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

by Edited By Isaac Asimov

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  But, you know, I cannot resist the insertion at this point of a short-short story of my own (only one thousand words long, so forgive me), which was written in the spirit of disenchantment you find in “Devolution.”

  My story, entitled “Big Game,” was written on November 18, 1941, just about five years after I read “Devolution.” I mentioned “Big Game” in The Early Asimov (see page 366) as the last of the eleven science fiction stories I had written but had been unable to publish. In that book I said, “I wish I could remember what ‘Big Game’ was about. . . . The tide, however, recalls nothing to my mind, and the story now no longer exists.”

  But apparently it did indeed exist. I have been handing material to Boston University, as I mentioned earlier in this book, and among some old manuscripts I hadn’t looked through was one of the never-published “Big Game.”

  After The Early Asimov appeared, some fan of mine, poking through some of the material in Boston University’s library (with permission), came across the manuscript, had it Xeroxed, and sent a copy to me.

  So here it is, the only story of mine that exists (as far as I know—perhaps I had better not be too sure of myself any more) but has never, till now, been published.

  * * * *

  BIG GAME

  by Isaac Asimov

  “I see by the papers,” I said, over my beer, “where the new time machine at Stanford has been sent forward in time two days with a white mouse inside. No ill effects.”

  Jack Trent nodded gravely and said, “What they ought to do with one of those things is to go back a few million years and find out what happened to the dinosaurs.”

  I had been watching Hornby at the next table for the last few minutes in a casual fashion, and the fellow looked up and caught my eye at that point. He was alone, and had a bottle—quarter empty—to himself. Maybe that’s why he spoke then.

  Anyway, he grinned and said to Jack, “Too late, old fellow. I did that myself ten years ago and found out. The bigwigs say it was climatic changes. It wasn’t.” He raised his glass to us in a silent toast and tossed it off.

  We looked at each other. Neither of us knew Hornby, except by sight, but Jack’s right eyelid flickered and his head motioned slightly. I grinned, and we moved over to that next table and ordered two more beers.

  Jack looked at Hornby solemnly. “You invented a time machine, did you?”

  “Long ago.” Hornby smiled amiably and filled his glass again. “Better than the ones those amateurs at Stanford rigged up. I’ve destroyed it, though. Lost interest.”

  “Tell us about it. You say it wasn’t climate that knocked off the big lizards?”

  “Why should it be?” He glanced quickly out of eye corners. “Climate didn’t annoy them for millions of years. Why should a sudden dry spell wipe them out so completely and finally, while other creatures lived on comfortably?” He tried to snap his fingers derisively, but didn’t succeed, and ended by muttering, “Not logical!”

  “What did?” I asked.

  Hornby hesitated doubtfully, and teetered his bottle. Then he said, “Same thing that knocked off the bison. Intelligent life!”

  “Men from Mars?” I suggested. “It was a little too early for the inhabitants of Atlantis.”

  Hornby grew truculent quite suddenly. He was more than half gone, I imagine. “I saw them, I tell you,” he said violently. “They were reptiles, and not large, either. They were four feet tall and bipeds. Why not? Those dinosaurs had millions of years to evolve. They crawled and climbed and flew and swam. They were all shapes, sizes, and varieties. Why shouldn’t one develop a brain—and kill off all the rest?”

  I said, “No reason, except that no fossil saurian has ever been discovered with a brain-case capable of holding the gray matter of anything more than a kitten.” Jack nudged me—he wanted Hornby to rattle on—but I hate bull.

  Hornby merely gave me a look of contempt. “You don’t find many fossils of intelligent animals. They don’t fall into mudholes, you know, as a general rule. Besides, it so happens they were pinheads, and what of it? How much of your brain do you use? Not a fifth, if that, and the rest is waste, or God knows what. Those reptiles had kitten brains, but they used it all.” Then he fired up, “And don’t ask why we don’t find traces of their cities or machines. I don’t think they built any. Their intelligence was of an entirely different order from ours. They tried to tell me what their life was like, but I couldn’t understand—except that their great amusement was the hunting of big game.”

  “How did they try to tell you?” asked Jack. “Telepathy?”

  “I think so. They had brains, I tell you. I just looked at them, and they looked at me, and then I knew. I knew lots of things. I didn’t hear or feel anything; I just knew. I can’t explain, really. Try it someday.” His eyes were brooding, fixed on his glass. “I wish I could have stayed longer. Might have learned more.” He shrugged.

  “Why didn’t you?” I asked.

  “It wasn’t safe,” he said. “I could tell that. I was a freak to them, remember, and they were curious about me. Not about my body, of course; that didn’t bother them. It was my brain.” He smiled crookedly at us. “It was so big, you know. They wondered what I could use it all for. They were going to dissect me to find out, so I didn’t stay.”

  “How did you get away?”

