Transfusion

  Transfusion

  Chad Oliver

  First published in Astounding Science Fiction, June 1959.

  This copy derived from the above source.

  Ignorance and stupidity are not the same thing. And Ignorance has a very high and special value. Be it noted: No other mammal starts life as ignorant as Man!

  * * *

  The machine stopped. There was no sound at all now, and the green light on the control panel blinked like a mocking eye. With the easy precision born of long routine, Ben Hazard did what had to be done. He did it automatically, without real interest, for there was no longer any hope.

  He punched a figure into the recorder: 377.

  He computed the year, using the Gottwald-Hazard Correlation, and added that to the record: 254,000 B.C.

  He completed the form with the name of the site: Choukoutien.

  Then, with a lack of anticipation that eloquently reminded him that this was the three hundred seventy-seventh check instead of the first, Ben Hazard took a long preliminary look through the viewer. He saw nothing that interested him.

  Careful as always before leaving the Bucket, he punched in the usual datum: Viewer Scan Negative. He unlocked the hatch at the top of the Bucket and climbed out of the metallic gray sphere. It was not raining, for a change, and the sun was warm and golden in a clean blue sky.

  Ben Hazard stretched his tired muscles and rested his eyes on the fresh green of the tangled plants that grew along the banks of the lazy stream to his right. The grass in the little meadow looked cool and inviting, and there were birds singing in the trees. He was impressed as always by how little this corner of the world had changed in fifty years. It was very much as it had been a thousand years ago, or two thousand, or three…

  It was just a small corner of nowhere, lost in the mists of time, waiting for the gray sheets of ice to come again.

  It was just a little stream, bubbling along and minding its own business, and a lonely limestone hill scarred with the dark staring eyes of rock shelters and cave entrances.

  There was nothing different about it.

  It took Man to change things in a hurry, and Man wasn’t home.

  That was the problem.

  Ben took the six wide-angle photographs of the terrain that he always took. There were no animals within camera range this trip. He clambered through the thick brown brush at the base of the limestone hill and climbed up the rough rocks to the cave entrance. It was still open, and he knew its location by heart.

  He well remembered the thrill he had felt the first time he had entered this cave. His heart had hammered in his chest and his throat had been so dry that he couldn’t swallow. His mind had been ablaze with memories and hopes and fears, and it had been the most exciting moment of his life.

  Now, only the fear remained—and it was a new kind of fear, the fear of what he wouldn’t find.

  His light blazed ahead of him as he picked his way along the winding passage of the cave. He disturbed a cloud of indignant bats, but there was no other sign of life. He reached the central cavern, dark and hushed and hidden under the earth, and flashed his light around carefully.

  There was nothing new.

  He recognized the familiar bones of wolf, bear, tiger, and camel. He photographed them again, and did manage to find the remains of an ostrich that he had not seen before. He took two pictures of that.

  He spent half an hour poking around in the cavern, checking all of the meticulously recorded sites, and then made his way back to the sunlit entrance.

  The despair welled up in him, greater than before. Bad news, even when it is expected, is hard to take when it is confirmed. And there was no longer any real doubt.

  Man wasn’t home.

  Ben Hazard wasn’t puzzled any longer. He was scared and worried. He couldn’t pass the buck to anyone else this time. He had come back to see for himself, and he had seen.

  Imagine a man who built a superb computer, a computer that could finally answer the toughest problems in his field. Suppose the ultimate in computers, and the ultimate in coded tapes; a machine—however hypothetical—that was never wrong. Just for kicks, suppose that the man feeds in an easy one: What is two plus three?

  If the computer answers six, then the man is in trouble. Of course, the machine might be multiplying rather than adding—

  But if the computer answers zero or insufficient data, what then?

  Ben Hazard slowly walked back to the Bucket, climbed inside, and locked the hatch.

  He filed his films under the proper code number.

  He pushed in the familiar datum: Field Reconnaissance Negative.

  He sat down before the control board and got ready.

