Anthonology

SMALL MOUTH, BAD TASTE

Sphere, in England, had published some of my novels, and their editor Anthony Cheetham asked me for a story for their Science Against Man anthology. There was something about his first name I liked, so in 1969 I wrote "Small Mouth" for that volume, and Dave Kyle had the bad taste to quote a paragraph from it for a volume he published. No, I don't know what paragraph; I never saw Kyle's volume, since this was a transaction called to my attention later by a reader. What got me was the audacity of it; Kyle simply informed my agent that he had all the authorization he needed, without telling him what he was using, so my agent learned of it only after I did. No, I didn't make a big fuss; I would have given permission for the use of the material had anyone bothered to ask. But editors are human, and human beings, as this story shows, are fallible.

"Man is a small-mouthed animal," Miss Concher said as the truck stopped. "He was less successful in the jungle than were the apes, and became carnivorous to fill his belly. Since he could no longer use those recessed teeth effectively for hunting, he had to make do with his forelimbs. Which in turn forced him to assume the bipedal stance, and he didn't even have a tail to brace against." She nodded sagely. "We can be sure that the first stone-thrower was not without sin; he was without food, and desperate. Tell me what you see."

Mrs. Rhodes was ready for the abrupt shift in subject. She rotated her sturdy frame a quarter turn on the seat and looked out over the landscape. "I see an irregular network of shrubbery interspersed with dirt or gravel—what I would term a badlands. At the base of the valley is a meandering brown stream, and in the distance are gray mountains."

Miss Concher smiled. "Beautiful." She was small and ancient, hair off-white and wirelike, and her eyes focused alertly though she was long blind. Personality radiated from the fine lines of her face: in crows-feet, deltas and crevasses.

"What do you see?" Mrs. Rhodes asked. She had learned that such direct questions did not offend the old lady, who thrived on her handicaps as though they were advantages.

"I see a great verdant vale, cooler and wetter than now. Trees of many types grow on its flank, rich with fruit and nut, and the river is wide and clear despite the nearby volcano-cone. High grass waves over rolling stretches, and flowers sparkle in the gentle breeze. Birds abound, from the colorful flamingo to the huge brooding vulture. I call it a garden of Eden, for in addition to the foliage there are animals for a spectacular hunt. Baboons, pigs, gazelles, hares, rhinos, chalicothere—"

"Beg pardon?"

"Chalicothere. A large tree-cropper, now extinct. Oh yes, it was fascinating here, two million years ago."

"Your vision is far more pleasant than mine. Miss Concher."

"My vision is of the past, as befits me. I am closer to it than you are, by a good thirty years." The old gray eyes pierced her again. "Let's have the map."

Mrs. Rhodes brought out the sheet showing East Africa. "We're in Tanganyika—Tanzania, I mean—somewhat south of Lake Victoria, and west."

Miss Concher smiled indulgently "Now look at the natural features."

Mrs. Rhodes studied the map, not certain what the point was this time. "There's Lake Victoria, of course, and only a few miles from us is Lake Tanganyika. And another long thin lake farther south, Nyasa. And mountains—to the east is Kilimanjaro, Africa's highest point, almost twenty thousand feet. And the Nile River drains to the north, and the Congo to the west."

"Very good." The old lady sounded disappointed, as though an apt pupil had overlooked the obvious.

"And within three hundred miles of us is Olduvai Gorge, where old Dr. Leakey discovered Man's bones."

"Bones!" But Miss Concher still wasn't satisfied. "My map shows the mighty continent of Africa, a vast tropical reservoir of life. Beyond its coastlines, two thousand miles out. is the great mid-oceanic ridge, the longest continuous mountain range in all the world. And in the center of this ridge is the rift, looping through the Indian Ocean, projecting up to slice off Arabia and parting Israel from Jordan, and a branch spiking down into Africa itself to form the Great Rift Valley wherein we now stand. And athwart that rift is a crater, as though a monstrous meteor had impacted there and smashed it into a broken circle. And the rains came, a flood like none we know today, filling the fragments of the Rift and crater—"

"Lake Victoria!" Mrs. Rhodes exclaimed, suddenly seeing it come to life on the map. "Tanganyika! Nyasa!"

"Yes. What a cataclysm! But a blessing for Man, for it was in this crazily shattered region, this verdant land protected by its new geography—it was here that he found Eden." Miss Concher smiled once more. "And we're here for the serpent."

"The serpent? Surely you don't mean the one that tempted Eve—"

"Surely I do, my dear. Without that snake, man never would have left Eden—and that, believe me, would have been too bad."

