Short Fiction

Later Than You Think

Obviously the Archeologist’s study belonged to an era vastly distant from today. Familiar similarities here and there only sharpened the feeling of alienage. The sunlight that filtered through the windows in the ceiling had a wan and greenish cast and was augmented by radiation from some luminous material impregnating the walls and floor. Even the wide desk and the commodious hassocks glowed with a restful light. Across the former were scattered metal-backed wax tablets, styluses, and a pair of large and oddly formed spectacles. The crammed bookcases were not particularly unusual, but the books were bound in metal and the script on their spines would have been utterly unfamiliar to the most erudite of modern linguists. One of the books, lying open on a hassock, showed leaves of a thin, flexible, rustless metal covered with luminous characters. Between the bookcases were phosphorescent oil paintings, mainly of sea bottoms, in somber greens and browns. Their style, neither wholly realistic nor abstract, would have baffled the historian of art.

A blackboard with large colored crayons hinted equally at the schoolroom and the studio.

In the center of the room, midway to the ceiling, hung a fish with iridescent scales of breathtaking beauty. So invisible was its means of support that—also taking into account the strange paintings and the greenish light—one would have sworn that the object was to create an underwater scene.

The Explorer made his entrance in a theatrical swirl of movement. He embraced the Archeologist with a warmth calculated to startle that crusty old fellow. Then he settled himself on a hassock, looked up and asked a question in a speech and idiom so different from any we know that it must be called another means of communication rather than another language. The import was, “Well, what about it?”

If the Archeologist were taken aback, he concealed it. His expression showed only pleasure at being reunited with a long-absent friend.

“What about what?” he queried.

“About your discovery!”

“What discovery?” The Archeologist’s incomprehension was playful.

The Explorer threw up his arms. “Why, what else but your discovery, here on Earth, of the remains of an intelligent species? It’s the find of the age! Am I going to have to coax you? Out with it!”

“I didn’t make the discovery,” the other said tranquilly. “I only supervised the excavations and directed the correlation of material. You ought to be doing the talking. You’re the one who’s just returned from the stars.”

“Forget that.” The Explorer brushed the question aside. “As soon as our spaceship got within radio range of Earth, they started to send us a continuous newscast covering the period of our absence. One of the items, exasperatingly brief, mentioned your discovery. It captured my imagination. I couldn’t wait to hear the details.” He paused, then confessed, “You get so eager out there in space—a metal-filmed droplet of life lost in immensity. You rediscover your emotions …” He changed color, then finished rapidly, “As soon as I could decently get away, I came straight to you. I wanted to hear about it from the best authority—yourself.”

The Archeologist regarded him quizzically. “I’m pleased that you should think of me and my work, and I’m very happy to see you again. But admit it now, isn’t there something a bit odd about your getting so worked up over this thing? I can understand that after your long absence from Earth, any news of Earth would seem especially important. But isn’t there an additional reason?”

The Explorer twisted impatiently. “Oh, I suppose there is. Disappointment, for one thing. We were hoping to get in touch with intelligent life out there. We were specially trained in techniques for establishing mental contact with alien intelligent life forms. Well, we found some planets with life upon them, all right. But it was primitive life, not worth bothering about.”

Again he hesitated embarrassedly. “Out there you get to thinking of the preciousness of intelligence. There’s so little of it, and it’s so lonely. And we so greatly need intercourse with another intelligent species to give depth and balance to our thoughts. I suppose I set too much store by my hopes of establishing a contact.” He paused. “At any rate, when I heard that what we were looking for, you had found here at home—even though dead and done for—I felt that at least it was something. I was suddenly very eager. It is odd, I know, to get so worked up about an extinct species—as if my interest could mean anything to them now—but that’s the way it hit me.”

Several small shadows crossed the windows overhead. They might have been birds, except they moved too slowly.

“I think I understand,” the Archeologist said softly.

“So get on with it and tell me about your discovery!” the Explorer exploded.

