No Connection
Raph was a typical American of his times. Remarkably ugly, too, by American standards of our times. The bony structure of his jaws was tremendous and the musculature suited it. His nose was arched and wide and his black eyes were small and forced wide apart by the span of said nose. His neck was thick, his body broad, his fingers spatulate, with strongly curved nails.
If he had stood erect, on thick legs with large, well-padded feet, he would have topped two and a half yards. Standing or sitting, his mass neared a quarter of a ton.
Yet his forehead rose in an unrestricted arc and his cranial capacity did not stint. His enormous hand dealt delicately with a pen, and his mind droned comfortably on as he bent over his desk.
In fact, his wife and most of his fellow-Americans found him a fine-looking fellow.
Which shows the alchemy of a long displacement along the time-axis.
Raph, Junior, was a smaller edition of our typical American. He was adolescent and had not yet lost the hairy covering of childhood. It spread in a dark, close-curled mat across his chest and back, but it was already thinning and perhaps within the year he would first don the adult shirt that would cover the proudly-naked skin of manhood.
But, meanwhile, he sat in breeches alone, and scratched idly at a favorite spot just above the diaphragm. He felt curious and just a little bored. It wasn’t bad to come with his father to the museum when people were there. Today was a Closed-Day, however, and the empty corridors rang lonesomely when he walked along them.
Besides, he knew everything in it-mostly bones and stones.
Junior said: “What’s that thing?”
“What thing?” Raph lifted his head and looked over his shoulder. Then he looked pleased. “Oh, that’s something quite new. That’s a reconstruction of Primate Primeval. It was sent to me from the North River Grouping. Isn’t it a nice job, though?” And he returned to his work, in the grip of a momentary twinge of pleasure. Private Primeval wasn’t to go on exhibition for a week at least-not until he prepared an honorable place for it with suitable surroundings, but, for the moment, it was in his office and his own private darling.
Raph looked at the “nice job” with quite other emotions, however. What he saw was a spindly figure of contemptuous size, with thin legs and arms, hair-covered and owning an ugly, small-featured face with large, protruding eyes.
He said: “Well, what is it, Pa?”
Raph stirred impatiently: “It’s a creature that lived many millions of years ago, we think. That’s the way we think it looks.”
“Why?” insisted the youngster.
Raph gave up. Apparently, he would have to root out the subject and do away with it.
“Well, for one thing we can tell about the muscles from the shape of the bones, and the positions where the tendons would fit and where some of the nerves would go. From the teeth we can tell the type of digestive system the animal would have, and from the foot-bones, what type of posture it would have. For the rest, we go by the principle of Analogy, that is, by the outside appearance of creatures that exist today that have the same kind of skeleton. For instance, that’s why he’s covered with red hair. Most of the Primates today-they’re little insignificant creatures, practically extinct-are red-haired, have bare callosities on the rump-”
Junior scurried behind the figure and satisfied himself on that score.
“-have long, fleshy probosces, and short, shriveled ears. Their diets are unspecialized, hence the rather all-purpose teeth, and they are nocturnal, hence the large eyes. It’s all simple, really. Now, does that dispose of you, youngster?”
And then Junior, having thought and thought about it, came out with a disparaging: “He looks just like an Eekah to me, though. Just like an ugly, old Eekah.”
Raph stared at him. Apparently he had missed a point: “An Eekah?” he said, “What’s an Eekah? Is that an imaginary creature you’ve been reading about?”
“Imaginary! Say, Pa, don’t you ever stop at the Recorder’s?”
This was an embarrassing question to answer, for “Pa” never did, or at least, never since his maturity. As a child, the Recorder, as custodian of the world’s spoken, written, and recorded fiction, had, of course, had an unfailing fascination. But he had grown up-
He said, tolerantly: “Are there new stories about Eekahs? I remember none when I was young.”
“You don’t get it, Pa.” One would almost suppose that the young Raph was on the very verge of an exasperation he was too cautious to express. He explained in wounded fashion: “The Eekahs are real things. They come from the Other World. Haven’t you heard about that? We’ve been hearing about it in school, even, and in the Group Magazine. They stand upside down in their country, only they don’t know it, and they look just like Ol’ Primeval there.”
Raph collected his astonished wits. He felt the incongruity of cross-examining his half-grown child for archeological data and he hesitated a moment. After all, he had heard some things. There had been word of vast continents existing on the other hemisphere of Earth. It seemed to him that there were reports of life on them. It was all hazy-perhaps it wasn’t always wise to stick so closely to the field of one’s own interest.
He asked Junior: “Are there Eekahs here among the Groupings?”
Junior nodded rapidly: “The Recorder says they can think as good as us. They got machines that go through the air. That’s how they got here.”
“Junior!” said Raph severely.
“I ain’t lying,” Junior cried with aggrieved virtue. “You ask the Recorder and see what he says.”
Raph slowly gathered his papers together. It was Closed-Day, but he could find the Recorder at his home, no doubt.
The Recorder was an elderly member of the Red River Gurrow Grouping and few alive could remember a time when he was not. He had succeeded to the post by general consent and filled it well, for he was Recorder for the same reason that Raph was curator of the museum. He liked to be, he wanted to be, and he could conceive no other life.
The social pattern of the Gurrow Grouping is difficult to grasp unless born into it, but there was a looseness about it that almost made the word “pattern” incongruous. The individual Gurrow took whatever job he felt an aptitude for, and such work as was left over and needed to be done was done either in common, or consecutively by each according to an order determined by lot. Put so, it sounds too simple to work, but actually the traditions that had gathered with the five thousand years since the first Voluntary Grouping of Gurrahs was supposed to have been established, made the system complicated, flexible-and workable.
The Recorder was, as Raph had anticipated, at his home, and there was the embarrassment of renewing an old and unjustly neglected acquaintanceship. He had made use of the Recorder’s reference library, of course, but always indirectly-yet he had once been a child, an intimate learner at the feet of accumulated wisdom, and he had let the intimacy lapse.
The room he now entered was more or less choked with recordings and, to a lesser degree, with printed material. The Recorder interspersed greetings with apologies.
“Shipments have come from some of the other Groupings,” he said. “It needs time for cataloguing, you know, and I can’t seem to find the time I used to.” He lit a pipe and puffed strongly. “Seems to me I’ll have to find a full-time assistant. What about your son, Raph? He clusters about here the way you did twenty years ago.”
“You remember those times?”
“Better than you do, I think. Think your son would like that?”
“Suppose you talk to him. He might like to. I can’t honestly say he’s fascinated by archaeology.” Raph picked up a recording at random and looked at the identification tag: “Um-m-m-from the Joquin Valley Grouping. That’s a long way from here.”