by Chad Oliver
In the very dawn of Man, lost in the gray mists of the Pleistocene, the evolving mammal that was to become homo sapiens was differentiated into two main branches. The first was the one familiar to all students of primate evolution, the one which climaxed in Cro-Magnon and so-called modern man.
The second was a very large strain, going back to Gigantopithecus and Meganthropus, and dividing conclusively with Pithecanthropus robustus. By the time of the second interglacial, there were two distinct species of man on the earth. One group, composed of Average men, lived in caves. The other group, composed of Advanced men, dwelt in the midst of a flourishing civilization.
The two groups were quite different, and in a very fundamental way. The size was important mainly as a convenient tag for differentiating between the two groups at a glance; the real difference lay in their relative effectiveness as cultural units. There was no real significant difference in the “intelligence” of the two kinds of men. The true differences between them could be traced to a single fact: the Advanced men had learned a lesson, learned it early and learned it well.
The only mutation involved had been a cultural one.
The Advanced men had learned the secret of cooperation.
It was painfully obvious, really, that the real key to evolution lay in the concept of cooperation and not in competition. It was not competition between men that enabled the species to survive; it was cooperation between men. One man alone was nothing. A society of men, working together, was invincible.
The Advanced men learned this early. They learned it, and they applied it. Naturally, as they pooled their resources within their group, they pulled ahead rapidly. The same snowballing effect that had so characterized the later development of the Average men exhibited itself to the Advanced group—five hundred thousand years earlier. They built a flourishing civilization, and they were not fools by any means. They looked out at their sub-human brothers smashing each other’s heads with stone axes and they saw a golden opportunity—an opportunity to shape their own destiny through that of the animals in the caves.
And so, quite without their knowledge, they domesticated the other men.
Do the sheep in the field understand the social system which put them there? Does the ape born and reared in a zoo understand that he is not a free agent? How is he to judge, never having known anything else?
The other men, obviously, were of little use in their barbarous state. Therefore, the Advanced men helped them up the ladder. They were in no sense fiends; they were superior, and they realized that the progress of the Average men was necessary for their own development. They neither hated nor loved their brothers. How does the parasite feel toward his host?
The Advanced men kept in the background, although their cities and their physical appearance sifted down into legend. They knew what had put them in their present position, and they worshipped cooperation with clear-eyed devotion. They knew the cardinal law of social control: the group being controlled must not realize that they are not their own masters.
As the Average men developed a civilization of their own, the Advanced men destroyed their own cities and infiltrated the communities of the other men. Inasmuch as they had charted its development themselves, they had no difficulty in securing and maintaining positions of dominance. They were the lords of the manors, the powers behind the thrones. They let the other men fight and work and build, and they skimmed the gravy off for themselves.
But they had built a Frankenstein.
There is one trouble with progress: it never follows the same path twice, and it never unfolds quite the way it is supposed to. It is easy to start a boulder rolling down the side of a mountain, but it is something else again to try to check it in midflight.
The Average men began to catch up. Once technology took hold in their society, it snowballed as it always did. Invention followed invention, development followed development. There was no basic difference in the intelligence of the two groups; one simply had a sizeable head start.
The Advanced men had to work to keep their superiority. They were very few in numbers, due to a culturally imposed breeding ban, and they began to worry. World War One had been an attempt on their part to smash the growing science of the other men, but it had backfired.
A menace arose from an unexpected source: archeology. So long as archeology had been the harmless pot-hunting pastime of a few eccentric antiquarians, it had been nothing, and no cause for alarm. But when scientific techniques had been introduced, when archeologists had turned their attention to an exhaustive reading of the record left in the earth, when they had begun to reconstruct the past …
The Advanced men had developed time travel in a hurry, and had altered the record so that it read what they wanted it to read. But time travel had proved tricky and difficult, and traces had remained—such as a plastic disc left in the dust of a centuries-dead Indian village.
They had altered the record, and they had done other things. They had tried to stop archeology. They had tried to stop it by ridiculing it, by cutting off its funds. They had worked subtly, planting questions….
What good is it?
Why don’t you spend that time doing something practical?
Why bother with all that precise data? What’s a potsherd? Why not just dig for the fun of it?
They had planted men who would interpret the data in the way they wanted it interpreted. They had placed fascinating problems in the earth for the archeologists to play with—false problems. They had planted antagonism in fellow anthropologists, who tended to look with good-natured tolerance on their impractical compatriots. They had planted dogma: if you find something that you shouldn’t find, cover it up again! Nobody will ever believe you!
They were good, these Advanced men. These same techniques were applied all through society, guiding it, directing it, holding it back.
But were they good enough?
The Average men were catching up, incredibly. The cattle were getting dangerous. Despite the best efforts of their masters, they were threatening to burst the bonds of earth entirely and flash outward to the stars. The Advanced men were inherently conservative, their very status and existence depending upon the maintenance of the status quo. And they were too few to follow their cattle to the stars.
