Finally, the smaller of the two fell backwards, to be immediately pounced upon by the larger. At that Arch jumped to his feet, flame pistol tightly gripped in his hand.
“What’s the idea?” Joyce asked in a startled voice.
“A thought’s just struck me. We could do with a companion from this world to tell us what it’s all about. I’m going to rescue the smaller ape, if I can. Before long he’ll be a man. Stay here or come with me. Please yourself.”
She scrambled to her feet at that and followed him through the cave opening. Running swiftly together over the loose rubble they gained the fighting pair at last and paused, momentarily appalled by the overpowering fury and speed of the brutes. Beyond doubt it was a fight to the death. The forest behind was echoing with the gibbering of apes, subhumans, and queerly fashioned things that had no discernible origin, scuttling wildly through the fastness.
Arch hesitated for a moment, maneuvering for a good position—then as the giant aggressor abruptly stood upright for a final plunge, Arch released his flame gun. Vivid streaking energy struck the brute clean in the stomach, blasted his great hairy body into fragments amidst a passing stench of singeing hair and flesh.
“Nice going!” Joyce breathed in delight, then swung round nervously as the other ape got painfully to its feet.
By the time it had fully stood up, it was miraculously healed of its injuries and had become less apelike in form, less shaggy. Instead it had all the evidences of an Earthly Heidelberg man—huge, hairy, and terrible.
Arch backed away gently, flame gun ready, calling to the biped coaxingly.
“We’re friends. Want to help,” he said anxiously. “Don’t try and start anything or I’ll let you have it!”
A momentary silence fell. Even the forest went quieter—changing and sliding strangely into new and complex patterns, whirling in the sea of mutations.
The rescued apeman stood in puzzled bewilderment, grinning diabolically. Joyce drew tightly into Arch’s arm at the sight of that receding forehead, protruding eyebrows, iron hard jaws, and sharply pointed ears.
“Couldn’t—couldn’t you have chosen a better-looking pupil?” she ventured, voice trembling. “He’s giving me the jitters.”
“As long as I’ve got this flame gun, we’re safe enough.…”
Arch held out his hand slowly, then snatched it back as the brute’s huge teeth bared in petulant anger.… Then suddenly it raised a hand to its little forehead and seemed to give the slightest of shudders. When it lowered the hand the facial appearance had changed again into that of a near-Neanderthal man.
Arch tired of the mutual scrutiny at last, tired of guessing at the workings in the creature’s little brain. He turned, pointed towards the cliff cave, and headed back towards it, glancing ever and again over his shoulder.
“Maybe he’ll follow,” he murmured, and the girl sniffed.
“I don’t fancy being bottled up in a cave with that brute,” she grumbled. “Apart from the fact that he isn’t handsome, he might make the place smell.”
“Will you get it through your thick head that he’ll one day be a man of supreme and far-reaching intelligence?” Arch snapped. “At the rate he changes at, he’ll be equal with you and me at the end of a few days. Besides, he’ll be darned helpful to us. He owes us a debt, don’t forget. We saved his life.”
She glanced back nervously, “Well, he’s following us anyhow,” she said worriedly. “Suppose—suppose we stop outside the cave? Maybe it’ll be safer.”
Arch nodded assent and once they gained the cave he stood ready and waiting until the brute came up. There was something incredible and baffling about the mad evolution of the creature. The subhuman effect had changed again: the creature had lost the power of operating the nodules of its simian-pointed ears. At terrific speed he was developing into an intelligent man.
Finally he came level, looking in almost childlike wonderment at his outspread fingers. Between them reposed the vestigial remains of his saurian origin. In thirty seconds they had become natural fingers, but thickly stubbed.
“We’re trying to help you,” Arch said presently, making dumb motions. “We want you for a friend.”
The brute looked up; a faint flash of wisdom crossed his apish face and then disappeared. His only response was a deep, chesty grunt, then he sat down heavily right across the cave entrance as though to wait.
“No dice,” Arch growled. “He would choose that place to squat. Guess we’ll have to wait until he gets more intelligent.”
