by Chad Oliver
They crossed the narrow valley through sheets of rain, their boots sinking into the soaked ground with every step. They climbed up the rocks to the gaping black hole of the cave entrance and worked their way in under the rock ledge, out of the rain. They switched on their lights, got down on their hands and knees, and went over every inch of the dry area just back of the rock overhang.
Nothing.
The gray rain pelted the hillside and became a torrent of water that splashed out over the cave entrance in a hissing silver waterfall. It was a little warmer in the cave, but dark and singularly uninviting.
“Here we go again,” Ed muttered. “I know this blasted cave better than my own backyard.”
“I’d like to see that backyard of yours about now. We could smoke up some chickens in the barbecue pit and sample some of Betty’s tequila sours.”
“Right now I’d just settle for the tequila. If we can’t figure this thing out any other way we might just as well start looking in the old bottle.”
“Heigh-ho,” Ben sighed, staring at the waiting cave. “Enter one dwarf and one gnome, while thousands cheer.”
“I don’t hear a thing.”
Ed took the lead and they picked and crawled their way back through the narrow passages of the cave, their lights throwing grotesque black shadows that danced eerily on the spires and pillars of ancient, dripping stone. Ben sensed the weight of the great rocks above him and his chest felt constricted. It was hard to breathe, hard to keep going.
“Whatever I am in my next incarnation,” he said, “I hope it isn’t a mole.”
“You won’t even make the mammals,” Ed assured him.
They came out into a long, twisted vault. It was deep in the cave, far from the hidden skies and insulated from the pounding of the rain. They flashed their lights over the walls, across the dry gray ceiling, into the ageless silence.
Nothing.
No cave paintings.
It was as though man had never been, and never was to be. “I’m beginning to wonder whether I’m real,” Ed said.
“Wait a minute.” Ben turned back toward the cave entrance, his body rigid. “Did you hear something?”
Ed held his breath and listened. “Yeah. There it is again.”
It was faint and remote as it came to them in the subterranean vault, but there was no mistaking it.
A sound of thunder, powerful beyond belief.
Steady, now.
Coming closer.
And there had been no thunder in that cold, hissing rain …
“Come on.” Ben ran across the cavern and got down on his hands and knees to crawl back through the twisting passage that led to the world outside. “There’s something out there.”
“What is it?”
Ben didn’t stop. He clawed at the rocks until his hands were bloody. “I think the lunch hour’s over,” he panted. “I think Man’s coming home.”
Like two frightened savages, they crouched in the cave entrance and looked out across the rain-swept valley. The solid stone vibrated under their feet and the cold gray sky was shattered by blasting roars.
One thing was certain: that was no natural thunder.
“We’ve got to get out of here,” Ben yelled. “We’ve got to hide before—”
“Where? The Bucket?”
“That’s the best bet. It’s almost invisible in this rain, and we can see through the viewer.”
“Right. Run for it!”
They scrambled down among the slick rocks and ran across the wet grass and mud of the valley floor. It was cold and the rain pelted their faces in icy gray sheets. The deafening roar grew even louder, falling down from the leaden sky.
Fumbling in their haste, they jerked up a corner of the plastic cover so that the viewer could operate. Then they squirmed and wriggled under the plastic, dropped through the hatch, and sealed the lock. They dripped all over the time sphere but there was no time to bother about it. Even inside the Bucket they could feel the ocean of sound around them.
Ben cut in the recorder. “Start the cameras.”
“Done.”
“Hang on—”
The shattering roar reached an ear-splitting crescendo. Suddenly, there was something to see.
Light.
Searing white flame stabbing down from the gray skies.
They saw it: Gargantuan, lovely, huge beyond reason.
Before their eyes, like a vast metal fish from an unknown and terrible sea, the spaceship landed in the rain-soaked valley of Paleolithic France.
The long silence came again.
Fists clenched, Ben Hazard watched the Creation.
The great ship towered in the rain, so enormous that it was hard to imagine that it had ever moved. It might have been there always, but it was totally alien, out of place in its setting of hills and earth and sodden grasses.
Circular ports opened in the vast ship like half a hundred awakening eyes. Bright warm yellow light splashed out through the rain. Men—strangely dressed in dark, close-fitting tunics—floated out of the ship and down to the ground on columns of the yellow light.
The men were human, no different physically from Ben or Ed.
Equipment of some sort drifted down the shafts of light: strange spider-legged machines, self-propelled crates that gleamed in the light, shielded stands that might have been for maps or charts, metallic robots that were twice the size of a man.
It was still raining, but the men ignored it. The yellow light deflected the rain—Ben could see water dripping down the yellow columns as though solid tubes had been punched through the air—and the rain was also diverted from the men and their equipment.
The men from the ship moved quickly, hardly pausing to glance around them. They fanned out and went to work with the precision of trained specialists who knew exactly what they were doing.
Incredible as it was, Ben thought that he knew what they were doing too.
The spider-legged machines stayed on the valley floor, pulsing. Most of the men, together with three of the robots and the bulk of the self-propelled crates, made their way up to the cave Ben and Ed had just left and vanished inside.
