Before the Universe

by Frederik Pohl

  “If you’re Ellenbogan,” said Stanton, “then you must be a survivor from the first Mars expedition. The one that started the war.”

  “Exactly,” said the creature. He straightened himself with a sort of somber dignity. “You can’t know,” he groaned, you never could know what we went through. Landed in a desert. Then we trekked for civilization – all of us, except three kids that we left in the ship. I’ve often wondered what happened to them.” He laughed. “Civilization! Cold-blooded killers who tracked us down like vermin. Killed Kelly, Keogh. Moley. Jumped on us and killed us – like that.” He made a futile attempt to snap his fingers. “But not me – not Ellenbogan – I ducked behind a rock and they fired on the rock and rock and me both fell into a cavern. I’ve wandered – Lord! how I’ve wandered. How long ago was it, efts?”

  The lucid interval heartened the explorers. “Fifty years, Ellenbogan,” said Josey. “What did you live on all that time?”

  “Moss-fruits from the big white trees. Meat now and then, eft, when I could shoot one of your light-headed brothers.” He leered. “But I won’t eat you. I haven’t tasted meat for so long now … Fifty years. That makes me seventy years old. You efts never live for more than three or four years, you don’t know how long seventy years can be.”

  “We aren’t efts,” snapped Stanton. “We’re human beings same as you. I swear we are! And we want to take you back to Earth where you can get rid of that poison you’ve been soaking into your system! Nobody can live in a radium-impregnated cave for fifty years and still be healthy. Ellenbogan, for God’s sake be reasonable!”

  The gun did not fall nor waver. The ancient creature regarded them shrewdly, his head cocked to one side. “Tell me what happened,” he said at length.

  “There was a war,” said the girl. “It was about you and the rest of the expedition that had been killed. When you didn’t come back, the Earth governments sent another expedition – armed this time, because the kids you left in the ship managed to raise Earth for a short time when they were attacked, and they told the whole story. The second expedition landed, and well, it’s not very clear. We only have the ship’s log to go by, but it seems to have been about the same with them. Then the Earth governments raised a whole fleet of rocket-ships, with everything in the way of guns and ray-projectors they could hold installed. And the Martians broke down the atomic-power process from one of the Earth ships they’d captured, and they built a fleet. And there was a war, the first interplanetary war in history. For neither side ever took prisoners. There’s some evidence that the Martians realized they’d made a mistake at the beginning after the war had been going only about three years, but by that time it was too late to stop. And it went on for fifty years, with rocket-ships getting bigger and faster and better, and new weapons being developed … Until finally we developed a mind-disease that wiped out the entire Martian race in half a year. They were telepathic, you know, and that helped spread the disease.”

  “Good for them,” snarled the elder. “Good for the treacherous, devilish, double-dealing rats … And what are you people doing here now?”

  “We’re an exploring party, sent by the new all-Earth confederation to examine the ruins and salvage what we can of their knowledge. We came on you here quite by accident. We haven’t got any evil intentions. We just want to take you back to your own world. You’ll be a hero there. Thousands will cheer you – millions. Ellenbogan, put down your gun. Look –we put ours down!”

  “Hah!” snarled the pixy, retreating a pace. “You had me going for a minute. But not any more!” With a loud click, the pixy thumbed the safety catch of his decades-old blaster. He reached back to the power-pack he wore across his back, which supplied energy for the weapon, and spun the wheel to maximum output. The power-pack was studded with rubies which, evidently, he had hacked with diamonds into something resembling finished, faceted stones.

  “Wait a minute, Ellenbogan,” Stanton said desperately. “You’re the king of these parts, aren’t you? Don’t you want to keep us for subjects?”

  “Monarch of all I survey, eft. Alone and undisputed.” His brow wrinkled. “Yes, eft,” he sighed, “you are right. You efts are growing cleverer and cleverer – you begin almost to understand how I feel. Sometimes a king is lonely – sometimes I long for companionship – on a properly deferential plane, of course. Even you efts I would accept as my friends if I did not know that you wanted no more than my blood. I can never be the friend of an eft. Prepare to die.”

  Josey snapped: “Are you going to kill the girl, too?”

