Transfusion

Ben looked around for Nate York, who was working with the chimps, and spotted him talking to a technician and keeping track of his experiment out of the corner of his eye. Ben waved and went on to the elevator.

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 of 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 Winfield-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 dreamed 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 world-wide 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. “Piltdown 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, Den. 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 sunbaked 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 unearthed.

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.

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 (lashed 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 row-boat.”

“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.”

Ben chewed on his pipe. It made sense, to the extent that anything made sense any more. “I’ll buy that. But where does it leave us?”

“Still up that well-known creek. Every answer we get just leads back to the same old question. Why did they leave us a history book?”

“Answer that one,” Gottwald said, “and you win the gold cigar.”

Ben got to his feet. His head felt as though it were stuffed with dusty cotton.

“Where are you going?”

“I’m going fishing. As long as I’m up the creek I might as well do something useful. I’ll see you later.”

“I hope you catch something,” Ed said.

“So do I,” Ben Hazard said grimly.

The car hummed sleepily across the monotonous flatlands of New Mexico, passed through the gently rolling country that rested the eye, and climbed into the cool mountains where the pines grew tall and the grass was a thick dark green in the meadows.

Ben loved the mountains. As he grew older, they meant more and more to him. The happiest times of his life had been spent up next to the sky, where the air was crisp and the streams ran clear, He needed the mountains, and he always returned to them when the pressure was too much to bear.

He turned off the main road and jolted over a gravel trail; paved roads and good fishing were mutually exclusive, like cities and sanity. He noted with approval that the clouds were draping the mountain peaks, shadowing the land below. When the sun was too bright the fish could see a man coming.

He took a deep breath, savoring the tonic of the air.

Relax, that’s the ticket.

He checked to see that no interloper had discovered his favorite-stretch of water, then parked his car by the side of Mill Creek, a gliding stream of crystal-clean water that tumbled icily out of the mountains and snaked its lazy way through the long green valley. He grinned like a kid with his first cane pole.

Ben pulled on his waders, assembled his rod with practiced skill, and tied on his two pet flies—a Gray Hackle Yellow and a Royal Coachman. He hung his net over one shoulder and his trout basket over the other, lit his pipe, and waded out into the cold water of Mill Creek.

He felt wonderful. He hooked a nice brook trout within five minutes, taking him from a swirl of dark water shadowed by the bank of the stream. He felt the knots and the tensions flow out of him like melting snow, and that was the first step.

He had to relax. There was no other way.

Consider the plight of a baseball player in a bad slump. He gives it all he has, tries twice as hard as usual, but everything he does backfires. His hits don’t fall in, he misses the easy grounders. He lies awake at night and worries.

“Relax, Mac,” his manager tells him. “All you gotta do is relax. Take it easy.”

Sure, but how?

It was the same with a tough scientific problem. Ben had long ago discovered that persistent and orderly logic could take him only so far. There came a time when no amount of forced thinking would get the job done.

The fresh insights and the new slants seldom came to him when he went after them, no matter how hard he tried. In fact, the more he sweated over a problem the more stubbornly recalcitrant his mind became. The big ideas, and the good ones, came to him in a flash of almost intuitive understanding—a flash that was conditioned by what he knew, of course, but a flash that did not come directly from the conscious mind.

The trick was to let the conscious mind get out of the way, let the message get through—

In Ben’s case, go fishing.

It took him two hours, seven trout, and part of a banana to get the answer he sought.

He had taken a long, cool drink from the stream, cleaned his fish, and was sitting down on a rock to eat the lunch he had packed when the idea came.

He had peeled a banana and taken one bite of it when his mind was triggered by a single, innocuous word:

Banana.

Not just any old banana, of course. A specific one, used for a specific purpose.

Remember?

Charles Darwin and Cleopatra, two chimpanzees in their cages. Charles Darwin pushing his ape brain to the limit to fit two sticks together. Why?

To get a banana.

One lousy banana.