“I’ve already told you that it wasn’t my discovery,” the Archeologist reminded him. “A few years after your expedition left, there was begun a detailed resurvey of Earth’s mineral resources. In the course of some deep continental borings, one party discovered a cache—either a very large box or a rather small room—with metallic walls of great strength and toughness. Evidently its makers had intended it for the very purpose of carrying a message down through the ages. It proved to contain artifacts; models of buildings, vehicles, and machines, objects of art, pictures, and books—hundreds of books, along with elaborate pictorial dictionaries for interpreting them. So now we even understand their languages.”

“Languages?” interrupted the Explorer. “That’s queer. Somehow one thinks of an alien species as having just one language.”

“Like our own, this species had several, though there were some words and symbols that were alike in all their languages. These words and symbols seem to have come down unchanged from their most distant prehistory.”

The Explorer burst out, “I am not interested in all that dry stuff! Give me the wet! What were they like? How did they live? What did they create? What did they want?”

The Archeologist gently waved aside the questions. “All in good time. If I am to tell you everything you want to know, I must tell it my own way. Now that you are back on Earth, you will have to reacquire those orderly and composed habits of thought which you have partly lost in the course of your wild interstellar adventurings.”

“Curse you, I think you’re just trying to tantalize me.”

The Archeologist’s expression showed that this was not altogether untrue. He casually fondled an animal that had wriggled up onto his desk, and which looked rather more like an eel than a snake. “Cute little brute, isn’t it?” he remarked. When it became apparent that the Explorer wasn’t to be provoked into another outburst, he continued, “It became my task to interpret the contents of the cache, to reconstruct its makers’ climb from animalism and savagery to civilization, their rather rapid spread across the world’s surface, their first fumbling attempts to escape from the Earth.”

“They had spaceships?”

“It’s barely possible. I rather hope they did, since it would mean the chance of a survival elsewhere, though the negative results of your expedition rather lessen that.” He went on, “The cache was laid down when they were first attempting space flight, just after their discovery of atomic power, in the first flush of their youth. It was probably created in a kind of exuberant fancifulness, with no serious belief that it would ever serve the purpose for which it was intended.” He looked at the Explorer strangely. “If I am not mistaken, we have laid down similar caches.”

After a moment the Archeologist continued, “My reconstruction of their history, subsequent to the laying down of the cache, has been largely hypothetical. I can only guess at the reasons for their decline and fall. Supplementary material has been very slow in coming in, though we are still making extensive excavations at widely separated points. Here are the last reports.” He tossed the Explorer a small metal-leaf pamphlet. It flew with a curiously slow motion.

“That’s what struck me so queer right from the start,” the Explorer observed, putting the pamphlet aside after a glance. “If these creatures were relatively advanced, why haven’t we learned about them before? They must have left so many things—buildings, machines, engineering projects, some of them on a large scale. You’d think we’d be turning up traces everywhere.”

“I have four answers to that,” the Archeologist replied. “The first is the most obvious. Time. Geologic ages of it. The second is more subtle. What if we should have been looking in the wrong place? I mean, what if the creatures occupied a very different portion of the Earth than our own? Third, it’s possible that atomic energy, out of control, finished the race and destroyed its traces. The present distribution of radioactive compounds throughout the Earth’s surface lends some support to this theory.

“Fourth,” he went on, “it’s my belief that when an intelligent species begins to retrogress, it tends to destroy, or, rather, debase all the things it has laboriously created. Large buildings are torn down to make smaller ones. Machines are broken up and worked into primitive tools and weapons. There is a kind of unraveling or erasing. A cultural Second Law of Thermodynamics begins to operate, whereby the intellect and all its works are gradually degraded to the lowest level of meaning and creativity.”

“But why?” The Explorer sounded anguished. “Why should any intelligent species end like that? I grant the possibility of atomic power getting out of hand, though one would have thought they’d have taken the greatest precautions. Still, it could happen. But that fourth answer—it’s morbid.”

“Cultures and civilizations die,” said the Archeologist evenly. “That has happened repeatedly in our own history. Why not species? An individual dies—and is there anything intrinsically more terrible in the death of a species than in the death of an individual?”

