Before the Universe

by Frederik Pohl

  “Could be — but so help me, if —” I broke off abruptly as I realized that I was lying full length on the floor. I shuddered at the very thought of what my aunt would say to that. “The point I was about to make,” he continued without a quaver, “was that if all circles are equal, all circles can be traversed at the same expenditure of effort, money, or what have you.” He stopped and gasped at me, collecting his thoughts. “All circles can be traversed, also, with the same amount of time! No matter whether the circle be the equator or the head of a pin! Now do you see?”

  “With the clarity appalling. And the time travelling .. .?”

  “Ah — er — yes. The time travelling. Let me think for a moment.” He indicated thought by a Homeric configuration of his eyebrows, forehead, cheeks and chin. “Do you know,” he finally said with a weak laugh, “I’m afraid I’ve forgotten the connection. But my premise is right, isn’t it? If it takes the same time to traverse any two circles, and one of them is the universe, and the other is my time wheel —” His voice died under my baleful stare.

  “I question your premise vaguely,” I said. “There’s nothing I can exactly put my finger on, but I believe it’s not quite dry behind the ears.”

  “Look,” he said. “You can question it as much as you like, but it works. I’ll show you the gimmicks.”

  We clambered to our feet. “There,” he pointed to the box I had nearly sat upon, “there lies the key to the ages.” And he took up a crowbar and jimmied the top off the crate.

  I lifted out carefully the most miscellaneous collection of junk ever seen outside a museum of modern art. “What, for example,” I asked, gingerly dangling a canvas affair at arms’ length, “does this thing do?”

  “One wears it as a belt,” he said. I put the thing on and found that it resolved itself into a normal Sam Browne belt with all sorts of oddments of things dangling from it. “Now,” he said, “I have but to plug this into a wall socket, and then, providing you get on the time wheel, out you go like a light — pouf!”

  “Don’t be silly,” I said. “I’m practically out now in the first place, in the second place I don’t care whether I go out pouf or splash – though the latter is more customary – and in the third place I don’t believe your silly old machine works anyway. I dare you to make me go pouf – I just dare you!”

  “All right,” he said mildly. “Over there is the time wheel. Get on it.”

  The time wheel reminded me of a small hand-turned merry-go-round. I got on it with a good will, and he made it turn. Then he plugged in the lead to a wall socket, and I went out like a light – pouf !

  There are few things more sobering than time-travel. On going pouf I closed my eyes, as was natural. Possibly I screamed a little, too. All I know is when I opened my eyes they were bleary and aching, and certainly nowhere very near the old house past the dog-pound on Court Street. The locale appeared to be something like Rockefeller Center, only without fountains.

  I was standing on polished stones – beautifully polished stones which seemed to set the keynote of the surroundings. Everything was beautiful and everything was polished. Before me was a tall, tall building. It was a dark night, and there seemed to be a great lack of illumination in this World of Tomorrow.

  I followed my nose into the building. The revolving door revolved without much complaint, and did me the favor of turning on the lights of the lobby.

  There were no people there; there were no people anywhere in sight. I tried to shout, and the ghastly echo from the still darkened sections made me tremble to my boots. I didn’t try again, but very mousily looked about for an elevator or something. The something turned out to be a button in a vast column, labeled in plain English, “Slavies’ ring.”

  I rang, assuring myself that doing so was no confession of inferiority, but merely the seizing of an offered opportunity.

  All the lobby lights went out, then, but the column was glowing like mother-of-pearl before a candle. A sort of door opened, and I walked through. “Why not?” I asked myself grimly.

  I seemed to be standing on a revolving staircase – but one that actually revolved! It carried me up like a gigantic corkscrew at a speed that was difficult to determine. It stopped after a few minutes, and another door opened. I stepped through and said “Thank you” nicely to the goblins of the staircase, and shuddered again as the door slammed murderously fast and hard.