That was well enough, but there was more. Darwin might get his banana, and that was all he cared about. But who had placed the sticks in the cage, who had supplied the banana?

And why?

That was an easy one. It was so simple a child could have figured it out. Someone had given Charles Darwin two sticks and a banana for just one reason: to see whether or not he could solve the problem.

In a nutshell, a scientific experiment.

Now, consider another Charles Darwin, another problem.

Or consider Ben Hazard.

What is the toughest problem a man can tackle? Howells pointed it out many years ago. Of all the animals, man is the only one who wonders where he has come from and where he is going. All the other questions are petty compared to that one. It pushes the human brain to the limit…

Ben stood up, his lunch forgotten.

It was all so obvious.

Men had been seeded on the Earth, and a problem had been planted with them—a real problem, one capable of yielding to a true solution. A dazed huddle of human beings had been abandoned by a fire in the mouth of a cave, lost in the morning of a strange new world. Then they had been left strictly alone; there was no evidence that they had been helped in any way since that time. Why?

To see what they could do.

To see how long it would take them to solve the problem.

In a nutshell, a scientific experiment.

Ben picked up his rod and started back toward the car.

There was one more thing, one more inevitable characteristic of a scientific experiment. No scientist merely sets up his experiment and then goes off and forgets about it, even if he is the absolute ultimate in absent-minded professors.

No.

He has to stick around to see how it all comes out. He has to observe, take notes.

It was monstrous.

The whole history of man on Earth…

Ben climbed into his car, started the engine.

There’s more. Face up to it.

Suppose that you had set up a fantastic planetary experiment with human beings. Suppose that you—or one of your descendants, for human generations are slow—came back to check on your experiment. What would you do, what would you be?

A garage mechanic?

A shoe salesman?

A pool room shark?

Hardly. You’d have to be in a position to know what was going on. You’d have to work in a field where you could find out the score.

In a word, you’d be an anthropologist.

There’s still more. Take it to the end of the line.

Now, suppose that man on Earth cracked the time barrier. Suppose a Temporal Research Project was set up. Wouldn’t you be in on it, right at the top?

Sure.

You wouldn’t miss it for anything.

Well, who fit the description? It couldn’t be Ed; Ben had known him most of his life, known his folks and his wife and his kids, visited the Texas town that had been his home.

It wasn’t Ben.

That left Franz Gottwald.

Franz, who had come from Germany and never talked about his past. Franz, with the strangely alien accent. Franz, who had no family. Franz, who had contributed nothing to the project but shrewd, prodding questions…

Franz.

The Grand Old Man.

Ben drove with his hands clenched on the wheel and his lips pressed into a thin, hard line. Night had fallen by the time he got out of the mountains, and he drove across an enchanted desert beneath the magic of the stars. The headlights of his car lanced into the night, stabbing, stabbing—

He passed the great New Mexico rocket base, from which men had hurled their missiles to the moon and beyond. There had been talk of a manned shot to Mars…

How far would the experimenters let them go?

Ben lit a cigarette, not wanting to fool with his pipe in the car. He was filled with a cold anger he had never known before.

He had solved the problem.

Very well.

It was time to collect his banana.

It was after midnight when Ben got home.

He stuck his fish in the freezer, took a shower, and sat down in his comfortable armchair to collect his thoughts. He promptly discovered yet another fundamental truth about human beings: when they get tired enough, they sleep.

He woke up with a start and looked at his watch. It was five o’clock in the morning.

Ben shaved and was surprised to find that he was hungry. He cooked himself some bacon and scrambled eggs, drank three cups of instant coffee, and felt ready for anything.

Even Franz.

He got into his car and drove through the still-sleeping town to Gottwald’s house. It looked safe and familiar in the pale morning light. As a matter of fact, it looked a lot like his own house, since both had been supplied by the government.

That, he thought, was a laugh.

The government had given Gottwald a house to live in.

He got out of his car, walked up to the door, and rang the bell. Franz never got to the office before nine, and his car was still in the garage.

