Robert Abernathy

“ Dalton said. “And I sensed what you did. That voice or some combination of frequencies or overtones within it, is resonant to the essence of evil—the fundamental life-hating self-destroying evil in man—even to have glimpsed it, to have heard the brainless beast mocking, was an outrage to humanity that a man must....”
Dalton paused, got a grip on himself. “But, consider—the outrage was wiped out, humanity won its victory over the monster a long time ago. What if it isn’t quite extinct? That record was fifty thousand years old.”
“What did you do with the record?” Thwaite looked up sharply. ”

“ Out of the forest came the crying grunting hooting voices of its life that woke at nightfall, fiercer and more feverish than that of the daytime. To the man from the north there seemed something indecent in the fertile febrile swarming of life here. Compared to a temperate woodland the mato was like a metropolis against a sleepy village. ”

“ Dalton scrutinized one label intently. “Odd,” he said. “I realize how much the Martian archives may have to offer us when we master their spoken language—but I still want most to hear this record, the one the Martians made right here on Earth.”
Thwaite nodded comprehendingly. “The human race is a good deal like an amnesia patient that wakes up at the age of forty and finds himself with a fairly prosperous business, a wife and children and a mortgage, but no recollection of his youth or infancy—and nobody around to tell him how he got where he is. ”

“ Dalton played his flashlight on the water’s surface and the still-moving ripples seemed to reflect redly.
Thwaite was first to break the silence. He said grimly, “Damned lucky for me you got here when you did. It—had me.”
Dalton nodded without speaking.
“But how did you know what to do?” Thwaite asked.
“It wasn’t my discovery,” said the linguist soberly. “Our remote ancestors met this threat and invented a weapon against it. Otherwise man might not have survived. I learned the details from the Martian records when I succeeded in translating them. ”

“ He held up the little reed flute and the archeologist’s eyes widened with recognition.
Dalton looked out across the dark swamp-water, where the ripples were fading out. “In the beginning there was the voice of evil—but there was also the music of good, created to combat it. Thank God that in mankind’s makeup there’s more than one fundamental note!” ”

“ Dalton looked down at the thing the archeologist had been brushing. It was a reed syrinx, the Pan’s pipes of antiquity. “That’s not a very Martian-looking specimen,” he commented.
“The Martians, not having any lips, could hardly have had much use for it,” said Thwaite. “This is of Earthly manufacture—one of the Martians’ specimens from Earth, kept intact over all this time by a preservative I wish we knew how to make. It’s a nice find, man’s earliest known musical instrument—hardly as interesting as the record though.” ”

“ Brazil is a vast country, and it cost much trouble and time and expense before Dalton caught up with Thwaite in a forlorn riverbank town along the line where civilization hesitates on the shore of that vast sea of vegetation called the mato. ”

“ Looks like the Martians saw something on Earth they didn’t like. Too bad we can’t reproduce the visual record yet.”
Dalton said soberly, “The Martian’s vocabulary indicates that for all their physical difference from us they had emotions very much like human beings’. Whatever they saw must have been something we wouldn’t have liked either.”
The reproducer hummed softly. Thwaite closed the motor switch and the ancient film slid smoothly from its casing. ”

“ Personally, I have a weakness for the magical theory—that man invented language in the search for magic formulae, words of power. Unlike the other theories, that one assumes as the motive force not merely passive imitativeness but an outgoing will. ”

“ The apparatus, squatting on a sturdy table in the small room beyond, had the slightly haywire look of an experimental model. But it was little short of a miracle to those who knew how it had been built—on the basis of radioed descriptions of the ruined device the excavators had dug up on Mars. ”