Before the Universe

by Frederik Pohl

  “Admiring the giants. She thinks the one in the middle has the cutest beard.” Just then the vague drone of a colossal motor somewhere near them stopped.

  “Journey’s end, I take it? Or perhaps just a traffic light?”

  “First stop thus far,” said Jocelyn. The ship lurched again. “Up we go!” she cried gaily. “Better than a roller-coaster.”

  There was a brief, bumpy transition with admonishing grunts from the giants. “Easy there,” warned Jocelyn. “Don’t drop it more than two hundred feet—these animals might be delicate. Blunderbore, you dope—keep your end up—what’re you doing, hanging on? There we are!” The ship settled and the seasick Gaynor groaned with relief. “Now what?” he asked tremulously.

  “Now we get picked out and put on fish hooks, I guess. Think you’ll wiggle?”

  “Horrid woman!” he snapped, holding his head. And then something suspiciously like a can-opener poked through the shell of the Prototype with a screech of tearing metal. Jerkily it worked its way along the top of the ship, then twisted sidewise and opened a great gap in the frames. “Now we strangle?” worried Jocelyn. The air rushed out for just a moment, then the pressure seemed to equalize.

  “Pfui!” sniffed Ionic Intersection. “Sulfur somewhere. But breathable, this air. How do you feel, honey?” She caught a glance from Jocelyn. “Paul, I mean,” she amended.

  “Okay, I guess—hey!” squawked Gaynor as a pair of forceps reached down into the ship and picked him up by his coat collar, through the colossal rent in the Prototype’s hide.

  “Write me a post card when you get there, dearest,” called Jocelyn. “Oh well,” she asided to Io, “easy come; easy go. But still I’d have—hey!” she squawked as the forceps made a return trip.

  IV.

  “No privacy,” complained Gaynor bitterly. “No privacy at all—that’s the part I don’t like about it. And that damned blue ray they use—insult on injury; Pelion on Ossa! The great lubberly swine implied that they needed a short-wavelength to see us at all. Oh the curs, the skulldruggerers!”

  “Shut up,” advised Jocelyn. “We seem to be here for some little time under inspection. What comes next I can’t possibly imagine. The thing I don’t like is that while you can talk yourself out of any given scrape, this presents peculiar difficulties, such as that they can’t hear you for small green caterpillars, and even if they could, they couldn’t because your voice is too high-pitched. You!” She turned accusingly on Ionic Intersection.

  “Your husband has to go running out on us and get himself involved with these stinkers— ”

  “Now, Jos,” said Gaynor placatingly, “the poor child— ”

  “Child, huh? I’ve a notion that you weren’t as unconscious as you pretended when she landed in your lap. And if she’s a child, I’m the gibbering foetus of a monkey’s uncle!”

  “Look!” said Gaynor hastily. “There comes another one.” A colossal eye stared blankly at them, its jelly-like corona quivering horribly, the iris contracting like a paramecium’s vacuole under a microscope.

  “Nyaa!” taunted Jocelyn, thumbing her nose at the monstrous thing. “Bet you wish you were my size for an hour or two—I’d teach you manners, you colossal slob! Come on in here and fight like a man!” There was an elephantine grunt from the creature’s mouth somewhere.

  “No,” said Jocelyn scornfully. “Not like him—” jerking a thumb at her husband—“I said a man.” “Now, Jos, really,” began Gaynor.

  Ionic Intersection looked up from her corner. “I’m hungry,” she wailed.

  “Hungry, hah?” asked Mrs. Gaynor. “Room Service!” she bawled. The eye reappeared. “Ah, they’re learning. Now for the customary pantomime of starvation.” She patted her stomach, pointed to her mouth, slumped to the floor, gestured as if milking a cow and chewed vigorously on nothing. “Think Joe up there will get it?”

  “I hope so,” worried Gaynor. “I could go for an outside amoeba myself. Which reminds me—do you think these ginks’ cellular structure is scaled up like their bodies, or do you suppose their cells are normal size like ours—but much more plentiful?”

  “Bah!” spat his wife. “Scientist! Why didn’t I marry an international spy? I knew the nicest little anarchist once—full of consonants. I called him Grischa and he called me Alice. Always meant to ask him why, but they shot him before I had the chance. I wish they’d shot you instead. And your half-baked partner! And his blubbering wife!”

  A tiny—about twenty feet—section of the netting avove their heads lifted off and an assortment of stuff fell at their fee. “Reaction?” suggested Gaynor.

