You Created Us
(1955)*
Fantastic Universe, October 1955
Tom Godwin
He saw the things for the first time in the Spring of 1953. A dust storm was raging across the southern Nevada desert that night, making a roaring, swirling medium through which his headlights penetrated for a limited distance and forcing him to drive slowly despite the importance of his being in San Francisco before noon of the following day. He was a hundred miles north of Las Vegas when he saw them--suddenly caught in the illumination of his headlights as he swung around a curve.
There were two of them, and they were leaping up the embankment onto the highway, less than a hundred feet ahead of him, and in the first instant of seeing them he thought they were huge and grotesquely misshapen men. For an instant the swirling dust partly obscured them. Then they looked toward him as they bounded across the highway, and he knew they were not men. Their eyes blazed green as no human eyes ever could.
He was almost abreast of them as they leaped down the opposite embankment and he saw them quite clearly for a moment. They ran on two legs, as men normally would run, but they were gray and scaly things eight feet tall. They had reptilian, lizard-like faces and they ran stooped forward a little as if to balance their heavy tails.
His tires screamed above the roar of the wind as he jammed on the brakes and reached for the spotlight control. He was beyond them when his car slowed to a stop and the beam of the spotlight finally picked them out. It was a disappointing glimpse, for it revealed only their gray backs disappearing into the windswept darkness to the west.
He backed down the highway to the place where they had crossed, and got out with a flashlight to look at the tracks. They were still visible in the soft silt beyond the highway. Great three-toed imprints they were, clawed, with the first and fifth toes set far back, as the digits are set on the foot of a lizard.
He absently rubbed the back of his head, which felt oddly numb, and followed the tracks for some distance out across the desert. The wind had erased them by the time he had followed them for six hundred feet and when he returned to the car, frowning uneasily, the tracks by the highway had also disappeared.
Back in his car, he checked the mileage from Las Vegas with his map and compass. He found the lizard-things had come from the direction of the atomic bomb test site and that they had been going toward the Funeral Range, which bounded Death Valley along its eastern side in that area.
There was a village fifteen miles from where he had halted and he stopped there for a sandwich. Two hours later, and a hundred miles farther on, the numbness which he had noticed only subconsciously, suddenly left the back of his head. With its going, the realization and fear came to him.
He had seen things that had not existed upon earth for a hundred million years, if ever—and he had been no more than mildly interested. He had seen them at close range as his car swerved past them. He had seen the powerful bulk of them, had seen the way their jaws were lined with knife-like serrations. Either of them could have torn him into ribbons in a matter of seconds.
Yet, knowing that, he had followed their tracks out into the darkness armed only with a flashlight. He had not been afraid and only a mindless fool would have been unafraid under such unusual circumstances.
He had told no one in the village of what he had seen as he ate his sandwich. At the time it had seemed of little importance to him. Now, it was too late to tell them. He could not go back and say: "By the way, I forgot to mention it when I was here before. I saw a couple of creatures as large as young dinosaurs cross the highway fifteen miles south of here."
It was not too late to inform the Army authorities, of course. But what would they think of a phone call in the middle of the night from a madman or a drunk with a wild story of lizard-monsters coming from the atomic bomb test site?
And what if he should rick losing the promotion to superintendent of his company's San Francisco plant by driving back to the army base and telling the authorities in person what he had seen? Would they believe an incredible story which he could not prove and which would indicate that he was not sane?
And in addition he wore a silver plate on his skull where a piece of Chinese shrapnel in Korea had almost taken his life. Would not that be enough in itself to insure that all concerned would dismiss what he had seen as a hallucination caused by the old brain injury?
He knew it had been no hallucination. Yet he had reacted in a manner not at all normal. Why? What had dulled his mind and caused him to accept it all with merely casual interest? Had the lizards done something to him, exerted some kind of hypnotic influence over him, as snakes were said to be able to do when they preyed on small birds? Or was it that the old injury under the silver plate on his skull had manifested itself at last, and he had made the first terrifying step into insanity that night?
Which was it?
He had no way of knowing for sure and fear and uncertainty rode with him for the rest of the night …
The demands of his job kept him in San Francisco for two years. During the first year he watched the papers carefully for any scoffingly skeptical reports of lizard-monsters in southern Nevada. There were none and even before the year was out he almost succeeded in forgetting what he had seen. He almost succeeded in making himself believe he had been tired and drowsy from the night driving and had been deceived by no more than two clouds of dust whipping across the highway.
