“Yeah, you’re right,” Ben answered him with equal sobriety. “I’m getting so that I can believe seven impossible things before breakfast. What were you saying just before we passed that oil tanker?”
“I was just trying to lay before you an idea I’ve been mulling over in my mind the past several weeks. It’s a big idea, so big that I can hardly believe it myself.”
“Well, spill it.”
Phil commenced checking points off on his fingers. “We’ve proved, or tended to prove, that the normal human mind has powers previously unsuspected, haven’t we?”
“Tentatively—yes. It looks that way.”
“Powers way beyond any that the race as a whole makes regular use of.”
“Yes, surely. Go on.”
“And we have reason to believe that these powers exist, have their being, by virtue of certain areas of the brain to which functions were not previously assigned by physiologists? That is to say, they have organic basis, just as the eye and the sight centers in the brain are the organic basis for normal sight?”
“Yes, of course.”
“You can trace the evolution of any organ from a simple beginning to a complex, highly developed form. The organ develops through use. In an evolutiona ry sense function begets organ.”
“Yes. That’s elementary.”
“Don’t you see what that implies?”
Coburn looked puzzled, then a look of comprehension spread over his face. Phil continued, with delight in his voice, “You see it, too?” The conclusion is inescapable: there must have been a time when the entire race used these strange powers as easily as they heard, or saw, or smelled.
And there must have been a long, long period—hundreds of thousands, probably millions of years—during which these powers were developed as a race. Individuals couldn’t do it, any.more than I could grow wings. It had to be done racially, over a long period of time. Mutation theory is no use either—mutation goes by little jumps, with use confirming the change. No indeed—these strange powers are vestigial—hangovers from a time when the whole race had ’em and used ’em.”
Phil stopped talking, and Ben did not answer him, but sat in a brown study while some ten miles spun past. Joan started to speak once, then thought better of it. Finally Ben commenced to speak slowly.
“I can’t see any fault in your reasoning. It’s not reasonable to assume that whole areas of the brain with complex functions ‘jest growed’. But, brother, you’ve sure raised hell with modern anthropology.”
“That worried me when I first got the notion, and that’s why I kept my mouth shut. Do you know anything about anthropology?”
“Nothing except the casual glance that any medical student gets.”
“Neither did I, but I had quite a lot of respect for it. Professor Whoosistwitehell would reconstruct one of our great grand-daddies from his collar bone and his store teeth and deliver a long dissertation on his most intimate habits, and I would swallow it, hook, line, and sinker, and be much impressed. But I began to read up on the subject. Do you know what I found?”
“Go ahead.”
“In the first place there isn’t a distinguished anthropologist in the world but what you’ll find one equally distinguished who will call him a diamond-studded liar. They can’t agree on the simplest elements of their alleged science. In the second place, there isn’t a corporal’s guard of really decent exhibits to back up their assertions about the ancestry of mankind. I never saw so much stew from one oyster. They write book after book and what have they got to go on?—The Dawson Man, the Pelkin Man, the Heidelberg Man and a couple of others. And those aren’t complete skeletons, a damaged skull, a couple of teeth, maybe another bone or two.”
“Oh now, Phil, there were lots of specimens found of Cro-Magnon men.”
“Yes, but they were true men. I’m talking about submen, our evolutionary predecessors. You see, I was trying to prove myself wrong. If man’s ascent had been a long steady climb, submen into savages, savages to barbarians, barbarians perfecting their cultures into civilization … all this with only minor setbacks of a few centuries, or a few thousand years at the most … and with our present culture the highest the race had ever reached … If all that was true, then my idea was wrong.