“Here’s food. You’ll need a lot of it from now on. And a mirror, for your own amusement.”
“Callister!”
“But I can’t do anything now, obviously. I can’t let you go. I’d give you some books to pass the time, but I know you’ll be too worried to read. I’ll give you sleeping powders, though, a few at a time, if you like.”
There was a silence.
“All right.”
“I’ll have to see you take them, though. You might save them and take a lethal dose.”
“You devil!” Prendergast said, in a voice too shaken to be rancorous.
“Want a powder?”
“No, Callister, can’t we—somehow—”
“We can’t,” said Callister, and swung the turntable. He went away, leaving Prendergast to his food.
It was not pleasant after that, for Callister was neither a sadist nor a machine. He simply shut off his mind to the distressing aspects of the experiment. The process continued with rapidly increasing acceleration. Lost characteristics returned to Prendergast.
By the end of the day he was humpshouldered, awkward, unable to cross his thumb over his palm. His toes were mobile. His skin was flushed, and he ate tremendously, despite the refrigeration. He drank gallons of water and broth, and ate largely of the vitamin capsules that were supplied to him.
At sundown he was not quite unrecognizable. Cro-Magnon, perhaps. Piltdown came later. Pithecanthropus—
Two nights later Prendergast escaped, by means of the turntable in the wall. His strength was surprising. He had bent metal, presumably with his bare hands. Returning from a stroll, Callister went white when he saw the Filipino in a crumpled heap in the hall. He ran to his laboratory, snatched a gun and began his investigation.
Tommy wasn’t dead, just stunned. Splay footprints outside the house showed where Prendergast had gone. Callister loaded another weapon with mercy bullets and took up the hunt. If the man-beast could still communicate with humans, the jig would be up.
But Prendergast couldn’t talk, and his hands were too awkward to hold pen or pencil. Just the same—
CALLISTER traced the fugitive to the private road, and along it to the macadamized alternate route through the mountains. A girl was moving rapidly toward him, having hysterics in transit. She fainted at sight of his dimly glimpsed figure.
Callister administered first-aid. He had seen the girl once or twice, knew she lived a few miles down the road, and guessed at what had happened. She woke up and explained with some attempt at coherence.
“A terrible gorilla—” she began.
“Don’t be frightened. You’re safe enough.” Callister showed her his revolver, and she quieted.
“I was riding my bike down the road when it jumped out at me. I—ran right into it. It picked me up and started snarling and growling.”
Callister’s eyes widened.
“Well?” he prodded.
“I thought—I don’t know what. Finally I broke away and ran. It started after me, and then went back to the bicycle and climbed on it. I jumped into the bushes, and the thing went right past, down the hill. So I came up the other way.”
“Uh-huh. It’s harmless. A trained gorilla. I bought it a while ago—Come back to my place and I’ll drive you home.”
The girl gasped with relief. Callister pulled at his lower lip. Prendergast was heading for the nearest town, Altadena, in the foothills above Pasadena. If he could overtake the fugitive—
He got his car, dropped the girl at her place, and shot down the road like a Juggernaut. Pines cast geometrical shadows ahead of him. The headlights glazed a white, searching swath. There was no sign of Prendergast.
No, there was no sign of him—it. By road, the distance was ten miles through and around the mountains. The man-beast had taken short-cuts, carrying the bicycle with him. Here and there were traces where he had dropped swiftly down slopes and fire-brakes, His agility and strength were a match for the car, partly because of the low-speed road and the hairpin turns.
Callister wondered about finger prints. Were Prendergast’s still recognizable?
He saw the bicycle, a twisted wreck, in his path. Hard usage had proved too much for the machine. But the lights of Altadena were spread below, and isolated window-squares glowed much closer. A roadhouse was half a mile distant. Callister jammed on his brakes as he heard significant sounds from the underbrush.
No—a frightened deer. He speeded up. The roadhouse?