His ring was greeted by total silence.

He tried again, holding his finger on the bell. He rang it long enough to wake the dead.

No answer.

Ben tried the door. It was unlocked. He took a deep breath and stepped inside. The house was neat and clean. The familiar books were on the shelves in the living room. It was like stepping into his own home.

“Franz! It’s me, Ben.”

No answer.

Ben strode over to the bedroom, opened the door, and looked inside. The bed was tidily made, and Franz wasn’t in it. Ben walked through the whole house, even peering inside the closets, before he was satisfied.

Franz wasn’t home.

Fine. A scientist keeps records, doesn’t he?

Ben proceeded to ransack the house. He looked in dresser drawers, on closet shelves, even in the refrigerator. He found nothing unusual. Then he tried the obvious.

He opened Gottwald’s desk and looked inside.

The first thing he saw was a letter addressed to himself. There it was, a white envelope with his name typed on it: Dr. Benjamin Wright Hazard.

Not to be opened until Christmas?

Ben took the letter, ripped it open, and took out a single sheet of paper. He started to read it, then groped for a chair and sat down.

The letter was neatly typed. It said:

My Dear Ben: I have always believed that a scientist must be capable of making predictions. This is not always an easy matter when you are dealing with human beings, but 1 have known you for a long, long time.

Obviously, you are searching my home, or you would not be reading this note. Obviously, if you are searching my home, you know part of the truth.

If you would like to know the rest of the story, the procedure is simple. Look behind the picture of the sand-painting in my bedroom. You will find a button there. Press the button for exactly five seconds. Then walk out into my patio and stand directly in front of the barbecue pit.

Trust me, Ben. I am not a cannibal.

The letter was signed with Gottwald’s scrawled signature.

Ben got up and walked into the bedroom. He looked behind the picture that was hanging over the dresser. There was a small red button.

Press the button for exactly five seconds.

And then—what?

Ben replaced the picture. The whole thing was a trifle too reminiscent of a feeble-minded practical joke. Press the button and get a shock. Press the button and get squirted with water. Press the button and blow up the house—

No. That was absurd.

Wasn’t it?

He hesitated. He could call Ed, but then Ed would insist on coming over right away—and Ed had a wife and kids. He could call the police, but the story he had to tell would have sounded absolutely balmy. He had no proof. He might as well recite “Gunga Din.”

He went back to Gottwald’s desk, found some paper, and typed a letter. He outlined the theory he had formed and wrote down exactly what he was going to do. He put the letter into an envelope, addressed the envelope to Ed, stamped it, and went outside and dropped it in the mailbox on the corner.

He went back into the house.

This time he did not hesitate—not for a second.

He punched the button behind the picture for exactly five seconds. Nothing happened. He went out into the patio and stood directly in front of the barbecue pit.

The wall around the patio hid the outside world, but the blue sky overhead was the same as ever. He saw nothing, heard nothing.

“Snipe hunt,” he said aloud.

Then, with breathtaking suddenness, something did happen.

There was an abrupt stillness in the air, a total cessation of sound. It was as though invisible glass walls had slipped silently into place and sealed off the world around him.

There was no perceptible transition. One moment the cone of yellow light was not there, and the next it was. It surrounded him: taut, living, seething with an energy that prickled his skin.

He knew that yellow light.

He had seen it once before, in the dawn of time…

Ben held his breath; he couldn’t help it. He felt strangely weightless, buoyant, a cork in a nameless sea—

His feet left the ground.

“Good God,” Ben said.

He was lifted into the yellow light, absorbed in it. He could see perfectly, and it didn’t help his stomach any. He could see the town below him—there was Gottwald’s patio, the barbecue pit, the adobe house. He began to regret the bacon and eggs he had eaten.

He forced himself to breathe again. The air was warm and tasteless. He rose into the sky, fighting down panic.

Think of it as an elevator. It’s just a way of getting from one place to another. I can see out, but of course nothing is visible from the outside…

But then how did I see the yellow light before?

