Devolution

by Edmond Hamilton

  Devolution

  Edmond Hamilton

  Scientists in the woods of North Quebec are in search of clues to man’s glorious path “up” the evolutionary chain. The story begins with a review of known evolutionary theory and questions about the role of mutations in achieving evolutionary branching and new species. Events take an unexpected turn when they encounter visiting jelly-like creatures. The creatures are enraged to find that their descendents have “devolved” into the simple lifeforms, such as man, that now litter the world.

  Edmond Hamilton

  Devolution

  Introduction

  Edmond Hamilton was one of the most prolific and popular authors of science fiction before the Golden Age. His first professionally published story appeared in 1926 in Weird Tales, and it was in this magazine that he first made his reputation, writing a low-tech hybrid of science fiction and fantasy dubbed the "weird scientific" tale. Hamilton's stories are fast-oaced and action-packed, cast with heroic scientists and space explorers and featuring menaces of such colossal proportions-evolution gone awry, interstellar invasion, planets on collision courses-that fans nicknamed him "World Wrecker Hamilton." Some of Hamilton's best work from these years was collected in 1936 in The Horror on the Asteroid, one of the earliest appearances of pulp science fiction in book form. Standout works from this period include The Time Raiders, a time-travel tale about a crack army of top soldiers assembled from different eras to fight a threat to civilization, and the stories of the Interstellar Patrol, collected as Crashing Suns and Outside the Universe, about a pangalactic space brigade that protects galactic civilization from nonstop challenges to its existence. Hamilton's renown as a writer of thrilling space opera earned him the slot to write most of the lead novels for the science fiction hero pulp Captain Future, under his own name and the pseudonym Brett Sterling, and his affiliation with this magazine eventually earned him work writing for the Superman comics. He also wrote detective fiction and occasionally, under the pseudonym Hugh Davidson, tales of straight horror, some of which have been collected in The Vampire Master. Hamilton was one of the few early writers to adapt to the changing demands of science fiction in the years after World War II. His novels The Haunted Stars, A Yank at Valhalla, The Star Kings, and City at the World's End are notable for their fully drawn characterizations and focus on human moods and motives. Some of his best short fiction from this time appears in What's It Like Out There? His Starwolf novels, Weapon from Beyond, The Closed World, and World of the Starwolves, are ranked as some of the best space operas of the postwar years.

  Edmond Hamilton

  Devolution

  Ross had ordinarily the most even of tempers, but four days of canoe travel in the wilds of North Quebec had begun to rasp it. On this, their fourth stop on the bank of the river to camp for the night, he lost control and for a few moments stood and spoke to his two companions in blistering terms.

  His black eyes snapped and his darkly unshaven handsome young face worked as he spoke. The two biologists listened to him without reply at first. Gray's blond young countenance was indignant but Woodin, the older biologist, just listened impassively with his gray eyes level on Ross's angry face.

  When Ross stopped for breath, Woodin's calm voice struck in. "Are you finished?"

  Ross gulped as though about to resume his tirade, then abruptly got hold of himself. "Yes, I'm finished," he said sullenly.

  "Then listen to me," said Woodin, like a middle-aged father admonishing a sulky child.

  "You're working yourself up for nothing. Neither Gray nor I have made one complaint yet. Neither of us has once said that we disbelieve what you told us."

  "You haven't said you disbelieve, no!" Ross exclaimed with anger suddenly re-flaring. "But don't you suppose I can tell what you're thinking?

  "You think I told you a fairy story about the things I saw from my plane, don't you? You think I dragged you two up here on the wildest wild-goose chase, to look for incredible creatures that could never have existed. You believe that, don't you?"

  "Oh, damn these mosquitoes!" said Gray, slapping viciously at his neck and staring with unfriendly eyes at the aviator.

  Woodin took command. "We'll go over this after we've made camp. Jim, get out the dufflebags. Ross, will you rustle firewood?"

  They both glared at him and at each other, but grudgingly they obeyed. The tension eased for the time.

  By the time darkness fell on the little riverside clearing, the canoe was drawn up on the bank, their trim little balloon-silk tent had been erected, and a fire crackled in front of it. Gray fed the fire with fat knots of pine while Woodin cooked over it coffee, hot cakes, and the inevitable bacon.

  The firelight wavered feebly up toward the tall trunks of giant hemlocks that walled the little clearing on three sides. It lit up their three khaki-clad, stained figures and the irregular white block of the tent. It gleamed out there on the riffles of the McNorton, chuckling softly as it flowed on toward the Little Whale.

  They ate silently, and as wordlessly cleaned the pans with bunches of grass. Woodin got his pipe going, the other two lit crumpled cigarettes, and then they sprawled for a time by the fire, listening to the chuckling, whispering river-sounds, the sighing sough of the higher hemlock branches, the lonesome cheeping of insects.

  Woodin finally knocked his pipe out on his boot-heel and sat up.

  "All right," he said, "now we'll settle this argument we were having."

  Ross looked a little shamefaced. "I guess I got too hot about it," he said subduedly. Then added, "But all the same, you fellows do more than half disbelieve me."