  Lights go again at my landing place – I was getting a bit more familiar with this ridiculous civilization. Was everybody away at Bermuda for the summer? I wondered. Then I chattered my teeth.

  Corpses! Hundreds of them! I had had the bad taste, I decided, to land in the necropolis of the World of Tomorrow.

  On slabs of stone they lay in double rows, great lines of them stretching into the distance of the huge chamber into which I had blundered. Morbid curiosity moved me closer to the nearest stiff. I had taken a course in embalming to get my C.E., and I pondered on the advances of that art.

  Something hideously like a bed-lamp clicked on as I bent over the mummified creature. Go above! With a rustling like the pages of an ancient book it moved – flung its arm over its eyes!

  I’m afraid I may have screamed. But almost immediately I realized that the terror had been of my own postulation. Corpses do not move. This thing had moved – therefore it was not a corpse, and I had better get hold of myself unless I was determined to go batty.

  It was revolting but necessary that I examine the thing. From its fingers thin, fine silver wires led into holes in the slab. I rolled it over, not heeding its terrible groans, and saw that a larger strand penetrated the neck, apparently in contact with its medulla oblongata. Presumably it was sick – this was a hospital. I rambled about cheerfully, scanning cryptic dials on the walls, wondering what would happen next, if anything.

  There was a chair facing the wall; I turned it around and sat down.

  “Greetings, unknown friend,” said an effeminate voice.

  “Greetings right back at you,” said I.

  “You have seated yourself in a chair; please be advised that you have set into motion a sound track that may be of interest to you.”

  The voice came from a panel in the wall that had lit up with opalescent effects.

  “My name,” said the panel, “is unimportant. You will probably wish to know first, assuming that this record is ever played, that there are duplicates artfully scattered throughout this city, so that whoever visits us will hear our story.”

  “Clever, aren’t you?” I said sourly. “Suppose you stop fussing around and tell me what’s going on around here.”

  “I am speaking,” said the panel, “from the Fifth Century of Bickerstaff.”

  “Whatever that means,” I said.

  “Or, by primitive reckoning, 2700 A.D.”

  “Thanks.”

  To explain, we must begin at the beginning. You may know that Bickerstaff was a poor Scottish engineer who went and discovered atomic power. I shall pass over his early struggles for recognition, merely stating that the process he invented was economical and efficient beyond anything similar in history.

  “With the genius of Bickerstaff as a prod, humanity blossomed forth into its fullest greatness. Poetry and music, architecture and sculpture, letters and graphics became the principal occupations of mankind.”

  The panel coughed. “I myself,” it said, modestly struggling with pride, “was a composer of no little renown in this city.

  “However, there was one thing wrong with the Bickerstaff Power Process. That is, as Bickerstaff was to mankind, so the element yttrium was to his process. It was what is known as a catalyst, a substance introduced into a reaction for the purpose of increasing the speed of the reaction.”

  I, a Chemical Engineer, listening to that elementary rot! I didn’t walk away. Perhaps he was going to say something of importance.

  “In normal reactions the catalyst is not changed either in quantity or in quality, since it takes no real part in the proc
ess. However, the Bickerstaff process subjected all matter involved to extraordinary heat, pressure, and bombardment, and so the supply of yttrium has steadily vanished.

  “Possibly we should have earlier heeded the warnings of nature. It may be the fault of no one but ourselves that we have allowed our race to become soft and degenerate in the long era of plenty. Power, light, heat – for the asking. And then we faced twin terrors: shortage of yttrium – and the Martians.”

  Abruptly I sat straight. Martians! I didn’t see any of them around.

  “Our planetary neighbors,” said the panel, “are hardly agreeable. It came as a distinct shock to us when their ships landed this year – my year, that is – as the bearers of a message.

  “Flatly we were ordered: Get out or be crushed. We could have resisted, we could have built war-machines, but what was to power them? Our brain-men did what they could, but it was little enough.

  “They warned us, did the Martians. They said that we were worthless, absolutely useless, and they deserved the planet more than we. They had been watching our planet for many years, they said, and we were unfit to own it.