  “Food!” said his wife hungrily. She looked closer. “But what food! Note this object d’excrete—I’ll swear its the leg of a ten-foot cockroach.” As she spoke, the thing flopped convulsively. “Pavlik,” she said coaxingly, averting her eyes, “put the thing away somewhere where I won’t be able to see it, huh?”

  Gaynor lugged the sticky horror to the netting that enfenced them and poked it through one of the holes. “All gone,” he announced. “And the rest of the stuff looks almost appetizing. That is, if you’ve eaten as many things as I have in my academic career. Snails at the Sorbonne, blutwurst at Heidelberg, Evzones—I think it was Evzones—at the University of Athens— ”

  “Well, let’s try it. What first? The—er—pickled—er things or the fried—they look fried—stuff?”

  “Let’s try it out first,” suggested Gaynor, covertly indicating Ionic Intersection, whose eyes were buried in her handkerchief.

  “Of course,” murmured Jocelyn, sweetly. With a shudder she picked up something green and lumpy and brought it to the brunette. “Now, dear,” she urged, “do try some of this delicious ragout de pferdfleisch avec oeufs des formis.”

  “Is it nice?” asked Io trustingly.

  “Of course,” said Jocelyn, watching like an eagle as Io bit into the thing. “How do you feel? I mean, how do you like it, sweet?”

  “Delicious,” said Io, tightening her clutch on the thing.

  “That’s all I wanted to know,” snapped Jocelyn. “Give it back!” She wrenched it from the brunette, who broke out into a new freshet of tears, and sunk her teeth into the most promising of the green lumps.

  “Tsk, tsk, such manners,” chided Gaynor, “when there’s ample for all. Here, Io,” he said gently, bringing the little brunette an assortment of the green stuff.

  “Quite full, you goat?” asked Jocelyn of her husband.

  “Nearly.” He reached for a brownish object; his arm fell halfway. “Can’t make it,” he observed. “Must be full. What happens now, wife of my heart?”

  “Can’t imagine,” she assured him, studying her lips in the mirror of a compact.

  “To hazard a guess,” he said, looking up, “that forceps is intimately connected with our immediate futures. Here we go,” he called down gaily as it lifted him high into the air.

  A moment later, Jocelyn and Io joined him, via forceps. “Where are we?” wailed the brunette, looking around wildly.

  “Keep off those coils,” warned Gaynor. “Better just stand still. It looks like a twenty foot bowl lined with all kinds of electric junk in it.”

  He turned on the woman suddenly. “What’s that you called me?” he mouthed furiously, working his hands.

  “I didn’t say anything,” protested his wife.

  “I didn’t either,” chimed in Io. “Has he gone crazy?” she asked Jocelyn.

  “Hah!” she laughed loudly and vulgarly. “I won’t even take that lead.” She turned and surveyed her brooding husband. “What!” she squawked suddenly, turning on Io. “If you want my opinion that goes for you, too—double!” The brunette looked bewildered.

  “Hold it, girls,” said Gaynor. “Io didn’t say a thing—I was watching her by—er—coincidence.”

  “Yeah,” said Jocelyn. “You look out for those coincidences. Reno’s still doing a roaring trade, I hear. But if Io didn’t say it, who did?”

  Gaynor pointed
upward solemnly.

  “Oh Paul, don’t be a bore!” his wife exploded. “I didn’t know I was married to a religious fanatic!”

  “No,” said Gaynor hastily, “don’t get me wrong. I mean Joe or his friends. This thing, now that I consider it, looks like the well known thought transference-helmet we meet so often. Not being able to make one small enough for us, they put us into one of theirs. Now try opening your minds so maybe something more than subconscious insults from our captors may get through. Ready? Concentrate!”

  They wrinkled their brows for a moment; Io giggled and cast a sidewise glance at Gaynor, who uneasily eyed Jocelyn, who gave Io a murderous look. “Heaven help you if I intercept another one like that, husband mine,” Mrs. Gaynor warned.

  “Must have been wholly subconscious,” he replied. “Even I don’t know what it was.”

  “I’d rather not tell you,” said Jocelyn, “but your subconscious has a mighty lively imagination.”

  “Hush,” said Gaynor abruptly. “Here it comes!” He squatted on the base of the helmet and shut his eyes tightly, his jaws clenched in an attempt to get over and receive.

  “Paul!” said Jocelyn, alarmed.

