The blood taken from the Gibraltar tribes was heavily B and slightly A, with four individuals who were O. This presented a puzzling picture. The answer, if it would ever be found, would probably come after all data was brought back to the twenty-first century.
The two tribes marched on across the land bridge which, at that time, was over six miles wide. They entered North Africa and continued along the coast eastward. The coast was about four to five hundred feet below the level of the Mediterranean as the twenty-first century knew it. The group moved slowly, because the three scientists were busy taking specimens and measurements. As the scientific collection increased, more people had to be detailed to carry the growing bulk of information. And that meant that the work of the bearers had to be parceled out among the others. As a result, Gribardsun had to spend more time hunting with the rifle to feed the mob. But he also had to devote extra time to the scientific work, since Silverstein was incapable of performing his duties.
The total range of duties kept Gribardsun working from dawn or before until far past supper. But he was an excellent administrator, in that he knew the value of letting his inferiors share the burden.
'I learned that in His Majesty's Service,' he told Rachel.
'His? But...
'I meant Her Majesty's, of course.'
'Even so,' Rachel said, 'that would make you born...'
It was just a matter of speaking,' he said. 'One of the archaic phrases of which I'm so fond. I meant, in the government service, of course. But I learned that if you don't want to kill yourself with work and worry, you delegate responsibility.'
'You should be exhausted,' she said. 'But you took fresh as ever. I'm the one who's dying of overwork and lack of sleep, and yet my duties are as nothing compared to yours.'
'You're worried about Drummond.'
'Yes. It's all over between us. And he may even have tried to - well, he did try to kill me, and I believe he tried to kill you. But he was mentally ill. He couldn't help himself. I don't hate him. I just don't love him any more. Yet, I feel responsible for him. Sorry for him, I suppose. I can understand him. I sometimes feel that I'm going insane myself. I just can't get a strong grip on reality. If this is reality. It all seems so dreamlike and too often nightmarish. Sometimes I think I'll scream if I don't see something familiar. I know it's blasphemy, from a scientific viewpoint, but I wish that we could return to our time tomorrow. I'd chuck all that has to be learned for a chance to climb aboard and know that in a few minutes I'd be back in the twenty-first century.'
'This reaction - this temporal shock - is just as valuable a datum as anything we'll bring back,' he said. 'I hope it won't cause time travel to be abandoned. I doubt it, since only one of us is very much incapacitated, and we can't prove that that happened because of temporal dislocation. In any event, you can be sure that those chosen for future expeditions will be much more deeply tested. But,' he added, smiling, 'it will be too late for anybody on this expedition.'
'Why do you smile?'
'I'll tell you some day.'
The two tribes moved on along the coast of Morocco. Though it was cold, often below freezing, and snow fell, the climate was not as rigorous as in Iberia. They marched more swiftly, but their halts were longer, since the three scientists had enough to do to keep them in each area for six months. They took thousands of photographs, made maps of the coastal areas, took samples of the soil and the water and specimens of flora and fauna, from local bacteria and amoeba and earthworms up to the elephants. They could not take the elephant bodies with them, of course, but Gribardsun and Rachel Silverstein did random dissections and preserved tissue slides. They made Carbon-14 and xenonargon datings on the spot with their equipment. They fished and then studied specimens before giving them over to the cooks.
The tribes living on the coast were generally small and lived by hunting and fishing. Rivers ran through the Sahara and emptied into the western half of the Mediterranean. The river mouths were plentiful with fish and seal and porpoise, and inland were the elephants and rhinoceroses, antelope and deer and goat, horses, aurochs, and even bison. There were also lions and bears and leopards. Although the great snow leopards existed in France and Iberia, Gribardsun had never seen one in those regions. But he had not been in Africa more than a week before he glimpsed three at a distance.
The natives were larger than the Arab-Berber type of the modern era but somewhat smaller, thinner-boned and darker than the modern Europeans. They were also longer-headed and tended toward aquiline faces. So far, no Negroes had been encountered nor had any of the Africans ever heard of black men.
'It's too late, even in 12,000 B.C., to determine the origin of the Negro race,' Gribardsun said. 'I don't suppose we'll ever know if it's true that they arose somewhere in southern Asia and then migrated to Africa and Austronesia and were killed off or absorbed on the Asiatic mainland. Or if they originated in Africa and then, somehow, some migrated to New Guinea and Melanesia, leaving damn few traces along the trail. Even so, we might learn something if we could explore East Africa now and learn what types are living there. I suspect there'd be some Caucasoid and Capsoid types and perhaps some Negritos.'
'You surely aren't thinking of taking us down there?' Rachel said.
'I would object,' von Billmann said. 'That would take us entirely too far from the vessel; it would definitely imperil the expedition. Moreover, if we're going to roam far and wide, we should be doing it in central Europe, preferably somewhere between the Elbe and Vistula. We should be ascertaining whether proto-Indo-Hittite speech exists there, or ...'