  “That is almost a quotation of what they said. Not a translation, either, for they spoke English and indeed all the languages of Earth perfectly. They had observed us so minutely as to learn our tongues!

  “Opinion was divided as to the course that lay before us. There were those who claimed that by hoarding the minute quantity of yttrium remaining to us we might be able to hold off the invaders when they should come. But while we were discussing the idea the supply was all consumed.

  “Some declared themselves for absorption with the Martian race on its arrival. Simple laws of biogenetics demonstrated effectively that such a procedure was likewise impossible.

  “A very large group decided to wage guerilla warfare, studying the technique from Clausewitz’s “Theory and Practise”. Unfortunately, the sole remaining copy of this work crumbled into dust when it was removed from its vault.

  “And then …

  “A man named Selig Vissarion, a poet of Odessa, turned his faculties to the problem, and evolved a device to remove the agonies of waiting. Three months ago – my time, remember –he proclaimed it to all mankind.

  “His device was – the Biosomniac. It so operates that the sleeper – the subject of the device, that is – is thrown into a deep slumber characterized by dreams of a pleasurable nature. And the slumber is one from which he will never, without outside interference, awake.

  “The entire human race, as I speak, is now under the influence of the machine. All but me, and I am left only because there is no one to put me under. When I have done here – I shall shoot myself.

  “For this is our tragedy: Now, when all our yttrium is gone, we have found a device to transmute metals. Now we could make all the yttrium we need, except that …

  “The device cannot be powered except by the destruction of the atom.

  “And, having no yttrium at all left, we can produce no such power …

  “And so, unknown friend, farewell. You have heard our history. Remember it, and take warning. Be warned of sloth, beware of greed. Farewell, my unknown friend.”

  And, with that little sermon, the shifting glow of the panel died and I sat bespelled. It was all a puzzle to me. If the Martians were coming, why hadn’t they arrived? Or had they? At least I saw none about me.

  I looked at the mummified figures that stretched in great rows the length of the chamber. These, then, were neither dead nor ill, but sleeping. Sleeping against the coming of the Martians. I thought. My chronology was fearfully confused. Could it be that the invaders from the red planet had not yet come, and that I was only a year or two after the human race had plunged itself into sleep? That must be it.

  And all for the want of a little bit of yttrium!

  Absently I inspected the appendages of the time travelling belt. They were, for the most part, compact boxes labeled with the curt terminology of engineering. “Converter,” said one. “Entropy gradient,” said another. And a third bore the cryptic word, “Gadenolite.” That baffled my chemical knowledge. Vaguely I remembered something I had done back in Housatonic with the stuff. It was a Scandinavian rare earth, as I remember, containing tratia, eunobia, and several oxides. And one of them, I slowly remembered…

  Then I said it aloud, with dignity and precision “One of the compounds present in this earth in large proportions is yttrium dioxide.”

  Yttrium dioxide? Why, that was —

  Yttrium!

  It was one of those things that was just too good to be true. Yttrium! Assuming that the Martians hadn’t come yet, and that there really was a decent amount of the metal in the little box on my belt …

  Quite the little heroine, I, I thought cheerfully, and strode to the nearest sleeper. “Excuse me,” I said.

  He groaned as the little reading-lamp flashed on. “Excuse me,” I said again.

  He didn’t move. Stern measures seemed to be called for. I shouted in his ear, Wake up, you!” But he wouldn’t. I wandered among the sleepers, trying to arouse some, and failing in every case. It must be those little wires, I thought gaily as I bent over one of them.

  I inspected the hand of the creature, and noted that the silvery filaments trailing from the fingers did not seem to be imbedded very deeply in the flesh. Taking a deep breath I twisted one of the wires between forefinger and thumb, and broke it with ease.

  The creature groaned again, and – opened its eyes. “Good morning,” I said feebly.