Prendergast was in the roadhouse. The yells proved that. When Callister came through the door, he saw a riot. In the dim light, men and women were boiling around, an expanding cosmos fleeing from the gorilla-creature in the center of the floor. The orchestra leader on his dais was holding a saxophone defensively, while a strip-teaser cowered behind him.
Prendergast stood there for a moment, staring around, inhuman and grotesque. A curious moment of calm succeeded. The patrons hesitated, paused, and waited, wondering perhaps if this was part of the floor show.
Callister felt a momentary qualm at the bulk of the brute across the room. His guns seemed utterly futile.
Prendergast saw him. The thick lips writhed. The apish being stooped, peering through the gloom, eyes reflecting the light.
NO recognition was there. Prendergast’s gaze wandered, fastened on a plate of sandwiches nearby. He lumbered toward them, hunkered down and began to feed.
His brain, as well as his body, had been processed, Callister saw. Some blind instinct had led Prendergast to the outskirts of Altadena. He was no longer—intelligent.
Callister breathed deeply and lifted his gun. He primped high-powered mercy bullets into Prendergast’s thick hide. The powerful anesthetic took effect almost immediately.
Prendergast’s hairy skin twitched all over his gross body. He looked around, still stuffing sandwiches into his mouth. Then he slumped down, harmless and horrible.
Horrible indeed, Callister thought, as he superintended the loading of the limp, unconscious creature into the back of his car. He had had to talk fast, but a call to the Altadena authorities had arranged matters satisfactorily.
A harmless, trained gorilla had escaped from his private menagerie in the mountains. Yes—quite harmless. There was no danger. And some greenbacks passed surreptitiously to the orchestra leader and the master of ceremonies proved the final touch.
An officer rode back with Callister to the house, and he was not averse to that companionship. He was not afraid of Prendergast, but he shrank fastidiously from the presence of this—this creature.
There was talk, and more explanations, and by midnight Callister went to bed, tired but relieved. Prendergast was back in his cell, Tough steel bars had been welded across the turntable opening by Tommy, who had recovered consciousness soon after Callister left the house. The officer was gone, overawed by the laboratory. He had seen nothing suspicious.
Prendergast was once more under the influence of the process. From now on, retrogression would be rapid, incredibly so. And the terrible strength of the pithecanthropus would vanish. Agility, not power was the next step backward.
Prendergast grew a tail.
A few days passed. Prendergast turned into a marsupial. He was much smaller, and looked like a lemur, big-eyed and large-eared.
Callister waited. He was no longer fearful of investigation. Prendergast’s business office ran smoothly, though once a manager telephoned. Nothing untoward came of that.
Prendergast changed under Callister’s eyes. The extraordinary acceleration of the process made the scenelike an unreeling film. Prendergast spent all his, time eating. Concentrated food was necessary in order to keep pace with the increased metabolism.
Then Prendergast lost his pelt. He was hairless for an hour or so. After that he grew scales.
He shot back along the evolutionary path like a rocket. Long since he had reached the main trunk, so there were no offshoots such as wings. Functional and protean, he devolved.
After a while, Cal
lister placed him in an aquarium in the cell. Prendergast flopped about feebly and blew a spray of water at the man.
It was then eight o’clock at night, and Callister was very tired. In an hour or less, Prendergast would be reduced to the original unicellular organism. Probably less, for the process was accelerating continually. Eons were bridged in moments.
There was no point in waiting any longer The job was practically finished. Callister eyed the aquarium and let the hint of an amused smile play about the corners of his mouth. In the morning, he knew, what was left of Prendergast would be gone.
At the door Callister paused, not quite knowing why. Some vague, indefinable premonition troubled him. He shrugged it off and went in search of a nightcap of brandy and soda. Silently he toasted Prendergast—or, rather, his memory.
