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

by Edited By Isaac Asimov

  “Didn’t know it.” Deverel laughed. “It’s a cinch if you weren’t out there you wouldn’t have heard me say I knew you were.”

  “That’s right.” Colbie laughed, too, and blue eyes and gray eyes met each other in mutual amusement. “Like some soup?”

  Deverel said enthusiastically that he did. So that these two men, mutually respecting enemies of each other, sat down and ate for all the world as if each was an affectionate friend of the other.

  For many days life was easy. No grueling flights through harsh space. No anxieties. No dread of death to come. No fear of insanely impersonal meteors. Here on Cyclops, the planet of the great mirror, living was a pleasure.

  Deverel regained his health. He was finally able to get out of bed and walk around. With that done, it was not long before Deverel was considered a well man once more. Of course, the old life then had to be recognized. There had been a tacit understanding between the two men— for a little while their personal relationships did not stand. That was fair.

  But that understanding had to be sundered eventually, and Deverel did not put the time off. The moment he felt his strength had returned in full measure, he said: “Well, it’s been fun while it lasted. But it’s time for us to sort of assume our natural antagonisms. So you put me in irons—right away. Or I’ll give you a swift, underhanded poke to the jaw.”

  Colbie regarded him judicially. “Fair enough,” he conceded. “You wouldn’t mind getting me about the heaviest pair of leg and arm irons from the lazaret, would you?” he inquired quizzically.

  “Not at all,” murmured Deverel politely.

  “Wait a minute,” Colbie said uneasily. He leaned forward. “Now look. Did you notice the mirror?”

  “Certainly. And damned curious about it, too.”

  “And I. Now suppose we let this unwritten pact of mutual noninterference drag on for a while, just enough to allow us to explore? Y’know, I haven’t got a time limit on me—”

  “Oh”—Deverel waved a scornful hand—”neither have I. Let’s let it drag on, shall we?” he said in the unconscious manner of a youngster excited over the prospect of a pleasing new toy. “You’ve got my promise, Colbie— I won’t try to get away.”

  They saluted each other with a grin, and forthwith made ready for their adventure in exploration.

  * * * *

  Sleep was the first preparation. After a good many hours, they set off across the gouged, forbidding plain. The stars looked down at them un-windingly through the vacuum separating them from Cyclops’ harsh terrain. Behind the men loomed the sharp, high peaks of the mountain in whose proximity Deverel had put down his stolen cruiser.

  They were decked out as completely as they deemed advisable. They had oxygen, water, and food for at least a day. Colbie had decided not to carry his projector. It was a clumsy weapon, and he saw no possible use for it. Thus, attached by a two-hundred-foot hank of rope, which was suited in composition to the demands the cold and vacuum of space might make upon it, they wended their starlit way across Cyclops. When they were not using the rope fording dangerous chasms, they wound it up about them. They progressed steadily toward the rim of the reflector which probably had been constructed long before man had made the first full stride toward harmonized society.

  Twice, Colbie slipped at the termination of a leap which taxed all his physical powers, and twice would have plunged into the apparently bottomless gorges below; and twice Deverel braced himself against the rims of the pits, and pulled the Interplanetary man back to safety. In both cases they made extended searches for narrower crevices.

  Slowly but surely they worked their way to the rim, and finally struck level country. The last mile was a true plain, so unmarred that they suspected it must have been smoothed over artificially at some long-gone period. It struck Colbie that this would have been a much better place for Deverel to have put his ship down. Deverel explained that at the moment the first spasm of sickness had hit him, he was not in a frame of mind to care where he landed.

  They came, then, to the rim.

  They regarded with awe the black wall. It was composed of some dully hued metal. It stretched away from them in a slow curve that lost itself to their eyes many miles to either side of them. It was perfectly formed and unmarred in the slightest particular, about twice as tall as a man.

  Deverel struck a pose, and said vibrantly, “The mirror!” But certainly he was not unshaken by the anciently constructed reflector.

  Colbie put in wonderingly, “Some things a man can’t believe. I wonder how old this thing is—wonder who made it—how they made it! Lord, what engineers they must have been! What a job!”

  “What a contract for the firm that landed the bid!” Deverel put in, smiling. “What do you say we top it? I’ve got an itch to see it firsthand—touch it.”

  Colbie nodded, and Deverel braced himself against the wall, forming a cup with his heavily gloved hands. “Up you go! But once you get up,” he warned, “careful you don’t topple. That’d mean trouble in large doses.”

  “Don’t worry about that,” Colbie said grimly. “If any one falls, it’s going to be you, not me.”

  He put one foot in the outlaw’s hands. Deverel heaved. Colbie shot up and caught both hands around the rim, which sloped inward. That done, he drew himself upward so that he was sitting carefully on the rim, facing Deverel.

  With much effort and care, he drew Deverel beside him, and then, as if with mutual consent, they twisted their heads and sent their eyes out over the great mirror.

