“You all right?”
Hall had shaken him lightly by the shoulder and Artie gingerly took off the helmet and the gloves. It was difficult to come back to reality, and he was afraid for a moment that he was going to be sick.
“You’re pale as a ghost,” Hall said, worried. “Too much for you? Some people get vertigo with the VR glasses.”
Artie got to his feet, holding on to the top of the chair for support. “You’re not going to show this to kids, are you?”
Hall looked surprised. “Why not? I think it’s pretty effective. The kids’ll love it when the pterodactyl zooms down at them. We’re doing another one with a fight between a seismosaurus and a tyrannosaurus—one’s from the Lower Cretaceous and the other from the Upper, but at least they’re both North American, and anyway, I think we should be allowed some license.”
“That’s not what I saw,” Artie said slowly.
Hall frowned and stepped around him to pull the diskette out of the drive. “Sure it is—see, it’s marked.”
Artie glanced at the typed label and mumbled, “What the hell …”
Hall was already back in his office, calling to Artie over his shoulder, “Let’s do it; I’ve got an appointment.”
Artie’s mind was still thick with images of White Beard and Soft Skin and the feel of the stone cutter against his throat.
“I take it your friend wasn’t the practical-joker type,” Hall said, flipping through the pages of research in front of him. “Or was he?”
“I didn’t see anything funny in there,” Artie said curtly. He was looking at Hall through a haze of time that was only slowly beginning to drift away. Right then, Soft Skin and Deep Wood were more real to him than the anthropologist.
“No, of course not.” Hall leaned back in his chair, uncertain how to begin. “If everything here is accurate, then I can understand why he was writing a paper about the deceased—a couple of references to
Science
in here. But I think this is one of those times when believing has to also be seeing. No scientist would take Dr. Shea’s research at its face value without being able to see the subject he was writing about.”
“You’re losing me,” Artie said.
Hall looked uneasy.
“According to Dr. Shea’s research, the man in the accident wasn’t human.” He hesitated. “Let me rephrase that. He was but he wasn’t. Human variability is enormous but”—he thumbed the pages again—“the statistics are here for anybody who wants to read them. Following Dr. Shea’s figures, William Talbot wasn’t human—not in the way we ordinarily define human.”
“So what was he?”
Hall waved his hand at the papers, frowning. He was silent for a moment, obviously reluctant to comment.
“Your doctor friend was trying to prove that William Talbot was a modern descendant of a different species, one that dates back maybe hundreds of thousands of years. Dr. Shea was convinced he was right and thought he had the measurements to prove it.”
Artie stared. It was one thing for Paschelke to say that Talbot had been different—radically different. It was quite another for Hall to say it.
“You’re telling me that Larry autopsied a caveman.”
Hall looked sour.
“Jesus, I hate that term. It’s like the ‘missing link.’ I’m not talking about primitives, movie monsters running around in hair suits. I’m talking about the
descendant
of a species. You and I are descendants of an archaic human species called Cro-Magnon and we’re not exactly primitives. I don’t think Dr. Shea autopsied a primitive man.”
“The only other species I know of is Neanderthals,” Artie said, puzzled.
Hall sighed. “Neanderthal is safely extinct, Mr. Banks. So is
Homo erectus,
which some anthropologists think might have coexisted as well—primitive men have really been coming out of the woodwork lately. But Dr. Shea’s measurements wouldn’t support any theory that primitive men are still running around today.”
“A descendant of another species,” Artie said slowly.
Hall nodded. “That’s right. A totally different species. One different from us and definitely from Neanderthal or
Homo erectus.
And that’s just flat-out impossible.”
“You keep coming back to cavemen,” Artie said, uncomfortable.
Hall looked impatient. “‘Caveman’ carries a lot of baggage with it. When I’m giving lectures to little kids, I use the terms ‘Old People’ and ‘New People.’ We’re the New People, the late arrivals.”
Artie pointed at the papers. “If Larry was right, that Talbot was different from us, then he would stand out in a crowd, wouldn’t he?”
“I don’t think so. From the photographs, facially Talbot was fairly average looking, your typical male of sixty or so. Even if you stripped him down, you wouldn’t notice much out of the ordinary unless you were a doctor or an expert on anatomy—” He broke off. “You don’t know much about this, do you?”
Artie shook his head. “That’s why I’m here.”
Hall glanced at the wall clock. “I’ll make it brief. When we mention cavemen, we usually think of the classic type of Western Europe, the ones with the barrel chests and the short limbs and broad noses—adaptations to glacial conditions of Europe at the time. You can see the same sort of adaptation in modern Eskimos. There might even have been several varieties of the Old People—we’ll call Dr. Shea’s species that. Others might have lived around the Mediterranean and could have been a racial variation. More gracile—more slender, more graceful, more like us, if you will, adaptations to a gentler climate. Dr. Shea suggests all of that in his notes; he apparently thought Talbot was one of their descendants.”
He frowned at Artie. “You getting this?”
Artie still felt numb from the images of the slaughter.
“Yeah. They weren’t human.”
Hall looked bemused. “They might have been more ‘human’ than we were at the time. They could have buried their dead with ceremony, signs of a primitive religion. Placed grave goods in with the burials—favorite weapons, toys if it was a child, things like that. They needn’t have been ‘inhuman’ at all. They might have known about medicinal plants, might have taken care of the elderly and others who might have been sick or crippled. They wouldn’t necessarily have left them on a hillside to die. We know that Neanderthals, for example, did all of that.”
Artie managed a smile.
“That’s a lot of might-haves. Now you’re the one who’s doing the speculation.”
