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

by Edited By Isaac Asimov

  Again he was raising his chant of dedication and sacrifice, screeched to the thunderous rhythm of the drum in the manner of those Old Ones before the Incas! Again it mounted to its climactic crescendo of frenzied adoration and black hate—rose to a maddened scream, and broke as his arm swept down against that bearded throat! With a merry cackle of savage laughter, my gun woke the echoes, sweeping leaden death across the clearing, mowing its swath of lives in sacrifice more terrible than any savage mind could plan!

  Through a bloody haze I saw the brown, broken bodies twisted and flung bodily from their feet by thudding missiles that tore their unresisting flesh from their broken bones and bathed the altar and the gaunt form stretched over it with spouting, smoking blood! Blood lust was in me as I raked their bewildered ranks with the laughing death, then the belt of cartridges was gone, and as I fumbled for a second the few cowering survivors fled screaming into the sheltering jungle!

  Sanity came, and horror at the slaughter I had done, and with them an awful fear that in my unreasoning rage I had murdered friend as well as foe! Stumbling over the torn and bleeding windrows of slain humanity, I raced across the bloody clearing to where he lay, the gun forgotten! And as I reached the rude altar where he lay, Marston heaved his blood-soaked frame free of the bodies that covered it, sat up, and growled whimsically:

  “Are you quite sure you’ve killed enough for the day? Or didn’t you know it was loaded?”

  “Marston, man!” I shouted frantically. “Are you all right? Did I hit you?”

  “Oh, not at all. I’m quite all right. You’re a rotten shot if I do say it—bring in a blasted flail, and then you can’t hit me! Though I’ll not say you didn’t try hard enough. You did well by the innocent bystanders, and of course the public must come first in the mind of every good citizen.”

  As a matter of fact, I had nicked a chunk out of his arm—a nice, clean hit—and the blood on him was not all Indian. Still, his sarcastic joshing served its purpose and brought me out of my near-hysteria, where I was doing nobody the slightest good, into a sort of sanity in which I could at least talk without dithering like a crazy fool. Not until we were well clear of the shambles around the altar did he speak of Valdez.

  “What happened?” he asked. “Did Valdez bolt?”

  “He tried to,” I replied glumly. “He had the stuff from the plane cached on the trail out, and—well, I wouldn’t listen to reason, he pulled a gun, and we had it out. I broke his neck—killed him.”

  “I’m not blaming you for it. I saw it coming, and I reckon it was you or he. But it’s stirred up merry hell among the Indians. Did you know he was a breed? He claimed to be pure Indian, son of a jungle chieftain and a princess of some remnants of the Old People, but he was a breed, and crossed the wrong way! The least hint that anyone had guessed the truth made a beast of him. I’ve seen him deliberately bash a man’s head to jelly because the fellow, a Portuguese muleteer, claimed relationship— on his mother’s side! He was one of their priests, a heritage from his father, and I guess they found his body. Hornby doesn’t know, though, and if I were you I’d lay the blame to the Indians—the dead ones. Right?”

  “I suppose so. It happened as you guessed. I slugged him in the neck with a heavy liana, too hard. But how did they get you?”

  “I told you I was suspicious of Valdez. I tried to follow you, and they jumped me, south of here, near the ravine. It must have been shortly after they found Valdez, for they were all crazy mad. I think the Doc is safe, though. Do you realize that this spawning means that they’re ready to go ahead and burn their way right through everything—make this whole planet a safer and better place for tetrahedra? Doc has figured they’re from Mercury—overcrowded, probably, by this wholesale system of reproduction in job-lots, and hunting for new stamping-grounds. I don’t know what our chances are of bucking them—about a quarter of what they were an hour ago—but they’re mighty slim, armed as we are. You’ve got the other machine-gun?”

  “It’s at the cache, with most of the food, if the Indians didn’t find it when they found Valdez. I have a map here, that he was using.”