  At once, all sense of perspective and balance left them. Light from all directions smote them, blinded them, sent a haze into their minds. Downward and to all sides and above, there was light. In fact, the light of the stars and the light of the mirror were indistinguishable in the split second when that bewildering sensation of instability struck them. Colbie thought fleetingly and in panic that he was poised upside down on the most insecure foothold in the universe. He could not decide, in that split second, which was the true sky.

  So—he clutched at the wrong sky, and toppled over the rim.

  Deverel, feeling precisely the same sensations, would have recovered in time had not the rope attaching him to Colbie forcefully jerked at him a second before he had fully decided which way was up. So they both fell down the angle of the mirror, and were, in a second, shooting haphazardly, horridly, through an interminable pressing mist of light and nothing but light.

  They were plunging downward so swiftly, and yet so lightly, that they might have been wafted along on an intangible beam of force. For they felt nothing. Not the slightest sensation of sliding—only a sense of acceleration downward.

  After that first moment of heart-stopping horror, after the first panic, the first moment of unutterable vertigo had passed, Colbie’s nerves started quivering violently. Deliberately he quieted them by closing his eyes and clenching his fists. Then he opened fists and eyes both, and looked around for Deverel. Deverel was about five feet behind him.

  Deverel was looking at him from eyes that were extremely concerned.

  “And I said to be careful,” he snapped angrily. Colbie started to open his lips with hot words, but Deverel waved a hand disgustedly. “I know, I know. My fault, too.” He drew a long breath and occupied himself putting his head where his feet were.

  Colbie did the same, and then very gingerly tried to stay his fall, by pressing his hands and feet on the surface of the mirror. This had not the slightest effect on his position or his velocity. He found that it was extremely difficult to twist his body except by flinging his arms around, but he accomplished this not by any aid the mirror gave him. His hands in no slightest degree rubbed against the mirror’s surface. In fact, he felt no sensation which told him that his hands might have touched a surface. It was as if he had run a finger over a vat of some viscous slime, as if the slime had imparted no heat, no cold, had not adhered to his finger, had not impeded its motion in any way, had merely guided it along a path determined by it
s own surface!

  He closed his eyes painfully. The trend of his thoughts hinted of insanity. He tried to analyze his sensations. He was falling. Falling straight down, at the acceleration the gravity of this planet gave his body. But he knew he was merely gliding along at a downward angle. He was simply being guided by a substance which in no degree impeded the action of gravity. That must mean-

  No friction!

  The words exploded in his brain—and exploded crazily from his mouth. “No friction!”

  Deverel stared at him, and then frantically made tests. He tried to rub that surface. He felt nothing, nothing that held his hand back—as if it had slid along infinitely smooth ice.

  “You’re right,” he said, staring stupidly. “That’s what it must be. Hell —it’s frictionless!” And then he cried, “But that can’t be!” and his lips twitched. “There can’t be anything that’s frictionless. You know that. It can’t be done!”

  Colbie shook his head as one speaking to a child. “No, Deverel,” he found himself saying in a kindly voice, an insistent but pitying voice, “it has no rub. You put your hand on it and push. And does it hold your hand back? No.” He shook his head sadly. “They made this stuff frictionless.”

  And as they shot downward into the sea of light, they held each other with their dumbfounded eyes.

  The outlaw sharply shook his head. “We’re making fools of ourselves. Let’s face it. There isn’t any friction. Now—now we’re up against something.”

  “I know it.”

  Colbie almost drunkenly squirmed around, and finally maneuvered until he was sitting, his feet crossed under him, his eyes trained hypnotically into the downward distance. Or was there any distance? There was no horizon. The stars, and the conglomerate glow of the mirror that was the absolute reflection of the stars, merged with each other.

  ‘We’ve got to pull ourselves together,” he said stubbornly. “Let’s think this out. We’ve got to get used to it.”

  “Right.” And Deverel did the first sensible thing by twisting and looking behind him. They had toppled over the rim of the mirror almost exactly two minutes ago, and though their velocity had steadily been mounting, there was a horizon back there which could be seen. It was mainly indicated by that lofty, slowly rising mountain which loomed up against the rim of the mirror. He felt that it was a good landmark—somehow, that was the place they had to get back to.

  “Now look,” he said seriously to Colbie, “let’s talk this over.” His voice was slightly metallic as it came through Colbie’s earphones. “Before I landed on this planet I took some readings on that mirror same as you, and I guess I came to the same conclusions.

  “Long ago, maybe a million years, there was a race of men—or beings— who lived on a planet that circled a sun just like ours, perhaps. They had a satellite, this planet we’re on. They were engineers on a monster scale. I have no doubt they could have remade their planet, and even their solar system, exactly to suit themselves—and maybe they did. But they made this satellite over to suit themselves, that’s certain. They gouged out—how I wouldn’t know—a section of this planet that corresponded to the bottom part of a sphere. The radius of that sphere—I figured it—is about 1600 miles out in space. Then, so help me—I wouldn’t know this, either—they coated that gouged-out surface with some substance which, when it hardened, formed an absolutely smooth surface. You came to the same conclusions I did, didn’t you? That it was such a perfect reflector you couldn’t measure the amount it didn’t reflect?”