“And so you see,” Thomas Fitz-James concluded, tapping out his cold pipe in an ash-tray, “from my point of view you’re something of a monster.”
Shackelford looked at his watch. Three hours had gone by, and he had hardly moved. He took a deep breath.
“Why did you kill my wife?” he asked slowly.
Fitz-James spread his great, strong hands in a placating gesture. “For the same reason, Bill, that we launched the so-called flying saucers into the sky. Before I could tell you all this, I had to prove to you that we meant business, just as one day we will have to step in and show you that we already control the space around the earth. I imagine it has puzzled you?”
Shackelford stared at the giant. It’s only an intellectual puzzle to him, he thought with sudden insight. Dawn wasn’t really human, not to him….
“Yes, it’s puzzled me.”
“Quite simple, really, Bill. Dawn was sick just before you left Mexico, remember? One night, an Erasure crew went back and left a window open by her bed, and put a few pills in her water. She died, of course. Unfortunately, this was rather a major undertaking, however, and it had curious consequences. It was necessary to rig things very carefully, so that no one but yourself saw the woman or talked to her between the time when she ‘died’ and the time she disappeared. On major changes such as this, the human mind often cannot quite adapt to it, and so you have two conflicting sets of memories, neither of them very clear. You wouldn’t understand the details, of course, but perhaps it will give you some insight if you think back to your conversation with your friend Dr. Johnston.” He smiled, enjoying the surprise on Shackelford’s face. “Perhaps he asked about your wife?”
Shackelford thought bac
k. He did seem to remember….
“And you didn’t answer him, of course. Didn’t that strike you as peculiar at the time?”
“I don’t know,” Shackelford said, closing his eyes. “I don’t know.”
“Of course you don’t, Bill. That’s just the point. I feel that you are now in a position to appreciate what I am going to offer you.”
“Offer?”
“Yes, Bill. Consider our position, if you can. We are not fiends; we do not kill for the fun of it. In fact, we abhor violence of any kind. Now, you have stumbled onto something that makes you potentially dangerous to us. I’ll be quite candid with you: an Erasure in your case would be difficult. You have too many contacts; too many questions would be asked. Once in a while we must resort to such methods, but we prefer not to. These disappearances mount up; sooner or later we would paint a picture that all could read. We are at the moment toying with the idea of blasting your whole civilization back to barbarism, but for the moment we like things as they are. We are not unreasonable. You are rather a tall man, Bill.”
Shackelford just sat there, in an unreal room, listening to an unreal giant….
“All we ask of you,” Fitz-James continued in his pleasant, well-modulated voice, as though he were discussing the weather, “is that you stick to the traditional theories in your teaching, that you discourage ‘crackpot’ research in your field, and refrain from it yourself. In other words, we are asking you to follow the path that will lead you to success in your profession. We are not ungrateful, you will find. We will help you; we will guarantee your success. And in time, with your height …”
Shackelford sighed, suddenly aware that he was very tired. “And if I don’t?” he asked.
Fitz-James shrugged his huge shoulders. “Ridicule, Bill, and unhappiness. You will never get anywhere, and you will never do any good. It would be quite futile on your part to resist us, you see. We are immeasurably ahead of you technologically and socially; you cannot fight us with your puny weapons. You would simply wind up in an insane asylum if you tried to tell others what I’ve told you tonight, and you know it. We are not harming you, we are helping you. You have everything to lose and nothing to gain by opposing us. Do I make myself clear?”
“Yes,” said Shackelford. “Very clear.”
Thomas Fitz-James got to his feet, towering over Shackelford. “I’ll be going then, Bill. Thank you so much for the drinks, and feel free to drop in on me at any time.” He extended his great hand. “Sorry about your wife, old man, but it was your fault.”
Shackelford shook the big man’s hand numbly and watched him go out the door. Then, for a long time, he simply stood there in the living room, unmoving.
“Sorry about your wife, old man, but it was your fault.”
Bill Shackelford walked back through the little hall and into the bedroom. He threw himself on the bed, not even bothering to take off his clothes. He was exhausted, physically and emotionally. His brain reeled and staggered and he felt sick again. He lay there in the darkness, in a world that was no longer his world, in a universe gone mad.
The empty bed next to him stabbed at his soul.
He closed his eyes, not caring whether or not he ever opened them again. His life was a chaos, a hideous joke. Out of all his past, all his learning, he knew only one thing with a terrible, icy certainty: he had looked upon the face of Evil.
VI
The little private universe in which we live is more, much more, than a mere random collection of people, buildings, villages and states. All of these things are tied together and made meaningful by the mental patterns, the culture sets, of the individual. We see what we have been trained to see.
For Bill Shackelford, the blinders had been taken off. He still saw the same things and did the same things, but they no longer meant what they were supposed to mean. He had never considered himself to be a naive man; he had, in fact, privately thought of himself as an emancipated, free thinker.