  He was completely alone in the small metallic sphere; he could see every inch of it. He knew that he was alone. And yet, as he had before, he had the odd impression that there was someone with him, someone looking over his shoulder…

  Ben Hazard had never been one to vault into the saddle and gallop off in all directions. He was a trained scientist, schooled to patience. He did not understand the soundless voice that kept whispering in his mind: Hurry, hurry, hurry—

  “Boy,” he said aloud, “you’ve been in solitary too long.”

  He pulled himself together and reached for the controls. He was determined to run out the string—twenty-three checks to go now—but he already knew the answer.

  Man wasn’t home.

  When Ben Hazard returned to his original year of departure, which was 1982, he stepped out of the Bucket at New Mexico Station—for the machine, of necessity, moved in space as well as time. As a matter of fact, the spatial movement of the Bucket was one of the things that made it tough to do an intensive periodic survey of any single spot on the Earth’s surface; it was hard to hold the Bucket on target.

  According to his own reckoning, and in terms of physiological time, he had spent some forty days in his check of Choukoutien in the Middle Pleistocene. Viewed from the other end at New Mexico Station, he had been gone only five days.

  The first man he saw was the big M.P. corporal.

  “I’ll need your prints and papers, sir,” the M.P. said.

  “Dammit, Ames.” Ben handed over the papers and stuck his thumbs in the scanner. “Don’t you know me by now?”

  “Orders, sir.”

  Ben managed a tired smile. After all, the military implications of time travel were staggering, and care was essential. If you could move back in time only a few years and see what the other side had done, then you could counter their plans in the present. Since the old tribal squabbles were still going full blast, Gottwald had had to pull a million strings in order to get his hands on some of the available Buckets.

  “Sorry, Ames. You look pretty good to me after a month or so of old camel bones.”

  “Nice to have you back, Dr. Hazard,” the M.P. said neutrally.

  After he had been duly identified as Benjamin Wright Hazard, Professor of Anthropology at Harvard and Senior Scientist on the Joint Smithsonian-Harvard-Berkeley Temporal Research Project, he was allowed to proceed. Ben crossed the crowded floor of the room they called Grand Central Station and paused a moment,to see how the chimps were getting along.

  There were two of them, Charles Darwin and Cleopatra, in separate cages. The apes had been the first time travelers, and were still used occasionally in testing new Buckets. Cleopatra scratched herself and hooted what might have been a greeting, but Charles Darwin was busy with a problem. He was trying to fit two sticks together so he could knock down a banana that was hanging just out of reach. He was obviously irritated, but he was no quitter.

  “I know just how you feel, Charles,” Ben said.

  Charles Darwin pursed his mobile lips and redoubled his efforts.

  What they won’t do for one lousy banana.

  * * *

  Ben looked around for Nate York, who was working with the chimps, and spotted him talking to a technician and keeping track of his experiment out of the corner of his eye. Ben waved and went on to the elevator.

  He rode up to the fourth floor and walked into Ed Stone’s office. Ed was seated at his desk and he looked very industrious as he studied the dry white skull in front of him. The skull, however, was just a paper weight; Ed had used it for years.

  Ed stood up, grinned, and stuck out his hand. “Sure glad you’re back, Ben. Any luck?”

  Ben shook hands and straddled a chair. He pulled out his pipe, filled it from a battered red can, and lit it gratefully. It felt good to be back with Ed. A man doesn’t find too many other men he can really talk to in his lifetime, and Ed was definitely Number One. Since they were old friends, they spoke a private language.

  “He was out to lunch,” Ben said.

  “For twenty thousand years?”

  “Sinanthropus has always been famous for his dietary eccentricities.”

  Ed nodded to show that he caught the rather specialized joke—Sinanthropus had been a cannibal—and then leaned forward, his elbows on the desk. “You satisfied now?”

  “Absolutely.”

  “No margin for error?” Ed insisted.

  “None. I didn’t really doubt Thompson’s report, but I wanted to make certain. Sinanthropus isn’t there. Period.”

