Карен Хабер: This Way to the End Times

Unhappily, this ingenious theory was not flawless. That most living things, whether of the animal or the vegetable order, had descended from marine ancestors seemed not to be denied; but the same could not be said of all, for there did exist a number of plants and animals seemingly unrelated to any known aquatic species. Though they might be explained as freaks, here was one of the two weak points in the system.

Man—and Sofr did not pretend otherwise—was the other weak point. There was no bringing together of man and animal. Of course, the basic essential functions, such as respiration, digestive processes, and locomotion, were the same; but there was a gulf between the physical development of the two orders that could not be crossed: a gulf between the number, disposition, and capacity of organs. Whereas, by a chain with only a few links missing, the great majority of animals could be joined with the progenitors that had come from the sea, such a linkage for man was not to be found. Hence, to make the theory of evolution complete, it was necessary to conceive, without a shred of evidence, of a hypothetical stock common to both mankind and the denizens of the sea. And nothing, absolutely nothing, indicated that such a stock had ever existed.

AT ONE TIME, SOFR HAD hoped to find evidence under the soil that would be favorable to his thesis. At his urging, and under his direction, excavations had been carried on for a long period of years, only to turn up results exactly opposite to those expected by their promoter.

After having passed through a thin skin of humus formed by the rotting of plants and animals similar or comparable to those seen every day, his diggers had got to the thick bed of marine clay, wherein the vestiges of former life were of a different kind. In the clay had been found no more of the existing flora or fauna, but instead a vast accumulation of fossils that were exclusively marine, with congeners still living, for the most part, in the oceans surrounding the Mahart-Iten-Schu.

What else must be concluded, if not that the scientists had been right in teaching that the continent had formerly served as part of the floor of those same oceans, and that Sofr had not been wrong, consequently, in affirming the marine origin of contemporary animals and plants?

But unfortunately for the attempt to fit man into the system, still another finding had been made. Scattered throughout the humus, and down into the topmost portion of the clay deposit, innumerable human bones had been brought to light. There was nothing exceptional in the structure of these fragments of skeletons, and Sofr had long since given up hope of finding among them intermediary types that might prove his theory: these bones were the bones of men, no more, no less.

At the same time, something totally unexpected had been confirmed. Reaching back to a certain age, which could be roughly put at two or three thousand years, the older the bones, the smaller the skulls uncovered. But, inconsistently, beyond this period the progression was reversed. From that point on, the further the retreat into the past, the greater the capacity of the skulls, and, by implication, the size of the brains that they had contained. The largest of all, in fact, had been found among fragments of weapons or tools, few though they were, in the surface of the bed of clay. Careful examination of these venerable remains had left no doubt that the men living in that distant epoch had already acquired a growth of brain very much greater than that of their successors—including even the contemporaries of the Zartog Sofr. Clearly, then, there had been a backward movement for a hundred and seventy centuries, followed by a new advance.

Troubled by these strange facts, Sofr had pushed on with his searchings. In many places he had had the bed of clay probed to its bottom, and its depth was such that, by the most conservative estimate, its deposit had required not less than fifteen to twenty thousand years. Below it came the surprising discovery of faint remains of an ancient layer of humus, and finally, beneath the humus, solid rock of a nature that varied with the site of the digging.

But the crowning astonishment was the uncovering of some vestiges, incontestably human in origin, buried at these mysterious depths. They included not only portions of the bones of men, but also the fragments of weapons or tools, bits of pottery, scraps of writing carved in an unknown tongue, and hard stone objects, artfully sculptured. Considering the uniform quality of these artifacts, it could only be supposed that some forty thousand years ago—that is, twenty thousand years before the coming (none knew whence or how) of the first members of the present race—another race had dwelt in these same places and had reached a highly advanced degree of civilization.

SUCH WAS, IN FACT, THE conclusion generally admitted. Still, there was at least one who dissented.

The dissenter was none other than Sofr himself. To admit that other men, separated from those who came after by a gap of twenty thousand years, had first populated the earth was, in his opinion, sheer folly. For in that event, how to account for their abrupt disappearance and the equally abrupt appearance of their descendents so long afterward, with no discoverable link between the two? Rather than entertain so absurd a hypothesis, far better wait for more data. Just because these odd findings had failed to explain something, it was not necessary to conclude that it was inexplicable. One day the answer would come. Until then, it was wiser to take no sides, and for the time being to hold to principles that completely met the requirements of sound reason. They could be summed up as follows:

Planetary life is divided into two phases: pre-human and human. In the first phase, the Earth being in a state of continuous change, it is for this very reason uninhabitable and uninhabited. In the second, the crust of the globe has reached a degree of cohesion affording stability. And given this stability at last, life at once appears. It begins in its simplest forms and moves always toward the more complex, finally producing man, its most perfect expression. And no sooner does man come to Earth than he immediately sets out to seek his own improvement. Slowly, proudly, he is marching toward his end, which is complete understanding and absolute domination of the universe.

CARRIED AWAY BY THE FEVER of his stubborn belief, Sofr had gone past his house. He turned back with an impatient scowl.

“What would they have me do!” he muttered. “Admit that men forty thousand years ago enjoyed a civilization like our own, and perhaps a better one? Admit that their wisdom and their skill and goods could then vanish, leaving not the slightest trace? Wipe those people out so completely that their descendents should be forced to begin the task once more at the bottom, thinking themselves pioneers in a world without men before their time? Why, that should be to gainsay the future, to cry out that our effort is in vain! That all human change is as aimless and as little secure as a bubble in the froth of the waves!”

Sofr halted in front of his house.

“No, no! Certainly not! Man is the master of things!” he whispered fiercely as he pushed open his door.

AFTER THE ZARTOG HAD RESTED for a few moments, he lunched with a good appetite, and then he lay down to take his daily nap. But the questions that had shaken him while on his way home continued to torment him, and they banished sleep.

Despite all his eagerness to establish an absolute uniformity in nature, his mind was too critical to miss the weakness of his system whenever he tackled the problem of the origin and development of man. To force facts to square with a hypothesis set up in advance is one way to convince others, but it is no way to convince oneself.