  “I wouldn’t have, if they hadn’t sighted a triceratops at that moment. They dropped everything and ran off with their little metal rods in their hands. Those were their weapons, you see. There’s your answer. Those brainy little reptiles killed saurians with all the enthusiasm of a big-game hunter bagging lions. They would rather knock off a tyrannosaurus than eat. Why not? Those huge beasts must have been magnificent prizes. All the rest, too, from the pterodactyl to the ichthyosaurus” (he couldn’t pronounce them very well, but we got his meaning), “none of them could stand up against the midget beasts that killed them for fun or glory. And they went fast, too. We killed off hundreds of millions of bison in thirty years, didn’t we?”

  He tried to snap his fingers again. Then, with bitterness, “Climatic changes, hell! But who’d believe the truth?”

  He fell silent, and Jack nudged him. “But say, old fellow, what killed off those little lizards? Why aren’t they still around, running things?”

  Hornby looked up, and gazed at Jack fixedly, “I never went back to find out, but I know what happened. The only fun they got out of life was this big-game hunting. I told you I found that out when I looked in their eyes. So when they ran out of brontosauri and diplodoci, they turned to the very biggest: themselves! And they did just as good a job at that.” Truculently he added, “Why not? Aren’t men doing the same thing?”

  * * * *

  And yet, perhaps it’s not important that a few of my stories have never been published. I suspect that I waste nothing. For instance, once I reread “Big Game,” I realized that I had made use of the plot and expanded it into “Day of the Hunters,” which appeared in the November 1950 Future Fiction. That story, however, never appeared anywhere else, not even in The Early Asimov, which traced my career only through 1949, so I doubt that its existence disturbs the novelty (if any) of “Big Game.”

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  As 1936 ended, my father sold his third candy store and, after some complications, bought his fourth, at 174 Windsor Place, in the Park Slope section of Brooklyn. (I always described it as being “on the other side of Prospect Park,” for whenever I said I lived near the Park, the other person always said, “On Flatbush Avenue?” and I always said, “No, on the other side.”)

  Times were improving now, and the candy store we bought proved the best of the lot. This time my father stayed put till it came time to retire.

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  * * * *

  Part Eight

  1937

  * * * *

  THE YEAR 1937 was a quiet one. I completed my sophomore ye
ar at Columbia and began my junior year without any particular crises.

  Astounding Stories continued to dominate the science fiction field more and more. Thrilling Wonder Stories seemed of little account to me, and Amazing Stories continued to stumble wearily toward its end. And yet there was one story in that magazine during 1937 hit me hard. That was By Jove! a three-part serial by Walter Rose, in the February, April, and June 1937 issues.

  I remember very little about the plot except for sympathetic giant insects on Jupiter. (Rose never wrote anything but this and one short story, at least in science fiction.) Yet, even as the serial was running, and it is too long, of course, to include here, my views on Jupiter changed utterly, thanks to something John W. Campbell, Jr., was doing.

  It seems that everything Campbell did influenced me even when he was not doing science fiction.

  You see, every once in a while a science fiction magazine would run a non-fiction piece that dealt with some subject the editor conceived to be of interest to science fiction readers. Generally, such articles tended to be a little mystic in content, and I was never satisfied with that. Astounding Stories, for instance, published Lo! a book by Charles Fort, in eight installments beginning with the April 1934 issue. It irritated the devil out of me, since to me it seemed to be an incoherent mass of quotations from newspapers out of which ridiculous conclusions were drawn.

  But then, beginning in the June 1936 issue of Astounding Stories, came an eighteen-part series called A Study of the Solar System, by Campbell. It was real science.

  For the first time, I read a modern account of the Solar System. (Until then, I had gotten my astronomy out of more or less out-of-date books in the public library.) For the first time, astronomy was made truly dramatic to me in Campbell’s somewhat overcharged prose. And of all the parts of that long series, the one that affected me most was the ninth part, “Other Eyes Watching,” which dealt with Jupiter and appeared in the February 1937 Astounding Stories.

  * * * *

  OTHER EYES WATCHING

  by John W. Campbell, Jr.

  All space flamed with an intolerable incandescence; for two thousand million miles, titanic streamers of flame shot out, wove and twined, streamers that flared dull-red and cooling where they stretched to breaking, then great clots that swirled in blue-white heat of new creation. Dimming slowly in the distance, the Wrecker was vanishing, the vagrant star that had lashed worlds out of the Sun as it swept by.

  Two worlds, each blazing with the blue-white heat of the violent racking their already incandescent masses were receiving, had neared, swung, passed on. Two suns, each a million miles in diameter—not quaking, since they were not solid, but flaming gas—had swept by at frightful, hurtling speeds, engendering gravitational stresses, as they passed within not millions of miles, but hundreds of miles of each other, that must have made the infinite fabric of space creak to the awful strains. Each a million-mile ball of incredibly hot matter—nearing, nearing—flames leaping out that were to make worlds, whole solar systems—shrieking at each other with a roaring thunder whose mere vibrations of sound would have pulverized this planet—and passing.

  But this is the thing that paralyzes my thoughts: I cannot conceive that this thing, this blasting of flames that made worlds, the explosions that scattered giant planets over three billion miles of space—all that flaming catastrophe—took place, was, and was done in not more than three hours! So inconsequential a thing as reading through this magazine will take longer than that. But in that almost instantaneous, Gargantuan catastrophe—worlds were made, set spinning, established—and the star that caused it passed on forever.