  “Girl?” cried the pixy in amazement. “What girl?” His eyes drifted to Annamarie Hudgins. “Bless me,” he cried, his eyes bulging. “Why, so he is! I mean, she is! That would explain it, of course, wouldn’t it?”

  “Of course,” said Stanton. “But you’re not going to kill her, are you?”

  “If she were an eft,” mused the pixy, “I certainly would. But I’m beginning to doubt that she is. In fact, you’re probably all almost as human as I am. However —” He mistily surveyed her.

  “Girl,” he asked dreamily, “do you want to be a queen?”

  “Yes, sir,” said Annamarie, preventing a shudder. “Nothing would give me more pleasure.”

  “So be it,” said the ancient, with great decision. “So be it. The ceremony of coronation can wait till later, but you are now ex officio my consort.”

  “That is splendid,” cried Annamarie, “Simply splendid.” She essayed a chuckle of pleasure, but which turned out to be a dismal choking sound. “You’ve – you’ve made me positively the happiest woman under Mars.”

  She walked stiffly over to the walking monument commemorating what had once been a man, and kissed him gingerly on the forehead. The pixy’s seamed face glowed for more reasons than the induced radioactivity as Stantin stared in horror.

  The first lesson of a queen is obedience,” said the pixy fondly, “so please sit there and do not address a word to these unfortunate former friends of yours. They are about to die.”

  “Oh,” pouted Annamarie. “You are cruel, Ellenbogan.”

  He turned anxiously, though keeping the hair-trigger weapon full on the two men. “What troubles you, sweet?” he demanded. “You have but to ask and it shall be granted. We are lenient to our consort.”

  The royal “we” already thought Stanton. He wondered if the ancient would be in the market for a coat of arms. Three years of freehand drawing in his high school in Cleveland had struck Stanton as a dead waste up till now; suddenly it seemed that it might save his life.

  “How,” Annamarie was complaining, “can I be a real queen without any subjects?”

  The pixy was immediately suspicious, but the girl looked at him so blandly that his ruffles settled down. He scratched his head with the hand that did not hold the blaster. “True,” he admitted. “I hadn’t thought of that. Very well, you may have a subject. One subject.”

  “I think two would be much nicer,” Annamarie said a bit worriedly, though she retained the smile.

  “One!”

  “Please – two?”

  “One! One is enough. Which of these two shall I kill?”

  Now was the time to start the sales-talk about the coat-of-arms, thought Stanton. But he was halted in mid-thought, the words informed, by Annarnarie’s astonishing actions. Puckering her brow so very daintily, she stepped over to the pixy and slipped an arm about his waist. “It’s hard to decide,” she remarked languidly staring from one to the other, still with her arm about the pixy. “But I think—”

  “Yes. I think – kill that one.” And she pointed at Stanton.

  Stanton didn’t stop to think about what a blaster could do to a promising career as artist by appointment to Mars” only monarch. He jumped – lancing straight as a string in the weak Martian gravity, directly at the figure of the ancient. He struck and bowled him over. Josey, acting a second later, landed on top of him, the two piled on to the pixy’s slight figure. Annamarie, wearing a twist
ed smile, stepped aside and watched quite calmly.

  Oddly enough, the pixy had not fired the blaster.

  After a second, Stanton’s voice came smotheredly from the wriggling trio. He was addressing Josey. “Get up, you oaf,” he said. “I think the old guy is dead.”

  Josey clambered to his feet, then knelt again to examine Ellenbogan. “Heart-failure, I guess,” he said briefly. “He was pretty old.”

  Stanton was gently prodding a swelling eye. “Your fault, idiot,” he glared at Josey. “I doubt that one of your roundhouse swings touched Ellenbogan. And as for you, friend,” “he sneered, turning to Annamarie, “you have my most heartfelt sympathies. Not for worlds would I have made you a widow so soon, I apologize,” and he bowed low, recovering himself with some difficulty.

