"But acoustical equipment is no good unless its potential for communication is realized. The incentive to speak. Find that, and you find man."
"I see," Mrs. Rhodes said, finding herself conscious of the motions of her lips and tongue. Prior to this expedition she had never had any great interest in such researches, but the vitality and intensity of the old lady was warming her to it. Why had man started to speak?
"See as I do," Miss Concher said earnestly. "Stare down this valley and don't blink until the vision comes."
She laughed. "That's a child's dare."
"Certainly. The childhood of man. Look." Miss Concher's eyes were fixed on the distance, and half unwillingly Mrs. Rhodes followed their object. "Look—there is green everywhere, and we are in a natural pastureland on the fresh mountainside of the Great Rift Valley. There is a splendid tree with solid foliage, and we hear the rustle of a bird within it. No—it is an animal behind it—that chalicothere we saw before, browsing on leaves. The sun is beaming intermittently as small clouds nag it; the day is shaping into possible rain. Yes, it is about to rain; we shall have to seek cover under a bough—"
Mrs. Rhodes kept staring, wishing there were some honest relief from the heat. Her vision began to blur, and colors appeared and disappeared. She had to blink at last, and the barren land came back into focus—but soon the distortions returned. It was easier simply to go along with Miss Concher's pleasant description, picturing the subject as well as she were able.
She closed her eyes and let the older woman dictate the entire scene. As she did so, the air seemed cooler, and she fancied the leaves fluttered on the branches of the tree, and a small bird swooped low in search of insects. Yes, rain was incipient.
A man came then—a brute of a creature with a tremendous belly. He leaned forward as he walked, his knees perpetually bent. He was naked, but the body hair was so thick that he was in fact well covered. His face was apelike: brown-leather skin stretched over massive eyebrow-ridges, a wrinkled gape-nostrilled nose, mouth bulging outward with large yellow teeth. His hair circled the face closely, beginning near the eyebrows, passing over the full cheeks well in front of the ears, and enclosing the mouth and receding chin.
This was Paranthropus: Para (akin to) + anthropus (man), of the dawning Pleistocene epoch, two million years ago.
The rainfall increased, no gentle dew, and lightning cracked nearby. From the other direction came another man-form, and with him a hairy woman clasping a cub. But these ones were smaller, their hair finer, their noses longer and straighter and the ridges over their eyes less pronounced. Still apelike in facial contour, they were closer to modern man than the one in the tree. These were Australopithecines.
"Aus-tral-o-pith-EE-cus," Miss Concher said, establishing the accent.
Confrontation: Paranthropus smelled the intruders and roared out his resentment. The Australopithecine male hesitated as though considering standing his ground. But as the other crashed down bellowing defiance, the visiting family took fright and loped away through the downpour. Mrs. Rhodes felt sorry for them.
"Paranthropus was king of the forest lowlands in this region," Miss Concher said. "Five feet tall and heavily built, he towered over his Australopithecine cousin by a hirsute head. He had the best foraging grounds. Small wonder Australopithecus, actually our nearer relative, was driven to scavenging in the savanna."
"Small wonder," Mrs. Rhodes echoed, surprised by the force of the vision she had stepped into.
"Yet this ejection was his blessing. Paranthropus did not need to evolve, so he endured for a million years unchanged—and became extinct. Australopithecus, scrounging in diverse habitats, always fighting on the fringe of Eden, continued to evolve into Homo Erectus, the first true man. That is, the first bad-tasting hominid."
"Pardon?"
"You don't like that notion? It was one of man's major adaptations for survival in the rough country. He couldn't always escape the larger carnivores, but soon he didn't have to. His meat had a foul flavor that no self-respecting predator would touch as long as there was anything else available. Thus like certain caterpillars, he survived."
The bell sounded on the drill-rig, and both women hurried to attend to the next step.
The narrow core now penetrated deep into the layers of earth and rock, stopping at the approximate boundary between the Pleistocene deposits and those of the older Pliocene. The ground, here and anywhere, was a kind of condensed history—that earthy, earthly residue remaining after the tribulations of the moment had evanesced. The record of all events was there, lacking only the means of interpretation.
Mrs. Rhodes brought up their sample: a cylinder of rock undisturbed by unnatural forces for the better part of two million years. She inserted it entire into the hopper of the analyzer and waited once more while the gimmick performed. She read the dials. "The trace is present," she said.
"Yes, I thought it would be. The Great Rift Valley is such a natural corridor, slicing down the eastern side of Africa. That's the beauty of it. But somewhere the trail has to diverge; then we shall find what we shall find."
Mrs. Rhodes shook her head. The analyzer operated on the principle that the odor of a living creature was more durable than had been supposed until recently. Minute particles of its substance drifted in the air, impregnated nearby objects, became fixed in them. A hound could detect that smell for hours or days, but it never faded entirely. As objects became buried and finally compressed into significant strata, that tiny olfactory trace remained. An instrument of sufficient sensitivity and attunement could sniff it out many thousands and hundreds of thousands of years later, since time affected the buried layers very little.
But there were millions of traces imbedded in every fragment, many of them so similar as to be overlapping. The instrument could not categorize them all. It merely responded with a typical pattern of readings if the particular one to which it had been sensitized were present. It told nothing about the nature of the original creature, or the duration of its stay in that area; it was too crude even to identify whether the trace was mammalian, avian or reptilian, large or small. The pattern either matched or it failed to match.
How Miss Concher had isolated this particular trace she never said, but Mrs. Rhodes suspected she had spent painstaking years at it. Somehow she had searched out a presence that could not be accounted for in the normal fauna of the time and region, and satisfied herself that it was significant. Now they were following the trail to its source, two million years later.
"What do you expect to find?" Mrs. Rhodes inquired, not for the first or second time.
"Look—a Dinotherium hunt!"
She looked automatically before realizing that this was another guided vision—and another evasion. The old woman saw so clearly into the living past that it was contagious. "Dino—is that an animal? Or a large reptile?"
Dinotherium was mammalian. Foraging in the swampy jungle, it sought no particular conflict with other creatures, and few bothered it. Like an elephant with tusks pointing straight down, and with an abbreviated trunk, it was the largest creature of this valley, and could well afford to be peaceful. This one had strayed onto solid ground, oblivious to danger.
Behind it manlike forms approached. Dinotherium hooked another leafy branch down, unconcerned though he was aware of the intrusion. His great tusks held the branch in place while his trunk picked it over.
The men came closer, making vocal sounds rather like the barking of canines. Dinotherium, annoyed, moved along a short distance, seeking to leave them behind. But they followed clamoring more loudly, hemming him in from back and side.