This Way to the End Times: Classic Tales of the Apocalypse

by Robert Silverberg

  Man—and Sofr did not pretend otherwise—was the other weak point. There was no bringing together of man and animal. Of course, the basic essential functions, such as respiration, digestive processes, and locomotion, were the same; but there was a gulf between the physical development of the two orders that could not be crossed: a gulf between the number, disposition, and capacity of organs. Whereas, by a chain with only a few links missing, the great majority of animals could be joined with the progenitors that had come from the sea, such a linkage for man was not to be found. Hence, to make the theory of evolution complete, it was necessary to conceive, without a shred of evidence, of a hypothetical stock common to both mankind and the denizens of the sea. And nothing, absolutely nothing, indicated that such a stock had ever existed.

  AT ONE TIME, SOFR HAD hoped to find evidence under the soil that would be favorable to his thesis. At his urging, and under his direction, excavations had been carried on for a long period of years, only to turn up results exactly opposite to those expected by their promoter.

  After having passed through a thin skin of humus formed by the rotting of plants and animals similar or comparable to those seen every day, his diggers had got to the thick bed of marine clay, wherein the vestiges of former life were of a different kind. In the clay had been found no more of the existing flora or fauna, but instead a vast accumulation of fossils that were exclusively marine, with congeners still living, for the most part, in the oceans surrounding the Mahart-Iten-Schu.

  What else must be concluded, if not that the scientists had been right in teaching that the continent had formerly served as part of the floor of those same oceans, and that Sofr had not been wrong, consequently, in affirming the marine origin of contemporary animals and plants?

  But unfortunately for the attempt to fit man into the system, still another finding had been made. Scattered throughout the humus, and down into the topmost portion of the clay deposit, innumerable human bones had been brought to light. There was nothing exceptional in the structure of these fragments of skeletons, and Sofr had long since given up hope of finding among them intermediary types that might prove his theory: these bones were the bones of men, no more, no less.

  At the same time, something totally unexpected had been confirmed. Reaching back to a certain age, which could be roughly put at two or three thousand years, the older the bones, the smaller the skulls uncovered. But, inconsistently, beyond this period the progression was reversed. From that point on, the further the retreat into the past, the greater the capacity of the skulls, and, by implication, the size of the brains that they had contained. The largest of all, in fact, had been found among fragments of weapons or tools, few though they were, in the surface of the bed of clay. Careful examination of these venerable remains had left no doubt that the men living in that distant epoch had already acquired a growth of brain very much greater than that of their successors—including even the contemporaries of the Zartog Sofr. Clearly, then, there had been a backward movement for a hundred and seventy centuries, followed by a new advance.

  Troubled by these strange facts, Sofr had pushed on with his searchings. In many places he had had the bed of clay probed to its bottom, and its depth was such that, by the most conservative estimate, its deposit had required not less than fifteen to twenty thousand years. Below it came the surprising discovery of faint remains of an ancient layer of humus, and finally, beneath the humus, solid rock of a nature that varied with the site of the digging.

  But the crowning astonishment was the uncovering of some vestiges, incontestably human in origin, buried at these mysterious depths. They included not only portions of the bones of men, but also the fragments of weapons or tools, bits of pottery, scraps of writing carved in an unknown tongue, and hard stone objects, artfully sculptured. Considering the uniform quality of these artifacts, it could only be supposed that some forty thousand years ago—that is, twenty thousand years before the coming (none knew whence or how) of the first members of the present race—another race had dwelt in these same places and had reached a highly advanced degree of civilization.

  SUCH WAS, IN FACT, THE conclusion generally admitted. Still, there was at least one who dissented.