“Want to bet on what’s in those crates?” Ben whispered.
“Haven’t the faintest idea, but two-bits says you spell it b-o-n-e-s.”
The great ship waited, the streams of yellow light still spilling out into the rain. Five men pored over the shielded stands, looking for all the world like engineers surveying a site. Others worked over the spider-legged machines, setting up tubes of the yellow light that ran from the machines to the rocky hills. Two of the robots, as far as Ben could see, were simply stacking rocks into piles.
After three hours, when it was already growing dark, the men came back out of the cave. The robots and the crates were reloaded through the ship’s ports and the uniformed men themselves boarded the ship again.
Night fell. Ben stretched to ease his cramped muscles, but he didn’t take his eyes from the viewer for a second.
The rain died down to a gentle patter and then stopped entirely. The overcast lifted and slender white clouds sailed through the wind-swept sky. The moon rose, fat and silver, its radiance dimming the burning stars.
The impossible ship, towering so complacently beneath the moon of Earth, was a skyscraper of light. It literally hummed with activity. Ben would have given a lot to know what was going on inside that ship, but there was no way to find out.
The pulsing spider-legged machines clicked and buzzed in the cold of the valley night. Rocks were conveyed along tubes of the yellow light to the machines, which were stamping something out by the hundreds of thousands. Something …
Artifacts?
The long, uncanny night ended. Ben and Ed watched in utter fascination, their fears almost forgotten, sleep never even considered.
Dawn streaked the eastern sky, touching the clouds with fingers of rose and gold. A light breeze rustled the wet, heavy grasses. Water still dripped from the rocks.
/> The uniformed men came back out of the ship, riding down on the columns of yellow light. The robots gathered up some immense logs and stacked them near the mouth of the cave. They treated the wood with some substance to dry it, then ignited a blazing fire.
Squads of men moved over the valley floor, erasing all traces of their presence. One of them got quite close to the Bucket and Ben felt a sudden numbing chill. What would happen if they were seen? He was no longer worried about himself. But what about all the men who were to live on the Earth? Or—
The squad moved away.
Just as the red sun lifted behind the hills, while the log fire still blazed by the cave, the ship landed the last of its strange cargo.
Human beings.
Ben felt the sweat grow clammy in the palms of his hands.
They floated down the shafts of yellow light, shepherded by the uniformed men. There were one hundred of them by actual count, fifty men and fifty women. There were no children. They were a tall, robust people, dressed in animal skins. They shivered in the cold and seemed dazed and uncomprehending. They had to be led by the hand, and several had to be carried by the robots.
The uniformed men took them across the wet valley, a safe distance away from the ship. They huddled together like sheep, clasping one another in sexless innocence. Their eyes turned from the fire to the ship, understanding neither. Like flowers, they lifted their heads to the warmth of the sun.
It was a scene beyond age; it had always been. There were the rows of uniformed men, standing rigidly at attention. And there were the clustered men in animal skins, waiting without hope, without regret.
An officer—Ben thought of him that way, though his uniform was no different from the others—stepped forward and made what seemed to be a speech. At any rate, he talked for a long time—nearly an hour. It was clear that the dazed people did not understand a word of what he was saying, and that, too, was older than time.
It’s a ceremony, Ben thought. It must be some kind of ritual. I hadn’t expected that.
When it was over, the officer stood for a long minute looking at the huddle of people. Ben tried to read his expression in the viewer, but it was impossible. It might have been regret. It might have been hope. It might have been only curiosity.
It might have been anything.
Then, at a signal, the uniformed men turned and abandoned the others. They walked back to their waiting ship and the columns of yellow light took them inside. The ports closed.
Ten minutes later, the ship came to life.
White flame flared beneath its jets and the earth trembled. The terrible roar came again. The people who had been left behind fell to the ground, covering their ears with their hands. The great ship lifted slowly into the blue sky, then faster and faster—
It was gone, and only the sound remained, the sound of thunder …
In time, that, too, was gone.
Ben watched his, own ancestors with an almost hypnotic fascination. They did not move.
Get up, get up—
The skin-clad people stood up shakily after what seemed to be hours. They stared blankly at one another. As though driven by some vague instinct that spoke through their shock, they turned and looked at the blazing fire that burned by the mouth of the cave.
Slowly, one by one, they pulled themselves over the rocks to the fire. They stood before it, seeking a warmth they could not understand.
The sun climbed higher into the sky, flooding the rain-clean world with golden light.
The people stood for a long time by the cave entrance, watching the fire burn down. They did nothing and said nothing.
Hurry, hurry. The voice spoke again in. Ben’s brain. He shook his head. Was he thinking about those dazed people out there, or was someone thinking about him?
Gradually, some of them seemed to recover their senses. They began to move about purposefully—still slowly, still uncertainly, like men coming out from under an anaesthetic. One man picked up a fresh log and threw it on the fire. Another crouched down and fingered a chipped piece of flint he found on a rock. Two women stepped behind the fire and started into the dark cave.
Ben turned away from the viewer, his unshaven face haggard. “Meet Cro-Magnon,” he said, waving his hand.