  “Good. Let’s have it. You keep an eye on the Professor tomorrow, now that the Indians are out for blood, and I’ll get the stuff back to camp. Now I know they’re hostile, I’ll keep my weather eye open for trouble and I’ll guarantee I won’t be caught napping again. Come on—let’s hunt him up now, while they’re still scared.”

  “Wait, Marston,” I replied. “You get the stuff now. I have a hunch we’ll need it, and that soon. I can find Professor Hornby well enough, and I don’t think the Indians will want any more for some time to come.”

  “Right you are!” he exclaimed. “So long then.” And he swung off along my back-track.

  * * * *

  CHAPTER IV

  At Bay!

  I had no trouble in finding the Professor. In truth, he found me. He was all but boiling over with excitement, for he had seen something we had not.

  “Hawkins,” he exclaimed, grabbing my shoulder fiercely, “did you see them spawn? It is remarkable—absolutely unequalled! The speed of it all— and, Hawkins, they do not have to grow before cleaving. I saw two that divided and redivided into three-inch tetrahedra—over a thousand of them! Think of it—Hawkins, they can overrun our little planet in a few days, once they start! We’re done for!”

  “I guess you’re right, Professor,” I replied. “But tell me—have you seen anything of the Indians?”

  “The Indians? Yes—there seems to be something wrong with them now, Hawkins. They seem to have lost their reverence for the tetrahedra. These tribes do not paint much, but those I have seen were decorated for battle, and one old man was cursing the things from the edge of the forest, working himself up into a regular frenzy of invective. They may resist, now, if the tetrahedra try to start anything.”

  “Marston will be glad to hear that! Right now, I think we had better strike for the high ground across the ravine, where their flame is less likely to reach us. I’ll leave you there and then look for Marston and the guns. We’re going to need them before long.”

  “Very well, Hawkins. Your plan sounds good, and I’m glad you found the plane. But where is Valdez? Isn’t he with Marston?”

  “No. He’s dead.”

  “Dead! You mean—the Indians?”

  “Um. They nearly got Marston too, but I had one of the guns. Come on, we’ll pick it up, and my pack of food, and find a place where we can see what happens and still be fairly safe. Follow me.”

  We found an ideal fortress, high on the west side of the ravine, where a little spur ran down from the highlands to the valley of the tetrahedra. Indeed, it had been used as a lookout by the ancient inhabitants of the region, ages ago, when great cities of cut stone lay in the valleys now choked by vegetation. Enough of the ancient walls remained to provide a decent bulwark against attack, and I left Professor Hornby with the gun to hold the fort until I could find Marston.

  I had little difficulty in locating him, and between us we transferred the supplies from cache to lookout, while the Professor kept a perfunctory guard over them. As a matter of fact, he was more interested in digging around in the ancient floor of potsherds and tools of the former inhabitants. He explained that the ancient Pleistocene wave of immigration from Asia, via Alaska and North America, had split at Panama to pass down both sides of the Andes. On the west, along the coast, arose the ancient American civilizations, culminating in the Incas. On the east were the forest Indians, poor savage creatures of the thick jungles, such as we had seen. And here, on the boundary between these two regions, he sought a link between the two. Perhaps he had found it. We were never to know.

  It was two days before the hostilities began. Meanwhile we had found the wreck of the plane, very nearly intact but quite useless in this dense jungle. We drained the tanks of what gasoline they contained, storing it in great glazed jars of painted earthenware that Professor Hornby had found intact in a niche below our present f
loor-level. His idea was to fight fire with fire, incidentally clearing a space about the spur on which our little fort was perched, so that we could see what we were about in case of trouble.

  Marston and I cleared out the brush as best we could, and cut deep slots in the larger trees on the down-hill side. A back-fire is ticklish work in the forest, but we worked it, piling the quickly drying underbrush at the far side of our little swath, saturating it with gasoline, then digging in to one of the Professor’s excavations while the fireworks went off. In a drier climate we would not have lived to tell the tale. As it was, we more or less leveled the thick forest for about two hundred feet on all sides, before the fire petered out, leaving a tangled mess of blackened wreckage that effectively kept us in and others out, as well as clearing the field of view.

