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

by Edited By Isaac Asimov

  “I made up my mind quite a while ago,” Colbie pointed out. “If I hadn’t, I wouldn’t have contributed your clinching link just now.”

  Deverel laughed harshly. “You’re going to stick with it,” he jeered. “You’re going to let a principle kill you! Well, I’m going to let it kill me, too—and I’m not as scared of death as you are. In fact, it’d be better if I did die; I’ve got too much hell in store for me, one way and another. So I don’t really care. How do you like that?” he ripped out savagely.

  “It’s all right with me—I always knew you didn’t give much of a damn about anything, Deverel.” He smiled disarmingly.

  Deverel regarded him in blank amazement, an amazement that swiftly turned into sheer, obvious admiration. Until that moment, Deverel had doubted that Colbie was sure of his intentions; now he knew it, and the knowledge gave him a new picture of Colbie.

  Colbie yawned; and then Deverel’s rage apparently broke all bounds. He called Colbie every foul name under the Sun, reviled him with the unprintable verbal scum of innumerable space ports—and then stopped short.

  “Hell, I didn’t mean that,” he muttered. He waved a hand. “Sorry—I mean it. It’s just that”—he summoned a grin—”there went the second Crucial Moment. Rather, the minute we drop down from the eleventh apex—there it goes. It’s about a minute away. We’re now, to all intents and purposes, a mean one hundred ten feet below the rim. Phew!”

  “What are these crucial moments?” Colbie inquired in genuine bewilderment.

  Deverel laughed in amused disgust. “There are several of them—I think. And the more of them we pass up, the more crucial the next one is. Get it? At last we come to the Final Crucial Moment! And after we pass that up—” Deverel shook his head. “After that, there’s no more hope. No more Crucial Moments.” After a while, he said listlessly, “I’ll tell you when they come around.”

  They swept down and they swept up. Angles decreased and angles increased. The rim loomed up through the gloom of light, and dropped away. Constant acceleration, followed by just as constant deceleration. And light and still more light and nothing else but light.

  Two men against the magical mirror!

  Seventeen times the rim dropped away, and each time they approached it was farther away—ten feet higher than before. And then Deverel remarked wearily, “The third Crucial Moment—one hundred seventy feet below the rim.” He cocked an eye—a bleary eye—at Colbie, who was so exhausted and blinded by the incessant play of light from the mirror that he was apathetic. “What are you thinking about?”

  “Just waiting,” Colbie returned tiredly, “for you to give the word!”

  Deverel laughed harshly. “And I’ll never give it. Listen. In less than an hour comes the—”

  “The fourth Crucial Moment,” put in Colbie acidly.

  “Wrong. The final.” He waited for this to take effect, but it had none at all. Then he snarled, “You’re going to hold out—good Lord!” For a moment he was speechless, glaring at the other man. Then unaccountably, he laughed. “We’re two of a kind—two stubborn fools. I didn’t know you had it in you,” he remarked frankly. “I really believe you’re going to—” and he broke off.

  “That I’m going to hold out past the time that really means something to us?” Colbie asked him quizzically. He nodded slowly.

  Deverel sank back in disgust.

  They topped the eighteenth, the nineteenth, the twentieth apex. Deverel was jumpy, irritated. “About half an hour,” he said nervously. “That’s all we’ve got. I mean it. When that time goes, then we kiss life good-bye. I wish you’d see reason, Colbie. Either we both die—or I go free, and you live, too, and we’re just as if we never came to this planet. Just think of that—life again!”

  Deverel watched Colbie intently, but the IP man was absolutely unaffected. The outlaw had been hoping against hope that Colbie would, in the last vital moments, give in. He had determined to wait that long, just on the chance. Now that chance was definitely out, and Deverel had to play a card he had long ago decided to use if worse came to worse. It might win—and it might lose.

  So in the next few moments—with the verve and ability of a natural actor (he had played Hamlet when he was a younger man)—he increased his nervousness, the desperation of his manner, the snarl in his voice.

  “Twenty-five minutes, Colbie. Give us plenty of time.” Colbie was obdurate. They were on the twenty-second trip across. Deverel’s rasping voice went on later, “Twenty minutes. And here comes the rim.”

  The rim came toward them, slowly. More and more slowly, and then gently started dropping away. The twenty-third trip.

  “Fifteen minutes, Colbie.” Deverel’s voice had the rasp of a buzz saw in it. He was actually nervous now. The amount of time was pretty small. So that suddenly he said in a tone of voice that was deprived of every trace of moisture, “Colbie.”

  Colbie met his eyes, and what he saw there made his own open wider.

  “You guessed it, Colbie.” The outlaw’s tone was dull. He spread his hands. “I’m done. I’ve cracked. Good Lord!” he burst out. “You don’t give a damn! That’s what gets me—I can’t understand it. Listen—you may think I’m scared to die, that I’m not the kind of fellow I’ve painted myself to be—but I am. I’m careless with my life. I won’t care at all when my number’s due. What I can’t stand is the fact that it isn’t due! There’s a way out. And it’s only your stubborn refusal that’s blocking the way. But I guess when you come down to it, it’s me—”

  “It’s I—” Colbie corrected mildly.

