Journey Into Space (24 page)

There were about ten of them, including women and children.

So far as I could tell, they were neanderthaloids. Their skins were of a dark hue, whether naturally or from the want of a wash I couldn’t say. Their hair was auburn, their noses flat and their eyebrows beetling. From their wide mouths, which frequently opened in a snarl, long canine teeth protruded. Their feet were broad and large and, as they walked, their arms swung like a chimpanzee’s. Their bodies, as well as their heads, were covered with hair, thick and matted on the chest and thighs. The men had long ragged beards and some of the women held children to their breasts. They all carried some kind of weapon, either a long, sharpened stick, a branch of a tree shaped as a club, or merely heavy stones which they picked up from the ground and used as missiles. They were all stark naked and walked with a stoop.

“When we first arrived here,” the Voice continued, “thousands of years ago, there were only a few of these animals. But they have steadily multiplied and emerged as creatures with intelligence. They live in small communities and have learned to make fire. They have an insatiable desire to destroy us and all that belongs to us.”

“Then why don’t you do the same to them?” asked Jet.

“We can do many things, but we cannot harm any living creature.”

“Well, that’s a comfort,” Lemmy said to me quietly. “But won’t you even kill for food?” asked Jet.

“There is no need to kill to live.”

“But life is like that,” argued Jet. “One animal kills another so that it may survive and that, in its turn, is killed by another. And so on.”

“So we found when we first arrived on Earth; it was something new to us. But these creatures that you see have a far higher intelligence than any other animal and yet behave little differently. There is an incredible selfishness in their nature. They fight savagely for food and mates--even kill each other. They would kill
you
as soon as look at you.”

“But they won’t come looking for us down here, will they?” asked Lemmy.

“No. They seldom leave the forest.”

“Then we’ve got nothing to be scared of, so long as we stay here.”

“But you can’t.”

“Why not?” asked Jet.

“I’ve already told you. The last of us are about to leave, and we cannot protect you when we are gone. Already the forest creatures had begun to get curious about you. That is why we brought you here--where you can remain in safety until we can remove you to Venus to spend the remainder of your days in peace and comfort.”

“That’s what you say,” put in Lemmy, “but how do we know what you might get up to when you get us there?”

“You don’t have to come. You can remain here if you wish.”

“With those gorillas, you mean?” said Lemmy. “And you say you’ve no wish to harm us.”

“It would not be us that harmed you; it would be the forest creatures, your own ancestors.”

“Ah! That’s the point, isn’t it?” said Jet. “You think that because we’re descended from those--those cave men, we’re still like them. That’s the true reason you won’t attempt to get us back to our own time.”

“Can you blame us? We have seen the forces that drive them, their uncontrollable desire to destroy anything they do not understand. Can you imagine what such creatures would do if let loose on a peaceful planet where violence was unknown?”

“Yes, I can,” said Mitch, “but twentieth-century man is not like that. We are quite different, you can see that for yourself.”

“Physically, yes, but it takes a long time for such things to be driven out of a being’s nature--a long, long time, longer than your kind has inhabited this planet.”

“But in comparison with the age of the Earth,” I said, “Man has hardly existed any time at all.”

“You are merely proving my argument.”

“But even in that time we have learned a lot,” said Jet. “We’ve progressed.”

“You mean you don’t kill each other anymore? You no longer destroy the things that can give you life and comfort, as the forest men burn our crops which they could eat if they knew how? You are certain that the instinct does not remain in some other form?”

Jet was silent. “Look,” he said at length, “we’re not perfect. I don’t know how long your kind has been alive, probably many thousand times longer than Man. You’ve had time to conquer your primitive desires, suppress them. You have endless generations of experience behind you. Give us the time and we’ll be like you. We’ll stamp out the undesirable part of our natures; but you must give us the time.”

“I realise that,” said the Voice. “But meanwhile are you to be allowed to expand into the realms of space; to destroy others, perhaps? To conquer space before you have even conquered yourselves?”

“You can’t help destruction of some kind,” said Mitch. “You can’t plant a field without you clear the forest first. You can’t drive a steam engine without you dig out the coal or pump out the oil from the bowels of the Earth.”

