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

by Edited By Isaac Asimov

  “So you’re Lieutenant John Colbie, of the Interplanetary Police Force,” he mused. “Yet, not less than thirty-six hours ago another man stood before me and presented proof that he was John Colbie. One of you is wrong, I’d say, and no mistake about it.”

  “I’ve told you my story—that other man was a criminal, Edward Deverel by name, and I was put on his trail. I caught up with him on Vulcan, near the Sun, and we found it was hollow by the simple expedient of falling through a cavity on its surface. I had Deverel prisoner then, but he proved a bit too smart for me. We were trapped there, well enough, at the center of gravity. But he figured that the gases filling the planet’s interior would expand as the planet came to perihelion, thus forming currents which Deverel used to his advantage in escaping the trap and eluding me at the same time. I found him again, but we were wrecked above Jupiter, fell into a pit with a liquid ammonia lake at the bottom. And Deverel, using, I’ll have to admit, remarkably astute powers of deduction, figured that the lake drained by means of a siphon of some height. He eluded me that way, and I was left in the pit. I finally caught on—from some deliberate hints he had let drop—and followed him through the siphon. But he was waiting for me at the other end, demanded my credentials, and extracted from me a promise that I’d stay where I was for twenty-four hours.” Colbie grinned in slight mirth. “So after twenty-four hours I came on. And now he’s gone.”

  “ ‘Fraid he is,” admitted the other. “I had no reason to suspect he was an imposter, so I gave him a ship. Come to think of it, he seemed in a mighty hurry. Hm-m-m. How can I identify you as Lieutenant John Colbie?”

  “Easy,” snapped Colbie. “I’m not unknown. There must be a few IPF men in the city. Let some of them identify me.”

  “Good idea.” The man grimaced. “Something I should have done with the other man. However, that’s past. No use replotting an orbit you’ve swung. I’ll hunt up an IPF man or two.”

  And this he did. Within the space of a few hours, the commander had no doubt that the man who stood before him was one Lieutenant John Colbie, a native of Earth, and in the service of the Interplanetary Police Force.

  “Well, we’ll outfit you again, Lieutenant,” he assured Colbie. “What’s your course of action after that?”

  Colbie, lolling in a deep chair, bathed, resplendent in borrowed clothing and refreshingly combed hair, cigarette drooping from a corner of his square lips, said, “My assignment was to apprehend a certain criminal; those are my orders. I just have to keep on trying.”

  “Not if things go as they have,” said the other, smiling in such a manner that his sarcasm should have been without edge; but he saw immediately that he had said the wrong thing, for Colbie’s eyes narrowed half angrily. “Sorry,” he added quickly. And then apologetically, “Don’t blame you a bit. Must be a sore point. How come you aren’t in any especial hurry?” He deftly changed the subject.

  “I should say I’m not in a hurry!” Colbie exclaimed feelingly. “I’ve been space-tied for a few months now, and I have to stuff a few of the civilized benefits into my life now and then. There’s no need for haste, anyway. Only way I can find Deverel is by deducing his destination, then going there.”

  “Where do you think he went?” queried the other man interestedly.

  “The new planet. I notice there’s quite a lot about it in the papers. It’s been making its way into the solar system for the past five or six months, I understand. It’s a real wanderer—probably been zipping through interstellar space for ages. There’s a good chance that’s where Deverel’s gone. He’s curious, insanely curious about all things bizarre, and he won’t be able to resist it—I hope,” he added.

  “Good lead, anyway. It’ll be a worthwhile experience, too. No exploring parties have set foot on it. You two—if Deverel is there—will be the first to set foot on it. Hope you have good luck, this time,” he added sincerely.

  Colbie drew smoke into lungs that had not known cigarette smoke for a full half-year. “If there’s any doubt in your mind, commander, let me assure you that Deverel’s already up for trial, as far as my capturing him is concerned. Yes, I feel it in my bones. He’s going back with me, this time.”

  The two men then looked up statistics on the new planet. It was a large sphere of celestial flotsam, somewhere near five thousand miles in diameter, of extremely low density for its bulk. It was traveling at the good clip of eighty-two miles per second toward the Sun, but it was estimated that the speed would be cut in half by a near passage by Jupiter. Finally it would take up an orbit that would be located somewhere between those of Jupiter and Neptune.

  Shooting through space at furious velocity in his new cruiser, Colbie’s lips were set and grim. His nerves were on edge. There was a flame in his brain. Truth to tell, he was so furious at Deverel’s repeated escapes that the more he thought about it, the less he found himself able to think straight.

  He could see the new planet as a small, gray dot against the ubiquitous veil of stars. It was not yet named, but was destined to be called Cyclops, for a reason to be seen. And with the passing hours it grew in apparent size, until, seven days after Colbie had shot upward into space, fighting Jupiter’s gravitational fingers, it was a vast bulk in the heavens less than ten thousand miles distant. Colbie dived for it. He still had enormous speed, and was checking it with the greatest deceleration he could stand. When he came near enough to the planet, he used its gravitation as a further check. He started to circle it—and forthwith saw the “eye” of Cyclops staring up at him.