"Miss Concher, I realize you're speaking metaphorically. But—too bad? Wasn't the Biblical exile God's punishment for—?"

"Punishment can be very instructive. Look at Eden now."

Mrs. Rhodes looked around again at the bleak, baking terrain. It had changed, certainly, from the lush gardens of the past. But she felt she was missing the point.

"Trundle out the gimmick and we'll see what we can smell," Miss Concher said briskly. The temperature hovered near a hundred degrees Fahrenheit, but it hardly seemed to diminish the old lady's energy.

"The gimmick" was hardly a device to be trundled. It was a massive electronic instrument that occupied the greater portion of their converted army truck. There was also a collapsible tower for a miniature drilling rig. Its generator was powered by the truck's motor.

"That's as good a spot as any," Miss Concher said, indicating a declivity. Blind she might be, but she had a feel for the land.

Mrs. Rhodes maneuvered the truck and placed its tailgate neatly at the spot. This much was within her competence; it had been one of the prerequisites for the job. Not many female registered nurses could handle a three-axle vehicle with dispatch over rough ground. She could thank Mr. Rhodes for that legacy.

Mr. Rhodes. Her legal separation from him was hardly three months old, yet she found herself missing the crusty old engineer. Had he been too demanding, or she too independent? Now that she worked for Miss Concher she was beginning to appreciate the fact that a number of the traits she had objected to as masculine arrogance were actually natural functions of ambition. Surely her husband drove himself and others no harder than Miss Concher did.

Meanwhile she operated winch and derrick skillfully, setting up the drill-rig and anchoring it and connecting the generator. She was perspiring heavily by the time the job was done, but was glad for once that she was not a frail innocent beauty. The truck's motor pounded, the generator cut in, and the slender rod spun into the turf, squirting water down and spewing mud up rapidly. As the column penetrated to bedrock the rig disengaged automatically: time for the diamond bit. She made the exchange and set it working again. This would take some time.

They ate a crude picnic lunch while the drill did its job. Mrs. Rhodes looked out over the worn landscape again, wondering whether anything would come of this particular project. It still surprised her when she thought of it, to be wandering in a land of natives who wore headdresses of mud and dung and who drank fresh blood with gusto. Of course their conventions made sense, and that was only part of the story—

"The small-mouthed animal," Miss Concher repeated. "That bunglike orifice is one of man's few distinguishing traits. That, and his voluminous buttocks, and his naked skin. Doesn't sound like equipment to conquer the world, does it?"

Mrs. Rhodes was becoming used to her companion's acerbic viewpoint. "I had always understood that man's brain was the—"

"Brain? Whales and elephants have larger, and porpoises have convolutions as impressive. Nothing unique there."

"Or the specialized hands—"

"With the opposed thumb? Forget it; any tree-swinger has similar. Man's vaunted hand is one of the least specialized extremities in nature. It retains all the primitive fingers, poorly armored, suitable neither for fighting nor digging. No, the fleshy buttocks count for more; they give him vertical control and the ability to stride, and that frees him from the forest. And his bare skin gives him a large tactile surface. But most of all, his small mouth enclosing a proportionately large air-space provides a sounding chamber, and that makes true speech possible."

"I never looked at it quite that way—"

"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.

Dinotherium became moderately alarmed, and ceased browsing. These gesticulating bipeds could hardly harm him, but their proximity and persistence were unnatural. He ran smoothly, desiring only to free himself of the strange situation so he could finish his browse. He bore left, away from the concentration of Australopithecines.

Suddenly he realized where he was. Ahead was a deep sharp gully, the product of seasonal flash floods, whose tumbling sides were treacherous for a creature of his size. He veered farther left—and encountered more men.

The choice was between the gully and the men, now that he was fleeing. The gully at least was a known danger. But—there was a gap in the line, an easy escape. Dinotherium charged at it.

The noise increased. Men ran to cut him off, chattering. But the nearest one stood indecisively, failing to act in time. Dinotherium plunged through the space and headed for the swamp where men would be foolish to follow.

"He got away," Mrs. Rhodes said, relieved.

"Because one man did not follow instructions," Miss Concher said. "The leader plainly hooted at the fool to close it up, but he didn't comprehend in time."

"Yes, I saw that. But how does it relate to the trail we are following now? This is no Dinotherium hunt." This time she did not intend to be put off.

The blind eyes focused on her disconcertingly. "How much do you think that tribe lost, because of the failure of that one member?"

"I would imagine they went hungry—at least until they could set up another hunt."

"Hunger wasn't very funny in those days, was it?"