He paused. “With respect to the members of this one species, I think that a certain temperamental instability hastened their end. Their appetites and emotions were not sufficiently subordinated to their understanding and to their sense of drama—their enjoyment of the comedy and tragedy of existence. They were impatient and easily incapacitated by frustration. They seem to have been singularly guilty in their pleasures, behaving either like gloomy moralists or gluttons.

“Because of taboos and an overgrown possessiveness,” he continued, “each individual tended to limit his affection to a tiny family; in many cases he focused his love on himself alone. They set great store by personal prestige, by the amassing of wealth and the exercise of power. Their notable capacity for thought and manipulative activity was expended on things rather than persons or feelings. Their technology outstripped their psychology. They skimped fatally when it came to hard thinking about the purpose of life and intellectual activity, and the means for preserving them.”

Again the slow shadows drifted overhead.

“And finally,” the Archeologist said, “they were a strangely haunted species. They seem to have been obsessed by the notion that others, greater than themselves, had prospered before them and then died, leaving them to rebuild a civilization from ruins. It was from those others that they thought they derived the few words and symbols common to all their languages.”

“Gods?” mused the Explorer.

The Archeologist shrugged. “Who knows?”

The Explorer turned away. His excitement had visibly evaporated, leaving behind a cold and miserable residue of feeling. “I am not sure I want to hear much more about them,” he said. “They sound too much like us. Perhaps it was a mistake, my coming here. Pardon me, old friend, but out there in space even our emotions become undisciplined. Everything becomes indescribably poignant. Moods are tempestuous. You shift in an instant from zenith to nadir—and remember, out there you can see both.

“I was very eager to hear about this lost species,” he added in a sad voice. “I thought I would feel a kind of fellowship with them across the eons. Instead, I touch only corpses. It reminds me of when, out in space, there looms up before your prow, faint in the starlight, a dead sun. They were a young race. They thought they were getting somewhere. They promised themselves an eternity of effort. And all the while there was wriggling toward them out of that future for which they yearned … oh, it’s so completely futile and unfair.”

“I disagree,” the Archeologist said spiritedly. “Really, your absence from Earth has unsettled you even more than I first surmised. Look at the matter squarely. Death comes to everything in the end. Our past is strewn with our dead. That species died, it’s true. But what they achieved, they achieved. What happiness they had, they had. What they did in their short span is as significant as what they might have done had they lived a billion years. The present is always more important than the future. And no creature can have all the future—it must be shared, left to others.”

“Maybe so,” the Explorer said slowly. “Yes, I guess you’re right. But I still feel a horrible wistfulness about them, and I hug to myself the hope that a few of them escaped and set up a colony on some planet we haven’t yet visited.” There was a long silence. Then the Explorer turned back. “You old devil,” he said in a manner that showed his gayer and more boisterous mood had returned, though diminished, “you still haven’t told me anything definite about them.”

“So I haven’t,” replied the Archeologist with guileful innocence. “Well, they were vertebrates.”

“Oh?”

“Yes. What’s more, they were mammals.”

“Mammals? I was expecting something different.”

“I thought you were.”

The Explorer shifted. “All this matter of evolutionary categories is pretty cut-and-dried. Even a knowledge of how they looked doesn’t mean much. I’d like to approach them in a more intimate way. How did they think of themselves? What did they call themselves? I know the word won’t mean anything to me, but it will give me a feeling—of recognition.”

“I can’t say the word,” the Archeologist told him, “because I haven’t the proper vocal equipment. But I know enough of their script to be able to write it for you as they would have written it. Incidentally, it is one of those words common to all their languages, that they attributed to an earlier race of beings.”

The Archeologist extended one of his eight tentacles toward the blackboard. The suckers at its tip firmly grasped a bit of orange crayon. Another of his tentacles took up the spectacles and adjusted them over his three-inch protruding pupils.

The eel-like glittering pet drifted back into the room and nosed curiously about the crayon as it traced:

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