by Chad Oliver
He rode up to the fourth floor and walked into Ed Stone’s office. Ed was seated at his desk and he looked very industrious as he studied the dry white skull in front of him. The skull, however, was just a paper weight; Ed had used it for years.
Ed stood up, grinned, and stuck out his hand. “Sure glad you’re back, Ben. Any luck?”
Ben shook hands and straddled a chair. He pulled out his pipe, filled it from a battered red can, and lit it gratefully. It felt good to be back with Ed. A man doesn’t find too many other men he can really talk to in his lifetime, and Ed was definitely Number One. Since they were old friends, they spoke a private language.
“He was out to lunch,” Ben said.
“For twenty thousand years?”
“Sinanthropus has always been famous for his dietary eccentricities.”
Ed nodded to show that he caught the rather specialized joke—Sinanthropus had been a cannibal—and then leaned forward, his elbows on the desk. “You satisfied now?”
“Absolutely.”
“No margin for error?” Ed insisted.
“None. I didn’t really doubt Thompson’s report, but I wanted to make certain. Sinanthropus isn’t there. Period.”
“That tears it then. We’re up the creek for sure.”
“Without a paddle.”
“Without even a canoe.” Ben puffed on his pipe. “Blast it, Ed, where are they?”
“You tell me. Since you left, Gottwald and I have gotten exactly nowhere. The way it looks right now, man hasn’t got any ancestors—and that’s crazy.”
It’s more than crazy, Ben thought. It’s frightening. When you stop to think about it, man is a lot more than just an individual. Through his children, he extends on into the future. Through his ancestors, he stretches back far into the past. It is immortality of a sort. And when you chop off one end—
“I’m scared,” he said. “I don’t mind admitting it. There’s an answer somewhere, and we’ve got to find it.”
“I know how you feel, Ben. If this thing means what it seems to mean, then all science is just so much hot air. There’s no cause and effect, no evidence, no reason. Man isn’t what he thinks he is at all. We’re just frightened animals sitting in a cave gaping at the darkness outside. Don’t think I don’t feel it, too. But what are we going to do?”
Ben stood up and knocked out his pipe. “Right now, I’m going home and hit the sack; I’m dead. Then the three or us—you and I and Gottwald—are going to sit down and hash this thing out. Then we’ll at least know where we are.”
“Will we?”
“We’d better.”
He walked to the elevator and rode down to the ground floor of New Mexico Station. He had to identify himself twice more before he finally emerged into the glare of the desert sunlight. The situation struck him as the height of irony: here they were worried about spies and fancy feuds, when all the time—
What?
He climbed into his car and started for home. The summer day was bright and hot, but he felt as though he were driving down an endless tunnel of darkness, an infinite black cave to nowhere.
The voice whispered in his brain: Hurry, hurry—
His home was a lonely one, lonely with a special kind of emptiness. All his homes seemed deserted now that Anne was gone, but he liked this one better than most.
It was built of adobe with heavy exposed roof beams, cool in the summer and warm in winter. The Mexican tile floor was artfully broken up by lovely Navaho rugs—the rare Two Gray Hills kind in subdued and intricate grays and blacks and whites. He had brought many of his books with him from Boston and their familiar jackets lined the walls.
Ben was used to loneliness, but memories died hard. The plane crash that had taken Anne from him had left an emptiness in his heart. Sometimes, late in the evening, he thought he heard her footsteps in the kitchen. Often, when the telephone rang, he waited for her to answer it.
Twenty years of marriage are hard to forget.
Ben took a hot shower, shaved, and cooked himself a steak from the freezer. Then he poured a healthy jolt of Scotch over two ice cubes and sat down in the big armchair, propping his feet on the padded bench. He was still tired, but he felt more like a human being.
His eyes wandered to his books. There was usually something relaxing about old books and long-read titles, something reassuring. It had always been that way for him, but not any longer.