  The flaming drift of flame that it left shrieking through two thousand million miles of space cooled slowly, flaming filaments of wispy heat being drawn by mighty gravities of forming planets, till nearly all that scattered matter was collected in nine major clumps.

  But it could not stay, for the frightful heats that had been buried under cooler layers of the stars had been torn out into open space, and it could not even radiate till it began to collect properly. (Hot atoms can radiate only when they collide with others.) [One estimate places the temperature of that matter freshly torn from a star at more than 600,000° centigrade.] Our Earth condensed; others swiftly lost the hydrogen, the other light gases. But out farther from the Sun, the mightiest of all the groupings dragged at those atoms of flying hydrogen with a savage grip that slowed them as they struggled up one—five—ten —twenty million miles from the heart of the mass that was to be Jupiter.

  The Sun was far off, and the mighty drag it exerted to aid the gases in escaping the inner planets was weakened here. The gases, their speed exhausted in a running fight that lasted twenty million miles, fell back, captured. Half a million miles, and they could get free from Mars. But Jupiter? Not a chance! Already there were flaming aggregations that had half succeeded in escaping, only to be trapped as satellites rotating tens of millions of miles out, but captured, definitely.

  * * * *

  Jupiter dragged them back. Heavy metals were there, and condensing now, under the pressure of inconceivable tons of that captured stuff, to a liquid, terrifically compressed core. On to them piled the greater tons of these returning, captured atoms. More, more, more turned liquid, as the cold of space drank in their heat slowly. Ages passed, and the heat went rapidly. The core grew cold, as the core of all other planets had cooled.

  And now Jupiter, last to cool, felt the chill of its far position. The Sun gave no great heat at this distance. That vast atmosphere which had condensed out first the metals, then the oxides, the compounds, finally water, till all the compounds had churned in the slowly cooling furnace and had reached a new stability, wound up, at last, with a condition something like this: Every last trace of oxygen had found something to grip, and hold. Down it had gone, as silicon dioxide or iron oxide or calcium oxide, some as trillions of tons of water. Fluorine, most active of non-metals, had beaten even the oxygen to a mate. Chlorine was coming out, the bromine and iodine; sulphur and phosphorus had gone down with the oxygen.

  Everything was happily united—save for the inert gases that didn’t want to be: helium and xenon and radon and argon. And two others: hydrogen and nitrogen. Nitrogen, because it isn’t ordinarily very anxious to do anything about it. It’s not a confirmed-bachelor element; but it usually takes the stimulus of high temperatures to make nitrogen active. Then, of course, nitrogen becomes so virulently active it will drive even oxygen out of combination!

  Hydrogen didn’t unite simply because there was too much of it. Most plentiful of all elements in those vast flames the three-hour catastrophe had thrown out to make planets, it had gone down, by the trillions of tons, with oxygen to make water. By the millions, it had gone contentedly to rest with chlorine. It had combined with everything that it could combine with—and there simply wasn’t enough. So, there was hydrogen and nitrogen in the atmosphere, no half-hearted twenty per cent of hydrogen; most of that atmosphere was hydrogen.

  Unfortunately, hydrogen and nitrogen, while they unite to form ammonia, do not do so very willingly, as Earth chemists know. During the War, Germany spent millions developing very complex and expensive apparatus to force the unwilling elements together. Haber, the inventor, should have been killed, by all rights, in one of the almost innumerable explosions they had trying to force these two into combination.

  The principal point of the process is pressure—pressure in large doses— and they tried to use enormous steel retorts, made of metal of the finest quality and nine inches thick. But hydrogen has a nasty habit of forming a compound with iron—iron hydride—under these conditions, and that compound is twice as brittle as glass and not a tenth as strong. The retorts, fifty feet long and three feet in diameter, for all those nine-inch walls, blew up. Hydrogen and nitrogen do not unite readily, except under great pressure-

  Pressure! Of all things Jupiter has, pressure is outstanding. Pressure that would make the bottoms of our seas seem near vacu
um conditions. The hydrogen and nitrogen inevitably combined. Ammonia takes less room than the two gases; the elements were literally crushed together—not to ammonia water, but to liquid ammonia, for Jupiter was cold, bitterly cold. Water was the stuff that made those great chalky mountains along the torrid equator, where the vast, intensely blue seas washed at them, and steamed slowly. Seas, of little, low, choppy waves, crushed under the gravity of that 86,000-mile world—seas of liquid ammonia.

  The cold snows of the north—65,000 miles away around the titanic globe—were solid ammonia. And that atmosphere was hydrogen and ammonia vapor—and methane, carbon tetrahydride. That is the principal constituent of natural gas here on Earth, an excellent fuel. Not on Jupiter. On Jupiter it is the waste product, the incombustible residue. Gasoline would be a safe cleaning fluid there, utterly incombustible. There, they would say that hydrogen would not burn, but oxygen was an excellent fuel.