This must be different. They couldn’t risk being seen—

Relax!

But he kept going higher, and faster.

The Earth was far away.

It was an uncanny feeling—not exactly unpleasant, but he didn’t care for the view, it was like falling through the sky. It was impossible to avoid the idea that he was falling, that he was going to hit something…

The blue of the sky faded into black, and he saw the stars.

Where am I going, where are they taking me?

There!

Look up, look up—

There it was, at the end of the tunnel of yellow light.

It blotted out the stars.

It was huge even against the immense backdrop of space itself. It stunned his mind with its size, that sleeping metal beast, but he recognized it.

It was the same ship that had landed the first men on Earth.

Dark now, dark and vast and lonely—but the same ship.

The shaft of yellow light pulled him inside; there was no air lock. As suddenly as it had come, the light was gone.

Ben stumbled and almost fell. The gravity seemed normal, but the light had supported him for so long that it took his legs a moment to adjust themselves.

He stood in a cool green room. It was utterly silent.

Ben swallowed hard.

He crossed the room to a metal door. The door opened before he reached it. There was only blackness beyond, blackness and the total silence of the dead.

Ben Hazard tried to fight down the numbing conviction that the ship was empty.

There is an almost palpable air of desolation about long deserted things, about empty houses and derelict ships and crumbling ruins. There is a special kind of silence about a place that has once known life and knows it no longer. There is a type of death that hovers over things that have not been used for a long, long time.

That was the way the ship felt.

Ben could see only the small green room in which he stood and the corridor of darkness outside the door. It could have been only a tiny fraction of the great ship, only one room in a vast city in the sky. But he knew that the men who had once lived in the ship were gone. He knew it with a certainty that his mind could not question.

It was a ghost ship.

He knew it was.

That was why his heart almost stopped when he heard the footsteps moving toward him through the silence.

Heavy steps.

Metallic steps.

Ben backed away from the door. He tried to close it but it would not shut. He saw a white light coming at him through the dark tunnel. The light was higher than a man—

Metallic steps?

Ben got a grip on himself and waited. You fool, you knew they had robots. You saw them. Robots don’t die, do they?

Do they kill?

He saw it now, saw its outline behind the light. Twice the size of a man, its metal body gleaming.

It had no face.

The robot filled the doorway and stopped. Ben could hear it now: a soft whirring noise that somehow reminded him of distant winds. He told himself that it was just a machine, just an animated hunk of metal, and his mind accepted the analysis. But it is one thing to know what a robot is, and it is quite another to find yourself in the same room with one.

“Well?” Ben said. He had to say something.

The robot was evidently under no such compulsion. It said nothing and did nothing. It simply stood there.

“You speak English, of course?” Ben said, recalling the line from an idiotic story he had once read.

If the robot spoke anything, it wasn’t English.

After a long, uncomfortable minute, the robot turned around and walked into the dark corridor, its light flashing ahead of it. It took four steps, stopped, and looked back over its shoulder.

There was just one thing to do, and one way to go.

Ben nodded and stepped through the doorway after the robot.

He followed the giant metallic man along what seemed to be miles of featureless passageways. Ben heard no voices, saw no lights, met no living things.

He felt no fear now; he was beyond that. He knew that he was in a state of shock where nothing could get through to him, nothing could hurt him. He felt only a kind of sadness, the sadness a man knows when he walks through the tunnels of a pyramid or passes a graveyard on a lonely night.

The ship that men had built was so vast, so silent, so empty…

A door opened ahead of them.

Light spilled out into the corridor.

Ben followed the robot into a large, comfortable room. The room was old, old and worn, but it was alive. It was warm and vital and human because there were two people in it. Ben had never before been quite so glad to see anyone.

One of the persons was an elderly woman he had never seen before.

The other was Franz Gottwald.

“Hello, Ben,” he said, smiling. “I don’t believe you’ve met my wife.”