  “Quiet!” he snapped; “this isn’t easy.”

  Thus, to outward appearances, practically in a trance, he remained.

  “It must be wonderful to think like that,” breathed Io.

  “Yeah,” agreed Jocelyn. “But all he’s doing is getting us out of a jam, your husband’s a real thinker—by just hopping off with suicide in his mind, he can get us into the jam. You ought,” she continued witheringly, “to be mighty proud of your Art Clair. I just hope he turns up scattered from here to Procyon!”

  The brunette did not, as Jocelyn expected, burst into tears again. There was a sort of quiet contempt in her voice when she spoke. “If you had any honesty or decency in your makeup you would remember that Arthur took this trip to force your husband out of his blind stupidity. Arthur’s invention was a perfect success—it’s you and your husband’s fault we’re stuck now, not his.”

  Jocelyn stared at her for a moment. “Blah!” she said. Then, with concern in her eyes, she watched the motionless form of Gaynor.

  “God, that was awful!” groaned Gaynor. He relaxed and stretched his limbs. “I wish Art had been here—he was the psychologist of the team, ideally suited for a heavy load like I’ve been taking on for the last hour or so.”

  “What happened, Paul?” asked Jocelyn. “You didn’t move—I was worried.”

  “Well,” said Gaynor slowly, “it wasn’t as awful as it probably looked to Outsiders. The hardest part was getting their thought patterns down clear. You know how hard it is to understand someone from a radically different speech area, even though he speaks what is technically the same language?”

  “Yes,” his wife nodded.

  “Did it seem to come clear in your head suddenly?” asked Ionic Intersection.

  “Right—that’s how it was with our friends.” “Oh,” said Jocelyn sarcastically, “so they’re our friends, now, huh?”

  “Yep. I talked them out of some silly notion they had of popping us into iodoform bottles. They’re really not bad guys at all. As they explained it, they’re rather hard pressed. It’s the usual set-up, that you come on in history after history.”

  “Crisis?” asked Jocelyn, her eyes brightening. “Wow!”

  “Exactly. Democracy against—the other thing. And exceptionally fierce in this case because our friends, the democrats, are far less in number than their enemies. Culturally and technologically they’re well balanced. Just a matter of population that keeps them from winning. Our friends thought we were spies from the other side—who happen to be giants, too. They took the poor little Prototype for a deadly bomb—how do you like that?”

  “I like it fine,” said Jocelyn.

  “Did you find out anything about Arthur?” asked Io quietly.

  Gaynor hesitated. “I don’t want to raise any false hopes,” he said slowly, “but they have rumors—only the vaguest kind of rumors—of someone showing up in the enemy ship. From all accounts of the enemy camp, that someone’s chances of long survival are none to good. That’s all they could tell me.”

  “Too bad,” mused Jocelyn. “Too, too bad. Paul, can you get in touch with them again—can you stand it?”

  “No mistaken consideration, jos,” he replied. “What do you want me to ask the blighters?”

  “I’d like to find out if there’s any chance of our getting to see what might be the mutilated corpse of the late and lamented Mr. Clair.”

  “Let’s join forces with them” spoke up Io. “Being small as we are, we can easily look for Arthur and assist them at the same time.”

  “I say yes—loudly and emphatically,” agreed Gaynor. “Now if I can get a little silence around here, I’ll go into my trance.” He squatted on the floor and shut his eyes, droning: “Calling Joe … calling Joe … Gaynor calling Joe … Come in, Joe … what kept you?”

  V.

  Back in the relatively comfortable living quarters of the Prototype, which had been repaired during their absence, the voyagers were trying on their new thought-helmets. “As I understand it,” said Gaynor, “one big difference between the good guys and the versa is this helmet business. I doubt very much whether the good guys realize just how much difference that makes. Thus:

  “The common, everyday helmets, used by both good guys and bad are two-way, like a telephone circuit. Incoming and outgoing, both. Whereas these things we have, and which Joe and his friend have—albeit on a somewhat larger scale are monodirectional. While wearing these helmets we can receive, but we can’t send unless we want to very much. Get it?”

  “Then,” said Io thoughtfully, “they must have a two-way thought shield, not letting anything either in or out.”

  “Precisely. Both sides have that of course. And precious little good it is to anybody, either. How’s yours, Jos?”

  Jocelyn fitted the snug, gleaming little cap on her head with an uneasy smile. “Wow!” she exclaimed, reddening. “It seems to drag things up out of the subconscious—my own subconscious.”