  “That tears it then. We’re up the creek for sure.”

  “Without a paddle.”

  “Without even a canoe.” Ben puffed on his pipe. “Blast it, Ed, where are they?”

  “You tell me. Since you left, Gottwald and I have gotten exactly nowhere. The way it looks right now
, man hasn’t got any ancestors—and that’s crazy.”

  It’s more than crazy, Ben thought. It’s frightening. When you stop to think about it, man is a lot more than just an individual. Through his children, he extends on into the future. Through his ancestors, he stretches back far into the past. It is immortality of a sort. And when you chop off one end—

  “I’m scared,” he said. “I don’t mind admitting it. There’s an answer somewhere, and we’ve got to find it.”

  “I know how you feel, Ben. If this thing means what it seems to mean, then all science is just so much hot air. There’s no cause and effect, no evidence, no reason. Man isn’t what he thinks he is at all. We’re just frightened animals sitting in a cave gaping at the darkness outside. Don’t think I don’t feel it, too. But what are we going to do?”

  Ben stood up and knocked out his pipe. “Right now, I’m going home and hit the sack; I’m dead. Then the three of us—you and I and Gottwald—are going to sit down and hash this thing out. Then we’ll at least know where we are.”

  “Will we?”

  “We’d better.”

  He walked to the elevator and rode down to the ground floor of New Mexico Station. He had to identify himself twice more before he finally emerged into the glare of the desert sunlight. The situation struck him as the height of irony: here they were worried about spies and fancy feuds, when all the time—

  What?

  He climbed into his car and started for home. The summer day was bright and hot, but he felt as though he were driving down an endless tunnel of darkness, an infinite black cave to nowhere.

  The voice whispered in his brain: Hurry, hurry—

  His home was a lonely one, lonely with a special kind of emptiness. All his homes seemed deserted now that Anne was gone, but he liked this one better than most.

  It was built of adobe with heavy exposed roof beams, cool in the summer and warm in winter. The Mexican tile floor was artfully broken up by lovely Navaho rugs—the rare Two Gray Hills kind in subdued and intricate grays and blacks and whites. He had brought many of his books with him from Boston and their familiar jackets lined the walls.

  Ben was used to loneliness, but memories died hard. The plane crash that had taken Anne from him had left an emptiness in his heart. Sometimes, late in the evening, he thought he heard her footsteps in the kitchen. Often, when the telephone rang, he waited for her to answer it.

  Twenty years of marriage are hard to forget.

  Ben took a hot shower, shaved, and cooked himself a steak from the freezer. Then he poured a healthy jolt of Scotch over two ice cubes and sat down in the big armchair, propping his feet on the padded bench. He was still tired, but he felt more like a human being.

  His eyes wandered to his books. There was usually something relaxing about old books and long-read titles, something reassuring. It had always been that way for him, but not any longer.

  The titles jeered at him: Mankind So Far, Up from the Ape, History of the Primates, Fossil Men, The Story of Man, Human Origins, The Fossil Evidence for Human Evolution, History of the Vertebrates…

  Little man, what now?

  “We seem to have made a slight mistake, as the chemist remarked when his lab blew up,” Ben said aloud.

  Yes, but where could they have gone wrong?

  Take Sinanthropus, for example.

  The remains of forty different Sinanthropus individuals had been excavated from the site of Choukoutien in China by Black and Weidenreich, two excellent men. There was plenty of material and it had been thoroughly studied. Scientists knew when Sinanthropus had lived in the Middle Pleistocene, where he lived, and how he lived. They even had the hearths where he cooked his food, the tools he used, the animals he killed. They knew what he looked like. They knew how he was related to his cousin, Pithecanthropus Erectus, and to modern men. There was a cast of his skull in every anthropology museum in the world, a picture of him in every textbook.

  There was nothing mysterious about Sam Sinanthropus. He was one of the regulars.