Joyce, her fears abating somewhat at the evidence of the creature’s docility, relinquished her hold and squatted down too. Within a few minutes the Sun westered over the fantastic forest and sank at lightning speed.
The brute slept during the two-hour night, watched ceaselessly by the chilled and wondering Earthlings.… When the Sun rose again, the creature was no longer an ape but a naked man quite on a par with a modern earth being.
The moment he woke up and beheld the two shiveringly watching him he leapt lithely to his feet and sped at a terrific speed into the distance—not towards a forest, but towards an area now sprouting with rudely designed huts and abodes.
The age of the wild had passed.
“Pity he dashed off like that,” was Joyce’s comment, as she rose stiffly and rubbed her chilled bare arms. “Maybe he got self-conscious at finding himself a nudist. If he was as cold as I am, I’m not surprised.”
“The cold is our growing distance from the Sun,” Arch said. “As to our friend, you’ve said something a darn sight more accurate than most of your observations. The need for clothing, in his now advanced mind, will be a strong urge. Bet you a dollar he turns up again!”
“Check!” the girl said, and after diving into the cave for the provision bag, she settled herself to eat and wait again, grateful for the sun, smaller though it undoubtedly was.
For an hour there was no sign of the ape-cum-man. The only changes lay in the queer city. With every passing moment it changed indescribably. Illusory flutterings constantly rippled over it. In fifteen minutes the crude dwellings were normal edifices; the first ramifications of a city were coming into being.
“Do you think that city builds itself or is it actually erected by the labor of unseen creatures?” Joyce asked at last, her blue eyes utterly perplexed. “It isn’t even reasonable to suppose that any beings could work at such a frantic rate and with progression of ideas.”
“Don’t forget that this planet is in top gear,” Arch murmured. “Think back on the terrific speed at which everything has moved—or at least it’s looked that way to our senses. Remember the speed. of the earlier metamorphoses, the whirling rate of that ape fight—the way our naked friend streaked off like lightning with the lid off. Because Earthly evolution and movement is so slow, it doesn’t imply that the same thing must exist everywhere else. This chameleon planet has to cash in on the fruits of an entire existence in the equivalent of a mere earthly fortnight. That means that the inhabitants work in like ratio—don’t even waste time on dying. Just grow right up from beginning to end. Their buildings appear like blurs because of the rate they move at. The further on evolution and intelligence travel, the faster everything will go, I expect. Increasing knowledge and modernity makes for increasing speed. What really interests me is where it is all going to end. Maybe Almega will be able to tell us if he comes back.”
“Almega?” Joyce asked in surprise, frowning.
“Sure—Alpha and Omega cut short. Suits him, don’t you think?”
“Not bad—for you,” she admitted slyly; then before she could speak further, there came a streak of dust from tumult of the city.
Out of the sunshine there suddenly merged the figure of Almega himself, half smiling, now a complete man of an ultra-modern age.
A one-piece garment, blue in color and elastic in texture—specially designed to accommodate the constant changes of his figure—covered him from heels to neck.
Arch jumped in surpri
se.
“We’re friends,” he began again. “I tried to tell you—”
“I know, when I was in primordial form,” Almega interjected briefly. “My brain was not then developed to its present stage.”
Arch gazed in amazement. “Say, how come you talk my language?”
“Thought waves,” said Almega briefly. “I have not much time to speak. I am so fast and you are so slow. Listen to me. I speak under effort. Forced to go slow. Very slow.”
“Shoot!” Arch invited.
Almega hesitated for a moment, then said, “Our evolution is very rapid. Soon I shall be a superman. Then on to other states. Come to thank you for saving me. My brain was then only 430 grams. Now it is 1,350 grams. Soon it will be 2,000 grams.…”
He stopped again, visibly changing. His forehead, already massive, was commencing to bulge strangely. His body changed form swiftly, becoming thinner and smaller than before.
“Your spaceship was not destroyed. Lies in a straight line that way, some distance off.” He pointed the exact direction and Arch checked it minutely on his wrist compass. “Reach it as soon as you can. This world will pass shortly to remote aphelion. Cold will completely destroy you but we shall adapt ourselves.”
