WHEN TIME ROLLED BACK

by ED EARL REPP

[Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from Comet May 41. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]

Long before Rog found the mysterious, shining ball back in the mountains, he knew he was far different from the rest of his tribe that lived along the river. He knew it because he didn't think the same way they did, and because there was a difference even in their appearance.

Sarak, who was the Old Man of the tribe as well as his sire, and Monah, Rog's mother, were short and heavy and thickly covered with hair. Rog was taller and straighter, and endowed with much less hair. Too, his face was much broader through the cheekbones and less heavy-looking around the mouth. There was only one other in the tribe who seemed to be of the same physical cast as Rog, and that was Lo, a young woman who dwelt with her family in Sarak's cave.

Though the stalwart, blond young man took an active part in all the work of the tribe—hunting, skinning, tool-making—there were times when he would detach himself from the rest as though he were a creature of a higher world viewing a savage orgy.

Such a time was the delirious madness of eating after the lucky kill of a giant mammoth. All the able-bodied men of the tribe would aid in dragging the great, quiet animal into the clearing beside the river, and then, to the cries of men, women, and children, huge hunks of flesh would be torn off and devoured by all. The orgy did not cease until no one was able to stand without falling.

But Rog and Lo would stand back in the shadows and watch gravely, gnawing passively on smaller pieces of meat.

The others of the tribe realized that Rog and Lo were somehow different from them. And because of the young man's tremendous strength and because he was the son of the Old Man, he was not molested. But secretly the slow-thinking men and women classed him with Ta, the half-witted boy who sat all day playing with a stick.

None of them, not even the thoughtful Lo, ever stopped to wonder how far back their ancestors had lived in this spot. Nor did they care. But Rog found himself wondering if life had always been like this, or if it had once been superior or inferior to their mode of life. Sometimes he would grow curious enough to wander far down the river, or off into the hills, alone.

It was on one of those excursions, prompted by an increasing dissatisfaction with the life of the tribe, that Rog wandered back four or five ranges from the cave dwellings. He had just sat down to eat some of the dried meat he had brought along when his eye was caught by a glint of flashing metal off through the dense woods.

Startled, he leaped up and made his way nearer. Within ten minutes he was standing aghast, staring at a great, gleaming globe of silver, half buried in the soft, moldy ground. He was terrified, for an instant, and broke into panic-stricken flight before this thing that none of the aborigines had ever seen. Then Rog's overpowering curiosity brought him creeping back.

It was fifty times as tall as he was, just the half of it he could see. It sparkled in the sunlight like white fire. Then, down near the ground, Rog saw a round cut in the smooth surface. Something told him this was the way inside the ball, though there was no reason why he should not have believed it was anything but solid. But there was an inner urge that made him approach gingerly and take hold of the long cross-bar that was set into the door.

Eagerly he pulled at it. Nothing happened. He pushed, twisted, shoved, and still the thing would not budge. Then a gleam of comprehension flickered in his eyes. He grasped both ends of the bar and turned it the way a plumber turns a pipe-cutter. It moved!

The round entrance swivelled about on threads that were glass-smooth, until suddenly it swung aside on a hinge. Rog gasped and poked his head inside. He was so amazed that for a couple of minutes he could only stand in the portal, gaping.

The ball was divided into floors, apparently, for there was a spiral staircase in the middle that went up through the high ceiling, and a continuation of the stairway going down into the lower half of it. From some small globes hanging from the ceiling a soft radiation was thrown into the room. There were gleaming tables and cabinets and shelves of mystifying apparatus that Rog's eyes had never seen.

At last he ventured inside. He went from one glass-covered table to the next, frowning at the things he saw. He could make nothing of them.

There were twenty tables, and each bore a maze of strange symbols on its top. He was at a loss to divine what they meant, until he discovered that at the bottom of each chart there was a picture of a globe, with a tiny red arrow pointing to a section of it. Then he knew. The tables were supposed to tell him what was to be found on each floor.

All this Rog knew, although he had never seen metal before, or glass, or heard of a floor. But somehow he felt more at home in here than he did in the cave with Sarak and Monah. With perfect confidence he went to the staircase and climbed to the first floor.

A low, shining fence leading from the stairway made it plain that he was to follow inside it and view each exhibit as he went. Rog went to the first table, and within five minutes he was plunged into a maze of conjectures and mysteries that made his aboriginal brain ache.

The first table bore a number of short groups of symbols, completely lost on him. There were flowing, cursive characters; then a line of wedge-shaped pictures; line after line of characters differing only slightly; and finally, at the very bottom, something he could understand.

There was pictured a figure that brought a quick smile of apprehension to Rog's face—an old man, bowed with age. Beside him was a young child, enclosed in a red circle that set him off from the old man. A word leaped to his lips.... Not, perhaps, the word that the artist had intended, but close enough.

"Beginning!" was the thought that came from his lips.

After that the messages in the words and pictures made more sense to him. Stupefied, trembling with excitement at this thing that was happening to him, he went on and on.

He ignored the symbols as mere decorations, and read the pictures, hurrying from one group to the next. He stared long and amazed at amazingly life-like representations of the life of a tribe such as his own. The men and women even looked like his did—short, squat, hairy. The scenes showed them killing great animals somewhat similar to the ones on whose meat they lived, portrayed them chipping flint holes, and doing the other dozens of things life demanded of them.

But as he went on the life changed.

From cave-houses the migration was to peculiar dwellings of poles and boughs, making box-like affairs in which men and women lived. The tribe-folk, even, changed. They grew more upright and less hairy, and their faces looked something like the reflection that stared back at Rog from quiet forest pools.

The message of the pictures did not by any means unfold fully to Rog, but from the chain of scenes he began to grasp something. Life steadily became more and more complex, as though it were working toward something—with a purpose. Men grew taller, their dwellings bigger, their weapons stranger and apparently more efficient. He saw small tribal conflicts broaden into great wars between numbers of tribes.

He gaped at inventions which he could not begin to comprehend. Before his startled gaze caves gave way to great dwelling-places so large that men looked like ants beside them. He had to smile at the fanciful picturization of a man flying through the air in a fantastic machine. But as Rog neared the end of the exhibit, he realized that the story, if story it was, did not satisfy him.

In his crude, barbaric way, he had great visions of improving life so that death was not such a stern, everpresent reality, and men would have time for things other than eating and sleeping and mating. He was a philosopher, if such a thing were conceivable of a man who lived on raw meat. And this story did not appeal to him, for as far as he could tell men grew more and more dissatisfied, instead of contented....