It was in desperate haste that the last Venerian men had designed and
fashioned the new species for the colonization of Neptune. The mere
remoteness of the great planet, moreover, had prevented its nature from
being explored at all thoroughly, and so the new human organism was but
partially adapted to its destined environment. Inevitably it was a dwarf
type, limited in size by the necessity of resisting an excessive
gravitation. Its brain was so cramped that everything but the bare
essentials of humanity had to be omitted from it. Even so, the Ninth Men
were too delicately organized to withstand the ferocity of natural
forces on Neptune. This ferocity the designers had seriously
underestimated; and so they were content merely to produce a miniature
copy of their own type. They should have planned a hardy brute, lustily
procreative, cunning in the struggle for physical existence, but above
all tough, prolific, and so insensitive as to be scarcely worthy of the
name man. They should have trusted that if once this crude seed could
take root, natural forces themselves would in time conjure from it
something more human. Instead, they produced a race cursed with the
inevitable fragility of miniatures, and designed for a civilized
environment which feeble spirits could not possibly maintain in a
tumultuous world. For it so happened that the still youthful giant,
Neptune, was slowly entering one of his phases of crustal shrinkage, and
therefore of earthquake and eruption. Thus the frail colonists found
themselves increasingly in danger of being swallowed in sudden fiery
crevasses or buried under volcanic dust. Moreover, their squat
buildings, when not actually being trampled by lava streams, or warped
and cracked by their shifting foundations, were liable to be demolished
by the battering-ram thrust of a turbulent and massive atmosphere.
Further, the atmosphere’s unwholesome composition killed all possibility
of cheerfulness and courage in a race whose nature was doomed to be,
even in favourable circumstances, neurotic.
Fortunately this agony could not last indefinitely. Little by little,
civilization crumbled into savagery, the torturing vision of better
things was lost, man’s consciousness was narrowed and coarsened into
brute-consciousness. By good luck the brute precariously survived.
Long after the Ninth Men had fallen from man’s estate, nature herself,
in her own slow and blundering manner, succeeded where man had failed.
The brute descendants of this human species became at length well
adapted to their world. In time there arose a wealth of subhuman forms
in the many kinds of environment afforded by the lands and seas of
Neptune. None of them penetrated far towards the Equator, for the
swollen sun had rendered the tropics at this time far too hot to support
life of any kind. Even at the pole the protracted summer put a great
strain on all but the most hardy creatures.
Neptune’s year was at this time about one hundred and sixty-five times
the length of the old terrestrial year. The slow seasonal change had an
important effect on life’s own rhythms. All but the most ephemeral
organisms tended to live through at least one complete year, and the
higher mammals survived longer. At a much later stage this natural
longevity was to play a great and beneficial part in the revival of man.
But, on the other hand, the increasing sluggishness of individual
growth, the length of immaturity in each generation, retarded the
natural evolutionary process on Neptune, so that compared with the
Terrestrial and Venerian epochs the biological story now moves at a
snail’s pace.
After the fall of the Ninth Men the subhuman creatures had one and all
adopted a quadruped habit, the better to cope with gravity. At first
they had indulged merely in occasional support from their knuckles, but
in time many species of true quadrupeds had appeared. In several of the
running types the fingers, like the toes, had grown together, and a hoof
had developed, not on the old finger-tips, which were bent back and
atrophied, but on the knuckles.
Two hundred millions years after the solar collision innumerable species
of subhuman grazers with long sheep-like muzzles, ample molars, and
almost ruminant digestive systems, were competing with one another on
the polar continent. Upon these preyed the subhuman carnivora, of whom
some were built for speed in the chase, others for stalking and a sudden
spring. But since jumping was no easy matter on Neptune, the cat-like
types were all minute. They preyed upon man’s more rabbit-like and
rat-like descendants, or on the carrion of the larger mammals, or on the
lusty worms and beetles. These had sprung originally from vermin which
had been transported accidentally from Venus. For of all the ancient
Venerian fauna only man himself, a few insects and other invertebrates,
and many kinds of micro-organisms, succeeded in colonizing Neptune. Of
plants, many types had been artificially bred for the new world, and
from these eventually arose a host of grasses, flowering plants,
thick-trunked bushes, and novel sea-weeds. On this marine flora fed
certain highly developed marine worms; and of these last, some in time
became vertebrate, predatory, swift, and fish-like. On these in turn
man’s own marine descendants preyed, whether as subhuman seals, or still
more specialized subhuman porpoises. Perhaps most remarkable of these
developments of the ancient human stock was that which led, through a
small insectivorous bat-like glider, to a great diversity of true flying
mammals, scarcely larger than humming birds, but in some cases agile as
swallows.
Nowhere did the typical human form survive. There were only beasts,
fitted by structure and instinct to some niche or other of their
infinitely diverse and roomy world.
Certain strange vestiges of human mentality did indeed persist here and
there, even as, in the fore-limbs of most species, there still remained
buried the relics of man’s once cunning fingers. For instance, there
were certain grazers which in times of hardship would meet together and
give tongue in cacophonous ululation; or, sitting on their haunches with
fore-limbs pressed together, they would listen by the hour to the howls
of some leader, responding intermittently with groans and whimpers, and
working themselves at last into foaming madness. And there were
carnivora which, in the midst of the spring-time fervour, would suddenly
cease from love-making, fighting, and the daily routine of hunting, to
sit alone in some high place day after day, night after night, watching,
waiting; until at last hunger forced them into action.
Now in the fullness of time, about three hundred million terrestrial
years after the solar collision, a certain minute, hairless, rabbit-like
creature, scampering on the polar grasslands, found itself greatly
persecuted by a swift hound from the south. The subhuman rabbit was
relatively unspecialized, and had no effective means of defence or
flight. It was almost exterminated. A few individuals, however, saved
themselves by taking to the dense and thick-trunked scrub, whither the
hound could not follow them. Here they had to change their diet and
manner of life, deserting grass for roots, berries, and even worms and
beetles. Their fore-limbs were now increasingly used for digging and
climbing, and eventually for weaving nests of stick and straw. In this
species the fingers had never grown together. Internally the fore-paw
was like a minute clenched fist from the elongated and exposed knuckles
of which separate toes protruded. And now the knuckles elongated
themselves still further, becoming in time a new set of fingers. Within
the palm of the new little monkey-hand there still remained traces of
man’s ancient fingers, bent in upon themselves.
As of old, manipulation gave rise to clearer percipience. And this, in
conjunction with the necessity of frequent experiments in diet, hunting,
and defence, produced at length a real versatility of behaviour and
suppleness of mind. The rabbit throve, adopted an almost upright gait,
continued to increase in stature and in brain. Yet, just as the new hand
was not merely a resurrection of the old hand, so the new regions of the
brain were no mere revival of the atrophied human cerebrum, but a new
organ, which overlaid and swallowed up that ancient relic. The
creature’s mind, therefore, was in many respects a new mind, though
moulded to the same great basic needs. Like his forerunners, of course,
he craved food, love, glory, companionship. In pursuit of these ends he
devised weapons and traps, and built wicker villages. He held pow-wows.
He became the Tenth Men.