  “Did it ever occur to you,” Annamarie said tautly – Stanton was astounded as he noticed she was trembling with a nervous reaction – “did it ever occur to you that maybe you owe me something? Because if I hadn’t disconnected his blaster from the power-pack, you would be —”

  Stanton gaped as she turned aside to hide a flood of sudden tears, which prevented her from completing the sentence. He dropped to one knee and ungently turned over the old man’s body. Right enough – the lead between power-pack and gun was dangling loose, jerked from its socket. He rose again and, staring at her shaking figure, stepped unsteadily toward her.

  Josey, watching them with scientific impersonality, upcurled a lip in the beginnings of a sneer. Then suddenly the sneer died in birth, and was replaced by a broad smile. “I’ve seen it coming for some time,” more loudly than was necessary, “and I want to be the first to congratulate you. I hope you’ll be very happy,” he said …

  A few hours later, they stared back at the heap of earth under which was the body of the late Second Lieutenant Ellenbogan, U.S.N., and quietly made their way toward the walls of the cavern. Choosing a different tunnel-mouth for the attempt, they began the long trek to the surface. Though at first Stanton and Annamarie walked hand-in-hand, it was soon arm-in-arm, then with arms around each other’s waists, while Josey trailed sardonically behind.

  TROUBLE IN TIME

  “Trouble in Time” was the second story Cyril and I published in collaboration. (The first was “Before the Universe.”) In most of these early stories I thought them up and “action-charted” them; Cyril wrote a complete first draft from my plot outline; and I revised them for publication. So the responsibility for structure and final form is mostly mine. What Cyril contributed was only the hardest port.

  To begin at the beginning everybody knows that scientists are crazy. I may be either mistaken or prejudiced, but this seems especially true of mathematico-physicists. In a small town like Colchester gossip spreads fast and furiously, and one evening the word was passed around that an outstanding example of the species Doctissimus Dementiae had finally lodged himself in the old frame house beyond the dog-pound on Court Street, mysterious crates and things having been unloaded there for weeks previously.

  Abigail O’Liffey, a typical specimen of the low type that a fine girl like me is forced to consort with in a small town, said she had seen the Scientist. “He had broad shoulders,” she said dreamily, “and red hair, and a scraggly little moustache that wiggled up and down when he chewed gum.”

  “What would you expect it to do?”

  She looked at me dumbly. “He was wearing a kind of garden coat,” she said. “It was like a painter’s, only it was all burned in places instead of having paint on it. I’ll bet he discovers things like Paul Pasteur.”

  “Louis Pasteur,” I said. “Do you know his name, by any chance?”

  “Whose – the Scientist’s? Clarissa said one of the express-men told her husband it was Cramer or something.”

  “Never heard of him,” I said. “Good night.” And I slammed the screen door. Cramer, I thought – it was the echo of a name I knew, and a big name at that. I was angry with Clarissa for not getting the name more accurately, and with Abigail for bothering me about it, and most of all with the Scientist for stirring me out of my drowsy existence with remembrances of livelier and brighter things not long past.

  So I slung on a coat and sneaked out the back door to get a look at the mystery man, or at least his house. I slunk past the dog-pound, and the house sprang into sight like a Christmas tree – every socket in the place must have been in use, to judge from the flood of light that poured from all windows. There was a dark figure on the unkempt lawn; when I was about ten yards from it and on the verge of turning back it shouted at me : “Hey, you! Can you give me a hand?”

  I approached warily; the figure was wrestling with a crate four feet high and square. “Sure,” I said.

  The figure straightened. “Oh, so he’s a she,” it said. “Sorry, lady. I’ll get a hand truck from inside.”

  “Don’t bother,” I assured it. “I’m glad to help” And I took one of the canvas slings as it took the other, and we carried the crate in, swaying perilously. “Set it here, please,” he said, dropping his side of the crate. It was a he, I saw in the numerous electric bulbs’ light, and from all appearances the Scientist Cramer, or whatever his name was.

  I looked about the big front parlor, bare of furniture but jammed with boxes and piles of machinery. “That was the last piece,” he said amiably, noting my gaze. “Thank you. Can I offer you a scientist’s drink?”

  “Not – ethyl?” I cried rapturously.

  “The same,” he assured me, vigorously attacking a crate that tinkled internally. “How do you know?”