But he found that looking at the naked truth could be a jarring, heart-rending experience.
He stood in his office window and watched the students as they ebbed and flowed across the campus, responding to the steady pulls and thrusts of an artificial time system that bonged out the quarter hours on a bell. Some walked hurriedly, clutching their books, their eyes tired behind smudged glasses. Others moved reluctantly, debating whether or not to cut class and get a beer. Still others, couples, held hands and played the oldest games in the world. He watched and he thought: all of them, every single one of them, are moving in a maze not of their own construction. They are running a maze, and when they get through they will get their crumb of food—a job, in which they will work until they die, keeping a system going for a race they have never even heard of.
He walked along the streets of the city and watched the people hurrying, always hurrying—to get to work, to get home from work, to grab a cup of coffee, to have a little fun before the alarm rang again. Who were they working for?
He read the newspapers. In one corner of the world men were busily blowing each other to bits. In another people argued about whether the men should blow each other to bits or not. In another men spoke of freedom. Still elsewhere politicians rode eagerly about on trains, damning their opponents with gusto and offering charming wondrous panaceas for happiness. In a car by the side of the road two lovers talked about getting married and raising a family. At a scientific congress scientists soberly decided that overpopulation was the cause for war.
Bill Shackelford was like the world he saw around him and he knew it. Outwardly he was “normal,” doing his job. Inwardly he was being ripped apart by what he did and what he saw. He began to drink—not much, and not to excess, but enough to dull the edges of his perception. And even as he drank he thought: this, too, is part of the plan. This is what I’m supposed to do when I get mixed up, because it simply makes me ineffective and removes me as a vital factor in the total situation.
He went home at night to his home that was a home no longer. He sat in his living room with the lights out and his mind hurled its ceaseless, never-ending challenge at him: what are you going to do about it!
He fought out his battle alone. There were no bugles and drums, no flags, no medals, no pictures in the papers. He fought on a secret battleground, with his mind for a weapon. He fought in a world that spoke of war, but didn’t know there was a war on.
What could he do?
He held on tight to a belief in what his work had meant to him. He held on to science as a tool in the search for truth. He did not worship it blindly—he simply felt that it was the only weapon in his arsenal that was good enough to work. He tackled his problem as objectively as possible.
Somehow, it never occurred to him to give up.
The first thing to do was to determine what he couldn’t do—and he soon found that that included almost everything. He could not, obviously, write a letter to the Times about it, or buy time to go on the radio and explain the situation. He could just see himself running through the fantastic story and offering as proof his little plastic disc and the fact that his wife was dead.
That was the short, direct route to the padded ward.
He couldn’t write a book. It would be read, certainly, but what good would it do? It would undoubtedly form the basis for a new cult of some sort, be cited as proof of Atlantis, and filed on the Occult shelf in the library. Quite possibly, too, it would result in his Erasure. Erasure, he thought wryly. A lovely, expressive term. When you see something on the blackboard you don’t want there, just whish! and away it goes.
He couldn’t organize an underground movement to work for liberation. It was a nice, romantic idea, but it was hogwash. The cardinal principle of warfare was not to underestimate the enemy. They would know of an underground movement before it got started, and that would be that. There was something charmingly innocent about the idea of a revolution, but it didn’t appeal to Shackelford. Revolutions had a funny way of changing personnel and lea
ving the situation the same or worse.
It was too bad that life was not like fiction, he reflected. In fiction the good guys just got together and fought it out with the bad guys, and it was all beautifully simple and conclusive. One side utilized some damnably clever gimmick, and the other side gasped in despair and went down the drain. The hero and the heroine then gazed soulfully into each other’s eyes and lived happily ever after—or at least until the next plot of the bad guys arose to be manfully thwarted. This wouldn’t have been much of a story, Shackelford thought ruefully. He was a poor excuse for a hero, the heroine was dead, and there simply wasn’t going to be any pat solution to it all….
What is the solution to life? Shackelford knew that there wasn’t any, not in the usual sense of the term. The really significant changes in the story of man had been relatively small things, unnoticed, for the most part, until long after they had changed the course of history for good and all. Small things—a fish that got caught in the mud and flopped desperately in a world without water trying to breathe. A little mammal that climbed into the trees and another one that came down out of the trees. A man who was nailed to a Cross as a heretic and another who took a trip on a boat and wrote a book about what he had seen. A man who wrote an equation about mass and energy, and another who listened to the grinding chaos of a city and wrote a symphony about it….
Shackelford stared at the darkness. What could he do?
There was no answer.
Autumn had flashed its crimson colors and given way to the soot-gray of winter before Shackelford began to get an answer. He was sitting in the living room thinking about Dawn, when a slow question intruded itself on his mind.
Why had they had to kill her?
He got to his feet and lit a cigarette. They had killed her, obviously, because they wanted to warn him in a way that he would never forget. They had wanted to warn him because he was becoming dangerous….
Dangerous.
“Damn,” he said aloud.