  “Ah,” said Gaynor. “Yes, that’s because the things are so small. The theory that Joe’s boys have is that the conscious thoughts are sort of long-wave—though millimicrons smaller than anything measurable—and that subconscious thoughts are super short-wavelength. I asked them about the center band, but they didn’t have any opinions. Psychoanalysts and installation-engineers dance cheek to cheek, as it were, in this world. You can keep your ucs in line by voluntary means. That’ll come to you after a while. Now how is it?”

  “Okay. What now?”

  “I’ll send a test signal—without speaking, of course. You’re supposed to catch it and tell me what it is. Ready?” Gaynor, at his wife’s nod, frowned and shut his eyes. “That was it,” he said at length. “What did you get, if anything?”

  “Nothing at all.”

  “Did you catch anything, Io?” he asked worriedly.

  The brunette nodded, and recited

  There was a young fellow named Hannes

  Who had the most horrible manners;

  He would laugh and he’d laugh

  Making gaffe after gaffe,

  Spreading tuna-fish on his bananas.

  “Exactly,” said Gaynor. “But we’ll have to try again. I’ll send another one, Jos. See if you can get it this time.”

  She closed her eyes in concentration, then an instant later, recited

  Willis, with a fiendish leer,

  Poured hot lead in pappa’s ear;

  Sister raised a terrible fuss:

  “Now you’ve made him miss his bus!”

  “Right,” said Gaynor with a sigh of relief. “Io, you seem to be doing all right, but let’s see, Jos, if you can send one to me.”

  His wife leered and shut her eyes. A pause followed. “Well,” she said relaxing, “what was it?”

  Without comment, he recited:
/>   In the cabin of Gottesman’s Proto

  Sherlock Holmes met the suave Mr. Moto;

  You could tell by their air

  They were looking for Clair,

  Who had vanished, not leaving a photo.

  “You got it,” she approved.

  “Yeah, but who’s this guy Gottesman? Never heard of him.”

  “Just a guy I know,” she replied with an absent smile. “You wouldn’t be interested, Paul.”

  “No doubt. But you’d better not emit any more loose talk about Reno when I happen to glance in Io’s direction, my sweet.

  “Be that as it may—we have a job to do, sort of. As I told you, the bad guys are under the thumb of some sort of War Council which was established as a special emergency three centuries ago, and hasn’t been disbanded since. Because, the theory goes, the emergency still exists. Our job is to spy on these people—hence the helmets. Now, if you’ll honor me—?” He crooked a courtly elbow at her; she accepted with a gracious smile, and they stepped from the ship, followed by Ionic Intersection, who had a secretive sort of smile on her face.

  “Okay, Joe,” Gaynor announced to the colossus towering above them. “We’re off!” A tremendous hand gently closed about them, lifting the three of them high into the air. “Paul,” said Io tremulously looking down, “you never said a truer word.”

  The trip had been a dizzy panorama of a colossal countryside glimpsed from the windows of a car of some kind, and views from the pocket of Joe as he wormed through the ever-so-carefully prepared breech-hole in the walls of the bad guys’ city. And he had kept up a running commentary of information for their benefit:

  “This car operates by a new kind of internal combustion. We reburn water. Something that can’t be done on your world, I believe…. That ruin was once a sky-scraping building. This whole area was once one of our cities. We had to retreat in one grand movement on all fronts—they’d developed something new in electrostatic weapons, and manufacture of shields would have taken too long, longer than we had of time, at any rate….

  “The crisis, I suppose, is nothing new to travelers such as you. Once—before the war—we had the energy and initiative to spare so that we sent out a few ships such as yours—not protomagnetic, much cruder. Percentage of failure was rather high. And reports of .the returned voyagers were not very en couraging. You see, control was mostly psychological, so the ships were drawn to planets and dimensions whose make-up was most like our own. Highly antithetic, invariably. We should have taken warning—it was too late. Everything seemed to slap down on us all at once. The culminative nastiness of all time seemed to pour out on our heads. Our nation—country—whatever you call it—isn’t a natural one. No common language, no common cultural stream, as the dear archaeologists like to say. We’re exiles, most of us. And though we can’t get together long enough to agree on most things, we’re united on the grounds of mutual defense—very nice in one way, but if we happen to win, by some weird fluke, there’s going to be one hell of a squabble afterwards about the technique of our government.”