  The dissenter was none other than Sofr himself. To admit that other men, separated from those who came after by a gap of twenty thousand years, had first populated the earth was, in his opinion, sheer folly. For in that event, how to account for their abrupt disappearance and the equally abrupt appearance of their descendents so long afterward, with no discoverable link between the two? Rather than entertain so absurd a hypothesis, far better wait for more data. Just because these odd findings had failed to explain something, it was not necessary to conclude that it was inexplicable. One day the answer would come. Until then, it was wiser to take no sides, and for the time being to hold to principles that completely met the requirements of sound reason. They could be summed up as follows:

  Planetary life is divided into two phases: pre-human and human. In the first phase, the Earth being in a state of continuous change, it is for this very reason uninhabitable and uninhabited. In the second, the crust of the globe has reached a degree of cohesion affording stability. And given this stability at last, life at once appears. It begins in its simplest forms and moves always toward the more complex, finally producing man, its most perfect expression. And no sooner does man come to Earth than he immediately sets out to seek his own improvement. Slowly, proudly, he is marching toward his end, which is complete understanding and absolute domination of the universe.

  CARRIED AWAY BY THE FEVER of his stubborn belief, Sofr had gone past his house. He turned back with an impatient scowl.

  “What would they have me do!” he muttered. “Admit that men forty thousand years ago enjoyed a civilization like our own, and perhaps a better one? Admit that their wisdom and their skill and goods could then vanish, leaving not the slightest trace? Wipe those people out so completely that their descendents should be forced to begin the task once more at the bottom, thinking themselves pioneers in a world without men before their time? Why, that should be to gainsay the future, to cry out that our effort is in vain! That all human change is as aimless and as little secure as a bubble in the froth of the waves!”

  Sofr halted in front of his house.

  “No, no! Certainly not! Man is the master of things!” he whispered fiercely as he pushed open his door.

  AFTER THE ZARTOG HAD RESTED for a few moments, he lunched with a good appetite, and then he lay down to take his daily nap. But the questions that had shaken him while on his way home continued to torment him, and they banished sleep.

  Despite all his eagerness to establish an absolute uniformity in nature, his mind was too critical to miss the weakness of his system whenever he tackled the problem of the origin and development of man. To force facts to square with a hypothesis set up in advance is one way to convince others, but it is no way to convince oneself.

  Had Sofr not been a scholar, a very eminent Zartog, and had he been instead a member of the illiterate class, he should have had no trouble. The people, indeed, wasted no time in profound speculation. They were content to shut their eyes and repeat the old legend that had been transmitted, since time forgotten, from father to son. Explaining one mystery by another mystery, they traced the origin of man back to the interference of what they called a Higher Will. One day, this unearthly Power had created out of nothing, and for no apparent reason, Hedom and Hiva, the first man and first woman, whose descendents had peopled this world. Thus everything was linked up very simply. . . .

  Much too simply! mused Sofr. When a man despairs of understanding something, it is all too easy to have a god intervene: this device makes it useless to seek solutions of the riddles of the universe, for it suppresses the problems as soon as they are stated.

  If only there were a shred of support of the popular legend! But it rested upon nothing. It was only a tradition, born in times of ignorance, and thereafter handed down fro
m one age to another. Why, even the name Hedom! What was the source of this fantastic word, of outlandish sound, that seemed foreign to the tongue of the Andarti-Iten-Schu? Unnumbered scholars had worn themselves pale over just this little philological difficulty, and had found no satisfactory answer. Come, then! All this was idle stuff, unworthy of the attention of a Zartog.

  Sofr went down, in something of a temper, to his garden, for the hour had come when it was his custom to go there. By now there was less fire in the rays of the declining sun, and a soft breeze was beginning to blow in from the Spone-Schu. The Zartog wandered along the paths, shaded by trees whose shivering leaves were set to whispering by the on-shore wind, and little by little his nerves found again their habitual poise. He could shake off his absorbing thought, calmly enjoy the fresh air, and inspect with interest the fruits, which were the wealth of his gardens, and the flowers, their ornaments.

  His idle steps brought him by chance back toward his house, and he paused at the edge of a deep excavation, around which were scattered a number of tools. Therein would be laid, within a short time, the foundations of a new building that should double the size of his laboratory. But on this holiday the workmen had left their toil to take in the public games.