Ben didn’t know whether he was coming into a nightmare or coming out of one, but his manners were automatic.

“I’m very pleased to meet you,” he said, and meant it.

The room had a subtle strangeness about it that once more reminded Ben of a dream. It was not merely the expected strangeness of design of a new kind of room, a room lost in the lonely miles of a silent spaceship; it was an out-of-phase oddness that at first he could not identify.

Then he caught it. There were alien things in the room: furniture that was planned for human beings but produced by a totally different culture pattern, carvings that were grotesque to his eyes, rugs that glowed in curiously wrong figures. But there were also familiar, everyday items from the world he knew: a prosaic reading lamp, a coffee pot bubbling on a table, some potted plants, a framed painting by Covarrubias. The mixture was a trifle jarring, but it did have a reassuring air of homeliness.

How strange the mind is. At a time like this, it concentrates on a room.

“Sit down, sit down,” Franz said. “Coffee?”

“Thank you.” Ben tried a chair and found it comfortable.

The woman he persisted in thinking of as Mrs. Gottwald—though that was certainly not her actual name—poured out a cup and handed it to him. Her lined, delicate face seemed radiant with happiness, but there were tears in her eyes.

“I speak the language too a little,” she said hesitantly. “We are so proud of you, so happy—”

Ben took a sip of the coffee to cover his embarrassment. He didn’t know what he had expected, but certainly not this.

“Don’t say anything more, Arnin,” Franz said sharply. “We must be very careful.”

“That robot of yours,” Ben said. “Couldn’t you send him out for oiling or something?”

Franz nodded. “I forgot how weird he must seem to you. Please forgive me. I would have greeted you myself, but I am growing old and it is a long walk.” He spoke to the robot in a language Ben had never heard, and the robot left the room.

Ben relaxed a little. “Do you two live up here all alone?”

An inane question. But what can I do, what can I say?

Old Franz seated himself next to Ben. He still wore his white suit. He seemed tired, more tired than Ben had ever seen him, but there was a kind of hope in his eyes, a hope that was almost a prayer.

“Ben,” he said slowly, “it is hard for me to talk to you—now. I can imagine how you must feel after what you have been through. But you must trust me a little longer. Just forget where you are, Ben—a spaceship is just a ship. Imagine that we are back at the Station, imagine that we are talking as we have talked so many times before. You must think clearly. This is important, my boy, more important than you can know. I want you to tell me what you have discovered—I want to know what led you here. Omit nothing, and choose your words with care. Be as specific and precise as you can. Will you do this one last thing for me? When you have finished, I think I will be able to answer all your questions.”

Ben had to smile. “Be as specific and precise as you can.” How many times had he heard Franz use that very phrase on examinations?

He reached for his pipe. For a moment he had a wild, irrational fear that he had forgotten it—that would have been the last straw, somehow—but it was there. He filled it and lit it gratefully.

“It’s your party, Franz. I’ll tell you what I know.”

“Proceed, Ben—and be careful.”

Mrs. Gottwald—Arnin?—sat very still, waiting.

The ship was terribly silent around them.

Ben took his time and told Franz what he knew and what he believed. He left nothing out and made no attempt to soften his words.

When he was finished, Gottwald’s wife was crying openly.

Franz, amazingly, looked like a man who had suddenly been relieved of a sentence of death.

“Well?” Ben asked.

Gottwald stood up and stroked his white beard. “You must think I am some kind of a monster,” he said, smiling.

Ben shrugged. “I don’t know.”

Mrs. Gottwald dried her eyes. “Tell him,” she said. “You can tell him now.”

Gottwald nodded. “I am proud of you, Ben, very proud.”

“I was right?”

“You were right in the only thing that matters. The fossils were a test, and you have passed that test with flying colors. Of course, you had some help from Edward—”

“I’ll give him part of the banana.”

Gottwald’s smile vanished. “Yes. Yes, I daresay you will. But I am vain enough to want to clear up one slight error in your reconstruction. I do not care for the role of monster, and mad scientists have always seemed rather dull to me.”

