Before the Universe Read online

  BEFORE THE UNIVERSE

  Frederik Pohl

  C.M. Kornbluth

  Contents

  INTRODUCTION

  MARS-TUBE

  TROUBLE IN TIME

  VACANT WORLD

  BEST FRIEND

  BEFORE THE UNIVERSE

  NOVA MIDPLANE

  THE EXTRAPOLATED DIMWIT

  AFTERWORD

  ABOUT THE AUTHORS

  Bantam Science Fiction and Fantasy

  Ask, your bookseller for the books you have missed

  BEFORE THE UNIVERSE by Frederik Pohl and C. M. Kornbluth

  CAMP CONCENTRATION by Thomas M. Disch

  A CANTICLE FOR LEIBOWITZ by Walter M. Miller, Jr.

  THE CENTAURI DEVICE by M. John Harrison

  CITY WARS by Dennis Palumbo

  CROMPTON DIVIDED by Robert Sheckley

  CRYSTAL PHOENIX by Michael Berlyn

  ENGINE SUMMER by John Crowley

  FANTASTIC VOYAGE by Isaac Asimov

  THE GATES OF HEAVEN by Paul Preuss

  JEM by Frederik Pohl

  MAN PLUS by Frederik Pohl

  ON WINGS OF SONG by Thomas M. Disch

  THE SNAIL ON THE SLOPE by Boris and Arkady Strugatsky

  SPACE ON MY HANDS by Fredric Brown

  THE STAINLESS STEEL RAT WANTS YOU! by Harry Harrison

  SUNDIVER by David Brin

  TALES FROM GAVAGAN'S BAR by L. Sprague de Camp and Fletcher Pratt

  THE TIME MACHINE by H. G. Wells

  TIME STORM by Gordon Dickson

  20,000 LEAGUES UNDER THE SEA by Jules Verne

  BEFORE THE UNIVERSE

  A Bantam Book / July 1980

  Book designed by Cathy Marinaccio

  The stories contained in this volume were all previously published: "Mars Tube," copyright 1941 by Fictioneers, Inc.; "Trouble In Time," copyright 1940 by Fictioneers, Inc.; "Vacant World," copyright 1940 by Fictioneers, Inc.; "Best Friend," copyright 1941 by Fictioneers, Inc.; "Nova Midplane," copyright 1940 by Fictioneers, Inc., "The Extrapolated Dimwit," copyright 1942 by Columbia Publications, Inc.

  All rights reserved. Copyright © 1980 by Frederik Pohl. Cover art copyright © 1980 by Bantam Books, Inc. This book may not be reproduced in whole or in part, by mimeograph or any other means, without permission. For information address: Bantam Books, Inc.

  ISBN 0-553-11042—X Published simultaneously in the United States and Canada

  Bantam Books are published by Bantam Books, Inc. Its trademark, consisting of the words "Bantam Books" and the portrayal of a bantam, is Registered in U.S. Patent and Trademark Office and in other countries. Marca Registrada. Bantam Books, Inc., 666 Fifth Avenue, New York, New York 10019.

  PRINTED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA

  0 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 I

  INTRODUCTION

  In the late 1930s in New York City, a bunch of us kids, fans anxious to become twos, joined together in The Futurian Society of New York. Don Wollheim was the “old man” of the group. He had been old enough to vote in the presidential election of 1936; most of the rest of us wouldn’t make it for several years thereafter. The other members included Dirk Wylie, Robert W. Lowndes, Isaac Asimov, Richard Wilson, John B. Michel—well, the story of the Futurians has been told often enough.* (* And is the subject of a forthcoming nonfiction book by Damon Knight.)

  And to us was drawn, around 1938, a young, plump, bright fellow from the farthest north part of Manhattan you can be in without striking the Bronx, Cyril Kornbluth.