  Colbie, listening with interest, nodded. “And we should have seen that such a good reflector would be frictionless, too. Couldn’t be any other way. And say!” he exclaimed. “This stuff can’t be frictionless. We knew it couldn’t reflect all light. It simply reflects all but a negligible amount of light, and it’s got a negligible amount of friction, too!”

  “That’s right!” Deverel was genuinely relieved. “That idea of no friction at all had me going cuckoo. ‘Course not—there can’t be any surface that’s got no friction at all. The molecular state of matter forbids it. No matter how close you crowd the molecules, they still make an infinitesimally bumpy surface.

  “Now why did they make the mirror? Only reason I can see—power. They must have had a heat engine. It generated power in huge amounts, undoubtedly, and perhaps the power they took in that way was broadcast back to their planet. Or perhaps it was a weapon—another mirror, plane this time, which could rotate and train a searing beam of heat on an enemy ship. Would that ship blister! And they might have been able to rotate this satellite at will, too-

  “Then something happened. Those people lost their satellite. Maybe their own planet exploded. Maybe their sun exploded, and this planet went shooting away, and finally our Sun grabbed it.

  “And that’s a fair explanation—the only one, as far as I see. Unless, of course, it was meant to be something that was in the experimental stage and was never completed.”

  “The magical mirror,” Colbie interspersed softly. But neither of them then knew exactly what magical characteristics it did possess.

  For a moment they were silent. “Well”—Deverel had a shrug in his voice —”we can’t do anything now—can we? Shall we eat?”

  “Why not?”

  They ate in the strange manner necessitated by spacesuits. By buttons in a niche outside their suits they manipulated levers which reached into a complicated mechanism, pulling out food pills—tasteless things—and water, which they sucked through a tube.

  “Now,” said Deverel, smacking his lips as if he had just eaten a square meal, “this is just another situation, and not a fairy tale. Proved it by eating, which is so mortal it’s disgusting. Where we bound?”

  “For the bottom—”

  “Ho—not at all! We’re almost at bottom now—notice how the angle’s been straightening out? It’s almost 180° now. Let’s see. Phew!” He had looked at his chronometer. “We’ve fallen three hundred miles in something like eight or nine minutes.” Colbie started to protest, but the outlaw said, “Sure, to all intents and purposes we’ve simply fallen three hundred miles —the depth of the mirror. Remember, there isn’t any friction that’d hold us back, and the inclined surface we came down on just guided us. And that means we’re going to bounce right back to the other rim—see?”

  “Ye gods, yes!” yelled Colbie, then grimaced. “But we won’t quite reach the rim. Just that damnably small amount of friction will hold us back fifty or some feet. If there weren’t any friction things would be simple— we’d reach the other rim exactly.”

  “Sure. And climb over. Gravity gave us the momentum going down, but she’ll occupy herself taking it away at the same rate going up.”

  While they had been talking, they had passed bottom—quite definitely. They were going up, for the angle was slowly but surely increasing.

  “We won’t make it,” Colbie said disconsolately. “There’s the rub.”

  In the thoughtfully melancholy voice of the Danish prince, Deverel muttered, “Aye, there’s the rub; for in that sleep of death, what dreams may come, when we have shuffled off this mortal coil, must give us pause.”

  “And that’s appropriate, isn’t it!” Colbie sneered.

  “I played Hamlet once. Long time ago, of course, but I was pretty good. You know that second act scene where he—”

  “Skip it! Forget it—I don’t want to hear it. Let’s get on. There is the friction—infinitesimal. It doesn’t help at all when you try to change or retard your motion; but in the long run, it’ll build up a total resistance great enough to keep us from the rim.”

  “Check, check, and check,” agreed the outlaw, touching the fingers of his left hand with the index finger of his right.

  “That’s our situation. Looks hopeless.”

  “Maybe,” Deverel declared. “Let me add some further facts. We’re dropping down at an acceleration of twelve feet a second per second. At bottom, three hundred miles down, we had a terrific final velocity
. Don’t know exactly what it is, but there’s a formula for it. Going up, gravity will be right on our tails, lopping off twelve feet of speed for every second. Notice I say up and down. I mean it. Our angular speed is something else again, and is certainly much greater.”

  Then, as he saw Colbie’s impatient look, “I don’t know how we get out. Normally, when you get in some place, you go out the same way—but they closed the door on us. And, of course, I don’t see how we can change direction.”

  The IP man crossed his legs under him the other way for a change. He squinted upward. “Getting near top again. Damn that light. After a while, I’ll go blind.”

  “Shut your eyes,” Deverel told him callously, then, “Lord,” he remarked whimsically, his cynical, yet friendly, eyes crinkling. “I’m glad we’re what we are, Colbie. You have to chase me and I always feel obliged to run. Then we ran into the most interesting experiences. I’ve had plenty of good times looting canal boats on Mars—did I ever tell you how hard it was squeezing the rings off the Empress’ fingers? I used plenty of soap and water—and she was horrified at the way I wasted the water—but somehow I’m glad they got after me. And you are, too,” he added as if in self-defense.