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

by Edited By Isaac Asimov

  “Now in our vibrations, we always went through the center of the mirror, but we never went across to the other side. That is, one swing always began and ended in one-half the mirror. In relation to space, our plane of vibration was always the same; in relation to the mirror, it was a curve which crept round the mirror, touching the rim six times.

  “I had the devil of a time!” Deverel exclaimed. “I had to formulate a law which would tell me absolutely where each vibration would end, on the mirror, and thus how many times we’d have to swing across before we got back to our starting point—our original starting point. And finally I got this: One swing from rim to rim ends at that point on the rim which is opposite its starting point at end of swing. Get it? Well, if you don’t, draw a diagram of a circle divided into six sixty-degree wedges—and follow the law out.” And Colbie actually did draw such a diagram later. “In other words, it took us six swings from rim to rim to bring us back to our starting point. Those were the Crucial Moments. If we’d have got out at the wrong places, Colbie, we’d have starved before we traveled the distance back to the ships—if we knew where they were. Then, too, there was a chance one of us would end up pretty badly hurt! And one of us did—you had to drop back further than I’ll have to.

  “And that’s all there is to it. I let you out at the end of the twenty-third trip from rim to rim. I’m getting out at the end of the twenty-fourth—what I really believe would have been the Final Crucial Moment. We couldn’t have developed enough centrifugal force to send us over the rim if we’d gone around the mirror six more times, and fallen, as a consequence, sixty additional feet farther away from it. How’s your leg?” he inquired.

  “Rotten!” Colbie muffled a groan.

  “Keep your chin up!” Deverel snapped. “Seven minutes and I’ll be over the rim, and I’ll hotfoot it back to the ships. It may take several hours before I get back here,” he added in anxiety.

  “I’ll be all right,” Colbie mumbled.

  In the next few hours they kept in constant touch. Deverel made the rim, landed unharmed. He set off across the gouged plateau with both speed and care. He made the ships unharmed; and less than fifteen minutes later, the most beautiful sight in the world for Colbie was the sight of that slim, black IPF cruiser as it came zooming above Cyclops straight toward him.

  It landed. Deverel stepped out. He picked Colbie up in his strong arms, carried him inside the ship, took off his spacesuit, and bared his broken leg. It was a simple fracture, and was still in a healthy condition. Deverel went to work on it, put it in splints after having given it a wrench which accomplished the dual purpose of sending Colbie into a faint and setting the broken bone. Deverel put it in splints, and then bundled the IP man into bed.

  * * * *

  Six weeks later, when Colbie was able to hobble around on a makeshift crutch, Deverel was still there.

  “You make a nice nurse,” Colbie told him over a meal one day. “Thanks a lot.”

  “Skip it!” The outlaw grinned. “You weren’t such a bad nurse yourself. I’d have been gone before now if you hadn’t stepped in.” He gulped a cup of coffee. “You’re well enough, I figure,” he said uneasily. “‘Bout time to go?”

  Thoughtfully, uneasily, Colbie said, “Sure—I guess it is.”

  So that the next day Deverel sat down at the controls and touched them lightly. The ship shot upward into the eternal night of Cyclops, zoomed feather-light out over the strangest, most magical mirror ever to exist. And Colbie, looking at it, knew that he would always think of it with more affection than fear. He would always think of it as a child’s colossal toy. It had so many amusing characteristics that he halfway felt it’d be a pleasure to go zooming down its infinitely smooth surface once again.

  A dream world, he thought, if there ever was one.

  Once landed near Colbie’s ship, the outlaw said sardonically, “I guess we transfer from this ship to yours?”

  Colbie met his eyes seriously for a moment, then got up from where he was sitting, and limped back and forth in the close confines of the cabin.

  His teeth were set, his eyes frowning, his fists opening and closing. He sat down again and got up. The look on his face was almost savage.

  Suddenly he waved a hand violently, and a snarl contorted his features. He swung around, looking at the outlaw with hot, gray eyes. “I can’t do it!” he snapped. He shoved out his jaw. “Not after what we’ve been through. Damn it, Deverel,” he panted, “I don’t like this job. I feel too friendly for you. I like you too damn much. You’re a real guy. Hell, you could have run out any time you wanted to in the past six weeks.