Ed lit a cigarette, his first in eighteen hours. His hand was shaking. “Meet everybody, you mean. Those jokers planted the other boys—Neanderthal and whatnot—back in the cave before they landed the living ones.”
“We came out of that ship too, Ed.”
“I know—but where did the ship come from? And why?”
Ben took a last long look at the people huddled around the fire. He didn’t feel like talking. He was too tired to think. None of it made any sense.
What kind of people could do a thing like that?
And if they hadn’t—
“Let’s go home,” Ed said quietly. They went out and removed the plastic cover, and then set the controls for New Mexico Station in a world that was no longer their own.
Old Franz Gottwald sat behind his desk. His white suit was freshly pressed and his hair was neatly combed. He stroked his beard in the old familiar gesture, and only the gleam in his eyes revealed the excitement within him.
“It has always been my belief, gentlemen, that there is no substitute for solid thinking based on verified facts. There is a time for action and there is a time for thought. I need hardly remind you that action without thought is pointless; it is the act of an animal, the contraction of an earthworm. We have the facts we need. You have been back for three days, but the thinking is yet to be done.”
“We’ve been beating our brains out,” Ben protested.
“That may be, Ben, but a man can beat his brains out with a club. It is not thinking.”
“You try thinking,” Ed said, grinding out a cigarette.
Gottwald smiled. “You are too old to have your thinking done for you, Edward. I have given you all I can give. It is your turn now.”
Ben sat back in his chair and lit his pipe. He took his time doing it, trying to clear his mind. He had to forget those frightened people huddled around a fire in the mists of time, had to forget the emotions he had felt when the great ship had left them behind. Gottwald was right, as always.
The time had come for thought.
“O.K.,” he said. “We all know the facts. Where do we go from here?”
“I would suggest to you, gentlemen, that we will get no answers until we begin to ask the right questions. That is elementary, if I may borrow from Mr. Holmes.”
“You want questions?” Ed laughed shortly. “Here’s one, and it’s a dilly. There’s a hole in all this big enough to drive the American Anthropological Association through in a fleet of trucks. What about the apes?”
Ben nodded. “You quoted Conan Doyle, Franz, so I’ll borrow a line from another Englishman—Darwin’s pal Huxley. ‘Bone for bone, organ for organ, man’s body is repeated in the body of the ape.’ Hell, we all know that. There are differences, sure, but the apes are closer to men than they are to monkeys. If man didn’t evolve on Earth—”
“You’ve answered your own question, Ben.”
“Of course!” Ed fished out another cigarette. “If man didn’t evolve on Earth, then neither did the apes, That ship—or some ship—brought them both. But that’s impossible.”
“Impossible?” Franz asked.
“Maybe not,” Ben said slowly. “After all, there are only four living genera of apes—two in Africa and two in Asia. We could even leave out the gibbon; he’s a pretty primitive customer. It could have been done.”
“Not for all the primates,” Ed insisted. “Not for all the monkeys and lemurs and tarsiers, not for all the fossil primate bones. It would have made Noah’s ark look like a rowboat.”
“I would venture the suggestion that your image is not very apt,” Gottwald said. “That ship was big enough to make any of our ships look like rowboats.”
“Never mind,” Ben said, determined not
to get sidetracked. “It doesn’t matter. Let’s assume that the apes were seeded, just as the men were. The other primates could have evolved here without outside interference, just as the other animals did. That isn’t the real problem.”
“I wonder,” Ed said. “Could that ship have come out of time as well as space? After all, if we have time travel they must have it. They could do anything—”
“Bunk,” Gottwald snorted. “Don’t let yourself get carried away, Edward. Anything is not possible. A scientific law is a scientific law, no matter who is working with it, or where, or when. We know from the Winfield-Homans Equations that it is impossible to go back into time and alter it in any way, just as it is impossible to go into the future which does not yet exist. There are no paradoxes in time travel. Let’s not make this thing harder than it is by charging off into all the blind alleys we can think of. Ben was on the right track. What is the real problem here?”
Ben sighed. He saw the problem all too clearly. “It boils down to this, I think. Why did they plant those fossils—and probably the apes too? I can think of fifty reasons why they might have seeded men like themselves on a barren planet—population pressure and so forth—but why go to all the trouble of planting a false evolutionary picture for them to dig up later?”
“Maybe it isn’t false,” Ed said slowly.
Franz Gottwald smiled. “Now you’re thinking, Edward.”
“Sorry, Ed. I don’t follow you. You saw them plant those bones. If that isn’t a prime example of salting a site, then what the devil is it?”
“Don’t shoot, pal. I was trying to say that the fossils could have been planted and still tell a true story. Maybe I’m just an old codger set in his ways, but I can’t believe that human evolution is a myth. And there’s a clincher, Ben: why bother with the apes if there is no relationship?”
“I still don’t see—”
“He means,” Gottwald said patiently, “that the fossil sequence is a true one—some place else.”
Ed nodded. “Exactly. The evolutionary series is the genuine article, but man developed on their world rather than on ours. When they seeded men on Earth, they also provided them with a kind of history book—if they could read it.”