“Ah!” Arak commented. “I can tell the search has found something. And the time frame will be in the twenty-five-thousand-year range.” As he spoke, the images slowed and again stopped.
The scene was the same rocky prominence although there was no castle. Instead the crown of the hill was dominated by a short escarpment undercut in the center to form a shallow cave. Grouped around the entrance to the cave was an assemblage of Neanderthals clothed in fur and working on crude implements.
“It does look like the same place,” Perry commented.
As everyone watched, the image telescoped in on the domestic scene.
“And the pictures are clearer,” Perry added.
“At that time we didn’t worry about our ships being seen,” Arak explained, “so we felt comfortable dropping down to a mere hundred feet or so to study behavior.”
As they watched, one of the Neanderthal men straightened up from scraping a hide. In the process of stretching he happened to look straight up. When he did, his brutish face suddenly went blank, and his mouth dropped open in a mixture of surprise and terror. The image on the screen was close enough and clear enough to reveal his large square teeth.
“Well,” Arak commented, “here’s an example of our antigravity drone being seen. The poor devil probably thinks he’s being visited by the gods.”
“My gosh,” Suzanne said. “He’s trying to get the others to look up!”
“Their language was very limited,” Arak said. “But I know that there was another subspecies in this same time frame and in the same general area that you called the Cro-Magnon. Their language skills were far better.”
The Neanderthal grunted and leaped up and down while pointing toward the camera. Soon the entire group was looking skyward. Several of the women with young children immediately scooped their babies into their arms and disappeared into the cave while others dashed out.
One enterprising man bent down, picked up an egg-sized stone, and hurled it skyward. The missile approached, then went out of sight to the side.
“Not a bad arm,” Michael said. “The Red Sox could use him out in center field.”
Arak touched his console and the image faded. At the same time the lights went up in the room. Everyone moved back in their seats. Arak and Sufa looked around the room. The visitors were all quiet for the moment, even Richard.
“What was the supposed date of that recording?” Perry asked finally.
Arak consulted his console. “In your calendar it would have been July fourteenth, twenty-three three forty-twoB.C.”
“Didn’t it bother you people that your camera platform was seen?” Suzanne asked. The image of the Neanderthal’s face was haunting her.
“We were starting to be concerned about detection,” Arak agreed. “There was even some talk among our conservative wing at the time to eliminate cognitive beings from the surface of the earth.”
“Why would you be concerned about such primitive people?” Perry asked.
“Purely to avoid detection,” Arak said. “Obviously twenty-five thousand years ago, due to the primitivism of your civilization, it didn’t matter. But we knew it would, eventually. We know that our ships have been sighted occasionally even in your modern times, and it does concern us. Thankfully the sightings have mostly been greeted with disbelief, or if not with disbelief then with the idea that our interplanetary ships have come from someplace else in the universe, not from within the earth itself.”
“Wait a second,” Donald said suddenly. “I don’t like to rain on anyone’s parade, but I don’t think this little show you’re putting on here proves anything at all. It would be too easy to pull this off with computer-generated images. Why don’t you cut all this gibberish, and just tell us who you represent and what you want from us.”
For a moment no one spoke. Arak and Sufa leaned over and consulted with one another sotto voce. Then they conferred with Ismael and Mary. After a short, hushed conference, the hosts repositioned themselves back in their chairs. Arak looked directly at Donald.
“Mr. Fuller, your skepticism is fully understandable,” Arak said. “We’re not sure everyone else shares your suspicions. Perhaps later they can influence your opinion. Of course there will be more proof as your introduction proceeds, and I’m confident that you will be won over. Meanwhile, we’d like to beg for your patience for a while longer.”
Donald did not respond. He merely glared back at Arak.
“Let’s move on,” Arak said. “And allow me to give you a capsule history of Interterra. To do that we must begin in your domain, the earth’s surface. Life there began about five hundred million years after the earth formed and took several billion years to evolve. Your earth scientists are well aware of this. What they are not aware of is that we, the first-generation humans, evolved about five hundred and fifty million years ago during evolution’s first phase. The reason your scientists are unaware of this first phase is because almost the entire fossilized record of it disappeared during a time we call the Dark Period. More about that later. First we have some images of these early times of our civilization, but the quality is not good.”
The light dimmed progressively. In the gathering darkness Suzanne and Perry exchanged glances, but didn’t speak. Their attention was soon directed at the floor screen. After another flickering interval a scene appeared taken at eye level, depicting an environment similar to the one the visitors had seen in Interterra. The main difference was that the buildings were white instead of black although the shapes were similar. And the people appeared like normal human beings-they weren’t all gorgeous and they were engaged in a variety of everyday tasks.
“Watching these scenes makes us smile at our own primitiveness,” Sufa said.
“Indeed,” Arak agreed. “We didn’t have worker clones at that ancient time.”
Suzanne cleared her throat. She was trying to sort through everything Arak was saying. As an earth scientist, his lecture collided with everything she knew about evolution in general and human evolution in particular. “Are you suggesting that these images we’re seeing are from five hundred and fifty million years ago?”
“That’s correct,” Arak answered. He suppressed a laugh. He and Sufa were apparently amused by the antics of an individual trying to lift a block of stone. “Excuse us from finding this so funny,” he said. “We haven’t seen any of these sequences for a very long time. It was back when we had something akin to your nationalities, although they disappeared after the first fifty thousand years of our history. Wars disappeared at the same time, as you might imagine. As you can see, the surface of the earth was very different from the way it is now, and it is that appearance that we have re-created here in Interterra. Back then there was just one supercontinent and one superocean.”
“What happened?” Suzanne asked. “Why did your civilization choose to go underground?”
“Because of the Dark Period,” Arak said. “Our civilization had almost a million years of peaceful progress until we became aware of ominous developments in a galaxy close to ours. Within a relatively short time a series of cataclysmic supernova explosions occurred, effectively showering earth with enough radiation to dissipate the ozone layer. We could have dealt with that, but our scientists also recognized that these galactic events also upset the delicate balance of the solar system’s asteroid population. It became evident the earth was to be showered with planetesimal collisions, just as had happened when it was in its primordial state.”
“For crying out loud!” Richard moaned. “I can’t take much more of this.”
“Quiet, Richard!” Suzanne snapped without taking her eyes off Arak. “So Interterra was driven underground.”
“Exactly,” Arak said. “We knew the surface of the earth would become uninhabitable. It was a desperate time. We searched the solar system for a new home without success, and had not yet developed the time technology to search other galaxies. Then it was suggested that our only chance for survival was to move underground, or actually under the ocean. We had the technology so we did it in a miraculously short time. And very soon after we moved, the world as we knew it was consumed in deadly radiation, asteroidal bombardment, and geological upheaval. It was a close call even under the protective layer of the ocean, because at one point the ocean came close to boiling away from the intense heat. All life forms on earth were destroyed except for some primitive bacteria, some viruses, and a bit of blue-green algae.”