The Crack in Space (1966) Page 12

  Obligingly, Jim Briskin did so.

  The TV newsman was saying, ‘So now in only a matter of seconds presidential candidate James Briskin will be passing through the connecting link into a universe whose very existence was not even suspected two days ago. Authorities seem pretty well to agree now, on the basis of stellar charts taken by the no longer functioning Queen Bee satellite …’

  I wonder why it’s no longer functioning, Pethel mused. Has something gotten fouled up, over there? It didn’t sound like a good omen; it made him uncomfortable.

  On the other side, amid a meadow of excellently green grass and small white flowers, they, now a party of thirty, boarded an express jet-hopper which TD engineers had somehow managed to disassemble, pass through the rent, and then reassemble. Almost at once the ‘hopper rose and soared out over the Atlantic, toward the northern coast of France.

  Watching a flight of gulls, Jim Briskin thought: From this vantage point, it appears no different from our own world. The gulls disappeared behind them as the jet-hopper hurried on. Will we see ships of any sort on this ocean? he wondered.

  Fifteen minutes later, by his wristwatch, he saw a ship below.

  It did not seem to be large. But it was ocean-going, and that, he decided, was something. Of course it was wooden; he took that for granted, as did the others in the ‘hopper, all of whom were pressed against the windows, peering out. The ship, did not have sails, but it also lacked a stack. What propels it? he wondered. More nonsense machinery. If not the expansion of ice, then by all means the popping of paper bags.

  The pilot of the jet-hopper swooped low over the ship; they were treated to a thorough look, at least momentarily. Figures on the deck scampered about in agitation, then disappeared down below, lost from sight. The ship continued on. And, presently, the ‘hopper left it behind.

  ‘We didn’t learn much,’ Dillingsworth, the anthropologist, said in disappointment. ‘How long before we reach Normandy?’

  ‘Another half hour,’ the pilot said.

  They saw, then, a collection of small boats, perhaps a fishing fleet; the boats were anchored, and they did have sails. Aboard, the sailors gaped up at the sight of the ‘hopper, frozen in their positions as if carved there. Again the ‘hopper dipped low.

  The anthropologist, staring down, said, ‘Lower.’

  ‘Can’t,’ the pilot answered. ‘Too dangerous; we’re overloaded.’

  ‘What’s the matter?’ the sociologist from the University of California, Edward Marshak, asked Dillingsworth. ‘What did you see?’

  After a time Dillingsworth said, ‘As soon as we reach the European landmass, as soon as we can land, let’s do so. Let’s not wait to seek out their centers of concentration; I want to have us set down by the first one of them we spot.’

  The fishing boats disappeared behind them.

  With shaking hands, Dillingsworth opened a textbook which he had brought, began turning pages. He did not allow anyone else to see its title; he sat off by himself in a corner of the ‘hopper, a brooding, dark expression on his face.

  Stanley, the senior official from TD, said inquiringly, ‘Do you think we should turn back?’

  ‘Hell no,’ Dillingsworth rasped. And that was all he said; he did not amplify.

  Next to Jim Briskin, the round, heavy-set little businessman from Kansas City leaned over and said, ‘He makes me nervous; he’s found something and he won’t say what it is. It was when he saw those fishermen. I was watching his face, and he almost fainted.’

  Amused, Jim said, ‘Take it easy, Mr Pethel. We still have a long way to go.’

  ‘I’m going to find out what it was,’ Pethel said. He scrambled to his feet and made his way over to Dillingsworth. ‘Tell me,’ he said. ‘Why keep it quiet? It must have been pretty bad to make you clam up like this. What could you possibly have seen in those few seconds that would make you react this way? Personally, I don’t think we should go on until…’

  ‘Look at it this way,’ Dillingsworth said. ‘If I’m wrong, it doesn’t matter. If I’m right …’ He looked past Pethel to Jim Briskin. ‘We’ll know all about it before we make our return trip, later today.’

  After a pause, Jim said, ‘That’s good enough. For me, at least.’

  Fuming, Darius Pethel returned to his seat. ‘If I had known it’d be like this …’

  ‘Wouldn’t you have come?’ Jim asked him.

  ‘I don’t know. Possibly not.’

  Stirring restlessly, Sal Heim said, ‘I didn’t realize there was going to be any hazard involved in this.’