  “It’s I that’s blocking the way. So I give up. You win. You’re the world-beater of this crowd. You’re the champion holder-outer, the prince of don’t-give-a-damners! Colbie, you’ve got me in tears. Honest, I feel like blubbering like a kid. I can’t understand you—sitting there—” he groped.

  The IP man regarded Deverel steadily. “You’re funny,” he muttered. “I knew you’d give in, just because of that. You have dash—impulsiveness— a quick love of life. I’m just a stolid space-cop.”

  And Deverel suddenly thrust out his jaw angrily. “I gave in, didn’t I? And don’t think I haven’t got half a notion to take it back. I’m capable of it.” His eyes challenged the other’s.

  Colbie said slowly, “No. Don’t do it—forget it. We were fools—you decided not to be one. That’s all there is to it.” Once more he met the eyes of the other man, this time thoughtfully, then he nodded his head in slow determination. His head came up, and a sparkle entered his eyes.

  “What do we do?” he demanded. “Spill it—let’s get out of this forsaken place. I don’t like the lighting arrangements! Come on!”

  Deverel went into action.

  “Wind yourself up on this rope,” his voice cracked out, full of the energy of real desperation now. “Closer—come on! All right.” He braced his feet against Colbie, and pushed. Colbie went whirling dizzily away, the rope uncoiling. He came to the end of the rope. Deverel then pulled in such a manner that he utilized to the fullest extent Colbie’s rotatory motion. Colbie came spinning back, winding up. Deverel lashed out with his feet. Colbie unwound again, this time in a new direction. Time after time he came back, whirled away again. Deverel manipulated Colbie in the same way a small boy does a certain toy called the jo-jo.

  Swiftly, each was swinging around the other in an ellipse with a shifting axis.

  “Get it?” panted Deverel. “We’ve got a circular motion started. It isn’t affecting our course in the slightest, though. We’re a closed system. For every action a reaction. I’m swinging around you, too. Now, you stop spinning—it isn’t necessary now.” Colbie flailed about with his arms and, in the course of two revolutions, swung around Deverel in a true circle. And all the while they were hurtling up the slope of the mirror, at a rate dictated by no other force than the retarding power of gravity.

  Deverel was gasping. “Now—draw up on the rope. Pulls us nearer the center of the circle we’re making and w
e go faster—our angular velocity increases. Now we’re going.”

  And they were. By dint of prodigious exertions, they worked their angular velocity up to such a point that the centrifugal force was putting a terrific strain on their laboring lungs.

  And finally the outlaw gasped, “Enough! We’re going plenty fast. If we go any faster, we’ll split wide open. We’d keep on whirling like this until the slight bit of friction wore it down—that is, if we didn’t use it to escape this trap. And we’re going to use it, too! The rim should be along in —two minutes, seventeen seconds flat. Oh, yes, I figured that out to the hair’s breadth.”

  Suddenly he was shouting out loud, “And there it is—the rim! Now, look, honest to God, I don’t know which of us is going over.” His eyes feverishly watched the approach of the rim, whenever it swung into his line of vision. It was etched against the mountains. Throbbing seconds beat away into the past. Colbie’s pulses were hammering. How often afterward he thought of the snapping suspense the looming mirror engendered in him then! It was like a monster—mysterious and brutal. Deverel’s voice came again, “I think it’s going to be you. It has to be you! Yes!

  “We’re a closed system, remember. Now say we have an explosion. You fly that way, I fly the other. But we each retain the kinetic energy given us by centrifugal force.”

  Cocking a wild, red-rimmed, bleary eye on the approaching rim, he coiled himself up two feet nearer Colbie. They gyrated more swiftly. Colbie shouted in protest.

  Deverel snarled, “Can’t help it. The rope has to be parallel to the rim the minute we hit the apex.” He blinked his eyes to get the sweat out, looked at the chronometer above his eyes. Seven seconds to go. Deverel was shuddering—he had so damned many things to do at once. He had to regulate their angular velocity—his timing sense—the sense which tells us how many whole steps we can make to reach a curb exactly—was telling him how many gyrations they would make in order to hang poised, for an infinitesimal second, parallel to the rim. With one hand, he had to extract a razor-sharp knife from an outside space kit. And he had to keep an eye on his chronometer, for he had to know exactly when they reached the apex of this, the twenty-third trip across the great mirror.

  And perhaps the greatest miracle of that whole insane adventure was that everything worked itself out just as Deverel was planning. The rope, its human weights swinging dizzily at its ends, came parallel to the mirror’s rim on the exact, nonexisting moment they reached the climb’s apex. And in that exact moment, Deverel slashed at the rope close to where it was fastened about him.

  Colbie experienced no change of pace—simply a sudden release of pressure. The operation had been smoothly performed. At the exact moment when they, as a single system, had no upward and no downward motion, Deverel had severed the rope. Colbie simply shot straight toward the rim at the velocity he had been rotating at that particular moment.

  He plummeted up the slope of the mirror, gravity now definitely fighting him. He lost twelve feet in upward velocity every second. Would the kinetic energy his body now contained be sufficient to stave off that deadly deceleration? Would gravity whittle it down to zero, somewhere below the rim?

