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

by Edited By Isaac Asimov

  What did this mean?

  He looked upward. What was that giant circle overhead?

  He peered out. What were those colossal and serrated monuments that looked like the mechanism of giants and possessed eerie illusions of a four-dimensional geometry? What were those other massive bulks that towered toward the spaces above?

  Understanding, and fright paralyzed him in a flash of intuition.

  The White Bird reposed on the slide of a microscope! The second plain was a table top, the third plain a floor. The geometric metallic mountains were apparatus and machines. The towering things were living beings. He had burst through the atom that was his universe and had emerged on a planet of a greater universe, a superuniverse!

  The vastness and spaciousness around, the acres and leagues of ground, staggered him. Everything was on a giant scale to which it was hard for him to become accustomed. And yet it was not until he looked intently upward that the full magnitude of his surroundings impressed themselves upon him.

  At what seemed the horizon, and seen as through a light haze, beyond plains and mountains that were only tables and machinery, rose walls more towering than the peaks of the Himalayas or the cliffs of the Moon, walls that curved gigantically zenithward where lay an opening toward which pointed a monstrous tube whose length must have been miles.

  Around this tube stood two of the alien beings, and at a table far to one side sat a third, and a fourth faced a complicated mass of blue-white metal apparatus whose nature was beyond conjecture, while a fifth leaned beside the great microscope.

  Duane at long last understood completely. This vast region of bare surfaces and precipitous descents was only a single room, an observatory, and the beings were astronomers studying whatever skies lay above!

  Still dazed by his pilgrimage, he experienced a new awe. Dowell had guessed the truth in his amazing theory! All the universe that he had traversed was only an atom, perhaps drifting in the air around him, perhaps part of the slide, perhaps the whole interior of this world. He would never know where, for it was as lost to him as the treasures of Atlantis. But that universe, with its scope and sweep and myriad components, formed only the least part of this sphere. There must be other worlds, an entire new universe of stars and suns and comets! And beyond these— what? His mind, numb from the exhaustion of mere speculation upon so stupendous a scale, turned wearily to the beings.

  They were Titans. Compared to Duane, the Colossus of Rhodes was infinitely less than the tiniest particle of matter. Compared to the Titans, Duane stood as lowly as a worm!

  Anthropomorphic in general appearance, they possessed both strikingly human characteristics and alien traits. They reminded Duane—but on how gigantic a size!—of the Easter Island sculptures, for these Titans had flat-backed heads, high, slanting foreheads, deep-set eyes, the noses of kings, and thin, ascetic lips above a jutting jaw. No race of conquerors ever before gave such an impression of strength, austerity, intelligence, and power.

  Godlike, the incarnation of supremacy, these giants gained added impressiveness from the radiant texture of their skin, which was as clear and cold as the glint of ice or the sparkle of a blue-white diamond, and as smooth. Had some dim awareness of these entities filtered through the minds of the races of Earth and helped to develop the concept of deity? Were these the prototypes that served the sculptors of Easter Island?

  Duane, moody and tired, longed for the companionship of Anne, for the presence of one human being to accompany him in this Odyssey that vanquished space, only to plunge him into the beginning of new mystery.

  * * * *

  Far, far overhead towered the Titans, league-long, massive creations overshadowing even the inhabitants of Brobdingnag. The reddish tunics that they wore formed a splash of color against the brightness of their Cyclopean bodies.

  They were talking among themselves, the Earth man observed by the motion of their lips, and curiosity overcame fear. He stealthily opened the White Bird’s door. A Titan, peering through the telescope, spoke. In the vast but clear resonance of that voice, Duane distinguished a syllable wholly foreign to the tongues of Earth. The Titan by the mechanisms pushed a lever, and from the machine came five strokes of a gong. The first Titan peered through the telescope and spoke again, a different syllable. The mechanism rang once.

  Understanding flashed through Duane. The first Titan, evidently an astronomer, was studying a body in the skies and reading its position to his companion who registered the figure. The first word, then, meant “five,” and the second word, “one.” He jotted down the syllables as accurately as he remembered them.

  The astronomer spoke again, the recorder pressed a level, but no gong resounded. “Nothing, or zero,” Duane wrote. The last number was “nine.”

  Silence descended, and now the intruder made out, upon a great mirror beside the recorder, a reflection of star fields, and guessed that the Titans were studying one among that horde. The astronomer called out, and the recorder raised his head. Duane wrote two words as the name of the recorder who played with intricate mechanisms.

  Then the star fields began an apparent march, drawing ever nearer, until one bright sun or planet loomed largest in the mirror’s center. The astronomer uttered a command, the reflection became motionless, and Duane wrote the phonetic transcription for “stop.”

  All this while his fear of discovery had been lessening since the attention of the giants was centered elsewhere, but his curiosity was mounting. Why were the great ones so interested in this star or planet? Who were they and how did their apparatus function? He wished that he could understand every word they spoke; given time enough, he would, for already he had a fair list of primary words: several mathematical numbers, the concept “zero,” a few verbs, including “stop,” “continue” or “go,” and “to be,” the names of three of the Titans, and several adjectives of whose meaning he was uncertain but had an approximate understanding.