Yet there had been the green glow of their eyes in his headlights and there had been their tracks. Surely he could not have imagined the tracks! And if he had not imagined them, then the lizard-things might still be in the Funeral Range along the east side of Death Valley.
The creatures had been going toward a particular section of the Funerals—a place on their summit called Chloride Cliff. He had once visited Chloride Cliff and he knew that a trail led down from it into Death Valley, proceeding past an old mine that had known no activity in many years.
It occurred to him that the mine's many tunnels would be a perfect hiding place for the lizard-things—until he remembered that Chloride Cliff was a point of interest to the Death Valley winter tourist traffic. It was only a three-mile hike from the end of the dirt side-road up to the abandoned diggings and even though only a minor number of tourists would care to make the hike, it could be safely presumed that at least two or three a week would climb all the way up to the mine. Which meant that at least fifty people much have been to the mine since the night he had seen the lizards.
He met many different people in his work and he acquired the habit of bringing Death Valley into the conversation whenever he could do so in a casual manner. A man from Los Angeles supplied the first clue unimportant though it was in itself. His informant described the various points of interest in Death Valley with a detailed and painstaking clarity: Dante's View, Scotty's Castle, Ubehebe Crater and all the other places. But of the old mine he could only say vaguely:
"There were some tunnels there on a steep mountainside. I don't remember now what they looked like nor how many there were …"
Later, he met a man from Oregon who told him, when he inquired about the mine: "I remember climbing up to it, but I've forgotten now just what the tunnels were like."
A client of his firm from Ohio mentioned the mine in the same vague way, as did three young mining engineers from Colorado. The young mining engineers, even though green and inexperienced, should in obligation to their profession have observed the old workings with more than casual interest.
Instead, they couldn't even recall the formation of the rock, although they remembered well the mines at Skidoo, Bullfrog, Rhyolite and the other old camps in that area.
A question arose, and became an obsession with him: Were the lizards living in the tunnels and using their hypnotic powers to make people forget what they had seen?
Then the tormenting problem of the lizards lost some of its importance as the shadow of war grew increasingly darker throughout 1955. On May 10, 1956 he received a letter from his superiors, ordering him to the east coast and saying in part:
"With was almost certain to come within the next few months, San Francisco's vulnerability as a target area for enemy bombs makes further expansion of the San Francisco plant extremely unwise …"
He debated only briefly about what he would do. He would go to the east coast, of course, but not before he had gone to Death Valley. He could drive his own car east, with the side trip to Death Valley taking no more than an extra day at the most. And it would be his last and only chance to learn the truth about the lizard-things …
Death Valley was blue with haze under the warm spring sun as he rolled down the long grade from Daylight Pass, between mountains decked in the brightest of Maytime finery. To his left was the harsh, canyon-riven Funeral Range and he drove slowly after he passed the Stovepipe Wells junction so that he would not miss the dirt road he was seeking. He came to it and followed it down into the broad wash and up the long slope to the foot of the mountain.
He parked his car near the beginning of the trail, and slipped on a light jacket—and dropped an automatic pistol in the right pocket and a small camera in the left. He hesitated a moment, and then decided that a notebook and pencil might also prove of value.
He started up the trail then, in his growing excitement forgetting to take the key out of the car. He remembered the oversight when he was a hundred feet up, but did not turn back. The important thing was to reach the old tunnels, and to take pictures of them, even if he saw nothing. Light-and-shadow impressions on camera film would be incapable of a memory lapse and could not fade away.
He was sweating when he reached the end of the first and steepest half of the climb. His breath came hard and panting, but he refused to stop to rest. He followed the trail in a fast walk, the mountain rearing steeply above him and the canyon wall dropping swiftly away below.
He came first upon the old camp, where the few remaining buildings were warped with age, and the empty, crooked windows gaped vacantly. He passed the abandoned structures with hardly a glance, his attention on the steep mountainside above him where he could already see waste dumps that marked the location of the mine tunnels.
It was impossible to fully control his impatience and he was breathing hard again when the steep trail encircled one of the dumps and the first tunnel appeared suddenly before him. He stopped in his tracks, his hand on the pistol, and studied the deserted excavation while his breathing slowed toward normal.
There was nothing to see—only the empty, yawning, portal of the tunnel and the small, flat area of the waste dumps before it. Then, as he stood there, a wisp of a breeze stirred and brought an odor to him from the tunnel. It was, unmistakably, the odor of decaying flesh. And with it came the sensation of being watched.
He took the camera from his pocket—the camera that would view the portal with its cold mechanical eye and record exactly what it saw. He found his hands were trembling unaccountably and his fingers had become awkward and wooden. He tried to control the trembling, fearful he would drop the camera before he could use it, and he tried at the same time to set it for the proper range.