“It’s been supremely logical,” he mused. “The higher organism always must triumph. Which is right, of course. Well—”
He crushed out his cigarette and went to bed. His dreams were pleasant. They would have been less pleasant had Callister known what was happening in Prendergast’s prison.
FOR a while there had been no change. In the cell it was utterly silent. The invisible rays streamed down through the plastic of the ceiling, bathing and permeating the body of the creature that had been Sam Prendergast. Almost formless, with rudimentary fins and tail, it lay motionless at the bottom of the aquarium, its gills quivering as it breathed.
Then it began to alter.
The fins retracted and vanished. Presently the creature was completely featureless; eyeless, for it did not see; lungless, for it had no need to breathe. It shrank, dwindling as its activity suddenly increased. The amoeba was seeking food.
That period did not last long. By the time the organism was invisible to the naked eye, it had stopped feeding. It was a filterable virus, the basic life-spore—little more than merely an electric, atomic pattern of a life organism.
The evolutionary depths were plumbed. Sam Prendergast had gone back to the abyss from which the human race had so laboriously climbed. He was back in the nebulous, unearthly beginning.
The cell seemed empty. Bare, silent, sterile, it held neither sound nor movement. The rays continued to pour down.
Then something happened.
It was a little thing, but tremendous in its significance. It was a phenomenon that seemed utterly illogical, Prendergast had reversed. For the rays that originally had brought about his evolutionary recession were still sending their forces into the prison.
What happened was simply this: an amoeba appeared in the aquarium.
It remained featureless for only a few minutes. Light-spots appeared on its surface, and the vestige of a minuscule digestive tract could have been seen under a strong microscope. Pseudopods thrust out, and did not retract.
The thing had fins and a tail, as well as gills. It grew and developed visibly. It—returned!
In an hour it was a ganoid fish. Another hour, and it was a tiny, scaled reptile. In the evolutionary crucible its flesh changed and altered almost visibly. The scales gave place to an adaptation—hair.
And now it was a marsupial.
The night drew slowly on, a night of sheer fantasy, while the being that had once been Sam Prendergast mounted the ladder of time once more. Presently he looked like a lemur.
That phase passed almost at once. He was pithecanthropus—shortly, pithecanthropus erectus. The apish being crouched in the center of the cell, eyes closed, body torn and twisted by the frightful speed of the ordeal. Piltdown—Cro-Magnon—Homo sapiens—
The rays poured down. Gradually, almost imperceptibly, a further change was worked. The being, having become human, did not halt at that point. He continued to alter.
He continued to alter, and the mental change was far greater than the physical, though the latter was curious enough. The body elongated, stretching millimetre by millimetre till it was nearly seven feet tall. The joints of knee and elbow had developed so that they now worked on the ball-and-socket principle.
On the man’s forehead, above and between the eyebrows, was a third eye, which with the others made a fleur-de-lis pattern. Its longitudinal axis was vertical, and it was a variation of the pineal gland, a further development.
There were other points of interest. He was a telepath, for one thing. And his brain was the greatest thinking machine that had existed on Earth for unknown millions of years.
THE superman rose. His mind began to function.
He walked toward the door, his body automatically adjusting its atomic structure as he approached the barrier. He was scarcely conscious of the physical adjustment that was so natural to him. His electronic patter n—the matter that made up his. body—changed.
He stepped through the door without opening it. Cold moonlight was silvering the corridor in which he now stood.
New patterns of thought interlocked in his brain. Slowly he began to understand. But it was not easy. He had no memory—only intelligence. The intelligence of a superman.
He found his way to the laboratory by sheer chance, and for a long time stood looking through the darkness that was no hindrance to his nyctaloptic sight. Then he moved purposefully forward.
* * * * *
AT DAWN Callister awoke, though not completely. He had the curious, dreamlike feeling that something was reaching into his mind, probing, searching and then deadening his will, as though with some fantastic mental soporific.
He lay for a timeless eternity in the dim half-world between sleep and wakefulness, almost conscious of the fact that his brain was being searched while he was held in hypnotic slumber.