  ‘What did you think,’ one of the newsmen asked him, ‘when they took our QB satellite out?’

  ‘I just learned about that,’ Sal snapped back, ‘as we were entering the damn ‘scuttler.’

  A photographer for one of the big homeopapes said, ‘How about a game of draw? Jacks or better to open, penny a chip but no table limit.’

  Within a minute, the game had started.

  Ahead, on the horizon, Sal Heim thought he saw something and he took a quick look at his wristwatch. That’s Normandy, he realized. We’re almost there. He felt his breath stifle in his throat; he could hardly breathe. God, I’m tense, he decided. That anthropologist really shook me. But too late to turn back now. We’re fully committed; and anyhow it would look bad, politically-speaking, if Jim Briskin backed out. No, for our own good we have to continue whether we want to or not.

  ‘Set us right down,’ Dillingsworth instructed the pilot in a clipped, urgent tone of voice.

  ‘Do so,’ Don Stanley of TD chimed in. The pilot nodded.

  They were over open countryside, now; the coastline had already fallen behind them, the wave-washed shore. Sal Heim saw a road. It was not much of a road, but it could hardly be mistaken for anything else, and, looking along it, he made out in the distance a vehicle, a sort of cart. Somebody going uneventfully along the road, on his routine business, Sal realized. He could see the wheels of the cart, now, and its load. And, in the front, the driver, who wore a blue cap. The driver did not look up. Evidently he was not aware of the ‘hopper. And then Sal Heim realized that the pilot had cut the jets. The ‘hopper was coasting silently down.

  ‘I’m going to place it on the road,’ the pilot explained. ‘Directly in front of his cart.’ He snapped on a retrojet, briefly, to brake the ‘hopper’s fall.

  Dillingsworth said, ‘Christ, I was right.’

  As the ‘hopper struck, almost all of them were already on their feet, peering at the cart ahead, trying to discover what it was that the anthropologist saw. The cart had stopped. The driver stood up in his seat and stared at the jet-hopper, at them inside it.

  Sal Heim thought, There’s something wrong with that man. He’s - deformed.

  A homeopape reporter said gruffly, ‘Must be from war-time radiation, from fallout. God, he looks awful.’

  ‘No,’ Dillingsworth said. ‘That’s not from fallout. Haven’t you seen that before? Where have you seen it before? Think.’

  ‘In a book,’ the little businessman from Kansas City said. ‘It’s in the book you have there.’ He pointed at Dillingsworth. ‘You looked it up after we passed those fishing boats!’ His voice rose squeakily.

  Jim Briskin said, ‘He’s one of the races of pre-humans.’

  ‘He’s of the Paleoanthropic wing of primate evolution,’ Dillingsworth said. ‘I’d guess Sinanthropus, a rather high form of Pithecanthropi, or Peking man, as he is called. Notice the low vault of the skull, the very heavy brow ridge which runs unbroken across the forehead above the eyes. The chin is undeveloped. These are simian features, lost by the true line of Homo sapiens. The brain capacity, however, is reasonably large, almost as great as our own. Needless to say, the teeth are quite different from our own.’ He added, ‘In our world, this branch of primate evolution came to an end in the Lower Pleistocene, about a million and a half years ago.’

  ‘Have we … gone back in time?’ the Kansas City businessman asked.

  ‘N
o,’ Dillingsworth said irritably. ‘Not one week. Evidently here Homo sapiens either did not appear at all or for some reason did not win out. And Sinanthropus became the dominant species. As in our world we are.’

  Frank Woodbine said, ‘Yes, I thought he stooped. That one who jumped out of the glider yesterday.’ His voice shook.

  ‘True,’ Dillingsworth agreed. ‘Sinanthropus was not fully erect. That was an advantage in plains areas where short grass grew; an erect posture would have made him a better target.’ He spoke flatly. Methodically.

  ‘God,’ Sal Heim said. ‘So what do we do now?’

  There was no answer. From any of them.

  What a mess, Sal Heim said to himself as the thirty of them clambered from the parked ‘hopper and surrounded the stalled cart. Too frightened to try to escape, the driver continued to stare meekly at them all, clutching some sort of parcel in his arms. He wore, Sal noted, a toga-like one-piece garment. And his hair, unlike the reconstructions in the museums of dawn men, had been cut short and tidily. What repercussions there’re going to be from this, Sal realized. Damn it, what rotten luck!