  In 1939 I became editor of two P*R*O*F*E*S*S*I*O*N*A*L science fiction magazines called Astonishing Stories and Super Science Stories. They were low-budget projects in every respect. The magazines sold for a dime and fifteen cents respectively, and paid their writers (and me) accordingly. In order to acquire enough stories to put an issue together without leaving a sizeable fraction of the pages blank, I had to beat the bushes for cheap talent. The first and most obvious place to beat was within The Futurian Society. In putting together one issue, I found myself ten thousand words short, and had something like $35 left in my budget to buy a story with. So I took my troubles to the fannish commune on Bedford Avenue, Brooklyn, where half a dozen of the Futurians lived, and Cyril Kornbluth and Dick Wilson undertook to fill the hole for me. They stayed up all night, each banging away on his own typewriter. I have never known the exact circumstances, but as I understand it Dick Wilson started on page one and Cyril started on page twenty, and somehow they managed to make the ends match up in the middle. It came out to a precise ten thousand words, and was entitled “Stepsons of Mars.” They signed it with the joint pen name of “Ivar Towers”—the name of the commune, you see, was “The Ivory Tower”—and I published it. I would not say the story was good. But even at that stage both Cyril and Dick were gifted enough with words so that it wasn’t utterly bad. The reader mail dealt with it no more harshly, or kindly, than with any of the other stories in the issue.

  I don’t think it was the first Futurian collaboration. We had all been collaborating with each other from time to time. Any two Futurians might match up to produce a story. If they found the going rough, they might well call in any other, or any several others. There was one story in which, if my memory does not play me false, something like seven of us claimed a share before it was published. As an editor I was hospitable to all Futurians, being one of them myself. So were Don Wollheim and Doc Lowndes, when shortly thereafter they acquired magazines of their own to edit; but we managed to sell stories from time to time even to non-Futurian editors. I made sales, alone or in collaboration, to Amazing, Astounding, and Planet Stories. Wollheim and Michel sold to Astounding, Lowndes to Unknown, Asimov was beginning to sell to everybody, mostly alone (he was always a strange one, Isaac was), but once or twice in collaboration with me. Etcetera. There was a lot of talent in the Futurians. And a lot of it was concentrated in the person of Cyril Kornbluth.

  I remember some of Cyril’s nonprofessional production at that time. Strange little essays, quirky “almost-stories”, poetry. Some of it was doggerel, but funny doggerel, as in the one he called “Gym Class”:

  One, two, three, four,

  Flap your arms and prance,

  In stinky shirt and stinky shoes

  And stinky little pants.

  Some of it was lushly sexual, as in a poem—I think it was called “Elephanta,” but I cannot now say why—which began:

  How long, my love, shall I behold this wall

  Between our gardens, yours the rose

  And mine the swooning

  And some of it was simply brilliant. As far as I know, it is almost all lost, but it would repay someone to search through the Futurian fan magazines of the period to see if any might still be found.

  The first published story by Cyril and me was Before the Universe. (It is included in this volume.) We worked out an assembly line procedure: I wrote an “action chart”—essentially a plot outline, with some indication of characters and setting—from which Cyril wrote a first draft, which I then revised and retyped … and, more often than not, published. When “Before the- Universe” reached print, the reader mail was satisfactory, if not wildly enthusiastic, and we decided to continue the series with “Nova Midplane” and “The Extrapolated Dimwit,” also both included here.

  At the same time we were writing other stories together, sometimes with a third party; and we were both also writing extensively with others or alone. I really don’t know how many stories we wrote during the period covered by this book, which all in all was only about three years, late 1939 through 1942. According to my records, about twenty-six science fiction stories which I wrote (in whole or in part) did get published during that period. (Cyril and most of
the other Futurians stayed pretty close to science fiction. I wandered. I was also writing for the detective, horror, fantasy, air war, sports, and love pulps at that time—everything but Westerns, which I simply could not bring myself to do. It wasn’t so much that I wanted to appear in them as that I wanted to test myself to see if I could survive outside the SF ambience.) Cyril’s total must have been similar.