The titles jeered at him: Mankind So Far, Up from the Ape, History of the Primates, Fossil Men, The Story of Man, Human Origins, The Fossil Evidence for Human Evolution, History of the Vertebrates …
Little man, what now?
“We seem to have made a slight mistake, as the chemist remarked when his lab blew up,” Ben said aloud.
Yes, but where could they have gone wrong?
Take Sinanthropus, for example. The remains of forty different Sinanthropus individuals had been excavated from the site of Choukoutien in China by Black and Weidenreich, two excellent men. There was plenty of material and it had been thoroughly studied. Scientists knew when Sinanthropus had lived in the Middle Pleistocene, where he lived, and how he lived. They even had the hearths where he cooked his food, the tools he used, the animals he killed. They knew what he looked like. They knew how he was related to his cousin. Pithecanthropus Erectus, and to modern men. There was a cast of his skull in every anthropology museum in the world, a picture of him in every textbook.
There was nothing mysterious about Sam Sinanthropus. He was one of the regulars.
Ben and Gottwald had nailed the date to the wall at 250,000 B.C. After Thompson’s incredible report, Ben himself had gone back in time to search for Sinanthropus. Just to make certain, he had checked through twenty thousand years.
Nobody home.
Sinanthropus wasn’t there.
That was bad enough.
But all the early human and prehuman fossils were missing.
There were no men back in the Pleistocene.
No Australopithecus, no Pithecanthropus, no Neanderthal, no nothing.
It was impossible.
At first, Ben had figured that there must be an error somewhere in the dating of the fossils. After all, a geologist’s casual “Middle Pleistocene” isn’t much of a target, and radiocarbon dating was no good that far back. But the Gottwald-Hazard Correlation had removed that possibility.
The fossil men simply were not there.
They had disappeared. Or they had never been there. Or—
Ben got up and poured himself another drink. He needed it. .
When the Winfieid-Homans equations had cracked the time barrier and Ben had been invited by old Franz Gottwald to take part in the Temporal Research Project, Ben had leaped at the opportunity. It was a scientist’s dream come true.
He could actually go back and see the long-vanished ancestors of the human species. He could listen to them talk, watch their kids, see them make their tools, hear their songs. No more sweating with a few broken bones. No more puzzling over flint artifacts. No more digging in ancient firepits.
He had felt like a man about to sit down to a Gargantuan feast.
Unhappily, it had been the cook’s night out. There was nothing to eat.
Every scientist knows in his heart that his best theories are only educated guesses. There is a special Hall of Fame reserved for thundering blunders: the flat Earth, the medical humors, the unicorn.
Yes, and don’t forget Piltdown Man,
Every scientist expects to revise his theories in the light of new knowledge. That’s what science means. But he doesn’t expect to find out that it’s all wrong, He doesn’t expect his Manhattan Project to show conclusively that uranium doesn’t actually exist.
Ben finished his drink. He leaned back and closed his eyes. There had to be an answer somewhere—or somewhen. Had to be. A world of total ignorance is a world of terror; anything can happen.
Where was Man?
And why?
He went to bed and drea
med of darkness and ancient fears. He dreamed that he lived in a strange and alien world, a world of fire and blackness and living shadows—
When he woke up the next morning, he wasn’t at all sure that he had been dreaming.
Among them, an impartial observer would have agreed, the three men in the conference room at New Mexico Station knew just about all there was to know concerning early forms of man. At the moment, in Ben’s opinion, they might as well have been the supreme experts on the Ptolemaic theory of epicycles.
They were three very different men.
Ben Hazard was tall and lean and craggy-featured, as though the winds of life had weathered him down to the tough, naked rock that would yield no further. His blue eyes had an ageless quality about them, the agelessness of deep seas and high mountains, but they retained an alert and restless curiosity that had changed little from the eyes of an Ohio farm boy who had long ago wondered at the magic of the rain and filled his father’s old cigar boxes with strange stones that carried the imprints of plants and shells from the dawn of time.