“The truth is the truth.”

“A redundancy, Ben. But never mind. I must tell you that what has happened on Earth was not a mere scientific experiment. I must also tell you that I am not only a scientist who has come back, as you put it, to see how the chimpanzees are doing. In fact, I didn’t come back at all. We—my people—never left. “I was born right here in this ship, in orbit around the Earth. It has always been here.”

“For twenty-five thousand years?”

“For twenty-five thousand years.”

“But what have you been doing?”

“We’ve been waiting for you, Ben. You almost did not get here in time. My wife and I are the only ones left.”

“Waiting for me? But—” Gottwald held up his hand. “No, not this way. I can show you better than I can tell you. If my people had lived—my other people, I should say, for I have lived on the Earth most of my life—there would have been an impressive ceremony. That can never be now. But I can show you the history lesson we prepared. Will you come with me? It is not far.”

The old man turned and walked toward the door, his wife leaning on his arm.

“So long,” she whispered. “We have waited so long.”

Ben got up and followed them into the corridor.

In a large assembly room filled with empty seats, somewhere in the great deserted ship, Ben saw the history of Man.

It was more than a film, although a screen was used. Ben lived the history, felt it, was a part of it.

It was not a story of what King Glotz did to King Goop; the proud names of conventional history fade into insignificance when the perspective is broad enough. It was a story of Man, of all men.

It was Gottwald’s story—and Ben’s.

Ben lived it.

Millions of years ago, on a world that circled a sun so far away that the astronomers of Earth had no name for it and not even a number, a new animal called Man appeared. His evolution had been a freakish thing, a million-to-one shot, and it was not likely to be repeated.

Man, the first animal to substitute cultural growth for physical change, was an immediate success. His tools and his weapons grew ever more efficient. On his home world, Man was a patient animal—but he was Man.

He was restless, curious. One world could not hold him. He built his first primitive spaceships and set out to explore the great dark sea around him. He established colonies and bases on a few of the worlds of his star system. He looked outward, out along the infinite corridors of the universe, and it was not in him to stop.

He tinkered and worked and experimented.

He found the faster-than-light drive.

He pushed on through the terrible emptiness of interstellar space. He touched strange worlds and stranger suns—

And he found that Man was not alone.

There were ships greater than his, and Beings—

Man discovered the Enemy.

It was not a case of misunderstanding, not a failure of diplomacy, not an accident born of fear or greed or stupidity. Man was a civilized animal. He was careful, reasonable, prepared to do whatever was ethically right.

He had no chance.

The Enemy—pounced. That was the only word for it. They were hunters, destroyers, killers. They were motivated by a savage hunger for destruction that Man had never known. They took many shapes, many forms.

Ben saw them.

He saw them rip ships apart, gut them with an utter ferocity that was beyond understanding. He saw them tear human beings to shreds, and eat them, and worse—

Ben screamed.

The Beings were more different from Man than the fish that swim in the sea, and yet…

Ben recognized them. He knew them.

They were there, all of them. Literally, the Beings of nightmares.

The monsters that had troubled the dark sleeps of Earth, the things that crawled through myths, the Enemy who lived on the black side of the mind. The dragons, the serpents, the faces carved on masks, the Beings shaped in stones dug up in rotting jungles—

The Enemy.

We on Earth have not completely forgotten. We remember, despite the shocks that cleansed our minds. We remember, we remember. We have seen them in the darkness that lives always beyond the fires, we have heard them in the thunder that booms in the long, long night.

We remember.

It was not a war. A war, after all, is a specific kind of contest with rules of a sort. There were no rules. It was not a drive for conquest, not an attempt at exploitation. It was something new, something totally alien.

It was destruction.

It was extermination.

It was a fight between two different kinds of life, as senseless as a bolt of lightning that forked into the massive body of a screaming dinosaur.

Man wasn’t ready.

He fell back, fighting where he could.

The Enemy followed.