“Am I right in believing that time is far swifter here than it is to us?” Arch questioned eagerly.
The swelling head nodded swiftly. “Quite right. Our evolution is encompassed in one circling of the Sun—we go from beginning to end without dying and leave cellular spores at the end of our course, to start again at perihelion. Our climate too pursues the same changes, though of course it is an inactive state. Rain and sun here are so swift to you, you will hardly see the difference, save in the long disaster at the erratic point of this planet’s orbit, which you have already experienced. We look like you because of similar conditions.”
“When you’ve run this course of mankind, then, your world will be empty?” Joyce asked interestedly.
“No; man’s stage only represents one dominion. Be same on your world in the future. My brain is better now. I see your world is very far away. No matter. Man on any planet is only one form of dominion. Before that stage we were the masters in other forms. Just as there have been former types, so there will be later types. Incessant change. Shortly I shall lose sense of smell and develop spectroscopic eyes and ears. I shall read the light-symphonies of Nature; I shall hear the pulsations of the universe. My teeth will disappear, so will my hair. My eyes’ visual range will change as this world speeds further away from the sun and becomes embraced in twilight. As the dark deepens I shall see in that, too.”
“Then?” Arch asked, thinking of a possible Earthly parallel.
“Ears will disappear,” said Almega dispassionately. “We shall conquer all things as Man—so swiftly you will not see it. We shall conquer space and the universe. To you a mere blur. Evolution will go on.”
He changed again. His eyes glistened queerly: his body went even thinner. But with hardly an alteration in his clipped voice he went on:
“I can think better now. We shall become insects. So it will happen with your world. Already your insects are adapted for future control. Particularly your cephenomia fly. It is the fastest flier on your planet. So will we be. We shall war with termites, gain brief mastery, and change again. By then—to you mere days—our planet will have moved very far from the sun. It will be cold. We shall change into wormlike beings—echinodermata, as you call them. We shall go further than that; move into the state from which we came—a single cell. In that wise, still intelligent, we shall live through into the ultimate night of our world at aphelion. The cell will remain, to be born again at perihelion and repeat the life-cycle.”
“A single cell!” cried Arch in amazement.
“Yes,” Almega said, changing again into something that was all head and penetrating, thought-battering eyes. “You had a similar thing on your world in the alluvian epoch. You called it Caulerpa. It looked like green algae, had a fernish body, and grew to four feet in height. All in one cell.”
“He’s right there!” Joyce exclaimed. “I’ve heard of it.”
“And the purpose behind this astounding evolution of yours?” Arch demanded. “You live through all your stages and work back to a single cell, then you do it all again. Why?”
“Why is anything?” Almega asked surprisingly. “My race and I will not come again. When our intelligence passes at the planet’s aphelion, we shall go elsewhere, leaving behind only a cell, which, at perihelion, will sprout again. But with another mind. Where our own minds go we do not know. Like you, we do not understand the riddle of death.”
He turned with sudden swiftness and glanced at the westering sun. “An epoch has gone!” he said anxiously. “You go—keep safe. Thank you.…”
And the space where he stood was suddenly empty. Only a line of settling dust sweeping down to the crazy, changing city revealed the magically fast path he had taken.
“Can that guy move!” Arch whistled. “He could play badminton with himself and sleep between serves.…” Then he sobered a little and glanced at the girl. “Well, you heard what he said. Guess we’d better be moving, Mrs. Lakington.”
“It is a bit chilly at that,” she agreed. “Now we know all about it from our sentence-stilted friend, we might as well go.”
They shouldered their packs again, cast a last look at the cave, then as they moved away from it darkness returned to chameleon planet.
That night of all others was painted with sights unique in their experience of planet exploration. As they moved sharply in the direction Almega had indicated—apparently due south by Arch’s wrist compass—they beheld the transformation of the city in all its weird, incredible glory.
