My Brother—The Ape
(1972)*
Amazing Stories – January 1958
Tom Godwin
Disillusionment is the reward of the man who spent
a lifetime searching for what doesn't exist.
The taxi left the airport behind and the paper lay unnoticed in his lap as his mind hurried ahead to the meeting with professors Kolarik and Davis. The final month of excavating had been so successful that he felt almost certain they would be in favor of a second expedition. Unless, of course, the crisis between East and West flamed suddenly into another world war—
A horn shrieked in warning and brakes screamed, shattering his thoughts. The taxi swerved violently to dodge a milk truck and plunged into a street that was a seething, racing, clamorous tide of vehicles. He watched them, made nervous by the way they raced fender to fender with the cab, then stooped to recover his paper. He straightened just in time to scoot forward on the seat as the cab came to an abrupt halt at a four-way-stop intersection.
An ancient coupe was caught in the middle of the intersection. Its horn bleating desperately as it tried to evade the inexorable advance of a gravel truck. He saw that cars were massed at all four points of the intersection, their horns blasting as they jockeyed for position like fevered race horses.
The cab jumped ahead as a momentary opening appeared, then jerked to a stop as a long sedan, signaling for a right turn, made a left turn in front of it. A convertible shot into the opening behind the sedan, other cars close behind it, and the cab driver made a growling sound.
There was a screech of brakes and a bright yellow panel truck stopped beside the cab, its motor racing in readiness for the charge. White letters on its side, CHURCH OF GOD'S PROPHET, and the horns of a public address system on top of it were bellowing a recording:
"—Your last chance to save your soul in this doomed world. God, Himself, will talk to you tonight through Prophet Simms and show you the way. Admission only three dollars."
The recording changed to a hymn as a brief opening appeared in the traffic. The sound truck and taxi lunged simultaneously for it and there was a lurch and squeal of scraped fenders as the truck shouldered the taxi aside. It roared down the street with a triumphant chorus of, "Hallelujah! Hallelujah! ..." and the taxi followed, the driver snarling.
He realizes he was sitting as tense as a tight-drawn wire and he forced himself to relax. The mad rush of city traffic—he had been away so long he had forgotten what it was like. Two years in Africa—but it had been worth it. They had found fossils in the Miocene strata that were almost beyond doubt those of the long-sought missing-link between Man and his ape-like ancestors. It was a discovery comparable in importance to that of Neanderthal Man and if the war didn't prevent a second expedition he would—
He scooted forward again as the taxi stopped in obedience to a light that had abruptly changed from green to red. Pedestrians poured out onto the crosswalk, a blonde girl in the lead. A heavy man in shorts and open sandals walked close behind her, his eyes on her hips and his hairy paunch wobbling with each step of his splay-toed feet.
"—didn'tcha notice it?"
The driver was speaking to him and he raised his brows questioningly.
"Right in front of you," the driver said. "Special convenience the company has for their customers so they won't have to miss any of their favorite programs."
"Oh, yes," he said, and saw for the first time that the glassy eye of a television screen was staring at him. Apparently television programs had vastly improved during the past two years ...
"Good program on now—Detective Delaney," the driver said. "Best of the five murder shows on at this hour."
"Oh?" he said, retracting his assumption and wondering what there was about dead human bodies that held such fascination for so many people.
A newsboy came around the corner, calling shrilly: "Atomic Doom Predicted—Civil Defense Alerted ..." Two women walked past the taxi to get into their care, engrossed in the headlines of the paper one of them held. He could make out the two larger ones: WILL USE H-BOMB, RUSS THREAT, and, NEW STATION NEARS COMPLETION. One of the women was saying with a worried smacking of gums, "—John told me just last night that if there's a war, it may be years before it's finished."
He realized, with a little shock, that she referred not to the war but to the television station.
The red light flipped to green and horns behind the taxi trumpeted in chorus the instant it did so. The taxi shot forward as a voice howled, "Wake up!" and he made an effort to resume his former train of thought.
A second expedition would be necessary to fully prove that the fossils found represented the creature that had been the intermediate stage between Ape and the humble beginning of civilized Man. Money would be needed but it should not be difficult for the university to finance research work so certain of success ...
They came to another red light and as the pedestrians poured across before them the driver turned to give him a puzzled look.