"Of course not," Mrs. Rhodes agreed, visualizing a primitive camp, the children bawling, the women standing glumly. "What did they do to that man who—"

"The leader banished him from the tribe, so of course he soon perished. If you're going to hunt Dinotherium, you can't afford any lapses in your organization."

"Also, the others were mad, I'm sure. Had to take it out on someone. But how does that—"

"Communication," Miss Concher said. "Now Australopithecus has a compelling reason to select for that single trait. Note that—the first artificial selection in the history of life on Earth, and for a nonphysical trait. He can't tolerate tribesmen who can't or won't respond to spoken instructions, even if these only take the form of imperative barking. The groups with dumb members will fall on hard times, and their children will starve, while those who are selective will become fine hunting units. They will be capable of driving Dinotherium into the gully and stoning him to death there while he stumbles in the steep sand, and they will eat well and prosper. Communication is the key—the small mouth put to the uses of survival!"

"I concede that," Mrs. Rhodes said, both enlightened and annoyed. "But what—"

"Once you're on that treadmill, you have to continue. You need the big game to feed your increasing numbers, for squirrels and sparrows won't feed an entire tribe for long, and certainly not wild fruit. You become dependent on organization, on the specialization that is the hunt. And you begin to contest with neighboring tribes for the best hunting territory, staking it out, and so your communication is now employed man-against-man. That's a rough game, and if you quit you die. Today an army is helpless when its communications break down. Your size increases and your brain expands, as it must to handle the burgeoning linguistic concepts required to define an effective campaign. Barks meaning 'run,' 'stop' and 'kill' give way to subtler sounds meaning 'run faster,' 'stop over there' and 'kill on command only.' And finally you are not just Australopithecus, you are Homo Erectus. An animal with the single specialized organ so harshly selected for: the brain."

Mrs. Rhodes refused to be diverted. "This trail—"

"I believe," Miss Concher said gently, "that it was not mere coincidence or fleeting convenience that started Australopithecus along the demanding highway of verbal communication. The odds against this seem prohibitive. Some outside agency instructed him. Something forcibly directed him to speak, or somehow arranged it so that he had to communicate in order to survive at all. Something that knew where this process would lead. And that is what we are sniffing out now—that alien influence that shaped us into mastery."

At last Mrs. Rhodes saw the point. If somebody—something, for there could have been no true men then—if some agency had come to show potential man the route to success—

Man had a debt going back two million years.

And now two women, one middle-aged and the other old, were belatedly on the trail of that visitation, that phenomenally important influence. What would they find?

Miss Concher nodded. "It's a little frightening, isn't it? We may not appreciate the truth one bit—but can there be any question of turning back now?"

This close to the answer to the riddle of man's progress? No, of course they could not turn back.

Down the Great Rift Valley they traveled, sniffing out the ancient trace. The natives generally ignored them. What harm could two crazy old women do, with their truckful of junk? They skirted Lake Tanganyika and traversed the length of Lake Nyasa, and the trail continued. At last they stood at the mouth of the Zambezi River, and the trace vanished.

They stood on the shore and looked eastward, Mrs. Rhodes' live eyes seeing no more than Miss Concher's dead ones. Their gruelling weeks of travel and drilling had come to an unhappy halt, for the water held no scent.

"No," Miss Concher said. "This is merely a hurdle. It can not end here." But for once her words lacked conviction. She had been an energumen until this moment, expending energy at a cheerful but appalling rate; now she was an old woman who could not find her knitting.

"A sea-creature?" Mrs. Rhodes suggested, embarrassed by her companion's weakness. She tried to envision a credible object, but without Miss Concher's guidance it manifested as a parody: an ancient octopus struggling rheumatically out of the depths, donning sunglasses and marching up the Rift to the sound of fife and drum to instruct Australopithecus. Ridiculous!

"Unlikely," Miss Concher said. But her bulldog mind was working again, after its hesitation. "Could have been based on the sea-floor, though. Or floating on the surface. The sea is an obvious highway for civilized species—check the map."

Mrs. Rhodes gladly did so. "It's a long coast line. Funny that they should come to this particular place, then make a thousand mile journey overland, when they could have landed so much closer to Lake Victoria..." She paused. "Unless they crossed directly from Madagascar—"

"My diagnosis exactly!" Had it been—or was Miss Concher trying to conceal her lapse? "Let's rent a boat."

What did it matter? They had a mission once more.

The crossing was not so simple as merely "renting a boat," but two weeks later they had negotiated the physical and political hazards and were driving their truck along the west coast of Madagascar. In another two they had spotted the trace again. The trek resumed: east, into the heart of the huge island.