  Nearly everything Cyril and I wrote together got published. After all, once I was finished revising it there was at least one editor who, by definition, was pleased with it. So if it didn’t sell somewhere else the first time or two out, it always sold to me. But there were a few stories which we did not finish for one reason or another (some of which we came back to much later, and are in the other volume* (* Critical Mass, Bantam Books.)), and at least one story which we finished but never published, because it got lost. It was called “Under the Sequoias. ” (Neither Cyril nor I had ever seen a sequoia, but then we hadn’t actually seen the surface of Mars, either.) It had something to do with a superior race of beings who lived underground. Actually I think it was one of the best stories we wrote together at that time, but that may be only memory beautifying truth. At any rate, I have little hope of ever reading it again.

  We wrote another story about a man who used some chemical to precipitate oxygen out of the air in the form of snow, and jell the ocean as warm ice (ah, there, Kurt Vonnegut), but unfortunately it had to do with the impending crisis between the United States and Japan, and before we got it printed Pearl Harbor put it out of date. So we tore it up.

  All the other early stories we wrote in collaboration without other partners (plus two on which we called in a third hand) are herein. I hope you will read them gently, gentle reader. They are our youth.

  BEFORE THE UNIVERSE

  MARS-TUBE

  Nearly all the stories in this volume were written for, and appeared in, one of the two magazines I was editing at the time, Astonishing Stories and Super Science Stories. There are good reasons why an editor should not write for himself, but there are good reasons why he should, too. One is for balance. When, as writer, I write for myself, as editor, what I usually write is the kind of story I wish I had to print but don’t seem to get enough of from other sources. “Mars-Tube” is one of those. I like colorful extraterrestrial adventure. I also like humorous SF. I never, as an editor, have enough stories which combine these two qualities, and so over the years I’ve written a good many such stories to print myself. “Mars-Tube” was one of the first.

  I After Armageddon

  Ray Stanton set his jaw as he stared at the molded lead seal on the museum door. Slowly, he deciphered its inscription, his tongue stumbling over the unfamiliar sibilants of the Martian language as he read it aloud before translating. “To the –strangers from the third planet – who have won their – bitter –triumph – we of Mars charge you, – not to wantonly destroy –that which you will find – within this door … Our codified learning – may serve you – better than we ourselves – might have done.”

  Stanton was ashamed of being an Earthman as he read this soft indictment. “Pathetic,” he whispered. “Those poor damned people.”

  His companion, a slight, dark-haired girl who seemed out of place in the first exploratory expedition to visit Mars after the decades-long war that had annihilated its population, nodded in agreement. ‘the war was a crying shame,” she confirmed. “But mourning the dead won’t bring them back. To work, Stanton!”

  Stanton shook his head dolefully, but copied the seal’s inscription into his voluminous black archaeologist’s notebook. Then he tore off the seal and tentatively pushed the door. It swung open easily, and an automatic switch snapped on the hidden lights as the two people entered.

  Both Stanton and Annamarie Hudgins, the girl librarian of the expedition, had seen many marvels in their wanderings over and under the red planet, for every secret place was open to their eyes. But as the lights slowly blossomed over the colossal hall of the library, he staggered back in amazement that so much stately glory could be built into one room.

  The synthetic slabs of gem-like rose crystal that the Martians had reserved for their most awesome sanctuaries were flashing from every wall and article of furnishing, winking with soft ruby lights. One of the typically Martian ramps led up in a gentle curve from their left. The practical Annamarie at once commenced to mount it, heading for the reading-rooms that would be found above. Stanton followed more slowly, pausing to examine the symbolic ornamentation in the walls.

  “We must have guessed right, Annamarie,” he observed, catching up with her. “This one’s the central museum-library for sure. Take a look at the wall-motif.”

  Annamarie glanced at a panel just ahead, a bas-relief done in the rose crystal. “Because of the ultimo symbol, you mean?”

  “Yes, and because – well, look.” The room in which they found themselves was less noble than the other, but considerably more practical. It was of radical design, corridors converging like the spokes of a wheel on a focal point where they stood. Inset in the floor – they were almost standing on it –was the ultima symbol, the quadruple linked circles which indicated pre-eminence. Stanton peered down a corridor lined with racks of wire spools. He picked up a spool and stared at its title-tag.