  Ben and Gottwald had nailed the date to the wall at 250,000 B.C. After Thompson’s incredible report, Ben himself had gone back in time to search for Sinanthropus. Just to make certain, he had checked through twenty thousand years.

  Nobody home.

  Sinanthropus wasn’t there.

  That was bad enough.

  But all the early human and prehuman fossils were missing.

  There were no men back in the Pleistocene.

  No Australopithecus, no Pithecanthropus, no Neanderthal, no nothing.

  It was impossible.

  At first, Ben had figured that there must be an error somewhere in the dating of the fossils. After all, a geologist’s casual “Middle Pleistocene” isn’t much of a target, and radiocarbon dating was no good that far back. But the Gottwald-Hazard Correlation had removed that possibility.

  The fossil men simply were not there.

  They had disappeared. Or they had never been there. Or—

  Ben got up and poured himself another drink. He needed it.

  When the Winfield-Homans equations had cracked the time barrier and Ben had been invited by old Franz Gottwald to take part in the Temporal Research Project, Ben had leaped at the opportunity. It was a scientist’s dream come true.

  He could actually go back and see the long-vanished ancestors of the human species. He could listen to them talk, watch their kids, see them make their tools, hear their songs. No more sweating with a few broken bones. No more puzzling over flint artifacts. No more digging in ancient firepits.

  He had felt like a man about to sit down to a Gargantuan feast.

  Unhappily, it had been the cook’s night out. There was nothing to eat.

  Every scientist knows in his heart that his best theories are only educated guesses. There is a special Hall of Fame reserved for thundering blunders: the flat Earth, the medical humors, the unicorn.

  Yes, and don’t forget Piltdown Man.

  Every scientist expects to revise his theories in the light of new knowledge. That’s what science means. But he doesn’t expect to find out that it’s all wrong. He doesn’t expect his Manhattan Project to show conclusively that uranium doesn’t actually exist.

  Ben finished his drink. He leaned back and closed his eyes. There had to be an answer somewhere—or somewhen. Had to be. A world of total ignorance is a world of terror; anything can happen.

  Where was Man?

  And why?

  He went to bed and dreamed of darkness and ancient fears. He dreamed that he lived in a strange and alien world, a world of fire and blackness and living shadows—

  When he woke up the next morning, he wasn’t at all sure that he had been dreaming.

  Among them, an impartial observer would have agreed, the three men in the conference room at New Mexico Station knew just about all there was to know concerning early forms of man. At the moment, in Ben’s opinion, they might as well have been the supreme experts on the Ptolemaic theory of epicycles.

  They were three very different men.

  Ben Hazard was tall and lean and craggy-featured, as though the winds of life had weathered him down to the tough, naked rock that would yield no further. His blue eyes had an ageless quality about them, the agelessness of deep seas and high mountains, but they retained an alert and restless curiosity that had changed little from the eyes of an Ohio farm boy who had long ago wondered at the magic of the rain and filled his father’s old cigar boxes with strange stones that carried the imprints of plants and shells from the dawn of time.

  Ed Stone looked like part of what he was: a Texan, burned by the sun, his narrow gray eyes quiet and steady. He was not a big man, and his soft speech and deliberate movements gave him a deceptive air of lassitude. Ed was an easy man to underestimate; he wasted no time on frills or pretense, but there was a razor-sharp brain in his skull. He was younger than Ben, not yet forty, but Ben trusted his judgment more than he did his own.

  Franz Gottwald, old only in years, was more than a man now; he was an institution. They called him the dean of American anthropology, but not to his white-bearded face; Franz had small respect for deans. They stood when he walked into meetings, and Franz took it as his due—he had earned it, but it concerned him no more than the make of the car he drove. Ben and Ed had both studied under Franz, and they still deferred to him, but the relationship was a warm one. Franz had been born in Germany—he never spoke about his life before he had come to the United States at the age of thirty—and his voice was still flavored by a slight accent that generations of graduate students had tried to mimic without much success. He was the Grand Old Man.