  “Colbie,” he gritted, speaking softly to himself, “if you’ve never prayed before, try it now!”

  And perhaps the prayers did the trick, or it might have been the computations Deverel’s keen brain worked out. Using the factors of their individual weights on this planet, and the two-hundred-foot length of rope, and the time for one revolution, he had known the approximate kinetic energy each man would develop, had known that Colbie would go over the rim with a liberal margin to spare.

  Up past the rim Colbie shot. Over the rim—and up into space. And there, fifty feet above the planet, he stopped rising. The moment of falling was heart-stopping. His spacesuit was tough—but would it stand the strain? He didn’t have much time to theorize about it. He hit, and he hit hard. He felt as if every bone in his body was crushed in the moment before his consciousness faded away.

  When he came back to consciousness, he knew a sharp, agonizing pain below the knee of his right leg. “Broken,” he thought dismally, and grimaced as he almost involuntarily tried to move the injured member. He couldn’t move it at all.

  Then the thought of Deverel came back. Good Lord, he was still on the mirror!

  “Deverel!” he shouted.

  A cheery voice came back. “All here and right as rain.” Then the voice became anxious. “What’s wrong? I was trying to get in touch with you.”

  “Broken leg, I guess.”

  “Hurt?”

  “Damnably!” Colbie gritted his teeth.

  “I was afraid something like that would happen,” the outlaw answered with sympathy. “I’m sorry it had to be you—I would have taken the rap if we’d have swung around right. But we didn’t. That was my gamble for escape.”

  “How are you getting out?” Colbie demanded. Then in sudden panic, “And what if you break a leg?”

  “Ho! I’ll get out, and I won’t break a leg either. I have to travel across the mirror, you know, and I’ll lose ten vertical feet. How far did you fall?” he asked anxiously. Colbie told him. “Fine! Not bad at all for a rough calc.”

  “You did a fine job all around,” Colbie told him feelingly. “That’s right, you’ll go over the rim, too. You’ve got gravitational and centrifugal force acting on you.”

  “Now listen, Colbie, you’re on the wrong part of the rim, d’you know that?”

  No, Colbie hadn’t known it. So their ships were on the other side?

  “No, not on the other side. About a sixth of the circle of the rim around from where you are.”

  “Well, then, where are you bound?”

  “For the ships.”

  Colbie gasped. “You’re crazy! You’re headed directly opposite from where I am.”

  “Oh, no, I’m not,” Deverel sang sweetly. “I’m headed right for a point on the mirror a sixth of its rim removed from you in the direction the planet rotates. Now quit gasping like a fish, and listen to the most gorgeous and unbelievable part of this whole adventure. Do you think we went straight across the mirror?”

  “Certainly!”

  “We didn’t! Now here’s the bombshell—” He paused, and then said, “We were the hob of a pendulum!”

  “What?” Colbie shouted it in dismay. “Lord, Deverel, you’re crazy, crazy as a loon! A pendulum! We weren’t hanging from anything, from a string, or cable or—Lord!”

  “Getting it?” The voice was sympathetic. “Don’t you see? We were a pendulum. And the beautiful part was that we didn’t need to hang from anything so we could vibrate. A string, or something like that, would have ruined the effect entirely. As it is, we were a perfect, simple pendulum, the which that has, so far, existed only in theory! See, there wasn’t any friction, and there was a perfect vacuum. There was just gravity. It pulled us down and up and down and up and down and up. And there was a force which wouldn’t let us travel in any path except a perfect curve, the path a pendulum takes!

  “And what is so characteristic of the pendulum? Why, the periods of vibration are the same! Do you think that knowledge didn’t come in handy when I wanted to know to the dot, exactly when we’d reach the apex? You bet it did! And then there’s something else about a pendulum —I’m surprised you didn’t notice. At the Earth’s pole the plane of vibration of a pendulum turns around once every twenty-four hours, in a direction opposite to that at which the Earth rotates. Rather, it appears that way. Actually, it is the Earth that turns around under the pendulum! And that’s what happened to us. Didn’t you notice that the stars as a whole never changed positions all during the time we were on the mirror? They didn’t. We were a pendulum. The plane of our vibration was fixed in relation to space. This crazy planet revolved around under us because there wasn’t any friction to say ‘no’! So I figured it out diagrammatically—right! In my head! And if you think that wasn’t a brain-twister—!

  “I timed the
first two or three vibrations after this pendulum stuff came up and hit me. I found each trip across took seventeen minutes, forty-five and four-tenths seconds. And I knew the period of rotation of this planet —fifty-two minutes, twenty-five and a fraction seconds. Notice anything about those figures, any general relation?”

  “I get it,” Colbie replied. He was sweating. His leg felt numb from the hip down. “One vibration took about one-third as long as the planet takes to make a revolution.”

  “Exactly! I’ll keep talking, Colbie, help you forget the leg. And not only that, but the bottom of the mirror is a pole of the planet! So we were a true pendulum, vibrating at a planet’s pole. And the length of our ‘string,’ the radius of the sphere, of which the mirror is a part, was out in space about sixteen hundred miles!