  But it was even worse than that. Far, far worse. So Jim Briskin got beaten at the polls because of this … so what? That was a mere pebble in the bottom of the barrel. In an intuitive flash of insight, he saw the entire thing, spread out into their lives, ahead. His and Jim’s and everyone else’s … whites and cols alike. Because, in terms of race relations, this was an absolute calamity.

  By the cart, several TD employees and Dillingsworth were rapidly setting up a linguistics machine. They evidently were going to make the attempt to communicate with the driver.

  Hypnotized by the sight of the apparition seated in the cart, the little round businessman from Kansas City said stammeringly to Sal, ‘Isn’t it something? Given a chance these near-humans actually figured out how to lay roads and build carts. And they even made a gas turbine, the TV said.’ He looked stunned.

  ‘They had a million and a half years to do it,’ Sal pointed out.

  ‘But it’s still amazing. They built that ship we saw; it was crossing the Atlantic! I’ll bet there isn’t an anthropologist in the world who would have made book on that - bet they could create such an advanced culture, like they have. I take off my hat to them; I think it’s great. It’s … very encouraging, don’t you think? It sort of makes you realize that …’ He struggled to express himself. ‘… that if anything happened to us, to Homo sapiens, other life forms would go on.’

  It did not encourage Sal Heim.

  The best thing to do, he said to himself bleakly, is to go back to our world and then plug up that goddam hole. That entrance between our universe and this. Forget it ever existed, that we ever saw this.

  But we can’t, because there’ll always be some curious, scientific-type busybody who’ll insist on poking around here. And TD itself; it’ll still want to go over all the artifacts in this world to see what it can make use of. So it’s just not that simple. We can’t just shut our eyes, walk off, pretend it never happened.

  ‘I don’t think what these near-men have done here is so great,’ Sal said aloud. ‘They’re pitifully backward, compared to us, and they’ve had ten times as long to do it in. At least ten times; maybe twenty. They haven’t discovered metal, for instance. Take that one example.’

  Nobody paid any attention to him. They were all gathering around the linguistics machine, waiting to see how the attempt at communication was going to go.

  ‘So who wants to talk to that semi-ape?’ Sal said bitterly. ‘Who needs it?’ He walked about in an aimless, futile circle. I’ve got to get my candidate out of here, he knew. I can’t let him get identified with this.

  But Jim Briskin showed no signs of leaving. In fact he had gone up to the cart and was saying something to the Peking man, talking directly to him. Probably trying to calm him down. That would be just like Jim.

  You damn fool, Sal thought. You’re ruining your political career; can’t you see that? The ramifications of this - am I the only one who can perceive them? It ought to be obvious. But evidently it was not.

  Into the microphone of the TD linguistics machine, Dillingsworth was saying over and over again, ‘We’re friends. We’re peaceful.’ To Stanley he said, ‘Is this thing working or not? … We’re friends. We come to your world in peace. We will hurt no one.’

  ‘It takes time,’ Stanley explained. ‘Keep at it. See, what it has to do is take the visual images connected to the intrinsically meaningless words, images which flash up in your brain as you speak, and transmit replicas of those visual images directly to the brain of …’

  ‘I know how it works,’ Dillingsworth said brusquely. ‘I’m just anxious for it to get started before he bolts. You can see he’s getting ready to.’ Into the microphone he once again said, ‘We’re friends. We come in peace.

  All at once the Peking man spoke.

  From the audio section of the linguistics machine, a strangled noise sounded; recorded automatically, it was immediately repeated as the tape-deck rewound and played it back.

  ‘What’d he say?’ the little businessman from Kansas City demanded, looking around at everyone. ‘What’d he say?’

  Dillingsworth said into the mike, ‘Are you our friend, too? Are you friends with us as we are with you?’

  Going over to Jim Briskin, Sal put his hand on his shoulder and said ‘Jim, I want to talk to you.’

  ‘For God’s sake, later,’ Jim answered.

  ‘Now,’ Sal said. ‘It can’t wait.’

  Jim groaned. ‘Jesus, man, are you out of your head?’