  Woodin shook his head calmly. "No, we don't, Ross. When you told us that you'd seen creatures unlike anything ever heard of while flying over this wilderness, Gray and I both believed you.

  "If we hadn't, do you think two busy biologists would have dropped their work to come up here with you into these unending woods and look for the things you saw?"

  "I know, I know," said the aviator unsatisfiedly. "You think I saw something queer and you're taking a chance that it will be worth the trouble of coming up here after.

  "But you don't believe what I've told you about the look of the things. You think that sounds too queer to be true, don't you?"

  For the first time Woodin hesitated in answering. "After all, Ross," he said indirectly, "one's eyes can play tricks when you're only glimpsing things for a moment from a plane a mile up."

  "Glimpsing them?" echoed Ross. "I tell you, man, I saw them as clearly as I see you. A mile up, yes, but I had my big binoculars with me and was using them when I saw them.

  "It was near here, too, just east of the fork of the McNorton and the Little Whale. I was streaking south in a hurry for I'd been three weeks up at that government mapping survey on Hudson's Bay. I wanted to place myself by the river fork, so I brought my plane down a little and used my binoculars."Then, down there in a clearing by the river, I saw something glisten and saw- the things. I tell you, they were incredible, but just the same I saw them clear! I forgot all about the river fork in the moment or two I stared down at them.

  "They were big, glistening things like heaps of shining jelly, so translucent that I could see the ground through them. There were at least a dozen of them and when I saw them they were gliding across that little clearing, a floating, flowing movement.

  "Then they disappeared under the trees. If there'd been a clearing big enough to land in within a hundred miles, I'd have landed and looked for them, but there wasn't and I had to go on. But I wanted like the devil to find out what they were, and when I took the story to you two, you agreed to come up here by canoe to search for them. But I don't think now you've ever fully believed me."

  Woodin looked thoughtfully into the fire. "I think y
ou saw something queer, all right, some queer form of life. That's why I was willing to come up on this search.

  "But things such as you describe, jelly-like, translucent, gliding over the ground like that-there's been nothing like that since the first protoplasmic creatures, the beginning of life on earth, glided over our young world ages ago."

  "If there were such things then, why couldn't they have left descendants like them?" Ross argued.

  Woodin shook his head. "Because they all vanished ages ago, changed into different and higher forms of life, starting the great upward climb of life that has reached its height in man.

  "Those long-dead, single-celled protoplasmic creatures were the start, the crude, humble beginnings of our life. They passed away and their descendants were unlike them. We men are their descendants."

  Ross looked at him, frowning. "But where did they come from in the first place, those first living things?"

  Again Woodin shook his head. "That is one thing we biologists do not know and can hardly speculate upon, the origin of those first protoplasmic forms of life.

  "It's been suggested that they rose spontaneously from the chemicals of earth, yet this is disproved by the fact that no such things rise spontaneously now from inert matter. Their origin is still a complete mystery. But, however they came into existence on earth, they were the first of life, our distant ancestors."

  Woodin's eyes were dreaming, the other two forgotten, as he stared into the fire, seeing visions.

  "What a glorious saga it is, that wonderful climb up from crude protoplasm creatures to a man! A marvelous series of changes that has brought us from that first low form to our present splendor.

  "And it might not have occurred on any other world but earth! For science is now almost sure that the cause of evolutionary mutations is the radiations of the radioactive deposits inside the earth, acting upon the genes of all living matter."

  He caught a glimpse of Ross's uncomprehending face, and despite his raptness smiled a little.

  "I can see that means nothing to you. I'll try to explain. The germ-cell of every living thing on earth contains in it a certain number of small, rod-like things which are called chromosomes. These chromosomes are made up of strings of tiny particles which we call genes. And each of these genes has a potent and different controlling effect upon the development of the creature that grows from that germ-cell.

  "Some of these genes control the creature's color, some control his size, some the shape of his limbs, and so on. Every characteristic of the creature that grows from that germ-cell will be greatly different from the fellow-creatures of its species. He will be, in fact, of an entirely new species. That is the way in which new species come into existence on earth, the method of evolutionary change.

  "Biologists have known this for some time and they have been searching for the cause of these sudden great changes, these mutations, as they are called. They have tried to find out what it is that affects the genes so radically. They have found experimentally that X-rays and chemical rays of various kinds, when turned upon the genes of a germ-cell, will change them greatly. And the creature that grows from that germ-cell will thus be a greatly changed creature, a mutant.

  "Because of this, many biologists now believe that the radiation from the radioactive deposits inside earth, acting upon all the genes of every living thing on earth, is what causes the constant change of species, the procession of mutations, that has brought life up the evolutionary road to its present height.

  "That is why I say that on any other world but earth, evolutionary progress might never have happened. For it may be that no other world has similar radioactive deposits within it to cause by gene-effect the mutations. On any other world, the first protoplasmic things that began life might have remained forever the same, down through endless generations.

  "How thankful we ought to be that it was not so on earth! That mutation after mutation has followed, life ever changing and progressing into new and higher species, until the first crude protoplasm things have advanced through countless changing forms into the supreme achievement of man!"