Ed Stone looked like part of what he was: a Texan, burned by the sun, his narrow gray eyes quiet and steady. He was not a big man, and his soft speech and deliberate movements gave him a deceptive air of lassitude. Ed was an easy man to underestimate; he wasted no time on frills or pretense, but there was a razor-sharp brain in his skull. He was younger than Ben, not yet forty, but Ben trusted his judgment more than he did his own.
Franz Gottwald, old only in years, was more than a man now; he was an institution. They called him the dean of American anthropology, but not to his white-bearded face; Franz had small respect for deans. They stood when he walked into meetings, and Franz took it as his due—he had earned it, but it concerned him no more than the make of the car he drove. Ben and Ed had both studied under Franz, and they still deferred to him, but the relationship was a warm one. Franz had been born in Germany—he never spoke about his life before he had come to the United States at the age of thirty—and his voice was still flavored by a slight accent that generations of graduate students had tried to mimic without much success. He was the Grand Old Man.
“Well?” asked Dr. Gottwald when Ben had finished his report. “What is the next step, gentlemen?”
Ed Stone tapped on the polished table with a yellow pencil that showed distinct traces of gnawing. “We’ve got to accept the facts and go on from there. We know what the situation is, and we think that we haven’t made any whopping mistakes. In a nutshell, man has vanished from his own past. What we need is an explanation, and the way to get it is to find some relatively sane hypothesis that we can test, not just kick around. Agreed?”
“Very scientific, Edward,” Gottwald said, stroking his neat white beard.
“O.K.,” Ben said. “Let’s work from what we know. Those skeletons were in place in Africa, in China, in Europe, in Java—they had to be there because that’s where they were originally dug up. The bones are real, I’ve held them in my hands, and they’re still in place in the museums. No amount of twaddle about alternate time-tracks and congruent universes is going to change that. Furthermore, unless Franz and I are the prize dopes of all time, the dating of those fossils is accurate in terms of geology and the associated flora and fauna and whatnot. The Buckets work; there’s no question about that. So why can’t we find the men who left the skeletons, or even the bones themselves in their original sites?”
“That’s a question with only one possible answer,” Ed said.
“Check. Paradoxes aside—and there are no paradoxes if you have enough accurate information—the facts have to speak for themselves. We don’t find them because they are not there. Next question: where the devil are they?”
Ed leaned forward, chewing on his pencil. “If we forget about their geological context, none of those fossils are more than a few hundred years old. I mean, that’s when they were found. Even Neanderthal only goes back to around 1856 or thereabouts. Science itself is an amazingly recent phenomenon. So—”
“You mean Piltdown?” Gottwald suggested, smiling.
“Maybe.”
Ben filled his pipe and lit it. “I’ve thought about that, too. I guess all of us have. If one fossil man was a fake, why not all of them? But it won’t hold water, and you know it. For one thing, it would have required a worldwide conspiracy, which is nonsense. For another—sheer manpower aside—the knowledge that would have been required to fake all those fossils simply did not exist at the time they were discovered. PiItdown wouldn’t have lasted five minutes with fluorine dating and decent X-rays, and no one can sell me on the idea that men like Weidenreich and Von Koenigswald and Dart were fakers. Anyhow, that idea would leave us with a problem tougher than the one we’re trying to solve—where did man come from if he had no past, no ancestors? I vote we exorcise that particular ghost.”
“Keep going,” Gottwald said.
Ed took it up. “Facts, Ben. Leave the theories for later. If neither the bones nor the men were present back in the Pleistocene where they belong, but the bones were present to be discovered later, then they have to appear somewhere in between. Our problem right now is when.”
