Bowman pointed to the frozen tableau of his ancestors.
'Look how far we've progressed since then! Yet after that same three million years, where will the pyramid makers be? I don't mind admitting it-the thought sometimes scares me.'
'It scares me. But remember, progress is never uniform; even after three million years, they may not be incomprehensibly far ahead of us. Perhaps there's a plateau for intelligence that can't be exceeded. They may already have reached it when they visited the Moon. After all, it has yet to be proved that intelligence has real survival value.'
'I can't accept that!' protested Bowman. 'Surely, our intelligence has made us what we are-the most successful animals on the planet!'
'As an anthropologist, I'm naturally biased in favor of Man. From the short-term point of view, intelligence has undoubtedly been an advantage. But what about geological time-and how do you define a 'successful' species? My friend the curator of reptiles keeps reminding me that the dinosaurs flourished for more than a hundred million years. And their I.Q.'s were distinctly minimal.'
'Well, where are they now? I don't see any around today.'
'True-but you can't call a hundred-million-year reign a failure; it's a thousand times as long as Homo sapiens has existed. There may be an optimum level of intelligence, and perhaps we've already exceeded it. Our brains may be too big-dooming us as Triceratops was doomed by his armor. He overspecialized in horns and spikes and plates; we overspecialized in cerebral cortex. The end result may be the same.'
'So you believe that as soon as a species reaches more than a certain level of intelligence, it is heading for extinction?'
'I don't state it as a fact, I'm merely pointing out the possibilities. There's no reason to assume that the universe has the slightest interest in intelligence-or even in life. Both may be random, accidental by-products of its operations, like the beautiful patterns on a butterfly's wing. The insect would fly just as well without them; our species might survive as long as-oh, the sharks, which haven't changed much in a couple of hundred million years-if we were a little less clever. Look at the daily newspapers, and the history of the whole twentieth century.'
Dr. Brailsford smiled at her obviously disapproving audience.
'No-I'm not a pessimist,' she said, answering their unspoken accusation. 'Just a realist, who knows that only a tiny fraction of the species that have lived on this planet have any descendants today. And because I am a realist, perhaps I understand the importance of your project better than you do.'
'Go on, please.'
'The creatures who built the pyramid-how far ahead of us would you say they were from the technical viewpoint?'
'Probably no more than a hundred years, at our present rate of progress.'
'Exactly. Now suppose that they are still in existence, even if they've made little progress during the three million years since they visited the Moon. Don't you see-this will be the first definite proof that intelligence does have real survival value. That will be very reassuring.'
'Quite frankly, doctor,' said Goode, 'I don't need any reassurance. Even if intelligence has limited survival value, it has a good deal of comfort value. I wouldn't change places with them.' He jerked his thumb toward the tableau of ape-men.
The anthropologist joined in the laughter; then she became serious again.
'There's another possibility, though-and that's cultural shock. If they are too advanced, and we come into contact with them, we may not be able to survive the impact psychologically. As Jung put it, half a century ago, we might find all our aspirations so outmoded as to leave us completely paralyzed. He used a rather striking phrase– we might find ourselves 'without dreams.' Like the Atlanteans, you know-Herodotus said that they never dreamed. I always thought that made them peculiarly inhuman-and pitiable.'
'I don't believe in cultural shock,' said Hunter. 'After all, we expect to meet a very advanced society. It wouldn't be such an overwhelming surprise to us as-well, as it would be to him, if he was suddenly dumped here in Manhattan .'
'I think you are too-optimistic,' answered Dr. Brailsford; Bowman guessed that she had been tempted to use the word 'naive.' 'On our planet, societies only a few generations apart culturally have proved to be incompatible.'
'Perhaps our Pleistocene astronauts were aware of the danger-perhaps that's why they've left us alone, all these years.'
'Have they?' said the anthropologist. 'I wonder. If you'd like to come to my office now, I've something to show you.'
They walked out of the Leakey Memorial Exhibit, through the great, cathedral-like halls of the museum. From time to time Bowman was recognized by other visitors, and several eager youngsters rushed up for his autograph. Goode and Hunter were not asked for theirs, but they were accustomed to this; Goode was fond of quoting, a little ironically, Milton 's line 'They also serve who only stand and wait.'
Bowman's relationship with his two understudies was, on the whole, excellent-which was not surprising, for their intellectual and psychological profiles had been matched with great care. They were colleagues, not competitors, and they were often able to act as his alter egos, reporting back to him after missions and trips which he was too busy to make. Of course, each hoped that he would be the one finally selected, but they served Bowman loyally and with the minimum of friction. They had had disagreements, but never a serious quarrel-and so it had been with the other five trios. The psychologists had done their work well; but by this time, they had had plenty of practice.
Every time he entered a place like the Natural History Museum, Bowman was overwhelmed by the infinite variety of life produced by evolution on a single world, this one planet Earth. As he walked past the great displays with their panoramas of scenes from other times and other continents, he realized again the sheer foolishness of the question he was so often asked about the builders of the pyramid: 'What do you think they looked like?'
Even if one were given every relevant fact about Earth's climate, geography, atmosphere, and chemical composition, who could have predicted the elephant, the whale, the giraffe, the giant squid, the duck-billed platypus-or Man himself? How infinitely more impossible it was, therefore, to make sensible guesses about the inhabitants of a totally unknown, and perhaps quite alien, planet! Yet it was equally impossible to stop trying….
Dr. Brailsford's office was that of any museum curator– piled high with books, reports, journals from other institutions, exhibits being packed and unpacked, and hundreds of small drawers which covered two whole walls. On her desk were several skulls; she picked up one and said: 'Here is the gentleman we have been talking about; not much of a forehead yet, but he's taken the first step toward us. And I mean first steps; even today, none of the other anthropoids are good walkers.'
She placed the skull reverently back into its bed of cotton wool, then began ruffling through the folders drawings, maps, and photographs on her crowded desk. Presently she dug out a large book,* opened it at a marker, and handed it over to her visitors.
*The Search For the Tassili Frescoes, Henn Lhote
'My god!' said Hunter. 'What the devil is that?'
'That' was a line drawing of a looming, roughly anthropomorphic figure, shown from the waist up. The head appeared to be covered by some kind of helmet, in the center of which was a large, Cyclopean eye. Another, smaller eye was tucked away in one corner of the helmet there were no other features, and by no possible distortion or artistic license could it be converted into a human face.
'Thought-provoking, isn't it? It's a Paleolithic cave painting, found in the Sahara half a century ago-back in 1959. And it made such an impression on the discoverers that, believe it or not, they christened it the 'Great Martian God.'
'How old is it?'
'About ten thousand years. Not very old compared with your TMA-1-but ancient enough by human standards.'
There was a long and profound silence while the three astronauts studied the painting. Then Hunter asked: 'Do you really think it's a record of a meeting with extraterrestrials?'
'Frankly, no. It's probably a medicine man or witch doctor wearing some peculiar hairdress. I should have mentioned that it's extremely large-about eighteen feet high-so the artist obviously considered it quite