  Our fire may have served to set off the onslaught of the tetrahedra. Certainly, with the next morning, there was renewed activity in their rocky pocket. They cleared out a sizeable ring of forest before sun-set. The next noon they had another sunfeast, and now the blackened valley was fairly teeming with their angular forms, large and small, for many seemed to have split without growing, as the Professor had seen one do before.

  Now, their army of destruction assembled, the tetrahedra began their conquest of Earth! In vast waves of horrid destruction with rays of angry yellow flame darting from apexes their flaming floods of energy swept over the jungle, and now not even its damp dark could resist. Mighty forest-giants toppled headlong, by the cleaving yellow flame, to melt into powdery ash before they touched the ground. Giant lianas writhed like tortured serpents as their juices were vaporized by the awful heat, then dropped away in death to lie in long grey coils along the stripped rock of the forest floor—rock that was fast taking on the glassy glare of the little valley, rock fused by heat such as Earth had never known.

  By evening, our spur of rock was a lone peninsula, an oasis in a desert of harsh black, a height which the tetrahedra, for some unknown reason, had not attempted.

  Now we could watch their plan of campaign, and our hearts sank in fear for our race, for while half of the tetrahedral army engaged in its holocaust of destruction, the remaining half fed and spawned in the full blaze of the sun. With every day dozens of square miles were added to their hellish domain and thousands of tetrahedra to their unnatural army. For now we could see that more and more of them were taking the second course, were splitting into hosts of tiny, three-inch creatures which, within a few days’ time, had swelled to full size and on the following day could spawn anew! It was dreadful, but now we were hopelessly isolated—an island in a sea of black rock, untouched as yet by the blasting fires, but utterly unable to save ourselves or our world.

  * * * *

  Aside from the vegetation which they were so methodically blasting, the Mercutian tetrahedra—for such Professor Hornby swore they were and such we later found them to be—had not yet come into real contact with the life of our planet, much less its master, Man. The worship of the Indians had been carried on from afar, and we ourselves were careful not to tempt our visitors from space. Now all that was changed in something of a double-barreled fashion. It began with the Indians. It ended with us.

  Now that we were shut off from the jungle, we no longer sensed the unease and stealthy activity of the forest people. Their gods had betrayed them—perhaps they thought them devils now—their sacrifice had been interrupted and their chief men slaughtered unmercifully by the slayers of their half-white brother. Their whole life and legend had gone wrong. The tetrahedra were to blame, and the tetrahedra must pay!

  The invaders did not start their daily program of devastation until the sun was high. Of late, the people of the forest had become creatures of the night, and so it was that Marston roused us about midnight to watch the fun, as he put it. As a matter of fact, we all realized that what the Indians did would probably be of vital importance to our own situation.

  The spheres were too small to hold all the tetrahedral hosts, now, and they lay crowded in great confocal ovals about them, sleeping, if such things can be said to sleep. The first indication of the attack was a tiny fire of leaves and twigs on the rocks above the ravine, now choked with slabs of rock scaled from its walls by the terrific heat. It was barely visible —merely a smudge in size, kindled for some magical purpose. Then there came a low, wailing chant, rising swiftly in vehemence and bitter hatred— a curse designed to blast the unearthly invaders where they lay. Professor Hornby was fairly gasping at the enormously ancient background of legend and superstition which it revealed, when it suddenly broke in a shrill, senile yammer of sheer madness! The strain was more than the old priest could stand.

