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, politicallyspeaking, 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 wavewashed 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 wartime 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.
'No,' 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 onepiece 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 he 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
sad.' 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.