The scene presented was that of a blur of lights as buildings supplanted buildings, as the air machines of a now far-reaching science streaked the blackness. Sound, deep-pitched and vibrant, floated across the intervening space like the droning of a super beehive. It was hard to imagine that in that enormity of power and mutation a race was passing literal epochs.
The two only stopped twice during the night to rest. When the dawn came, the city was behind them, momentarily still in its wild up-building. The chill wind of that dawn, the paling light of the increasingly distant sun, both embraced a city that had come to a stop, the ingenuity of architecture evidently at last played out. A row of tall, slender buildings reaching to the sky, atop which there stood complicated towers and the various devices of a far advanced science, stood in mute testimony to the slow passing of a race that had reached its mightiest thoughts—in man form at least—in two short hours of apparent night!
“Don’t you think it’s time we wrapped ourselves up a bit?” Joyce asked at length, rubbing her arms vigorously. “It’s getting freezing cold. The air’s thinning a bit, too. No telling yet how far we may have to go.”
The night shut down like a breath from the void, sending them stumbling onwards with a slowly rising terror—the monstrous fear of unknown forces’ reaching out of that great and ebon dark. Afraid to stop, they kept on going.
The dawn was the strangest they had seen. The sun was as red and cold as a super-Arctic, so vast was his distance. Its long, slanting red wavelengths fell upon a forest directly ahead.
“Is—is it a forest?” asked Joyce uncertainly through the helmet phones, stopping wearily. “I thought all life had gone for good:”
They moved more slowly now, both from fatigue and the cumbersome folds of their spacesuits. In five minutes they gained the forest and passed into its slowly changing midst. It was so far the slowest and yet the most astounding place they had witnessed. A woodland of gray, frosty shapes, sheerly beautiful, deeply red lit. The life that tenanted it, harmless apparently, moved with a certain slowness…but what life!
Enormous reeds were gliding along through the thinning air like decapitated serpents, twisting and writhing, unutterably grotesque. In another direction bristling gray footballs were rolling swiftly al
ong in search of hidden prey, propelled after the manner of an earthly polypus by whip-like tentacles.
As the Earthlings passed wonderingly through their midst, staring incredulously at the infinitely diversified forms, one or other of the strange objects burst suddenly apart and became two—bipartition of cells.
“Unicellular life of the nth degree,” Arch breathed, fascinated.
“I’d sooner see a spaceship than a whole lot of cells.” Joyce sighed. “How much further, I wonder?”
They went on slowly through the very midst of the balls and rods, through the thickest part of the lacy, cellular trees, until at length they were through it. Behind them, the forest began to disappear.… Gigantic bacteria, the toughest, most adaptable things in life, were beginning the final dominion before the utter extinction of death itself.
Ahead there stretched a desert of ice. Nothing was stirring in that redly lit bitterness: no new form of life was manifesting under the sheathed armor of what had once been land and water. Chameleon Planet was on the verge of death.
Joyce stopped suddenly and gripped Arch’s inflated arm.
“Suppose we never find the ship?” she asked almost hysterically. “Do you realize what it means? This world is finished—and so will we be if something doesn’t—”
She broke off. The Sun, slanting swiftly down to the horizon, suddenly set something gleaming brightly not half a mile distant—a pointed spire in the ice field. She jerked forward so quickly that she nearly broke the helmet phone cord.
“What the hell—!” Arch gasped, then he pulled up short on the ice as he saw the reason for her wild lunge.
It was the ship! Half of it projecting sharply out of the ice; the rest of it was buried in the frozen tomb. Quick as a flash he whipped out his flame gun.
“Still a chance!” he panted. “The door’s shut, so the inside will be unharmed. It won’t be crushed, either—the plates are plenty strong enough to resist ice pack. Get busy!”
Without further words they both set to work with their twin flame guns.
Tearing off his pack, Arch dived, perfectly protected by his space suit. He used his flame gun constantly to keep the ice from reforming and crushing him to death.… To spin the external screws of the airlock was a matter of moments. His shout of triumph traveled into the girl’s helmet phones as she too came floating through the narrow tunnel.
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