The palms of the shoreline gave way to rice fields and islandlike hills and occasional thatch-roofed earthern houses. Mrs. Rhodes looked up one dusk to meet a pair of large eyes. "Something's watching us," she whispered, startled.

"Describe it," Miss Concher said, unruffled.

She peered at the creature, beginning to make it out in the shadow. "Small, bushy-tailed, head rather like a fox—but it has monkey-feet, and it's clinging to a branch."

"Lemur," Miss Concher said. "Madagascar is their homeland. The few species extant today are a poor remnant of those that ranged the world in past times."

"Not dangerous, then," Mrs. Rhodes said, relaxing.

"Not now. One type, Megaladapis, was larger than a gorilla—in fact, was the largest primate known. And another extinct Lemuridae, Archaeolemur, may have been remarkably cunning, if we are to judge by the precocious development of the temporal lobe during the—"

"You're leaving me behind, I'm afraid," Mrs. Rhodes cut in gently. The old lady smiled, making no secret of her pleasure in doing just that. It had become a kind of game. The fact was that Mrs. Rhodes, a skilled nurse, was not confused by anatomical allusions. She merely wished to abbreviate a developing lecture.

A modern city whose name they ignored obliterated a segment of the trail, but they resumed operations on the far side. Now they crossed parched savanna dotted with palms. "On this island, in historic times," Miss Concher said, "ranged the largest bird ever known: aepyornis."

"Now that sounds like a primate!"

"Its egg weighed twenty pounds, and a mature bird up to half a ton. Man wiped it out, of course."

"You don't have a very high opinion of man, do you."

"That's why I'm single." But Miss Concher smiled again, too enthusiastic over the progress of the search to be properly cynical. She knew the fauna far better than Mrs. Rhodes did, identifying by description everything from a camouflaged tree-lizard to a forest cuckoo. She also called off a solitary baobab, the tree with the grossly swollen trunk that seemed to have its roots in the air in place of branches, and related an amusing myth about its origin. She knew how to get through a thorny didierea jungle, grown up in recent generations as though to preserve the secrets of the trail.

They moved on with growing excitement, day by day, until at last the trail debouched into a secluded valley. Repeated soundings verified it: this had been the home, two million years ago, of the mysterious traveler. Today it was wilderness, with only the shy lemurs and curious birds present. Where had man's ancient tutor gone?

"If I make out the lay of the land correctly," Miss Concher said, "there should be buried caves. They may have been occupied, then."

Mrs. Rhodes shook her head, marveling anew at the spinster's talents. If she conjectured buried caves, there would be buried caves.

They drilled and drilled again, searching. On the third day the bit broke through the wall of a subterranean discontinuity. Its age fell in the correct range and the trace inside was very strong.

"Now," Miss Concher said briskly, "we dig."

It had to be by hand, since the rig was not geared for wholesale tunneling and in any event the bulldozer technique was hardly appropriate for archaeological excavation. The two women dug a long shallow trench, pausing as often as they had to in deference to sex and age and inexperience. Miss Concher's contribution was a good deal more than token; her zest drove her ruthlessly. Next day they deepened it, leaving a ramp at one end. As their trench descended into the earth they hauled loads of loam, sand and gravel out in a wheeled sample cart never intended for such crude maneuver-ings.

The work was slow, their muscles sore, and both had ugly blisters on their hands despite the heavy gloves. Each day the excavation sank deeper, and their anticipation grew. Down there, perhaps, was tangible evidence of a two-million-year old culture—a culture to which man probably owed his present eminence. Blisters were beneath consideration, with the solution to such a mystery so near.

At last they struck the rocky outer wall of the cave. The drill-hole penetrated a yard of crumbling stone.

"Either we can keep digging until we come across the natural entrance," Mrs. Rhodes said, touching the aperture with weary fingers, "or we can break out the sledgehammer. I'm not at all sure my resources will survive either course."

"Hammer and chisel will do it," Miss Concher said, declining to ride with the proffered excuse though she could have done so with grace. Mere stone would not halt her. She demonstrated, flaking off wedges skillfully. "Variation of a technique used in the Oldowan industry for a million years or so, so it will do for us. The stone age had a lot to recommend it."

So the old lady knew how to chip stone! The process was slow, but it did promise to get the job done with a minimum of damage to whatever might be in the cave.

They took turns, the sighted woman laboring clumsily much of the day, and the blind one continuing far into the night. Miss Concher seemed indefatigable and she needed no illumination. Mrs. Rhodes, weary to the marrow, became too dull to marvel further at the resources of her companion. Most women of that age would be crocheting harmlessly in rockers while their grandchildren matured. Purpose animated Miss Concher, provided the motive power—but what would happen once the mission was done? Would there then be a disastrous reckoning?