Whether he liked it or not, Man was in a fight to the finish.

He fought for his life. He pushed himself to the utmost, tried everything he could think of, fought with everything he had. He exhausted his ingenuity. The Enemy countered his every move.

There was a limit.

Man could not go on.

Ben leaned forward, his fists clenched on his chair. He was a product of his culture. He read the books, saw the tri-di plays. He expected a happy ending.

There wasn’t one.

Man lost.

He was utterly routed.

He had time for one last throw of the dice, one last desperate try for survival. He did his best.

He worked out the Plan.

It wasn’t enough to run away, to find a remote planet and hide. It wasn’t enough just to gain time.

Man faced the facts. He had met the Enemy and he had lost. He had tried everything he knew, and it hadn’t been good enough. One day, no matter how far he ran, he would meet the Enemy again.

What could he do?

Man lives by his culture, his way of life. The potential for any culture is great, but it is not limitless. Culture has a way of putting blinders on its bearers; it leads them down certain paths and ignores others. Technological complexity is fine, but it is impotent without the one necessary ingredient:

Ideas.

Man needed new ideas, radically new concepts.

He needed a whole new way of thinking.

Transplanting the existing culture would not do the job. It would simply go on producing variants of the ideas that had already been tried.

Man didn’t need transplanting.

He needed a transfusion, a transfusion of ideas.

He needed a brand new culture with fresh solutions to old problems.

There is only one way to get a really different culture pattern: grow it from scratch.

Sow the seeds and get out.

Man put the Plan into effect.

With the last of his resources, he outfitted four fugitive ships and sent them out into the wastes of the seas between the stars.

“We don’t know what happened to the other three ships,” Franz Gottwald said quietly when the projection was over. “No ship knew the destination of any other ship. They went in different directions, each searching for remote, hidden worlds that might become new homes for men. There is no way of knowing what became of the others; I think it highly unlikely that any of them survived.”

“Then Earth is all there is?”

“That is what we believe, Ben—we have to go ahead on that assumption. You know most of the rest of the story. This ship slipped through the Enemy and found the Earth. We landed human beings who were so conditioned that they could remember little or nothing, for they had to begin all over again. We planted the fossils and the apes as a test, just as you supposed.”

“But why? There was no need for such a stunt—”

Gottwald smiled. “It wasn’t a stunt, my boy. It was the key to everything. You see, we had to warn the men of Earth about what they had to face. More than that, once their cultures had developed along their own lines, we had to share what we had with them. I need hardly remind you that this ship is technologically many thousands of years ahead of anything the Earth has produced. But we couldn’t turn the ship over to them until we were certain they were ready. You don’t give atomic bombs to babies. The men of Earth had to prove that they could handle the toughest problem we could dream up. You solved it, Ben.”

“I didn’t do it alone.”

“No, of course not. I can tell you now that my people—my other people—never did invent time travel. That was a totally unexpected means of tackling the problem; we never could have done it. It is the most hopeful thing that has happened.”

“But what became of the men and women who stayed here on the ship?”

Franz shook his head. “Twenty-five thousand years is a long, long time, Ben. We were a defeated people. We worked hard; we were not idle. For one thing, we prepared dictionaries for every major language on Earth so that all the data in our libraries will be available to you. But man does not live well inside a ship. Each generation we became fewer; children were very scarce.”

“It’s like the old enigma of the cities, isn’t it?”

“Exactly. No city in human history has ever reproduced its population. Urban births are always lower than rural ones. All cities have always drawn their personnel from the surrounding countryside. The ship was sealed up; we had no rural areas. It was only a matter of time before we were all gone. My wife and I were the last ones, Ben—and we had no children.”

“We were so afraid,” Mrs. Gottwald said. “So afraid that you would not come before it was too late…”

“What would you have done?”

Franz shrugged wearily. “That is one decision I was spared. I did cheat a little, my boy. I was careful to give you no help, but I did plant some projectors near you that kept you stirred up. They broadcast frequencies that… ah… stimulate the mind, keep it in a state of urgency. Perhaps you noticed them?”

