The Complete Short Stories: The 1960s

‘I don’t want it! – It’s haunted. …’

‘Don’t say that, Keith. Don’t turn into a Neanderthal!’

‘What?’ He sat fully upright, glaring at her through the gloom. ‘What the hell do you mean?’

‘You know. You understand, don’t you?’

‘I don’t understand one bit of what’s going on here. You’d better start explaining – and first of all, I want to know what it looked as if I was doing when I ran into this cave.’

‘Don’t get excited, Keith. I’ll tell you what I can.’ She put her hand over his before continuing. ‘After you’d thrown your watch into the river, you twisted and ran about a bit – as if you were dodging something – and then rushed into here.’

‘You didn’t hear anything odd? See anything?’

‘No.’

‘And no glaciers?’

‘Not on Nehru, no!’

‘And was I – dressed in skins?’

‘Of course you weren’t!’

‘My mind. … I’d have sworn there was a glacier. … Moving too fast …’

Alice’s face was pale as she shook her head.

‘Oh, Keith, you are in danger. You must get back to Earth at once. Can’t you see this means you have a Neanderthal layer in your brain? Obviously you were experiencing a race memory from that newly opened layer. It was so strong it took you over entirely for a while. You must get away.’

He stood up, his shoulders stooped to keep his skull from scraping the rock overhead. Rain drummed down outside. He shook with impatience.

‘Alice, Alice, begin at the beginning, will you? I don’t know a thing except that I’m no longer in control of my own brain.’

‘Were you ever in control? Is the average person? Aren’t all the sciences of the mind attempts to bring the uncontrollable under control? Even when you’re asleep, it’s only the neo-cortex switched off. The older limbic layers – they never sleep. There’s no day or night, that deep.’

‘So what? What has the unconscious to do with this particular set-up?’

‘“The unconscious” is a pseudo-scientific term to cover a lack of knowledge. You have a moron in your skull who never sleeps, sweetie! He gives you a nudge from time to time; it’s crazy thoughts you overhear when you think you’re dreaming.’

‘Look, Alice –’

She stood up too. Anxiety twisted her face.

‘You wanted an explanation, Keith. Have the grace to listen to it. Let me start from the other end of the tale, and see if you like it any better.

‘Neanderthal was a species of man living in Europe some eighty thousand and more years ago, before homo sap came along. They were gentle creatures, close to nature, needing few artefacts, brain cases bigger even than homo sap. They were peaceful, unscientific in a special sense you’ll understand later.

‘Then along came a different species, the Crows – Cro-Magnons, you’d call them – Western man’s true precursors. Being warlike, they defeated the Neanderthals at every encounter. They killed off the men and mated with the Neanderthal women, which they kept captive. We, modern man, sprang from the bastard race so formed. This is where Arlblaster’s theory comes in.

‘The mixture never quite mixed. That’s why we still have different, often antagonistic, blood groups today – and why there are inadequate neural linkages in the brain. Crow and Neanderthal brains never established full contact. Crow was dominant, but a power-deprived lode of Neanderthal lingered on, as apparently vestigial as an appendix.’

‘My God, I’d like a mescahale,’ Anderson said. They had both sat down again, ignoring the occasional beads of moisture which dripped down their necks from the roof of the cave. Alice was close to him, her eyes bright in the shadow.

‘Do you begin to see it historically, Keith? Western man with this clashing double heritage in him has always been restless. Freud’s theory of the id comes near to labelling the Neanderthal survivor in us. Arthur Koestler also came close. All civilisation can be interpreted as a Crow attempt to vanquish that survivor, and to escape from the irrational it represents – yet at the same time the alien layer is a rich source for all artists, dreamers, and creators: because it is the very well of magic.

‘The Neanderthal had magic powers. He lived in a dawn age, the dawn of rationality, when it’s no paradox to say that supernatural and natural are one. The Crows, our ancestors, were scientific, or potentially scientific – spear-makers, rather than fruit-gatherers. They had a belief, fluctuating at first maybe, in cause and effect. As you know, all Western science represents a structure built on our acceptance of unalterable cause and effect.

‘Such belief is entirely alien to the Neanderthal. He knows only happening, and from this stems his structure of magic. I use the present tense because the Neanderthal is still strong in man – and, on Nehru II, he is not only strong but free, liberated at last from his captor, the Crow.’

Anderson stirred, rubbing his wet skull.

‘I suppose you’re right ‘

‘There’s proof enough here,’ she said bitterly.

‘I suppose it does explain why the civilisation of old Europe – the ancient battle-ground of Cro-Magnon and Neanderthal – and the civilisations that arose from it in North America are the most diverse and most turbulent ever known. But this brings us back to Arlblaster, doesn’t it? I can see that what has happened in Swettenham connects logically with his theory. The Brittany skull he found back in the eighties was pure Neanderthal, yet only a few hundred years old. Obviously it belonged to a rare throwback.’

‘But how rare? You could pass a properly dressed Neanderthal in the streets of New York and never give him a second glance. Stanley says you often do.’

‘Let’s forget Stanley! Arlblaster followed up his theory. … Yes, I can see it myself. The proportion of Neanderthal would presumably vary from person to person. I can run over my friends mentally now and guess in which of them the proportion is highest.’

‘Exactly.’ She smiled at him, reassured and calmer now, even as he was, as she nursed his hand and his revolver. ‘And because the political economic situation on Earth is as it is, Arlblaster found a way here to develop his theory and turn it into practice – that is, to release the prisoner in the brain. Earth would allow Swettenham’s group little in the way of machinery or resources in its determination to keep them harmless, so they were thrust close to nature. That an intellectual recognition brought the Neanderthal to the surface, freed it.’

‘Everyone turned Neanderthal, you mean?’

‘Here on Nehru, which resembles prehistoric Earth in some respects, the Neanderthal represents better survival value than Crow. Yet not everyone transformed, no. Stanley Menderstone did not. Nor Swettenham. Nor several others of the intellectuals. Their N-factor, as Stanley calls it, was either too low or non-existent.’

‘What happened to Swettenham?’

‘He was killed. So were the other pure Crows, all but Stanley, who’s tough – as you saw. There was a heap of trouble at first, until they fully understood the problem and sorted themselves out.’

‘And these two patrol ships World Government sent?’

‘I saw what happened to the one that brought me. About seventy-five per cent of the crew had a high enough N-factor to make the change; a willingness to desert helped them. The others … died out. Got killed, to be honest. All but me. Stanley took care of me.’

She laughed harshly. ‘If you can call it care.

‘I’ve had my belly full of Stanley and Nehru II, Keith. I want you to take me back with you to Earth.’

Anderson looked at her, still full of doubt.

‘What about my N-factor? Obviously I’ve got it in me. Hence the glacier, which was a much stronger danger signal from my brain than the earlier illusion about having a sister. Hence, I suppose, my new fears of manufactured Crow objects like watches, revolvers and … model railroads. Am I Crow or not, for heaven’s sake?’

‘By the struggle you’ve been through with yourself, I’d say that you’re equally balanced. Perhaps you can even decide. Which do you want to be?’

He looked at her in amazement.

‘Crow, of course: my normal self – who’d become a shambling, low-browed, shaggy tramp by choice?’