Ben took his pipe out of his mouth and gestured with it, excited now. “We can handle that one. Dammit, all of our data can’t be haywire. Look: for most of his presumed existence, close to a million years, man was a rare animal—all the bones of all the fossil men ever discovered wouldn’t fill up this room we’re sitting in; all the crucial ones would fit in a broom closet. O.K.? But by Neolithic times, with agricultural villages, there were men everywhere, even here in the New World. That record is clear. So those fossils had to be in place by around eight thousand years ago. All we have to do—”
“Is to work back the other way,” Ed finished, standing up. “By God, that’s it! We can send teams back through history; checking at short intervals, until we see how it started. As long as the bones are where they should be, fine. When they disappear—and they have to disappear, because we know they’re not there earlier—we’ll reverse our field and check it hour by hour if necessary. Then we’ll know what happened. After that, we can kick the theories around until we’re green in the face.”
“It’ll work,” Ben said, feeling like a man walking out of a heavy fog. “It won’t be easy, but it can be done. Only—”
“Only what?” Gottwald asked.
“Only I wonder what we’ll find. I’m a little afraid of what we’re going to see.”
“One thing sure,” Ed said.
“Yes?”
“This old world of ours will never be the same. Too bad—I kind of liked it the way it was.”
Gottwald nodded, stroking his beard.
For months, Ben Hazard virtually lived within the whitewashed walls of New Mexico Station. He felt oddly like a man fighting a rattlesnake with his fists at some busy intersection, while all about him people hurried by without a glance, intent on their own affairs.
What went on in New Mexico Station was, of course, classified information. In Ben’s opinion, this meant that there had been a ludicrous reversion to the techniques of magic. Facts were stamped with the sacred symbol of ’CLASSIFIED, thereby presumably robbing them of their power. Nevertheless, the world outside didn’t know what the score was, and probably didn’t care, while inside the Station—
History flickered by, a wonderful and terrible film.
Man was its hero and its villain—but for how long?
The teams went back, careful to do nothing and to touch nothing. The teams left Grand Central and pushed back, probing, searching …
Back past the Roman legions and the temples of Athens, back beyond the pyramids of Egypt and the marvels of Ur, back through the sun-baked villages of the first farmers, back into the dark shadows of prehistory—
And the teams found nothing.
At every site they could reach without revealing their presence, the bones of the early men were right where they should have been, waiting patiently to be unear
thed.
Back past 8,000 B.C.
Back past 10,000.
Back past 15,000—
And then, when the teams reached 25,000 B.C., it happened. Quite suddenly, in regions as far removed from one another as France and Java, the bones disappeared.
And not just the bones.
Man himself was gone.
The world, in some ways, was as it had been—or was to be. The gray waves still tossed on the mighty seas, the forests were cool and green under clean blue skies, the sparkling sheets of snow and ice still gleamed beneath a golden sun.
The Earth was the same, but it was a strangely empty world without men. A desolate and somehow fearful world, hushed by long silences and stroked coldly by the restless winds …
“That’s it,” Ben said. “Whatever it was, we know when it happened—somewhere between 23,000 and 25,000 at the end of the Upper Paleolithic. I’m going back there.”
“We’re going back there,” Ed corrected him. “If I sit this one out I’ll be ready for the giggle factory.”
Ben smiled, not trying to hide his relief. “I think I could use some company this trip.”
“It’s a funny feeling, Ben.”
“Yes.” Ben Hazard glanced toward the waiting Buckets. “I’ve seen a lot of things in my life, but I never thought I’d see the Beginning.”
The machine stopped and the green light winked.
Ed checked the viewer while Ben punched data into the recorder.
“Nothing yet,” Ed said. “It’s raining.”
“Swell.” Ben unlocked the hatch and the two men climbed out. The sky above them was cold and gray. An icy rain was pouring down from heavy, low-hanging clouds. There was no thunder. Apart from the steady hiss of the rain, France in the year 24,571 B.C. was as silent as a tomb. “Let’s get this thing covered up.”
They hauled out the plastic cover, camouflaged to blend with the landscape, and draped it over the metallic gray sphere. They had been checking for eighteen days without results, but they were taking no chances.