Ben nodded. He remembered the voice that spoke in his skull:

Hurry, hurry—

“Franz, what will happen now?”

Gottwald stroked his beard, his eyes very tired. “I can’t tell you that. I don’t know the answer. I have studied the men of Earth for most of my life, and I still don’t know. You are a tough people, Ben, tougher than we ever were. You have fought many battles, and your history is a proud one. But I cannot read the future. I have done my best, and the rest is up to you.”

“It’s a terrible responsibility.”

“Yes, for you and for others like you it will be a crushing burden. But it will be a long fight; we will not live to see more than the beginning of it. It will take centuries for the men of Earth to learn all that is in this ship. It’s an odd thing, Ben—I have never seen the Enemy face to face. You will probably never see them. But what we do now will determine whether mankind lives or dies.”

“It’s too much for one man.”

“Yes.” Gottwald smiled, remembering. “It is.”

“I don’t know where to begin.”

“We will wait for Edward—he will be here tomorrow, unless I don’t know him at all—and then the three of us will sit down together for one last time. We will think it out. I am very tired, Ben; my wife and I have lived past our time. It is hard to be old, and to have no children. I always thought of you and Edward as my sons; I hope you do not find this too maudlin.”

Ben searched for words and couldn’t find any.

Franz put his arm around his wife. “Sometimes, when the job was too big for me, when I felt myself giving up, I would walk up into the old control room of this ship. My wife and I have stood there many times. Would you like to see it?”

“I need it, Franz.”

“Yes. So do I. Come along.”

They walked for what seemed to be miles through the dark passages of the empty ship, then rode a series of elevators up to the control room.

Franz switched on the lights.

“The ship is not dead, you know,” he said. “It is only the people who are gone. The computers still maintain the ship’s orbit, and the defensive screens still make it invulnerable to detection—you wouldn’t have seen it if you had not been coming up the light tube, and there is no way the ship can be tracked from Earth. What do you think of the control room?”

Ben stared at it. It was a large chamber, acres in extent, but it was strangely empty. There were panels of switches and a few small machines, but the control room was mostly empty space.

“It’s not what I expected,” he said, hiding his disappointment.

Franz smiled. “When machinery is efficient you don’t need a lot of it. There is no need for flashing lights and sparks of electricity. What you see here gets the job done.”

Ben felt a sudden depression. He had badly needed a lift, and he didn’t see it here. “If you’ll forgive me for saying so, Franz, it isn’t very inspiring. I suppose it is different for you—”

Gottwald answered him by throwing a switch.

Two immense screens flared into life, covering the whole front of the control room.

Ben caught his breath.

One of the screens showed the globe of the Earth far below, blue and green and necklaced with silver clouds.

The other showed the stars.

The stars were alive, so close he could almost touch them with his hand. They burned like radiant beacons in the cold sea of space. They whispered to him, called to him—

Ben knew then that the men of Earth had remembered something more than monsters and nightmares, something more than the fears and terrors that crept through the great dark night.

Not all the dreams had been nightmares.

Through all the years and all the sorrows, Man had never forgotten.

I remember. I remember.

I have seen you through all the centuries of nights. I have looked up to see you, I have lifted my head to pray, I have known wonder—

I remember.

Ben looked again at the sleeping Earth.

He sensed that Old Franz and his wife had drawn back into the shadows.

He stood up straight, squaring his shoulders.

Then Ben Hazard turned once more and looked out into the blazing heritage of the stars.

I remember, I remember—

It has been long, but you, too, have not forgotten.

Wait for us.

We’ll be back.

Transfusion

by Chad Oliver

An A\NN/A Preservation Edition.
Notes

The End.

Notes and proofing history

Transfusion

by Chad Oliver

An A\NN/A Preservation Edition. Notes

The End.

Notes and proofing history

An A\NN/A Preservation Edition.
Notes