  As in answer, other, greater fires sprang up all along the walls of the valley, and by their light we could see the Indians closing in from the edge of the forest—thousands of them, drawn to worship over untold leagues of jungle paths, and now racing into battle with all the mad fanaticism of an outraged religion! It was like a tidal wave of screeching humanity, pouring down over the black rock to break over the sleeping tetrahedra! Yet, as the last Indian burst from shelter of the jungle, the attacking force was revealed as pitifully small, compared to the ranks of those whom they attacked. Like a great city of black, tetrahedral tents the Mercutians lay, dim-lit by the failing moon, as if unaware of the savage swarm, led by its gibbering priest, that raced upon them. But they were far from unaware!

  It was I who first noticed the faint, rosy glow that hung over the silent ranks—a glow like that which had brought down my plane. I whispered to Marston, and he told me that it had not been there before—that the tetrahedra must be awake, and waiting!

  He was right. The red glow was spreading swiftly, out over the valley floor, and there must have been another, invisible emanation that preceded it, for I saw the old priest falter, beat with clawed fists at an unseen wall, then topple with a choking scream and lie still. Now, all round the valley, the first ranks of the savages were meeting this slowly advancing wall of unseen death—meeting it, and falling before it! In long windrows they lay, body after body piling up before the momentum of the unleashed rush of the red-skinned hordes! Stones, arrows, spears flew through the thickening red mist to clatter harmlessly upon the quiescent tetrahedra! But not as harmlessly as it seemed, for here and there among them showed a little spurt of pale blue flame as one of the smaller things was crushed by a hurtling stone! They were hard, but their skins of crystal were thin, and a well-flung stone might break them! They were not invulnerable!

  The Indians sensed this, too, for they had deserted spears and darts in favor of a hail of stones, large and small, that clattered among the tetrahedra in a veritable downpour, dealing really telling destruction among those who had not attained a fair size.

  The savages were yelling in triumph, now, thrilled with success, and their blind onslaught was checked, but still the invisible barrier crept on, dealing death all along their evilly grimacing front, and still the rose-red haze followed after, dissolving the crumpled bodies in fine white ash that in turn vanished in the deepening red. The yelling circle was thinning fast, yet they had not realized the futility of their attack when suddenly the tetrahedra deserted quiet defense for active combat!

  The cause was evident. Five Indians on the upslope had shoved over the cliff a huge rounded boulder that bounded like a live thing among the rocks and crashed full into the side of a great eight-foot tetrahedron, splintering its flinty flank and freeing the pent-up energy in a blinding torrent of blue flame that cascaded over the nearby ledges, fusing them into a white-hot, smoking pool of molten lava that glowed evilly in the ill-lit gloom! It was the last straw! The mad attack had become a thing of real menace to the tetrahedra, and they sprang into swift retribution. From their apexes they flashed out the flaming yellow streaks of destruction.

  Now at last the Indians broke and fled before the advancing hordes, but flight came too late, for the tetrahedra were aroused and they gave no quarter! Long tongues of yellow rea
ched out, beating down like awful flails on the fleeing savages and searing them with swift agony, dropping them in their tracks, driving them down in shapeless horror against the smoking rock, where the scarlet sea swept over them and dissolved them in drifting, fusing ash! The doomed Indians seemed to float in a yellow sea and what the sea touched was gone in an instant! Before that awful barrage nothing living could stand!

  Of a sudden the tragedy was borne forcibly to our own quarter, as a handful of Indians sought the refuge of our rocky spur! Like brown apes they scrambled up its precipitous side toward our fortress and burrowed through the tangled debris of our back-fire. They were men like ourselves, men in awful danger of their lives, and Marston and Hornby sprang to the parapet, shouting at them in their native tongue. But the frightened savage knows no friend, and their reply was a volley of long arrows that toppled the Professor into my arms and sent Marston cursing for the guns! Lips set grimly, he sprayed the rocky slope with whining leaden death, mowing down the frenzied savages as I had done in the place of sacrifice! At sight of us, their madness burst forth anew and they broke their flight to rush our pinnacle, voices raised in wild vituperation!