But she knew the answer to that. Miss Concher would not collapse; she would find another mission, another trail to follow. In fact it was not the trail that gave her purpose, it was her purpose that revealed the trail, where no one else had thought to look. It was, as the saying went, an education merely to know her.

And perhaps within this buried cave lay the answer to the start of that purpose. Not only to this immediate trek, but to the inherent motivation of man. The thing that had given a minor hominid the bug for knowledge, two million years ago, and thrust him mercilessly into greatness. The quality that really made Miss Concher the avid scientist she was, and set her species apart from all others. Intellectual motivation.

Mrs. Rhodes felt nervous goose-pimples rise along her arms despite the heat as the breakthrough point approached. The hole was widening, but Miss Concher refused to risk damaging the interior by rushing. Something was down there, though. Broken pieces where the bit had struck? Bones? Pottery? Weapons? Books? Or something more sinister?

She slept at last to the tap-tap of Miss Concher's patient excavation, not attempting to keep up with the woman's nocturnal energy. It would have been useless to urge her to stop, to rest, to sleep, for Miss Concher lived for this discovery. Better to be ready herself, in case the strain brought serious complications.

In indeterminate darkness she woke momentarily, still hearing the tap-tap. Regardless of the outcome of this quest, she knew what she was going to do after it was over. She had already learned enough about the heritage of her species to accept some things she had denied before. She had a better marriage than she had supposed, and it was not too late....

In the morning she discovered that Miss Concher had never returned to the truck to sleep. All was silent.

She scrambled up in alarm and ran for the gaping trench. She should have stayed up, kept watch... if the grand old lady had hurt herself, or collapsed, or—

She need not have worried. Miss Concher was standing waist-deep in the cave excavation, lifting out objects and using the main trench as a display shelf. Meticulously arranged were a series of irregular objects and portions of an animal skeleton.

"Miss Concher! Have you been up all night?" But the question was gratuitous and rhetorical.

The woman lifted her white head, smiling tiredly. "Yes, we have found the answer. We know who started man on his way. The artifacts are conclusive." She caressed the dirt-encrusted object in her hand. "Mesolithic culture, I would say—shaped tools, but no gardening. They were obviously able to sail on the rivers and ocean, at least with some kind of raft, and to domesticate certain animals—"

"You know who trained Australopithecus to—"

"Yes, the hominids were one of their domestics. They recognized in Australopithecus the potential for really effective service, and they took the long view. A few thousand years of selection and training—more than enough to affect the species profoundly—and man was on his way. He even—"

Mrs. Rhodes was shocked. "You mean man started out as—as a pet, like a dog?"

"More like a horse, or an elephant. He was trained to obey simple commands, to carry his master, fetch things, and finally to undertake dinotherium hunts under the direction of a few overseers. You see, mainland Africa was too wild for a gentle, civilized species then, as it is today for different reasons. Yet they needed certain commodities such as ivory—"

Mrs. Rhodes saw a fragment of tusk among the displayed artifacts, and knew that neither elephant nor dinotherium had ever ranged Madagascar. Ivory had to be imported. But how could there have been such a culture on Earth before human civilization arose? "Who—" But she was unable to frame the question properly, afraid of the answer.

"Why, the Lemuridae, of course. Didn't I tell you about Archaeolemur, with the almost hominid skull? Here in this cave we have an offshoot new to paleontology, with a comparatively enormous braincase and distinctive configuration. 1,000 cc easily, if my wrinkled old fingers do not deceive me. Easily capable of mesolithic technology, in the circumstances." She hefted the broken skull. "Look at this marvelous specimen yourself! Plainly derived from Archaeolemur, but the placement of the foramen magnum—"

"Are you saying the—the lemurs are civilized? That they—"

"Lemuridae. Not today's lemurs, but their advanced relatives. Yes, they were the ones. They controlled fire, they were artistic." Miss Concher patted the skull affectionately. "But they made one fatal mistake in their choice of domestics. Not the first time a tutor has been out-stripped by his pupil, I'm sure, or the last. Australopithecus was almost as intelligent as this lemuridae, even then—and he had more potential, because of his size and fully bipedal stance. All he needed was a good example and some discipline. What took the lemuridae several million years to develop, man covered in a few hundred thousand."

Mrs. Rhodes stopped fighting it. "Where is Archaeolemur now? With that head start—"

"Extinct, of course. His mouth was too large, his buttocks too small, his skin too hairy, his taste too good. Alas, he has been replaced on Earth by his domestic. Man could hardly have been a docile, loyal pet—not when trained as a hunter."