  Sofr was absently sizing up the amount of work already done and of work still to be done, when, in the gloom of the excavation, a brilliant point caught his eye. Puzzled, he climbed down to the bottom of the hole and pulled a queer object out of the dirt three-quarters covering it.

  Having climbed again into the light, the Zartog examined his find. It was some kind of case, with round ends, made of an unfamiliar metal, gray in color, granular in texture; its luster, dulled by the long time it had spent underground, gleamed only where it had been grazed by a workman’s pick. A slit one-third of the way down from the top indicated that it was made of two parts, one fitting into the other. Sofr tried to open it.

  At his first attempt, the metal, corroded by time, fell into dust, revealing a second object that it had contained.

  Its material was as new to the Zartog as the metal had been. It was a roll of large sheets peppered with strange marks of a regularity suggesting written characters—but forming an unknown script, of a kind that Sofr had never seen, nor even anything like it.

  Trembling with excitement, the Zartog hastened to lock himself in his laboratory, and having spread out the precious document with care, he stood contemplating it.

  Yes, it was some kind of handwriting; nothing could be more certain. But it was no less certain that the writing in no way resembled any that within historic times had been used anywhere on Earth.

  WHENCE CAME THIS DOCUMENT? WHAT message did it carry? These two questions now occupied Sofr’s mind to the exclusion of all else.

  To answer the first, he must be in a position to answer the second. The problem, then, was first of all to decipher the document and translate it—for it could be affirmed in advance that the language would be as unknown as the script.

  Would this task prove impossible? The Zartog Sofr did not think so, and without delay he set eagerly to work.

  That work took a long time—long, dull years, in fact. But Sofr kept tirelessly at it. Undiscouraged, he pursued his methodical study of the mysterious script, advancing step by step toward the light. Finally came a day when he discovered a remote likeness between this ancient tongue and the most archaic dialect of the Andarti-Iten-Schu, and he held the key to the puzzle; the day when, at last, with much hesitation, he could put the message into the tongue of the Men of the Four Seas.

  Now, when that day came, the Zartog Sofr-Ai-Sr made out what follows.

  Rosario, May 24, 19—

  I DATE IN THIS FASHION the beginning of my recital, although in reality it is being written long after this date and in surroundings very different. Considering my theme and motive, order, to my mind, is imperatively necessary, and that is why I am adopting the form of a “journal” written from day to day.

  On May 24, then, begins the recital of the horrible events that I intend to report here for the instruction of those who will come after me if ever again humanity can count upon any sort of future.

  In what language shall I write? In English or Spanish, which I speak fluently? No! I shall write in the language of my own country: in French.

  On this day, May 24, I was entertaining some friends in my villa near Rosario. Rosario is, or rather was, a Mexican city on the Pacific coast a little south of the Gulf of California. Some ten years previously I had installed myself there in order to direct the working of a silver mine that was entirely my own property. My affairs had prospered astonishingly. I was a rich man—the word makes me laugh aloud today!—and was planning to return in a short time to France, the land of my birth.

  My villa, among the most luxurious, was situated at the upper end of an extensive garden that sloped down towards the sea and ended abruptly in a perpendicular cliff more than a hundred meters high. Behind my villa, the terrain continued to rise, and by a winding road one could reach the summit of a mountain range having an altitude exceeding fifteen hundred meters. It was an agreeable drive and I frequently made the ascension in my automobile, a superb and powerful double Phaeton, one of the best French makes.

  It had been while living in Rosario with my son Jean, a handsome lad of twenty, that, upon the death of cousins distant in blood but dear to my heart, I had taken in their daughter Helene, left an orphan with no fortune. Since that time, five years had elapsed. My son Jean was now twenty-five; Helene, twenty. I secretly intended them for one another.

  We were well served by my valet, Germain, Modeste Simonat, a most resourceful chauffeur, and two girls, Edith and Mary, daughters of my gardener, George Raleigh, and his wife Anna.

  In the twilight of this day, May 24, eight of us were seated round my table in the soft light of electric lamps that drew their current from my own generators. In addition to the master of the house, his son, and his ward, there were five guests, of whom three were of the Anglo-Saxon race and two were natives of Mexico.