Gribardsun smiled but shook his head. 'You're the greatest linguist of the twenty-first century, Robert, and you have a very high intelligence. But I have to keep reminding you that those rivers are buried under vast masses of ice. If you ever did find your proto-I-H-speakers, it would be somewhere to the south. Maybe in Italy. Or in France, a few miles from where the vessel emerged. Or maybe on this coast, a few miles ahead of us. Or behind us, a few miles inland.'
Von Billmann laughed, but his face was red. 'I know,' he said. 'But that's my blind spot. My brain slips a cog every time I think of my love. I know that glaciers cover that area, but I'm so eager to locate my language, my beloved language, that I forgot. But I have a hunch, an intuition, worthless perhaps and only the expression of a wish, that my speakers are living not too far to the south of the glaciers, perhaps in Czechoslovakia.'
'Next year, if circumstances permit, we'll go. to Czechoslovakia,' Gribardsun said. 'We have to study the edges of the glaciers, anyway. And if we can go to North Africa, we can certainly go to central Europe.'
Von Billmann had never looked so happy.
The tribes moved on slowly eastward. By now they could communicate fairly well with signs and a mixture of each other's vocabulary. The structure of the two languages was dissimilar, and each contained sounds difficult for a nonnatal speaker to master. The result was the gradual building up of a pidgin. It contained sounds that both the Wota'shaimg and the Shluwg could pronounce, and vocabulary items which the two tribes had agreed to accept, though the agreement was apparently entirely unconscious. The structure of the pidgin tended more toward that of the Wota'shaimg, since they were the dominant tribe. But it was considerably simplified, and before a year was up, its structure had been determined. Von Billmann was ecstatic at being present at the birth of a new language. He recorded it as it developed and, in fact, since he knew more about pidgins and synthetic and artificial languages than anybody in this or any other time, he played a big part in the development of this one. He knew what the ideal language should be, and he used his influence to shape the pidgin.
'If the two tribes stay together,' he said, 'they may abandon their own language and substitute the pidgin. That would be the most economical and logical course.'
Though the two tribes were of somewhat different physical type, and their way of looking at the universe differed greatly in many respects, they shared many similar customs. T
heir attitudes toward marriage and their sexual habits were near identical, their methods of hunting were identical, and their governmental systems were much alike. They ate practically the same foods; the tabus of each were few, and neither objected to the other tribe eating its tabu animal
Then Tkant, the big man whom Gribardsun had defeated in the snow arena, decided that he could provide for two families. So he asked for, and got, Neliska, Dubhab's daughter, as his second wife. Gribardsun, as her protector, gave her away. He had one less obligation, though Neliska had asked him, before she accepted Tkant, if he intended to marry her. Gribardsun hesitated and then said that he thought it best if she married Tkant.
Laminak, Neliska's sister, was happy at this decision. She had just gone through her rites of passage and so was, theoretically, eligible at the age of twelve for marriage. In practice, the young females did not marry until they were fourteen; some not until they were sixteen. Most of the early married did not bear children until they were eighteen or even older. This was not because of any method of birth control; the women did not become fertile until relatively late.
On the other hand, some of the tribes along the coast had many females who bore children at the age of twelve. The rate of death at childbirth was higher for both infant and mother in these tribes.
The two tribes walked eastward, encountering peoples who either fled or were easily awed by the display of Very lights or a few shots fired over their heads. No lives were lost on either side in these encounters, and after Gribardsun shot a rhinoceros or two or some wild cattle for the natives, a peaceful if sometimes uneasy relationship was established.
About the middle of January, the group arrived in what would be, someday, Tunisia. Actually, they were in an area that would be underwater off the Tunisian coast in the modern age, but the scientists made a number of treks from their base camp into the interior. Here the snows lay not too deeply on the winter grass and on top of the many trees. A broad river wound through the land and poured down into the Mediterranean. Gribardsun followed its course for two hundred miles before reluctantly turning back.
'I get the same joy from seeing the vast herds of many different types of animals and the great predators that feed on them as Robert does when he finds a new language,' he said to Rachel. 'This is the way a world should be. Few human beings, many animals, plenty of water and grass. I would like this even better if there were many more trees, but I know that these do exist further south. The air is pure, and nature works unhindered by man.'
'I long for the day when I can return home,' she said. 'But you sound as if you dread it.'
'Far from it,' he said. 'I look forward with joy to the day that the vessel returns.'
That was only one of the many puzzling statements he made. Rachel did not ask him what he meant. By now she knew that he just would not reply.
After a month and a half at their Tunisian camp, Gribardsun gave the word to march again. They set off toward Sicily. The stealing of water by the great northern glaciers had not only resulted in a land bridge across what would be the Straits of Gibraltar. There was another, and far greater, land bridge between Italy, Sicily, Tunisia, and part of Libya. The Mediterranean was, at this time, two smaller seas separated by the extension of Italy.
The tribes moved on the western coast of the bridge with the hills high on their right. And the sixth day out, Drummond found their first human fossil skull.