“Oh yes, you can,” said the Voice. “There is power all around you; forces for all to use, with no digging and no pumping, no waste.”

“We haven’t learned to harness that power yet,” said Jet. “We don’t even know what it is.”

“Then perhaps you will leave your exploration of space until you do.”

“But don’t you see,” Jet was emphatic, “that is where you can help us.”

“How?”

“By telling us your secrets.”

“Would you explain the workings of your ship and all its equipment to the forest creatures?”

“What would be the point?” asked Jet. “It would be like trying to explain the quantum theory to a child.”

“Exactly.”

But Jet was not to be defeated. “At least,” he said, “you could make a start--with simple things. We are not quite as primitive as those ape men, even by comparison with you.”

“A child cannot be taught to run before it can walk, and you have hardly emerged from the crawling stage.”

“You don’t think much of us, one way and another, do you?” asked Lemmy.

“We think as much of you as we do of any other living creature anywhere in the Universe. We have no wish to harm you.”

“But if you leave us here,” said Lemmy, “it amounts to the same thing.”

“For our own safety, for the safety of our generations to come, it would be better to leave you here--to prevent your ever going out into space again.”

“Then you don’t know us as well as you think you do. Our deaths would make no difference. Man will conquer space; and neither you nor anybody else will stop him.”

There was no reply to Jet's last remark. We stood in silence and watched the cave men on the screen. Some of them were now sitting on the ground. Two were fighting; tearing at each other's throats with their fingernails. Others gathered round them, snarling and growling as though they, too, were likely to join in the fight at any moment. Then the picture faded and the globe became opaque once more.

Jet called the Voice two or three times but got no reply. So, one by one, we wandered back to the table and disconsolately sat down. "Well," said Jet, "what do you think they'll do now?"

"Take us to Venus, of course," said Mitch. "What else? How can we prevent them?"

"We don't have to take off," I said.

"I suppose they could find a way of making us if they wanted to," said Lemmy. "I wouldn't put it past them."

I wasn't of Lemmy's opinion. "I don't think they would ever make us do anything against our will," I told him. "The worst that could happen would be for us to have to leave this city and make our own way through this hostile, pre-historic world until death overtook us all."

"Blimey," said Lemmy, half smiling, "we wouldn't half put some of those archaeologists in a flutter if they found our skeletons in the same grave as one of those gorillas."

"Well," said Jet, "we'd better decide what we want to do. If they insist on taking us to Venus and no other place, are we to accept or not?"

"No," I said decisively. "At least we know we can breathe the air here. And, with luck, we may keep ourselves alive for some years yet. On Venus we might not live five minutes."

Mitch disagreed flatly. "If it comes to a final choice," he said, "I think I would go to Venus."

"Good heavens, Mitch," said Jet. "Why?"

"For the same reason as I went to the Moon. If I'm never going back to my own time anyway, I might as well see as much of the Universe as I can before I die."

And so began a lengthy discussion--hours of argument broken by long silences or walks outside to breathe the deeply-scented, invigorating air.

I was outside the sphere when I heard Jet call me. I ran back into the globe to hear the Voice saying, “We have decided, against our better judgment, to help you get back to your own time.”

We were immeasurably relieved. “Thank you,” said Jet quietly.

“Wait. We will help you, but there will be a considerable risk.”

“We don’t mind,” Jet spoke for us all, “if there’s a sporting chance.”

“We may not land you back at exactly the same time as we first picked you up. Are you willing to take that chance?” We were.

Two hours later we were aboard a Time Travellers’ saucer-like ship, watching a 3-D reproduction of the country we were travelling over as it passed through the spherical televiewer screen The journey as far as the river was uneventful. Then, just before we were due to land, we saw from the televiewer that our transfer from the time ship to Luna was not going to be easy.

The first intimation of our new peril was a dense cloud of smoke rising above the forest in the direction of the river. A few moments later, as we
sped on our course, we saw that the cultivated fields were burning furiously. Lining the river bank were swarms of ape men.