  “Past experience. My Alma Mater was the Housatonic University, School of Chemical Engineering.”

  He had torn away the front of the crate, laying bare a neat array of bottles. “What’s a C.E. doing in this stale little place?” he asked, selecting flasks and measures.

  “Sometimes she wonders,” I said bitterly. “Mix me an Ethyl Martini, will you?”

  “Sure, if you like them. I don’t go much for the fancy swigs myself. Correct me if I’m wrong.” He took the bottle labeled CH2OH. “Three cubic centimeters?”

  “No – you don’t start with the ethyl!” I cried. “Put four minims of fusel oil in a beaker.” He complied. “Right – now a tenth of a grain of saccharine saturated in theine barbiturate ten per cent solution.” His hands flew through the pharmaceutical ritual. “And now pour in the ethyl slowly, and stir, don’t shake.”

  He held the beaker to the light. “Want some color in that?” he asked, immersing it momentarily in liquid air from a double thermos.

  “No,” I said. “What are you having?”

  “A simple fusel highball,” he said, expertly pouring and chilling a beakerful, and brightening it with a drop of a purple dye that transformed the colorless drink into a sparkling beverage. We touched beakers and drank deep.

  “That,” I said gratefully when I had finished coughing, “is the first real drink I’ve had since graduating three years ago. The stuff has a nostalgic appeal for me.”

  He looked blank. “It occurs to me,” he said, ‘that I ought to introduce myself. I am Stephen Trainer, late of Mellon, late of Northwestern, late of Cambridge, sometime fellow of the Sidney School of Technology. Now you tell me who you are and we’ll be almost even.”

  I collected my senses and announced, “Miss Mabel Evans, late in practically every respect.”

  “I am pleased to make your acquaintance, Miss Evans,” he said. “Won’t you sit down?”

  “Thank you,” I murmured. I was about to settle on one of the big wooden boxes when he cried out at me.

  “For God’s sake – not there!”

  “And why not?” I asked, moving to another. “Is that your reserve stock of organic bases?”

  “No,” he said. “That’s part of my time machine.”

  I looked at him. “Just a nut, huh?” I said pityingly. “Just another sometimes capable fellow gone wrong. He thinks he knows what he’s doing, and he even had me fooled for a time, but the
idee fixe has come out at last, and we see the man for what he is – mad as a hatter. Nothing but a time-traveller at the bottom of that mass of flesh and bone.” I felt sorry for him, in a way.

  His face grew as purple as the drink in his hand. As though he too had formed the association, he drained it and set it down. “Listen,” he said. “I only know one style of reasoning that parallels yours in its scope and utter disregard of logic. Were you ever so unfortunate as to be associated with that miserable charlatan, Dr. George B. Hopper?”

  “My physics professor at Housatonic,” I said, “and whaddya make of that?”

  “I am glad of the chance of talking to you,” he said in a voice suddenly hoarse. “It’s no exaggeration to say that for the greater part of my life I’ve wanted to come across a pupil of Professor Hopper. I’ve sat under him and over him on various faculties; we even went to Cambridge together — it disgusted both of us. And now at last I have the chance, and now you are going to learn the truth about physics.”

  “Go on with your lecture,” I muttered skeptically.

  He looked at me glassily. “I am going on with my lecture,” he said. “Listen closely. Take a circle. What is a circle?”

  “You tell me,” I said.

  “A circle is a closed arc. A circle is composed of an infinite number of straight lines, each with a length of zero, each at an angle infinitesmally small to its adjacent straight lines.”

  “I should be the last to dispute the point,” I said judiciously. He reached for the decanter and missed. He reached again grimly, his fist opening and closing, and finally snapping shut on its neck. Will you join me once more?” he asked graciously.

  “Granted,” I said absently, wondering what was going around in my head.

  “Now — one point which we must get quite clear in the beginning is that all circles are composed of an in—”

  “You said that already,” I interrupted.

  “Did I?” he asked with a delighted smile. “I’m brighter than I thought.” He waggled his head fuzzily. “Then do you further admit that, by a crude Euclidean axiom which I forget at the moment, all circles are equal?”