  ‘No I’m not,’ Sal said evenly. ‘It’s everyone else here who is. Including you. Come on.’ He took hold of Jim by the shoulder and propelled him forcibly from the group, off to one side of the road. ‘Listen,’ Sal said. ‘How do you define man? Go on, define man for me.’

  Staring at him Jim said. ‘What?’

  ‘Define man! I’ll do it, then. Man’s a tool-making animal. Okay, what’s all this - for example, that cart and that hat and that package and that robe? Plus the ship we saw and that glider with that compressor and turbine? Tools. All of them, broadly speaking. So what does that make that damn creature sitting up there at the tiller of that cart? I’ll tell you: it makes him a man, that’s what. So he’s ugly-looking; so he has a low forehead and beetling brows and he isn’t too bright. But he’s bright enough to get in under the wire and qualify, that’s how bright he is goddam it. I mean, my god, he’s even built roads. And…’ Sal vibrated with rage. ‘… he even shot down our QB satellite!’

  ‘Look,’ Jim began, wearily, ‘this is no time…’

  ‘It’s the only time. We have to get out of here. Back across and forget what we saw.’ But, of course, as Sal well knew, it was hopeless. The ‘hopper, for instance, belonged to TD, was piloted by a TD employee to whom Sal Heim could give no orders. Only Stanley could, and obviously Stanley had no intention of leaving; he was standing by the linguistics machine, fascinated. ‘Let me ask you this,’ Sal panted. ‘If they’re men, and you admit they are, how’re we going to deny them the vote?’

  After a pause Jim said, ‘Is that actually what you’re worrying about?’

  ‘Yes,’ Sal said.

  Turning, Jim walked back to join the group. Without a word. Sal Heim watched him go.

  ‘He’s going to be voting,’ Sal said, aloud but to himself. ‘I can see it coming. And then you know what? Mixed marriages. Between us and them. Let’s go home; please, let’s go home. Okay?’ No one stirred. ‘I don’t want to foresee it, but I do,’ Sal said. ‘Can I help that? So I’m a prophet. Hell, don’t blame me; blame that thing sitting up there on that cart. It’s his fault. He shouldn’t even be existing.’

  From the audio curcuit of the linguistics machine a guttural, hoarse voice whispered, ‘… friend.’

  Frantically, Dillingsworth turned to those around him and said, ‘It was him; that was not feedback from what I put in.’

  �
�They don’t even have radio, here,’ Sal Heim said.

  In his N’York office, the private investigator Tito Cravelli received a puzzling bulletin from his contact at TD, Earl Bohegian: ‘First report from ‘hopper to TD. World inhabited by apes.’

  Taking a calculated risk, Cravelli dialed Terran Development through regular vidphone channels. When he reached TD’s switchboard, he matter of factly asked to speak to Mr Bohegian.

  ‘How could you be so foolish as to call me direct?’ Bohegian asked nervously, when the call was put through to his office.

  ‘Explain your message,’ Tito said.

  ‘They’re educated apes,’ Bohegian said, leaning close to the vidscreen and speaking in a low, urgent voice. ‘You know, missing links.’

  ‘Dawn men,’ Tito said, finally understanding. He felt his heart skip a beat. ‘Go on, Earl, I want to hear it all; keep talking and if you ring off, I’ll call you right back, so help me God.’

  Earl Bohegian muttered, ‘The report was given to old Leon Turpin; he’s examining it right now on floor twenty. They’re trying to decide if they want to shut the ‘scuttler down and wall the rent up or not. But I don’t think they’re gonna, not from what I’ve heard.’

  ‘No,’ Tito agreed. ‘They won’t. There’s too much to gain by leaving it open.’

  ‘But they are sort of upset. Who isn’t? Imagine; here we took it for granted that humans like ourselves …’

  ‘Did the ‘hopper specifically state which variety of sub-Homo sapiens it is?’ Cravelli asked, trying to remember his college anthropology.

  ‘Peking man. Does that sound right?’

  Cravelli bit his lip. ‘That’s a hell of a low-grade type. One of the lowest. Now, if it had been Cro-Magnon or even Neanderthal….’ That would be another matter. After all, the Palestine archeological discoveries were proof that Homo sapiens and Neanderthal had already interbred, tens of thousands of years in the past. And it had evidently done no harm; the Homo sapiens genetic strain had dominated.