  It was a mirror—a concave reflector, rather. But it looked like the eye of the planet, an eye that reflected starlight. Starlight, yes, because it was a reflector that caught the rays of the stars and threw them back to space. Indeed, Colbie, gazing on it awestruck, could see no slightest difference between the brilliance of the stars and the brilliance of that colossal mirror.

  “Lord!” he whispered to himself, feeling half-reverent. He suddenly had a sensation of smallness, and realized in that second what an infinitesimal part of the universe he was. He lived for only the fraction of a second and surely was no larger than a sub-electron. For that mirror was artificial, had been fabricated by the powerful tools and intelligence of a race which had certainly lived at least thousands, perhaps millions of years ago. Who could tell how far Cyclops had traveled, plunging at steady pace across the void that separates our solar system from the nearest star? Who could tell the manner of people who had constructed it? One could only say that they had been engineers on a scale which human beings could not at present comprehend.

  The mirror was perfect. Colbie took various readings on it, after the first mighty upsurge of awe had ebbed away. He found the diameter, about two miles less than a thousand; the depth, an approximate three hundred; and the shape, perfectly circular, perfectly curved. The albedo was so close to 1 that his instruments could not measure the infinitesimal fraction that it lacked!

  And thereat, Colbie sat down and whistled loud and long. Man knew of no perfect reflector; it was deemed impossible, in fact. All materials will reflect light in some small degree, but more often the greater amount is absorbed. But the material of this colossus among reflectors reflected all light save an absolutely negligible amount of that which impinged on its surface. For Colbie knew that some of it was certainly absorbed—he did not believe in impossibilities. It was impossible that that mirror didn’t absorb some light. His instruments had been unable to measure it, but of course there were instruments on Earth that would measure that absorption when the time came for it. But they would have to be delicate indeed. Even at that, however, the albedo of this mirror was a thing almost beyond belief, and certainly beyond comprehension.

  The mirror disappeared around the curve of the planet as Colbie’s ship plunged on, decreasing its velocity slowly but surely. Colbie forced his thoughts once more to the issue paramount in his mind—that of locating Deverel. But his exciting discovery of the mirror stayed in the back of his mind, and he wa
s determined to know more about it. And he did; more thoroughly, in fact, than he liked at the time.

  He now had his velocity under control. Hoping that Deverel had not detected his presence above the new planet, he gave himself up to the one problem that was perplexing him—where would Deverel have landed? Near the mirror; that was a certainty. Somewhere near the rim of the giant reflector—but that was anywhere on a circle three and a half thousand miles in circumference.

  He finally resolved to scour the area in which Deverel would have landed. Training his single telescope downward so that it would sweep the entire area, he applied his photo-amplifiers to the light received, and then, keeping at a distance of about fifty miles from the surface of the planet so that Deverel could not possibly sight him with the naked eye, he darted around that circle at low speed, eye glued to the eyepiece of the telescope. He hoped thus to see the outlaw’s ship.

  And he did. It lay at the base of one of those mountains of Cyclops that flaunted a sharp peak thousands of feet up into the sky. That mountain swept down to foothills that terminated abruptly in a level plain scarcely more than seven or eight miles from the rim of the great mirror.

  Colbie sighed in lusty relief, entirely glad that his assumption of Deverel’s destination had now been proven absolutely correct.

  Shooting the ship upward, and then, keeping that single landmark— the mountain—in view, he came up behind it, and, by dint of much use of forward, stern, and under jets, jockeyed the cruiser to rest far enough around the curve of the mountain so that the outlaw should not note his advent.

  He put out a vial to draw in a sample of the planet’s atmosphere, but as he had with good reason suspected, that atmosphere was nonexistent. The undistorted brightness of the stars had almost made him sure of it. He struggled into a spacesuit, buckled on his weapons, attached oxygen tank, screwed down his helmet, opened the air-lock and jumped down to the planet’s surface. It was hard. Examining it, he found that it consisted of ores in a frozen, earthy state. Whether this was true of the entire planet he did not know.

  He started around the curved base of the mountain, and, after the first mile, discovered that traveling across the surface of Cyclops was a terrific task. The planet was seamed and cracked in dozens of places; great gaping cracks which presented definite handicaps to a safe journey of any length. He found that he had to take precautions indeed, and often searched extensively for crevices narrow enough to leap with safety. He worried along, taking his time, but he was beginning to realize that he might not have as much of that at his disposal as he had indicated to the dome commander back on Jupiter.

  So that, after a good many hours, he rounded the breast of the mountain and caught the black shine of Deverel’s falsely acquired ship.

  But he saw nothing of Deverel.

  He threw himself to the ground. Suddenly he was painfully conscious that his heart was thumping. The thought of physical danger in no way caused this condition—he was simply afraid that Deverel might elude capture again by putting his tricky mentality to work. The competition between these two—law and disorder personified—had become a personal contest. Truth to tell, the IP man respected and rather admired Deverel’s uncanny ability to escape him, not the fact that he had escaped. Colbie had to bring him back, but respected Deverel’s unusual genius at escaping tight spots. But—he had to bring the man in, or admit the outlaw a better man than he.

