Айзек Азимов - Before The Golden Age

There are also the naïvetés of science that assume that slowing atomic and subatomic movement reduces size (it actually cools an object) or that mass automatically increases and decreases with size, or that the living creatures of the submicroscopic world would be of the same species as ourselves and would speak a kind of Hawaiian (which the hero fortunately understands).

But never mind. The action is rapid and violent; the hero is utterly heroic, the heroine utterly beautiful, the various villains utterly despicable. Everything breathed a kind of knightly chivalry, and at the time I asked no more.

“Submicroscopic” and “Awlo of Ulm” did not directly affect my own writing. I have never been able to throw myself into the kind of tale in which virtue just happens to have stronger muscles, readier fists, and better weapons.

Two things lingered, though. One was the seductive vision of a world in a grain of dust (something handled with much superior force in “He Who Shrank,” which will appear later in the book). The notion is an old one, but it seemed to gain scientific backing in 1910, when the atom was briefly pictured as an ultramicroscopic Solar System.

Science quickly abandoned the picture as impossibly simplistic, but it caught on with science fiction writers. I never used it, because by the time I became a writer I had too good a grounding in the physical sciences to make me comfortable with the notion.

However, in 1965, when I was asked to do a novelization of a motion picture that had already been made, I found myself brought face to face with a similar notion. The picture was Fantastic Voyage, and it dealt with the miniaturization of human beings to the size of bacteria and with their adventures in a human blood stream. It was not the type of situation I would have chosen to use of my own accord, but since it was handed me, the dim memory of “Submicroscopic” helped persuade me to accept the task.

The other aspect of the stories that particularly impressed me was the duel with the rays in “Awlo of Ulm.” The ray gun was a staple of science fiction (and came true, after a fashion, with the laser). That and the disintegrator gun were the two great hand weapons of the future. No one, however, had gone as all out as had Meek in “Awlo of Ulm.”

I don’t think I ever actually used ray guns myself in my stories, but the “neuronic whip” in my book Pebble in the Sky is a definite reminiscence of the weapons of “Awlo of Ulm.”

* * * *

It was not long after “Awlo of Ulm” that I read “Tetrahedra of Space,” in the November 1931 issue of Wonder Stories, and was nearly as impressed. That was an important issue to me anyway, for after twelve months of experiment with pulp size, Wonder Stories went back to the large size with that issue, to my great relief.

* * * *

A moon of mottled silver swam in the star-flecked sky, pouring its flood of pale light over the sea of blue-green vegetation that swelled up and up in a mighty, slow wave to break in the foaming crest of the Andes. The shadow of the plane raced far below, dipping into the troughs, breasting the summits of that vast, unbroken sea of emerald stretching on and on beyond reach of vision.

And the stars—blinking Mira nearly overhead, a great Fomalhaut blazing over the far off mountains, and to the south a host of exotic strangers, burning with a fire that we of the north seldom know—clustered like great, glowing fireflies around the invisible Pole. But I paid little heed to moon and stars and silvered jungle, for night had caught me unawares, and it is no simple matter to lay down supplies in a little clearing, marked only by a flickering camp-fire, lost somewhere among the jungles of Brazil.

Or was it Brazil? Here three great states mingled in an upland of forest and mountain and grassy valley—Peru, Bolivia, Brazil. Here ancient races had made their home, raised their massive temples in the little valleys, wrested a fortune from the mountains, given their lives to the jungles—a people more ancient by far than those others beyond the ranges whom the Incas conquered. Here none had come before to study, yet now, somewhere in the gloom beneath me, was a little oval valley hung midway between crag and forest, and there would be the tents and fires of scientists, men of my own world.

I must swoop and circle and loose my load, then soar off into the silver night like some great moth spurning the flame, out into the world of the moon and the jungles, back to the government that had sent me, to plunge once more into the hum-drum routine of government flight, the moon and the silvered jungle forgotten and forever gone.

But there came no glimmer of flame in the darkness, no flicker of white tents in the moonlight. Along the outflung cross of the plane swam the unbroken sea of green, dark and boding against its wan beauty. It takes little error of judgment to miss a tiny clearing in the dark. So, as the western ranges crept out of their alignment, I swooped and soared, and was roaring back, higher now, over the silent moon-lit forests.

But one gap had I seen in the jungle—a harsh, black scar seared by some great fire from the bowels of the planet, ugly and grim in the soft beauty of the night. Again it slipped beneath, and as the shadow of the plane vanished against its harsh blackness it seemed to me that there came a scurry of furtive motion, an instant’s flicker of shadow against its deeper gloom. I half checked the course of the plane, to wheel and search it closer, then of a sudden the air about me blazed with a dull crimson fire that burned into my body with a numbing fury of unleashed energy, the drone of the engines gasped and died, and we were spinning headlong toward the silver sea beneath!

As it had come, the tingling paralysis passed, and I flattened out the mad dive of the crippled plane, cut the ignition, and dived over the side. As in a dream I felt the jerk of the parachute, saw the deserted plane, like a huge, wounded bat of the jungles, swoop and check and swoop again in a long flat dive that broke and pancaked into the upper reaches of the forest. Then the heavy pendulum of my body alone beat out the dull seconds as I swung and twisted beneath the silken hemisphere of the ‘chute. And then the leafy boughs, no longer silver but like hungry, clutching talons of black horror, swept up and seized me. I crashed through a tangle of vine and brittle bough into a hot, sweet-scented darkness where little hidden things scurried away into the night and the silence.

The rain-forest is like a mighty roof stretched over the valleys of tropical America. Interlacing branches blot out the sun from a world of damp and rotting dark, where great mottled serpents writhe among tangled branches and greater vines strangle the life out of giants of the forest in the endless battle for light. And there are little, venomous things of the dark ways—savage two-inch ants with fire in their bite, tiny snakelets whose particolored beauty masks grim death—creatures of the upper reaches and of the glorious world above the tree-tops. With the sunrise, a blaze of life and flaming color breaks over the roof of the jungle—flame of orchid and of macaw, and of the great, gaudy butterflies of this upper world. Beneath, there comes but a brightening of the green gloom to a wan half-light in which dim horrors seem to lurk and creep and watch, and giant lianas twist and climb up and ever up to the living light. And lowest of all is death and damp decay—the dull, sodden carpet of mold and rotting vegetation where fat white grubs burrow in blind fear and huge centipedes scurry underfoot.

The sun was an hour gone when I fell, but it was not until its second coming when I managed to writhe and slip through the tangle as if I too were of the jungle, moving toward the spot where my memory placed that blasted clearing, and the light. And with the deepening of the gloom in the upper branches, I came upon it, quite by accident, from above.