful posterity had produced a species even more foolish and lacking in mental power than any before, ground-apes that roamed the cold plain in chattering, quarreling packs. The last shreds of Arctarian inheritance, the ancient instincts toward dignity and cleanliness and forbearance, had faded out of these creatures.

  And then a last picture filled Woodin’s brain. It was the world of the present day, the world he had seen through his own eyes. But now he saw and understood it as he never had before, a world in which degeneration had gone to the utmost limit.

  The apes had become even weaker bipedal creatures, who had lost almost every atom of inheritance of the old Arctarian mind. These creatures had lost, too, many of the senses which had been retained even by the apes before them. And these creatures, these humans, were now degenerating with increasing rapidity. Where at first they had killed like their animal forebears only for food, they had learned to kill wantonly. And had learned to kill each other in groups, in tribes, in nations and hemispheres. In the madness of their degeneracy they slaughtered each other until earth ran with their blood.

  They were more cruel even than the apes who had preceded them, cruel with the utter cruelty of the mad. And in their progressive insanity they came to starve in the midst of plenty, to slay each other in their own cities, to cower beneath the lash of superstitious fears as no creatures had before them.

  They were the last terrible descendants, the last degenerated product, of the an­cient Arctarian colonists who once had been kings of intellect. Now the other animals were almost gone. These, the last hideous freaks, would soon wind up the terrible story entirely by annihilating each other in their madness.

  * * * *

  Woodin came suddenly to consciousness. He was standing in the starlight in the center of the riverside clearing. And around him still were poised the ten amorphous Arctarians, a silent ring.

  Dazed, reeling from that tremendous and awful vision that had passed through his mind with incredible vividness, he turned slowly from one to the other of the Arctarians. Their thoughts impinged on his brain, strong, somber, shaken by terrible horror and loathing.

  The sick thought of the Arctarian leader beat into Woodin’s mind.

  “So that is what became of our Arctarian colonists who came to this world! They degenerated, changed into lower and lower forms of life, until these pitiful insane things, who now swarm on this world, are their last descendants.

  “This world is a world of deadly horror! A world that somehow damages the genes of our race’s bodies and changes them bodily and mentally, making them de­generate further each generation. Before us we see the awful result.”

  The shaken thought of another Arctarian asked, “But what can we do now?”

  “There is nothing we can do,” uttered their leader solemnly. “This degeneration, this awful change, has gone too far for us ever to reverse it now.

  “Our intelligent brothers became on this poisoned world things of horror, and we cannot now turn back the clock and restore them from the degraded things their descendants are.”

  Woodin found his voice and cried out thinly, shrilly.

  “It isn’t true!” he cried. “It’s all a lie, what I saw! We humans aren’t the product of downward devolution, we’re the product of ages of upward evolution! We must be, I tell you! Why, we wouldn’t want to live, I wouldn’t want to live, if that other tale was true. It can’t be true!”

  The thought of the Arctarian leader, directed at the other amorphous shapes, reached his raving mind. It was tinged with pity, yet strong with a superhuman loath­ing.

  “Come, my brothers,” the Arctarian was saying to his fellows. “There is nothing we can do here on this soul-sickening world.”

  “Let us go, before we too are poisoned and changed. And we will send warning to Arctar that this world is poisoned, a world of degeneration, so that never again may any of our race come here and go down the awful road that those others went down.

  “Come! We return to our own sun.”

  The Arctarian leader’s humped shape flattened, assumed a disk-like form, then rose smoothly upward into the air. The others too changed and followed, in a group, and a stupefied Woodin stared up at them, glistening dots lifting rapidly into the starlight.

  He staggered forward a few steps, shaking his fist insanely up at the shining, receding dots.

  “Come back, damn you!” he screamed. “Come back and tell me it’s a lie!

  “It must be a lie-it must-”

  There was no sign of the vanished Arctarians now in the starlit sky. The darkness was brooding and intense around Woodin.

  He screamed up again into the night, but only a whispering echo answered. Wild-eyed, staggering, soul-smitten, his gaze fell on the pistol in Ross’s hand. He seized it with a hoarse cry.

  The stillness of the forest was broken suddenly by a sharp cr
ack that reverberated a moment and then died rapidly away. Then all was silent again save for the chuckling whisper of the river hurrying on.

  * * * *

  On the whole, I am an optimistic writer, and my heroes generally win out in the end and the world is saved. Yet, for years I had noticed that stories with sad endings, or ironical ones, or paradoxical ones struck me harder than those with conventionally happy ones, and stayed with me longer.

  And, every once in a while, it seemed to me that the downbeat was better and was even necessary in my own usually upbeat stories. It was remembering stories like “Devolution” that gave me the courage to try such endings.

  For instance, there is my story “The Ugly Little Boy” (published in the magazines as “The Lastborn”), which ended in such utter tragedy that many readers have written to tell me that they were crying at the end. (So was I when I wrote it.) Yet it seemed not a tragic ending at all when I thought about it later. It ended with the triumph of love, and there is no greater triumph than that.