  In this uneasy state of mind, he lay there, projector out. It could shoot explosive missiles at thousands of feet per second, and was, in this, the twenty-third century, the ultimate in destructive hand weapons.

  Now, as he lay there, his eyes constantly on the ship and the area about, he turned his thoughts in a new direction. In the name of all that was holy, why had Deverel come here? Hadn’t he realized it was the first place Colbie would look? Certainly he must have known it. Then why had he come?

  Colbie thought he saw the answer. Deverel had planned on leaving this planet long before the space policeman had arrived. He had had a full thirty-six hours’ start on Colbie, and he decided that would give him enough time for the opportunity he so craved—to visit this new planet, and determine to his own satisfaction whether or not there was anything about it which would satisfy that love he had for the bizarre.

  He had had sufficient time. Sufficient time to satisfy himself as to the nature of the mirror; sufficient time to leave again, and break up his trail in the trackless wastes of space.

  But he hadn’t left.

  Why?

  And then Colbie began to feel acute mental discomfort. And the longer he lay there, the worse it became. He became conscience stricken. And why? Because Deverel might be lying in there sick, and Colbie could not risk coming out into the open until he knew absolutely Deverel’s whereabouts. And perhaps Deverel lay in there dying. Space sickness is a recognized malady, and it is not infrequent. It is ascribed to any number of causes, among which are noted positive and negative deceleration, a missing vital element in synthetic air, and the lack of gravitation. Its only cure is absolute rest under a decent gravitation. And—such a cure was impossible for a man who was dependent on no one but himself.

  Colbie squirmed uncomfortably. “The fool might be dying!” he snapped angrily to himself. “While I’m lying here. But I can’t give myself away.”

  But his nerves grew more and more tense. He dreaded the thought of Deverel sick in there while he was able to give him help. And in the end he sprang to his feet, determined he wouldn’t let the uncertainty of the situation wear on him any longer.

  And then his radio receiver woke to life, and screeched calmly though waveringly, “You’re out there, Colbie. You would be there. Listen—” the voice dwindled away, and then came back in renewed strength. “I’m sick, Colbie, rottenly sick. I think I’m going to do the death act. It’s the stomach that really hurts, though there’s the ears too. They hurt, too, and they send the blind staggers right through the brain. I’m sweating—” The voice ebbed, rushed back. “If you want to—come in and give me a hand—will you? Then you can take me back—” The voice groaned off, and sliding sounds came through the receiver.

  But already Colbie was tearing out into the open, racing across the space separating him from the ship, a wave of pity for the helpless man breaking over him.

  The outer valve was open. Colbie climbed in, drew it shut, manipulated the controls of the inner valve, and debouched into the ship proper.

  He was now amidships, standing opposite the lazaret. Forward was the control cabin and vital machinery, abaft, in the stern compartment, were sleeping and living quarters.

  Colbie bounded aft, swung through a door, and saw a pitiable sight indeed. The room was incredibly littered with such items as soiled clothing, and dishes with the scum of meals dried onto them. In the middle of the room was a table, and on that table an electric fan was whirling full blast, flinging a steady current of air upon a man who lay stark naked on a bunk which seemed the ultimate in human filth.

  Deverel lay there, twisting, squirming, panting, moaning, his eyes rolling, and rivulets of sweat bubbling up from his queerly yellow skin, and flowing down to encounter a plain, stained mattress.

  The first thing Colbie did was to snap off that venomous, killing fan. In fact, to sweep it from the table with one blow of his open palm. The next was to take Deverel’s pulse. It was quick, dangerously high, but certainly not predicting the close approach of death. In another day it might have ceased altogether, but at present there was plenty of chance.

  Deverel’s eyes lolled over to Colbie’s, and his lips drew back painfully over handsome white teeth.

  “Glad you came,” he whispered, and then his head dropped back and his eyes closed. He was not asleep; the knowledge that he was now in the hands of a competent person sent him into a dead faint.

  Colbie knew what to do in cases like this. He went forward to the control room, manipulated oxygen tank valves, and increased the quantity of oxygen in the air. He got
all the clean linen he could find, and bathed Deverel from head to foot in lukewarm water. He turned the mattress over, put on clean sheets, and then lifted Deverel lightly as a baby back on to it. Then he stuck a thermometer into the outlaw’s mouth.

  He cleaned the room, occupying a full hour in washing dishes with a minimum of valuable water. Then he took meats and vegetables from the refrigerator, where they had doubtless reposed for months perfectly frozen, and started a pot of soup.

  And that was all he could do for a while.

  He sat down and waited, taking many readings on the thermometer.

  And Deverel’s temperature went down. His breathing became even, and then he slept. Thirteen hours later he awoke.

  “Hi, Lieutenant,” he said.

  “Hi, yourself!” Colbie put down the magazine with which he had been really enjoying himself for the first time in months. “How’s the temperature?” he inquired.

  “Gone. Thanks a lot,” he added carelessly, but he was serious. “You know I mean it, too.”

  “Sure.” Colbie waved it aside. “A pleasure—I was glad to do it, y’know.” He fingered the pages of the magazine abstractedly. He jerked a thumb. “How’d you know I was out there?”