  It didn’t answer me, but sat up and stared from terribly sunken pits for a full second. It uttered a little wailing cry. The eyes closed again, and the creature rolled from its slab, falling heavily to the floor. I felt for the pulse; there was none. Beyond doubt this sleeper slept no longer – I had killed him.

  I walked away from the spot, realizing that my problem was not as simple as it might have been. A faint glow lit up the hall, and the lights above flashed out. The new radiance came through the walls of the building.

  It must be morning, I thought. I had had a hard night, and a strange one. I pressed the “Slavies’ ring” again, and took the revolving staircase down to the lobby.

  The thing to do now was to find some way of awakening the sleepers without killing them. That meant study. Study meant books, books meant library. I walked out into the polished stone plaza and looked for libraries.

  There was some fruitless wandering about and stumbling into several structures precisely similar to the one I had visited; finally down the vista of a broad, gleaming street I saw the deep-carven words, “Stape Books Place,” on the pediment of a traditionally squat, classic building. I set off for it, and arrived too winded by the brisk walk to do anything more than throw myself into a chair.

  A panel in the wall lit up and an effeminate voice began, “Greetings, unknown friend. You have seated yourself in a chair; please be advised —”

  “Go to hell,” I said shortly, rose, and left the panel to go through a door inscribed “Books of the Day.”

  It turned out to be a conventional reading room whose farther end was a maze of stacks and shelves. Light poured in through large windows, and I felt homesick for old Housatonic. If the place had been a little more dusty I’d never have known it from the Main Tech Library.

  A volume I chose at random proved to be a work on anthropology : “A General Introduction to the Study of Decapilation Among the Tertiates of Gondwana as Contrasted with the Primates of Eurasia.” I found one photograph – in color – of a hairless monkey, shuddered, and restored the volume.

  The next book was ‘the Exagmination into the incamination for the resons of his Works in pregress,” which also left me stranded. It appeared to be a critique of the middle work of one James Joyce, reprinted from the original edition of Paris, 1934 A.D.

  I chucked the thing into a corner and rummaged among the piles of pamphlets that jammed a dozen shelves. “Rittenhouse’s Necrology” – no. ‘statistic
al Isolates Relating to Isolate Statisticals” – likewise no. “The Cognocrat Manifest” – I opened it and found it a description of a super-state which had yet to be created. “Construction and operation of the Biosomniac” – that was it!

  I seated myself at one of the polished tables and read through the slim pamphlet rapidly once, then tore out some of its blank pages to take notes on. The arrangement of the regulating dials is optional,” I copied on to the paper scraps, and sketched the intricate system of Bowden wires that connected the bodies with the controls. That was as much of a clue as I could get from the little volume, but it indicated in its appendix more exhaustive works. I looked up Tissarion,” the first on the list.

  “Monarch! may many moiling mockers make my master more malicious marry mate —”

  it said. Mankind, artist to the last, had yet found time to compose an epic poem on the inventor of the Biosomniac. I flung the sappy thing away and took down the next work on the list, “Chemistry of the Somniac.” It was a sound treatise on the minute yet perceptible functionings of the subject under the influence of the Vissarion device. More notes and diagrams, collated with the information from the other book.

  The vitality of the sleeper is most profoundly affected by the operations of the Alphate dial … It is believed that the Somniac may be awakened by a suitable manipulation of the ego-flow so calculated as to stock the sleeper to survive a severing of the quasi-amniotic wiring system.”

  I rose and tucked the notes into my belt. That was enough for me! I’d have to experiment, and most likely make a few mistakes, but in a few hours men would be awake to grow hard and strong again after their long sleep, to pluck out their wires themselves, and to take my yttrium and with it build the needed war-machines against the Martians. No more sleep for Earth! And perhaps a new flowering of life when the crisis of the invaders was past?

  “The compleat heroine – quite!” I chortled aloud as I passed through the door. I glanced at the glowing panel, but it glowed no longer – the unknown speaker had said his piece and was done. Onward and outward to save the world, I thought.