The sensation passed suddenly. Callister became wide awake of an instant. He opened his eyes and sat up, staring at the noon-tide sunlight pouring hotly through the windows. Odd! He had not overslept for years. Nor had he been troubled with nightmares.
Scowling, he rang for Tommy. There was no answer. Callister found robe and slippers, dashed cold water over his face, and went in search of the Filipino. But at the door of his laboratory he paused, hearing an unfamiliar sound from within. What the devil! Was Tommy trespassing on forbidden ground?
Angrily Callister flung open the door and took two steps into the room, before his mind comprehended what his eyes saw. Then he stopped abruptly, a tight band clamping, over his heart. The laboratory was—changed!
There was new apparatus, for one thing—equipment that was completely unfamiliar to Callister. That glowing box in the corner might be a crucible, perhaps. Near it had been flung a pile of discarded tools—microscopes, oscillators and the like. The machine that was being built in the center of the room was a complete enigma, paradoxical in its simplicity and the impression of complexity that it gave.
But what stopped Callister in his tracks was the sight of the naked, three-eyed man who was working on the machine.
Callister sensed danger and instantly leaped aside, yanking open a drawer. His hand closed on the cold bulk of an automatic. The feel of the corrugated metal was reassuring. As Callister whirled, he saw, with a sense of shock, that the three-eyed man had not even turned to look at him.
“Who the devil are you?” he snapped, lifting the gun. “Do you talk English?”
The giant’s muscular back was toward Callister, but a thought entered the latter’s mind, reminding him of his inexplicable dream that morning. At first the sensation was like a lightning flash in darkness. Then Callister’s brain steadied as something akin to a—a hand gripped it.
“Put down your weapon,” the message came.
LIGHTING with all his will, Callister saw himself lay the automatic back in its drawer. Unarmed, he stared at the giant, who was continuing his cryptic task as though Callister did not exist. But the being was still conscious of him, for the telepathic message continued to flow into Callister’s mind. Somehow the thoughts were translated into words.
“I searched your memory-patterns this morning; I must thank you for your help. When I first realized myself, I ha
d no memories. I was a machine that had never worked. It was necessary for me to find the answer to the puzzle of my own existence.”
Callister caught his breath. Who was this—being? Where—In answer to the unspoken thought, the answer flashed vividly. The giant had wakened to intelligent life in the cell that had housed Prendergast.
“I found the answer, Callister.” He went on working, devoting-only a part of his attention to the telepathed conversation. “Luckily, my brain is sufficiently well developed. I had to use logic, I have been away, disembodied in space-time. Here is the answer.”
Slowly, gradually, Callister began to understand the incredible truth.
It had started in the immeasurable past, before life began on Earth. It had started when a ship had left another galaxy. In it were the three-eyed people. The space voyage took a long time. Not hundreds or thousands of years, but more than that. The ship passed through a region of space where the evolutionary process was reversed, Callister had discovered that same principle, isolating it.
But the three-eyed people degenerated. The change was too sudden for them to save themselves. Instruments became useless in hands that had lost their suppleness. They devolved.
As Prendergast had devolved, they changed back and back until they had reached the amoebic state. Then the ship, robot controlled, reached the Earth, landed and opened its ports. Inside were unicellular organisms which had once been a ruling race.
Outside was the right environment. But there was no life. Hot seas rolled around a young planet.
Inside were the basic life organisms, life-spores which had once been near-human beings. They filtered out of the ship.
On the Earth evolution began again. Affected by environment, some became the progenitors of vegetables. Some became microbes, and survived unchanged. Others grew, in the ancient waters, and acquired irritated spots which became eyes.
They evolved, finally, to backboned creatures, and at last to man. They were creeping back along the evolutionary road they had catastrophically descended. In a few hundred thousand years later than the present day, they would have regained their lost ground.
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