Suddenly the camera dropped out of his hands. He grabbed at it frantically, striking it with the side of his hand instead of catching it. It was knocked to one side by the blow, and out over the edge of the dump. It bounced once, spun outward in a wide arc and struck the rocks far below with a shattering sound.
When he turned back toward the tunnel the lizard-thing had emerged from the shadows and was standing nine feet in front of him, watching him.
His right hand stabbed for the pistol in his pocket while he made a split-second appraisal of the creature. It stood upright on its big, long-toed feet, towering a full two feet higher than the tunnel opening at its back. Its arms and hands were almost human in shape, though huge and scaled, and the eyes in its massive, reptilian face were regarding him with a degree of intelligence that chilled him to the core of his being.
His fingers touched the butt of the pistol in his pocket, reached around it, and went numb and lifeless.
He knew, then, why his hands had trembled and caused him to drop the camera and he noticed, without surprise, that the lizard had permitted his left hand to return to normal. But the right hand that gripped the pistol still remained limp and numb.
The lizard spoke to him then, soundlessly, in his mind:
Go to the tunnels above.
A strange coldness seemed to be touching his brain, and he obeyed without attempting to resist. But his mind was clear and he saw something he had not noticed before—the tracks of wild burros and mountain sheep in the trail ahead of him. The tracks led only one way, toward the upper tunnels.
He recalled with a shudder the odor of decaying flesh, and wondered if the lizards let some of the meat age, as a man might let cheese age to improve its flavor.
There were three of them standing before the portal of one of the upper tunnels. A thought came to him from the center one as he stopped before it:
We have been expecting you.
He asked the question that he was sure could have but one answer:
"Are you mutants from the atomic bomb test site?"
Yes.
The coldness still hovered around his mind, but he was no longer afraid, nor even nervous. For some reason they wanted him to be calm and at ease. But the coldness impinging on his brain was not enough to make him forget the importance of learning all he could about them.
"When did it start?" he asked. "And what were you, before?"
It began in the Spring of Nineteen fifty-two. The radiations from the bomb blast affected the eggs of an ordinary desert lizard. I and four others were the result.
"But the two I saw crossing the highway were already grown."
We reach the adult stage in one year.
He wondered how they had provided themselves with food, to grow to such a size in so short a time.
The lizard answered his unspoken question:
The mutation created by your bomb represents evolution to the near-perfect level. We can subsist on anything organic, including all kinds of desert vegetation, even though we prefer meat.
He wondered if there were only five of them, if they were incapable of reproduction.
The lizard's thought came:
We can reproduce. There are many of us in these tunnels and there will be many more when this year's eggs hatch.
So the lizards were mutations as he had suspected from the night of his first encounter with them. The hard radiations from the bomb had altered a desert lizard's eggs, and had done something to the developing embryo that was the equivalent of a hundred million years of evolution—or perhaps a thousand million.
True evolution was slow—a selective process of trial and error over millions of years. What had been the hit-or-miss likelihood that the lizard's eggs would be profoundly affected by the radiations? One chance occurrence out of a hundred million?
It did not matter, because the laws of chance were blind and without memory. A tossed coin would, in the long run, come up exactly fifty percent heads and fifty percent tails. But a coin had no memory and it could come up heads for a hundred times in succession. And the laws of chance evolution, produced by the hard radiations, had no memory either. They would as calmly produce one successful mutation out of a hundred million failures in one year as in a hundred million years.
They would—and they had.
He asked the lizard another question: "Why is it that I saw you that night on the highway and remembered when the others—the ones who have seen you up here—can't remember?"
That was partly due to the brain injury you once had, and partly to the fact we were only one year old and had not fully learned how to use our hypnotic powers.
"Why do you hide?" he asked. "Why are you so afraid that humans will know of your existence?"
The lizard's face remained expressionless but he sensed amusement in the way it regarded him.
What would be their reaction if they knew of us? They would want to see us caged, placed on exhibit. They would want their scientists to examine us. And when they found their minds were helpless before ours, they would want to destroy us. Your species and mine are too different for them to ever exist side by side.
"What are you going to do?" he asked. "You can't stay here always. There will be too many of you. Someday you will have to let humans know of your existence."
That is being arranged.
"How do you mean?"
We are letting humans prepare the way for us.
For a moment he was puzzled. Then suddenly, he knew what the lizard meant. The insanity of hate and fear and suspicion that filled the world—the insanity that was growing every day and could result only in war.
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