  The star cluster swam closer until only one body filled the mirror. The recorder played with dials and levers, and the one sphere, now discernible as a planet, and approaching rapidly, expanded beyond the reflector’s sides.

  The Titans gathered around the mirror. The surface of the satellite raced toward them. Continents became visible, outlined by seas. Dark masses of forests and mountain ranges contrasted with units that looked like villages or cities. Paths, trees, huts, and lakes were visible. At last the recorder adjusted whatever mechanism controlled this optical marvel, and the picture again became stationary.

  There on the Gargantuan panel, a forest glade showed clearly to the last detail. Strange and exotic trees, not unlike those of Earth’s carboniferous era, raised great conical leaves and flower buds and full blooms to the sky. The ground was riotous with ferns and glossy flowers, orchidaceous cups and blossoms of wallflower brown.

  Dawn was breaking and blue-white light filtered through the vegetation. Shadows shortened. Moths fluttered, and birds of brilliant plumage soared up with lyrical morning songs. A creature similar to a deer crossed with a rabbit bounded away in search of breakfast. Another beast, resembling a huge squirrel, but with a glossy coat and the membranes of a bat, flitted to the edge of a pool and, after drinking greedily, frolicked away through the forest.

  A path led to the pool. While the Titans and Duane looked on, a girl danced into view.

  Nothing that he had experienced in these hectic weeks affected Duane as profoundly as the sight of that girl. She differed from the women of Earth, and yet she possessed a similarity. He thought that she looked like Anne—or was his impression only a wish fulfillment? In the quiet of dawn, she danced along. She wore no garments. Her supple figure, tawny as ripe wheat, pirouetted around trees, and her light feet dipped across mosses. She had hair of emerald, that floated lightly around her, and liquid, beguiling eyes of amber. A glow the color of goldenrod pollen enriched her face. Her fingers seemed boneless, so tapering were they, and flexible as she cupped them and wove them in supplication to the dawn. />
  The scene held beauty of an exquisite kind, from the lush petals of flowers and mossy carpet to the exotic trees; from the young girl dancing in the glow of sunrise to the light that shimmered through branch and leaf and formed patterns of divided darkness upon the ground.

  Then the girl flung her arms skyward and lifted her face to greet the sun. In the forest glade she seemed lovelier than a naiad out of legend. Her lips parted, and Duane could almost hear the rapturous song that she caroled. Then she danced again in carefree abandon, swirling toward the edge of the pool, and there she flung herself down and laughed at her own drowning image in the waters.

  From the poetry and enchantment of the idyll, Duane’s attention was gradually turned to a crescendo whose volume reverberated through the air. The Titans were talking excitedly, one Titan apparently scoffing at the others who ringed him. Judging by his gestures, he was discounting the truth of the visualization which had occurred upon the mirror. He strode from the circle and in a few Gargantuan steps was beside the microscope to resume whatever investigation he had interrupted.

  His peril engraved itself on Duane’s mind in a second that saw him frantically spin the door to the White Bird. His action came too late. The door was only partly sealed when a vast cry issued from the throat of the giant. The others looked over and began approaching him. Two fingers the size of barrels appeared at the edges of the slide and lifted it in a wild swoop skyward!

  * * * *

  VI.

  That curving sweep, almost vertical, which carried him a mile upward in a mere second, was more sickening than a plunge, but Duane quaked at a simple but terrifying incident that followed. The Titan raised him to eye level and scrutinized him with cold appraisal. His eye, huge as a room, with fathomless depths of black in it and a piercing, hypnotic pupil, overwhelmed Duane with its conviction of dynastic power and its attitude of unhuman, solely scientific analysis. No worm in alcohol, no microbe under the lens, could have felt more lowly than he, under the glare of that tremendous orb.

  Duane was trapped and he knew it. One squeeze of colossal fingers and he would be pulp in the flattened shards of his stratoplane. It might have been fear, it might have been courage, that prompted him. He opened the White Bird’s door and stepped out onto the slide.

  The great eye widened and its black depths stirred. The four other Titans gathered around like shining angels of doom, their stern, conquerors’ faces staring at him with more interest, but no more personal feeling than they would have studied a fly. They talked rapidly, the cruel lips forming thunder that deafened at this close range. Duane gesticulated, and they became silent, looking at him and at each other with questioning glances. Using all the power he could muster, he shouted out the microscopist’s name.

  The effect was electrical. The Titan almost dropped the slide. He broke into a flood of questions, but the Earth man shook his head and shouted the syllable for “nothing.”

  The Titan understood—Duane did not know the questions. Walking toward a mechanism of abstruse nature, the astronomer set his captive on a table and placed upon his head a cap of metal with a skein of fine wires terminating in what resembled a telephone switchboard beside a smooth panel. He placed a similar cap on the table and indicated that Duane touch it with his head. It looked like the crown of an observatory, this hemisphere of the gods. A tingling flux ebbed through his body upon contact.