Apparently, though he was still living in the age of twelve, he had not forgotten everything he had learned since then. He was out walking near the camp, accompanied by Laminak and a juvenile male for protection, when he saw a piece of the skull sticking out of a layer of limestone halfway up a hill.
He told von Billmann of it. He would not speak to Rachel or John then - another indication that he was not entirely stuck at an early age. Robert verified the find and told the other two scientists. They spent a week delicately digging out the skull and some pieces of skeleton and looking for other fossils.
The study of the stratum and the bones, and the gaseous content and decay of the rocks, indicated that the skull belonged to a young man who had lived about 200,000 B.C., during the Third Glacial. His massive features indicated a human intermediate between Heidelberg and Neanderthal man. No tools were found in conjunction with the fossil.
The descendant of Homo heidelbergensis and the ancestor of Homo neanderthalensis was dubbed Homo Silverstein.
Though every member of the tribe was alerted to evidence of fossils, and some fossil animals and plants were found, no more human fossils were seen.
The land bridge was crossed and the safari was traveling on the west coast of Sicily, or, rather, on land that would be hundreds of feet below the twenty-first century Sicilian beaches. Occasionally, the scientists went to the mountains inland to make observations and collect specimens.
The next bridge was between Sicily and Italy. When they arrived at the mouth of the Tiber, they went up the river valley to the site of Rome-to-be. A small tribe of particularly brutish people lived there. They were short and squat and had skeletal characteristics which indicated a mixing with Neanderthals at some time in the past. They wore no clothes and daubed themselves with mud to keep themselves warm in the winter. Their weapons and tools were far too primitive for even 12,000 B.C., and they practiced cannibalism.
Farther north was another group which was a physical double of the pre-Romans. But these were far more advanced in technology and wore fur clothing skillfully sewn together and used fine stone, wood, and bone tools and weapons. Their language was related to that of the Tiber people.
Gribardsun had a theory that was, he admitted, mystical to some extent, and a modification of Jung's. He believed that each group of people had its own particular soul or collective psyche. The factors creating this soul were unconscious but deliberate. That is, the collective mind determined, in some as yet unanalyzable manner, to fashion itself into a mode belligerent or pacifist, lazy or busy, poetic or practical, progressive or static or regressive. Some collective souls yearned for a place by the gods; others, by swine.
The two groups they had just left were examples of the difference of collective psyches in two similar groups. Both had picked up some Neanderthal genes, and isolation from Homo sapiens had enabled them to retain these genes. It was possible that the two had only recently been one, and that the split had taken place only a few generations before. But one seemed to be deliberately brutish; the other, quite human.
'I don't think your colleagues at the University of Greater Europe would accept that theory,' von Billmann said.
'I do not care. It's only a theory, anyway, with no way to prove it, and I don't intend to waste time trying to do so,' Gribardsun said.
By early spring, they had entered that prong of land which took in the islands of Elba, Corsica, and Sardinia. These comprised one land mass connected with Italy and covered with firs and pines and filled with game, including elephants, cave bear and lions. Some of the tribes had Negroid skeletal traits, but they were definitely Caucasoid. Their hair was curly, but only loosely so, and their lips, though full, were not overly everted. There was a small minority of blonds among them.
By late April, the safari crossed the border-to-be between Italy and France. Gribardsun, having determined the border by astronomical and geodesic observations, was the first to walk across the imaginary line. Humming the Marseillaise, he strode along. His thick black hair was cut short straight across his forehead; the rest swinging shoulder-length. His face was shaven; he had not yet overcome his dislike of beards. He wore a yellow-brown lion-skin cape and a red deer loincloth and brown bearskin boots. The rifle was slung over his shoulder, and he carried a flint-tipped spear in one hand. His big steel hunting knife was in a sheath at his leopard-skin belt.
Behind him came Glamug, holding high at the end of a wooden pole a cave-bear skull. His face and body were painted with bright symbols, and he was chanting a protective ritual. Behind him came the chiefs and
chief warriors of both tribes in their pecking order and then the Wota'shaimg. Behind them was the standard bearer of the Shluwg, holding on a pole a wildcat skull, and after him his tribe. The drummers and fluters and whistlers of both tribes were playing their own 'national' anthems, and their people were singing, respectively, the Song of the Father Bear and the Song of the Great Wildcat Mother. The only ones whose musical sensibilities were offended were the time travelers.
'Lafayette, we are here!' shouted Gribardsun in French. He seemed to be unusually exuberant that day. They had covered over 3,600 miles in nine months by taking their time at some places and making long forced marches between others. Gribardsun would have liked to stop off for about two weeks to rest at their starting point, the overhang in the Vezere River valley. After their strength was restored, they could go northwestward across France and cross the land bridge into England, following the Thames, which ran across the bridge and into Europe.
But when, at the end of their two-weeks' rest, he suggested this plan, he found that the tribes refused to go. They had had enough of wandering. Now they wanted to settle down for the summer, hunt animals, pick berries, dig roots, tan skins, fish in the rivers for salmon, hold feasts, repair tents, and make new ones.
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