  Doctor Bathurst was of the Anglo-Saxon group, and Doctor Moreno of the Mexican. The fact that the two were scientists in the widest sense of the word did not prevent them from being rarely in agreement. But they were gallant gentlemen, and the best friends in the world.

  The two other Anglo-Saxons were Williamson, proprietor of an important fishery in Rosario, and Rowling, an enterprising young man who raised early fruits and vegetables in the outskirts of the city and was in the way of reaping a substantial fortune.

  As for the last guest, he was Senor Mendoza, President of the Rosario Tribunal, an estimable gentleman, a cultivated mind, of unquestioned integrity on the bench.

  NOTHING WORTH RECORDING OCCURRED UNTIL we arrived al the end of the meal. I have forgotten what words we had exchanged up to this point. But, on the contrary, I well remember what was said over our cigars.

  Not that our remarks had in themselves any particular importance; it was the brutal commentary on them, shortly to be made, that could not fail to give them a certain piquancy, and they have consequently stayed fresh in my memory.

  We had entered into a discussion of the marvelous achievements of man. At a certain point, Doctor Bathurst said:

  “It is a fact that if Adam” (naturally, as an Anglo-Saxon he pronounced it Eddem) “and Eve” (he said Eeve, you understand) “should return to earth, they’d be jolly well astonished.”

  That was the origin of the discussion. Being a fervent Darwinist, a convinced partisan of natural selection, Moreno asked Bathurst in an ironic tone if he seriously believed in the legend of the Earthly Paradise. Bathurst answered that at least he believed in God, and that, since the existence of Adam and Eve is affirmed in the Bible, it was not his privilege to dispute it. Moreno replied that he believed in God at least as strongly as did his adversary, but that the first man and the first woman could very well be only myths—symbols, rather—and that consequently there was nothing impious in supposing
the pair to represent the breath of life introduced by the Creator into the first cell from which all others had developed. Bathurst retorted that such an interpretation was specious, and that, as far as he was concerned, he held it more flattering to be the direct work of the Lord than to have descended through the medium of more or less monkey-like primates.

  The discussion, I felt, was about to grow heated; but it was suddenly dropped, for the two adversaries by chance found themselves in an area of agreement. (After all, that was how their arguments ordinarily ended.)

  This time, reverting to their earlier theme, the two antagonists concurred in admiring the high culture attained by humanity, whatever had been its origin; and proudly they began to enumerate its conquests. Everything passed in review. Bathurst extolled chemistry, which was advanced to such a degree of perfection that it was likely to disappear by merging with physics to form a single science, primarily concerned with studying the energy inherent in matter. Moreno delivered the eulogy of medicine and surgery, thanks to which, he said, the nature of life processes had been probed to the core, with consequent discoveries that afforded hope, in the near future, of assuring the immortality of animal organisms. After which, the two joined in praising the wonderful advances of astronomy. Were we not in communication, if not with the stars, at least with eight of the planets in the solar system?

  WHEN THE TWO ENTHUSIASTS PAUSED to catch their breath, my other guests and I seized the opportunity to put in a word in our turn, and we went into the vast field of practical inventions that had so profoundly modified our way of life. We toasted the rail-express and steamships that were still best adapted for the transport of heavy or bulky merchandise; the economical airplanes used by travelers who had time to spare; and the pneumatic or electro-ionic tubes, streaking through all continents and beneath the seas, indispensible for people in a hurry. We toasted the innumerable machines, increasingly ingenious, that could perform the work of hundreds of men. We toasted the new printing technique, and our ability to photograph not only light and color, but likewise sound, heat, and all the other waves vibrating in the ether. But above all we toasted electricity, the agent that was so versatile and controllable, the essence and properties of which were now so perfectly understood that, dispensing with wires, we could use it to run all kinds of machines, navigate any vessel, marine, submarine, or aerial, and write, see, or speak—and at whatever distance we pleased.