“What the devil are they up to?” asked Jet anxiously.

“It’s pretty obvious, isn’t it?” I answered him. “They’ve set fire to the fields, as the Voice said they frequently do.”

“Is it just the fields,” asked Mitch, “or is it something to do with our ship?”

A closer study of the televiewer told us what he meant. There was Luna all right, but a change had come over her. Instead of resting on her undercarriage as we had left her, Luna was standing on her tail. The ladder to the now highly elevated cabin was extended and the main door open.

Clouds of smoke were drifting by her and at first we thought that she, too, was surrounded by the flames. But although an attempt had been made to burn the grass round her, it had not taken well and was now only smouldering. The flames were emanating from the nearby crops.

There were about a dozen ape men and women quite near to Luna, and when they saw us coming they took to their heels and ran--but only for about a hundred yards, then they turned to watch us complete our descent. They must have realised long ago that the time ships never harmed them.

The moment we landed the televiewer picture dissolved and the hatchway in the ceiling slid open.

Jet climbed the ladder first, the rest of us following closely behind. The dome was already open when we reached the upper deck and we paused at the entrance to survey the scene. There wasn’t a great deal to see because of the smoke that was drifting past. So far as we could tell, the group of cave men who had been near the ship when we landed were at least a hundred yards away, but there might be others, much closer.

“If only we had a gun,” said Mitch. “A spear--anything --we would at least have a chance to defend ourselves--if they decide to attack us.”

“You mean you’d kill them?” I asked him.

“If it came to it,” Mitch said, “yes, I would.”

“But you daren’t,” I said.

“Huh?” Mitch looked at me as though I were crazy.

“How can you? These people are our ancestors. For all we know, each of us is directly descended from them. If you kill even one, you might well kill a child as yet unborn and his children and his children’s children, and so on down to the twentieth century.”

“Good Lord,” said Jet. “It hadn’t occurred to me. To kill one of these people might change the whole course of human progress and civilisation, and if we do get back to our own time, we might find the world is a completely different place.”

“We might well,” I said.

“Then what are we to do?” asked Lemmy. “Supposing they kill us?”

“That won’t matter,” said Jet. “We are not the past. Nothing they do to us can affect it. It could only affect the future. But God knows what havoc we might do if at this stage we wipe out something of what has been. There’s nothing for it but to try to reach the ship before they catch up with us. If they do attack, we must try to avoid harming them. I’ll go first, and the moment we’re all safely in the lock, we’ll retract the ladder. Is that clear?”

We all assented and without another word Jet made his way towards the ground. I was the last to go and by the time I’d touched down Jet was already sprinting towards Luna, and had covered half the distance. Close behind him was Mitch and then came Lemmy about twenty yards in front of me. The smoke was still thick. It got into my eyes, making them water and difficult to keep open.

Half choking and half blind, I ran as hard as I could, following the swiftly moving Lemmy.

I think I must have been within ten yards of Luna when it happened. Close to my ear there was a half-roar, half-scream, like the raving of a lunatic, and the next moment I felt a hot, steel-like grip on my shoulder. I tried to wriggle from the thing’s grasp, lost my balance and fell to the ground with the beast on top of me.

I was so terrified that for the first second or two I was completely paralysed. I had fallen on my back and was now staring into the most horrible face a ‘human’ being could have. The whites of his eyes were bloodshot and the creases in his skin were engrimed with dirt. As his mouth opened, drops of saliva fell on to my face and I could see his yellow, decaying, fang-like teeth. His long hair hung about his eyes, and his reddish, bushy beard, which, even then, I could see was full of vermin, hung to within an inch of my own face.

He had the strength of a horse. As soon as I was under him, he reached for my throat as though to tear it apart. I grabbed his wrists and exerted all my strength to deflect them from their savage intent. As I did so, he began to snap at my face like a dog. His breath stank noisomely. I began to yell at the top of my voice for help. At the same time, I brought my knee up and put my feet into the pit of my adversary’s stomach. Then, gathering all the force I could muster, I pushed. This most elementary ju-jitsu must have been a new experience for him. He crashed on his back a good three yards beyond me.