Hall shrugged. “You didn’t read all of Dr. Shea’s notes, did you? I’m just repeating the speculations he made.”
“But you don’t believe them.”
“I told you. The idea is impossible.”
“Why?”
“There’s no proof. The simple fact is that any competitors to
Homo sapiens
died off thirty-five thousand years ago. We’re the descendants of the only species that survived. We find the remains of Cro-Magnons, our own ancestors, and God knows we find plenty of remains of Neanderthals and a few recent ones of
Homo erectus
on the island of Java. But that’s it. No mysterious other species, Mr. Banks. They left no bones behind at all, and without them there’s no reason to believe they ever existed. We can account for all the bones in the bone bank.”
Memories of the scorched spot where the Tribe had built a funeral pyre for Little Fox flashed through Artie’s mind.
“They’ve found a lot of Neanderthal remains,” he said slowly. “Why?”
Hall was beginning to look bored.
“Primarily because they buried their dead, usually in caves. Frequently with ceremony, indicating some sort of religion.” He paused. “In a lot of ways they were much like us, Mr. Banks. They even had brains as large or larger. Maybe your Dr. Shea’s Old People did too. Whether they were wired up the same way, who knows? But they’re all gone now, one with history.”
Artie shook his head. “What if the Old People had a different religion? What if they cremated their dead and scattered the ashes over running water? Then they would have left no remains, no bones, right?”
Hall laughed. “You’re persistent, Banks. Granting that cremation dates back to prehistory—if that was the case, then you’re absolutely right. They could have vanished without much of a trace. But your Dr. Shea doesn’t suggest that, which puts you one up on him.”
“They could have interbred.”
Hall shrugged. “Who knows? To put it inelegantly, Mr. Banks, bones don’t fuck. If they existed at all, your Old People might have interbred with the New People—us—and their genes lost in the larger gene pool. If they were a truly separate species, the offspring would have been sterile, ‘mules.’ But chances are if they were a separate species they would have been marginalized and just died out. Pushed out of their hunt-ing grounds, outbred, that sort of thing. Simple competition would have done them in and modern man would have replaced them.”
“‘Replaced,’” Artie repeated, remembering his hour in the virtual reality room. “You’re being polite.”
“Not really.” Hall stood up and straightened his necktie, getting ready to leave. “There were probably some things your Old People weren’t very good at. Some experts think that the real edge
Homo sapiens
had over other species was language. If the larynx of Dr. Shea’s Old People was high up in the throat like it is in babies—they have to be able to breathe and swallow at the same time—they would have had a lot of difficulty. Lower down gives you a larger resonating chamber—you can make many different kinds of sounds. But the larynx is soft tissue and would never have survived, even if your Old People left some bones behind.”
Hall took a moment to fumble out his keys. “The point is, if they weren’t very good at language, that would have put them at a survival disadvantage with a group that was good at it—namely us.”
“How?” Artie asked.
“It’s obvious. Language is good for instruction, telling people how to make things. It’s good for giving commands. With language you can have a verbal history, you can pass on information … .”
“You can lie with it,” Artie muttered. The fight by the river was very vivid.
Hall looked startled, then changed the subject.
“They might not have been as good as
Homo sapiens
at hunting. For example, if they didn’t have spears they could throw from a distance, everything would have been close up and dangerous.” He shuffled the sheaf of papers back into its envelope, then hesitated. “You mind if I keep this until tomorrow? I’d like to go over it again tonight.”
Jerry still had the diskette, Artie thought. He could print out another copy anytime. “Sure, I’ll pick it up in the afternoon.” He pushed back his chair. “You mentioned competition. Like competition for patches of forest that had berries and nuts, for hunting grounds with lots of game? Which might have led to warfare between the Old People and the New? Maybe they were killed off—early genocide. Same thing as being replaced, right?” The image of the slaughter was still flickering in his memory.
Hall’s smile was patronizing. “Some anthropologists think it’s a possibility, but you’d have to show me the killing fields. There’s no evidence of any pitched battles with any other human species, or even any skirmishes, though there aren’t enough bones lying around to prove it one way or the other. In Europe your Old People probably shared the same living space with
Homo sapiens
for thousands of years, the same in the Levant. My guess is they would have got along. But then thirty-five thousand years ago, something happened. Nobody knows what.”
He suddenly sounded doubtful. “Maybe they didn’t get along so well after that.” He slipped into his coat, motioned Artie out, and locked the door behind him.
“What do you think about Talbot?” Artie asked. “You think he could be one of the Old People?”
“You mean like he was the son of a mother and father, both of whom were Old People? My God, no—of course not. You’d be talking different species then. Your doctor friend got carried away.”
“But say he was,” Artie persisted.
Hall looked pained; he was getting tired of humoring him. “If he was, then that means there must be more of them out there, doesn’t it? And if there are, my guess is they certainly wouldn’t want anybody to know about them.”
“Why not?”
“It’s inbred in humans—we hate anybody who’s different,” Hall said dryly. “We don’t treat other races very well. I wonder how we’d react to another species living among us?” He frowned. “Mr. Banks, we’re all there is. I’m sorry your doctor friend wasted so much of his time. Neanderthals died out thirty-five thousand years ago and there’s absolutely no evidence that any other species besides them and
Homo sapiens
and possibly a few examples of
Homo erectus
existed back then. Dr. Shea’s theory is a little like the old saw about if we had some ham we’d have ham and eggs if we had some eggs. In this case, there’s no ham, there’s no eggs, and there’s no other species. I’m sorry about that—I’d be fascinated if there were.”