  Woodin's enthusiasm had carried him away as he talked, but now he stopped, laughing a little as he relit his pipe.

  "Sorry that I lectured you like a college freshman, Ross. But that's my chief subject of thought, my idee fixe, that wonderful upward climb of life through the ages."

  Ross was staring thoughtfully into the fire. "It does seem wonderful the way you tell it. One species changing into another, going higher all the time-"

  Gray stood up by the fire and stretched. "Well, you two can wonder over it, but this crass materialist is going to emulate his remote invertebrate ancestors and return to a prostrate position. In other words, I'm going to bed."

  He looked at Ross, a doubtful grin on his young blond face, and said, "No hard feelings now, feller?"

  "Forget it." The aviator grinned back. "The paddling was hard today and you fellows did look mighty skeptical. But you'll see! Tomorrow we'll be at the fork of the Little Whale and then I'll bet we won't scout an hour before we run across those jelly-creatures."

  "I hope so," said Woodin yawningly. "Then we'll see just how good your eyesight is from a mile up, and whether you've yanked two respectable scientists up here for nothing."

  Later as he lay in his blankets in the little tent, listening to Gray and Ross snore and looking sleepily out at the glowing fire embers, Woodin wondered again about that. What had Ross actually seen in that fleeting glimpse from his speeding plane? Something queer, Woodin was sure of that, so sure that he'd come on this hard trip to find it. But what exactly?

  Not protoplasmic things such as he described. That couldn't be, of course. Or could it? If things like that had existed once, why couldn't they-couldn't they-?

  Woodin didn't know he'd been sleeping until he was awakened by Gray's cry. It wasn't a nice cry, it was the hoarse yell of someone suddenly assaulted by bone-freezing terror.

  He opened his eyes at that cry to see the Incredible looming against the stars in the open door of the tent. A dark, amorphous mass humped there in the opening, glistening all over in the starlight, and gliding into the tent. Behind it were others like it.

  Things happened very quickly then. They seemed to Woodin to happen not consecutively but in a succession of swift, clicking scenes like the successive pictures of a motion picture film.

  Gray's pistol roared red flame at the first viscous monster entering the tent, and the momentary flash showed the looming, glistening bulk of the thing, and Gray's panic-frozen face, and Ross clawing in his blankets for his pistol.

  Then that scene was over and instantly there was another one, Gray and Ross both stiffening suddenly as though petrified, both falling heavily over. Woodin knew they were both dead now, but didn't know how he knew it The glistening monsters were coming on into the tent.

  He ripped up the wall of the tent and plunged out into the cold starlight of the clearing. He ran three steps, he didn't know in what direction, and then he stopped. He didn't know why he stopped dead, but he did.

  He stood there, his brain desperately urging his limbs to fly, but his limbs would not obey. He couldn't even turn, could not move a muscle of his body. He stood, his face toward the starlit gleam of the river, stricken by a strange and utter paralysis.

  Woodin heard rustling, gliding movements in the tent behind him. Now from behind, there came into the line of his vision several of the glistening things. They were gathering around him, a dozen of them it seemed, and he now could see them quite clearly.

  They weren't nightmares, no. They were real as real, poised here around him, humped, amorphous masses of viscous, translucent jelly. Each was about four feet tall and three in diameter, though their shapes kept constantly changing slightly, making dimensions hard to guess.

  At the center of each translucent mass was a dark, disk-like blob or nucleus. There was nothing else to the creatures, no limbs or sense-organs. He saw that they could protrude ps
eudopods, though, for two, who held the bodies of Gray and Ross in such tentacles, were now bringing them out and laying them down beside Woodin.

  Woodin, still quite unable to move a muscle, could see the frozen, twisted faces of the two men, and could see the pistols still gripped in their dead hands. And then as he looked on Ross's face he remembered.

  The things the aviator had seen from his plane, the jelly-creatures the three had come north to search for, they were the monsters around him! But how had they killed Ross and Gray, how were they holding him petrified like this, who were they?

  "We will permit you to move, but you must not try to escape."

  Woodin's dazed brain numbed further with wonder. Who had said those words to him? He had heard nothing, yet he had thought he heard.

  "We will let you move but you must not attempt to escape or harm us."

  He did hear those words in his mind, even though his ears heard no sound. And now his brain heard more.

  "We are speaking to you by transference of thought impulses. Have you sufficient mentality to understand us?"

  Minds? Minds in these things? Woodin was shaken by the thought as he stared at the glistening monsters.

  His thought apparently had reached them. "Of course we have minds," came the thought answer into his brain. "We are going to let you move now, but do not try to flee."

  "I–I won't try," Woodin told himself mentally.

  At once the paralysis that held him abruptly lifted. He stood there in the circle of the glistening monsters, his hands and body trembling violently.

  There were ten of them, he saw now. Ten monstrous, humped masses of shining, translucent jelly, gathered around him like cowled and faceless genii come from some haunt of the unknown. One stood closer to him than the others, apparently spokesman and leader.

  Woodin looked slowly around their circle, then down at his two dead companions. In the midst of the unfamiliar terrors that froze his soul, he felt a sudden aching pity as he looked down at them.