  “Where do you suppose we ought to start?” he asked.

  “Anywhere at all,” Annamarie replied. “We’ve got lots of time, and no way of knowing what to look for. What’s the one in your hands?”

  “It seems to say, ‘the Under-Eaters” – whatever that may mean,” Stanton juggled the tiny “book” undecidedly. “That phrase seems familiar somehow. What is it?”

  “Couldn’t say. Put it in the scanner and we’ll find out.” Stanton obeyed, pulling a tiny reading-machine from its cubicle. The delicacy with which Stanton threaded the fragile wire into its proper receptacle was something to watch. The party had ruined a hundred spools of records before they’d learned how to adjust the scanners, and Stanton had learned caution.

  Stanton and his companion leaned back against the bookracks and watched the fluorescent screen of the scanner. A touch of the lever started its operation. There was a soundless flare of light on the screen as the wire made contact with the scanning apparatus, then the screen filled with the curious wavering peak-and-valley writing of the Martian graphic language.

  By the end of the third “chapter” the title of the book was still almost as cryptic as ever. A sort of preface had indicated that “Under-Eaters” was a name applied to a race of underground demons who feasted on the flesh of living Martians. Whether these really existed or not Stanton had no way of telling. The Martians had made no literary distinction between fact and fiction, as far as could be learned. It had been their opinion that anything except pure thought-transference was only approximately true, and that it would be useless to distinguish between an intentional and an unintentional falsehood.

  But the title had no bearing on the context of the book, which was a kind of pseudo-history with heavily allusive passages. It treated of the Earth-Mars war: seemingly it had been published only a few months before the abrupt end to hostilities. One rather tragic passage, so Stanton thought, read:

  “A special meeting of the tactical council was called on (an untranslatable date) to discuss the so-called new disease on which the attention of the enemy forces has been concentrating. This was argued against by (a high official) who demonstrated conclusively that the Martian intellect was immune to nervous diseases of any foreign order, due to its high development through telepathy as cultivated for (an untranslatable number of) generations. A minority report submitted that this very development itself would render the Martian intellect more liable to succumb to unusual strain. (A medical authority) suggested that certain forms of insanity were contagious by means of telepathy, and that the enemy-spread disease might be of that type.”

  Stanton cursed softly: “Damn Moriarity and his rocket ship. Damn Sweeney for getting killed and damn
and double-damn the World Congress for declaring war on Mars!” He felt like a murderer, though he knew he was no more than a slightly pacifistic young exploring archaeologist. Annamarie nodded sympathetically but pointed at the screen. Stanton looked again and his imprecations were forgotten as he brought his mind to the problem of translating another of the strangely referential passages:

  “At this time the Under-Eaters launched a bombing campaign on several of the underground cities. A number of subterranean-caves were linked with the surface through explosion craters and many of the sinister creations fumbled their way to the surface. A corps of technologists prepared to re-seal the tunnels of the Revived, which was done with complete success, save only in (an untranslatable place-name) where several Under-Eaters managed to wreak great havoc before being slain or driven back to their tunnels. The ravages of the Twice-Born, however, were trivial compared to the deaths resulting from the mind diseases fostered by the flying ships of the Under-Eaters, which were at this time …”

  The archaeologist frowned. There it was again. Part of the time “Under-Eaters” obviously referred to the Earthmen, the rest of the time it equally obviously did not. The text would limp along in styleless, concise prose and then in would break an obscure reference to the “Creations” or ‘twice-Born” or “Raging Glows.”

  “Fairy tales for the kiddies,” said Annamarie Hudgins, snapping off the scanner.

  Stanton replied indirectly: “Put it in the knapsack. I want to take it back and show it to some of the others. Maybe they can tell me what it means.” He swept a handful of other reading-bobbins at random into the knapsack, snapped it shut, and straightened. “Lead on, Mac-Hudgins,” he said.