commerce and.- global politics. Here was a country that the rush of progress had swept past, barely touching it.
Barely touching it, and thus leaving it with some of its old ideas. This place did not know that God was dead; in the little church at the upper end of the village the minister still might preach of fire and brimstone and his congregation would give him rapt attention. This place felt no overwhelming social guilt; it still believed that it was meet and proper that a man should work to earn a living. This place did not subscribe to deficit spending; it tried to get along with what it had and thus hold down the taxes. Once good and sterling virtues, but no longer so if measured against modern attitudes. And yet, I thought, not buried in the trivia of the outside world—escaping not only the physical trivia, but the intellectual and the moral and the aesthetic trivia as well. Still able to believe, in a world that had stopped believing. Still holding fast to certain values, even if mistaken values, in a world that had few values left. Still fiercely concerned about the fundamentals of life and living while much of the world long since had escaped into cynicism.
I glanced about the room, a simple place—small and bright and clean, with a minimum of furniture, with paneling on the wall and no carpet on the floor. A monk's cell, I thought, and that was the way it should be, for a man could do little work smothered in an overburden of conveniences.
Peace and quiet, I thought, and what about the rattlesnakes? Could this peace and quiet be no more than a tricky surface, the millpond water that masked a whirlpool's violence? I saw it all again—the cruel, skull-like head hanging over me—and as I remembered it my body ached with a recall of the tension that had frozen it into immobility.
Why should anyone have planned and executed such a bizarre attempt at murder? Who had done it and how had it been carried out and why should it be me? Why had there been two farmhouses so alike that one could scarcely be differentiated from the other? And what about Snuffy Smith and the stuck car that wasn't really stuck and the Triceratops that after a little time wasn't there at all?
I gave up. There were no answers. The only possible answer seemed to be that it had never happened and I was sure- k had. A man could imagine any one of all these things, perhaps; he could not, certainly, imagine all of them. There must, I knew, be an explanation somewhere, but I didn't have it.
I laid the manila envelope aside and looked at the other mail and there was little of importance. There were several notes from friends wishing me well in my new place of residence, but most of the notes had a trace of false joviality about them I was not sure I liked. Everyone, it seemed, thought that I was slightly crazy to bury myself in what to them was wilderness to write what probably would turn out to be a very lousy book. There were a couple of bills I had forgotten to pay and there were a magazine or two and some advertising.
I picked up the manila envelope again and ripped it open. Out of it came a sheaf of Xeroxed pages with a handwritten note clipped to them.
The note said:
Dear Horton: When I went through the papers in Uncle's desk, I ran across the enclosed and, knowing you were one of his closest and most valued friends, I ran off a copy for you. Frankly, I don't know what to make of it. With some other man I might think it was nothing more than a fantasy that, for some whimsical, personal reason, he had written down—perhaps to clear it from his mind. But Uncle was not whimsical, as I think you will agree. I am wondering if he might at some time have mentioned this to you. If such should be the case, you may have a better understanding of it than I seem able to muster—Philip.
I pulled the note clear from the stapled Xeroxed sheets and there, in the crabbed, miserly handwriting of my friend (a handwriting so unlike the man himself), was the document.
There was no heading on the sheet. Nothing to tell what he had intended it to be.
I settled down into the chair and began to read.
5
The evolutionary process (the document began) is a phenomenon which has been of special and absorbing interest to me all my life, although in my own particular field I have been concerned only with one small, and perhaps unspectacular, aspect of it. As a professor of history, I have been more and more intrigued, as the years go on, with the evolutionary trend of human thought. I would be ashamed to enumerate how many times I've tried and how many hours I've spent in attempting to draw up a graph or chart or diagram, or whatever one might call it, to show the change and development in human thought through all historic ages. The subject, however, is too vast and too diverse (and in some instances, I might as well confess, too contradictory) to lend itself to any illustrative scheme I've been able to devise. And yet I am sure that human thought has been evolutionary, that the basis of it has shifted steadily through all of man's recorded time, that we do not think as we did a hundred years ago, that our opinions are much changed from a thousand years ago, not so much attributable to the fact that we now have better knowledge upon which to base our thinking, but that the human viewpoint has undergone a change—an evolution, if you please.
It may seem amusing that anyone should become so absorbed in the process of human thought. But those who "think it amusing would be wrong. For it is the capability of abstract thought and nothing else which distinguishes the human being from any other creature that lives upon the earth.
Let us take a look at evolution, without attempting, or pretending to delve deeply into it, only touching a few of those more obvious landmarks which we are told by paleontologists highlight the path of progress from that primal ocean in which the first microscopic forms of life came into being at a very distant time. Not hunting for, or concerning ourselves with all the subtle changes which marked development, but only noting some of the horizon lines which stand out as a result of all those subtle changes.
One of those first great landmarks must necessarily be" the emergence of certain life forms from the water to live upon the land. This ability to change environment undoubtedly was a much protracted and perhaps a painful and probably a hazardous procedure. But to us today time telescopes it into a single event which stands out as a high point hi the evolutionary scheme. Another high point was the development of the notochord which, in millions of years to come, evolved into a backbone. Yet another high point was the development of bipedal locomotion, although I, personally, am inclined to discount somewhat the significance of the erect position. If one talks of man, it was not the ability to walk erect, but the ability to think beyond the moment and in other terms than the here and now that made him what he is today.
The evolutionary process represents a long chain of events. Many evolutionary trends ran their courses and were discarded and many species became extinct because they were tied inexorably into some of those evolutionary trends. But it was always from some factor, or perhaps from many factors which were involved in the development of those extinct life forms, that new evolutionary lines arose. And the thought must occur to one that through all this tangled jungle of change and modification there must have run a single central core of evolution pointing toward some final form. Through all the millions of years, that central evolutionary form, now expressed in man, lay in the slow growth of a brain which in time became a mind.
One thing, it seems to me, that stands out in the evolutionary process is that while developments, once they've happened, do make uncommon sense, no observer before the fact could have made a valid prediction that they were about to happen. It would not have made good sense for an observer, a half billion years ago, to have predicted that in a few more million years life forms would leave the water and live upon the land. It would have seemed, as a matter of fact, a most unlikely thing, well-nigh impossible. For life forms as they were then constructed, needed the water; they could live nowhere else but in the water. And the land of that day, sterile and barren, must have seemed as incredibly hostile to life as space seems to us today.