"You're the funniest passenger I ever had—you still ain't turned on the TV," he said. "It works just like any set"—he reached back a long arm to turn it on—"and you dial it with that other knob."
"Thank you," he said, not caring for the distraction of a television program but not wanting to offend the driver. He picked up his neglected paper and skipped down the headlines:
East-West Bombs Ready as Tension Grows ... Kuhnstein Kayoes Kelly ... Rapist Eludes Police ... Reds Hand 200 Rebels in East Berlin ... Ten Injured as Fans Mob Rock 'n' Roll Idol ... Los Angeles Free of Vice as Police Stamp Out Illegal Gambling ... Deviant Society Holds Meeting—
A hideous, ear-splitting dissonance blared out of the TV speaker with a full-volume suddenness that half lifted him from the seat. He dropped the paper and saw agitated movement on the screen: a young man before a microphone was writhing and jumping and jerking like a maniac while he screamed something unintelligible. A portion of the audience was visible, their eyes staring and their faces glistening with sweat as they shook and jerked in unison with him, their shrieking rising above the din:
"Go, man—go—go—go—"
He shut it off and asked in a hushed voice:
"What in the name of God was that?"
"That?" Rock 'n' roll—biggest thing since the atomic bomb." The driver stared at him with incredulous disbelief. "You mean you never heard of him?"
"Him? Oh—the boy who was jerking all over. I've been in Africa for two years but—"
The light turned green and his words were lost in the roar of traffic. When they came to the next red light the driver turned to ask curiously, "Two years on just one big-game hunt?"
"No—a paleontological expedition."
"A what?"
"We were excavating fossils—petrified bones."
"Why?"
"Because—" He found himself baffled by the question. It was like asking an astronomer why he wanted to study the stars. "We found something very interesting—it appears to be the missing link in Man's chain of evolution."
"So what?"
"Why—why, if we're right, we'll have added to Man's knowledge of the universe."
The driver stared at him with odd intensity. "Most people go to Africa for something worthwhile, like big-game trophies. But to spend two years digging up petrified bones ... I thought you were a queer joe when you didn't want to turn on the TV." His expression became almost pitying. "Get hep, doc. Nobody is interested in unimportant stuff like that." He shrugged his shoulders. "Who cares?"
He opened his mouth and shut it again. There was no reply he could make. Who cares? He had always taken it for granted that men were interested in their origin and would want the evidence of the chain of evolution completed, back to the lung-fish. So he had spent two years in Africa digging up petrified bones instead of procuring something worthwhile, such as a stuffed rhinoceros head.
The light changed to green but he was hardly aware of the forward movement of the taxi. Nobody is interested ... The world was absorbed in other things: Kuhnsten had kayoed Kelly and an H-bomb war might delay completion of a new television station; a rapist was baffling the police and God would talk to you for three dollars; Los Angeles was free of lawless vice and her homosexuals, legally incorporated since 1953, were holding a meeting; two hundred rebels dangled in East Berlin and hep-cats were trampling one another to touch their idol ...
The world was mad.
And yet ... Which was the more irrational: to dread an atomic war because it might interfere with watching television or to dread it because it might interfere with digging up more petrified bones?
"I said: here you are."
He saw that they were stopped and the driver was speaking for the second time. He paid the fare and went up the walk to the white cottage where Kolarik and Davis were waiting for him, all his enthusiasm for another expedition gone. He could see, now, that it would be utterly pointless ...
"Good news about the second expedition," Davis said when the greetings were over. "We think it can be arranged. Unless"—he bit worriedly on his pipe stem—"war comes too soon."
"The university"—Kolarik looked at him over his horn-rimmed glasses—"hasn't sufficient funds at present but there are other sources—"
"It doesn't matter," he said wearily. "A second expedition wouldn't find what we were looking for."
They stared, open-mouthed in shocked amazement.
"We were wrong," he said. "Everything, all the work ever done in that field, has been based on an erroneous appraisal of our present degree of evolution.
"We're ten thousand years too early."
He looked skyward—sadly. "After we're through messing it up—smashing it—knocking it to hell and gone—and destroying ourselves in the process—then they can start looking for us.
"Us—?"
"Of course. We'll be the missing link."
The End
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