  “No. No, I can’t do it. It’d be like”—he groped—”like taking unfair advantage, somehow. So,” he said bitterly, “you’re free.” He forced a smile onto his face. “I’ll write it in my report like this—Captured outlaw, but he put one over on me and escaped.’”

  “Right,” Deverel agreed steadily.

  “So I’ll be going. I’ll be here for, oh, about twenty-four hours. You going any place in particular?” he inquired politely.

  “No-o-o,” Deverel replied thoughtfully. “Don’t know as I have any particular destination. Drop you a postcard? I will, if you think you need me for anything.”

  “Don’t bother. I never have much trouble finding you,” Colbie said airily. Then he put on a spacesuit. Deverel worked the valves, and a moment later Colbie stood in the air-lock. For a moment, the two men stood there, saluting each other with grave eyes. Then the inner door closed and the outer opened.

  Deverel watched Colbie enter his ship.

  Then he sat down and, incandescent gases flaring from her stern jets, the slim cruiser accelerated until it was swallowed up in the trackless, illimitable wastes of space.

  * * * *

  I loved the story. It is a problem story, using authentic science (though the solution is inadequate, as a reader pointed out in the magazine’s letter column at considerable length a few months later).

  The time was to come when I was to try to write problem stories, but doing one as pure as “The Men and the Mirror” isn’t easy. The closest approach in my case was perhaps “Pâté de Foie Gras.”

  But “The Men and the Mirror” has a melancholy distinction for me. It was the last story I could thoroughly enjoy untrammeled by anything beyond science fiction readership. It was the last time I could experience the unalloyed delight of the uninvolved.

  You see, I had become more than a fan. As soon as I finished “Cosmic Corkscrew,” I took it to the offices of Astounding Science Fiction. There I met John Campbell for the first time. To be sure, “Cosmic Corkscrew” was rejected, but I was already working on another story (which was eventually sold and published as “The Callistan Menace”).

  It meant that I was evicted from Paradise. There was no longer, ever, any chance to read science fiction with complete enjoyment. I had become a writer, a competitor. If a published story was clearly worse than I could write, I was filled with contempt and annoyance. If it was clearly better, I was filled with envy and anxiety. I could no longer relax.

  But never mind . . .

  I was evicted from one Paradise only to enter another.

  In the August 1938 issue of Astounding Science Fiction there appeared “Who Goes There?” by Campbell himself, under his Don A. Stuart pseudonym. (By then, I knew who Stuart was.) This was, beyond any doubt, one of the very best science fiction stories ever written—perhaps the very best of any length below that of a novel.

  It was a rewrite of his “The Brain Stealers of Mars,” which is included in this anthology, but “Who Goes There?” is at a much higher level. It was as though Campbell was, by example, showing the science fiction world exactly what he wanted. “The Brain Stealers of Mars” was the story as it might be before, but “Who Goes There?” was as it was now and as he wanted it to be. [“Who Goes There?” was eventually made into the financially successful but science fictionally contemptible motion picture The Thing, for which John was
paid a mere few hundred dollars in total. When I expressed indignation at this, Campbell characteristically shrugged it off. He said, “It helps spread science fiction among the outsiders. That’s all that counts.”]

  Therefore, with the August 1938 issue of Astounding Science Fiction and with the story “Who Goes There?” The Golden Age of Science Fiction (with capitals) begins, and any book entitled Before the Golden Age must end.

  And I was part of the Golden Age. In October 1938, three months after I read “Who Goes There?” (with delight mingled with despair), I made my first sale—to the Ziff-Davis Amazing. And three months after that, I finally sold a story to Campbell.

  I was there. Like science fiction itself, I had moved up to a higher level. On that higher level, joys were not unalloyed, for the despair of a story that would not work out was there and the chilling dread of the deadly rejection slip. But the unprecedented pleasures of the occasional sale also existed.

  For what followed then, for the story of my next eleven years with its struggles and vicissitudes (and stories) I refer you to The Early Asimov, which must now be viewed as the second volume of my peculiarly designed autobiography.

  —Unless, of course, you have already read it.

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