  In the mirror appeared an image of the astronomer with his name underneath. Duane comprehended. This miraculous apparatus transformed thought currents into pictures and made ideas visible. Duane thought of his portrait and his name. Promptly they flashed upon the panel. In this novel manner, with the start he already had in finding something of their speech and language, he had little difficulty in carrying on a silent conversation.

  “Did you come from Valadom—the planet in the reflector? Are you one of the little creatures?”

  “No.”

  The Earth man’s reply obviously surprised them. The scientists conferred, as if deciding whether he was giving truthful answers.

  “Whence came you?”

  Duane hesitated. Would they believe him if he told the truth? Should he rescind his first answer and assert that he was one of the “little creatures”? These were giants of intellect as well as Titans of body. It would be wiser to answer truthfully even if they scoffed. “I came from an atom under your microscope,” he answered.

  His reply raised a tempest, but not the skepticism that he had expected. The astronomer talked with new animation as though he had found support for a theory, and the mind reflector became a crazed confusion of mathematical symbols, concepts involving energy and matter, and hypotheses of atoms.

  Appearances indicated that he had once set forth a theory that each particle of matter was as complex as the universe, and that submicroscopic parts might be star fields as elaborate as those visible above, and with life on a proportionately most infinitesimal scale, a theory which his associates must have decided against. The very concept taxed Duane’s faculties. His universe an atom forming this sphere; this globe a planet in the superuniverse; and what if that billion-bodied unit was, as Dowell had suggested, only the molecule of a cosmos still more far-flung, above and beyond and outside? Conversely, were there universes within the atoms of the Earth he had left? Where did the cycle begin or end?

  His gangling figure, in which tenseness fought his desire to relax, must have presented a study in contrasts. The cathedralesque majesty of this one hall that formed an arena as large as the ground and the heavens and the horizons of Earth was in itself a thing of wonder, but the lordly dwellers added the emotional burdens of awe and fear and inferiority, so massive were their statures, so radiant, so stern, so implacable, and godlike. And to the weight of these visible things was piled on concepts to stagger the brain of genius, or the universal mind, if such existed, or the intra-universal intellect. Yet the general patterns of nature as he knew it seemed to recur here. Where lay the beginning and whither the end? To what purpose? He drifted back from mental fog to find the Titans questioning him anew.

  * * * *

  “Can you return to your universe, your atom?”

  “No,” Duane replied.

  “Why not?”

  “I do not know where it is. I would not know how to find it. If I could find it, I would not be able to enter. Something happened, when I burst through. I am bigger than my whole universe was. I cannot shrink down. Besides, millions of years have passed back there since I departed. I do not even know whether Earth, my planet, still exists.”

  The sages nodded gravely, accepting his statement, and evidently understanding far better than he did what had happened.

  “What is the principle of your tiny ship, little one?”

  Duane bristled and his lank joints stiffened. The White Bird a “tiny ship”? He, Colossus, called a “little one”? He swore angrily, and a flock of “damns” appeared on the mind reflector. The Titans stared without feeling at these strange words, asked him to elaborate. Swallowing his indignation, he tried to pictorialize the building of the White Bird, and how it harnessed universal radiations for its energy. The Titans watched, attentive and impassive as before. And yet Duane sensed an extraordinary interest in his ideas; and by careful observation came to the conclusion that they had only recently built this laboratory with a scientific knowledge far in advance of that of the human race.

  They, too, had discovered how to tap perpetual power. Already exploration of the great spaces, the outer abysses, the chasms and voids and illimitable depths, was under way. They were plainly amazed that any creature as minute as he could have progressed so far; and still more eagerness accompanied their absorption in his story of the submicroscopic electrons which, to beings as small as he once had been, yet represented a mysterious, enormous, and complex universe of inconceivable magnitude.

  Duane felt his prestige rising. He thought it his turn to watch mind pictures and obtain some understanding of his journey’s end.


  “Who are you? Where am I?” he began.

  The astronomer reflected soberly, as though weighing whether this mite could possibly grasp the ideas that might be presented. Then, upon the panel, flowed a stream of images: Qthyalos, a giant world in its ripe maturity, inhabited by Titans of deific knowledge and power, whose intellects rivaled in proportion the girth of their bodies; mind supreme in supreme and vital matter whose life-span averaged thousands of years.

  Duane’s eyes ached when he saw their cities, how Cyclopean they were, and their works, how passing strange, and their arts, how alien and bizarre. Their structures baffled him with their apparent fluxes and processional changes, their tenuous and unreal unstability, combining with solid attributes. Had they a four-dimensional basis that warped straight lines into helical spirals, and cubes into weirdly shimmering pyramids?

  What was the gleaming stuff that composed these megalithic metropolises which shone with blinding color and yet whose incandescence was underlain with the shadow and ambiguity and shifting forms of a geometry that eluded him? Whether he understood or not, the résumé flowed on, and now he found why they were examining Valadom with such interest when he came. He translated the series of images into words.