The Creatures That Time Forgot - 1

THE CREATURES THAT TIME FORGOT
By RAY BRADBURY
Mad, impossible world! Sun-blasted by day,
cold-wracked by night--and life condensed by
radiation into eight days! Sim eyed the
Ship--if he only dared reach it and
escape! ... but it was more than half an
hour distant--the limit of life itself!
[Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from
Planet Stories Fall 1946.
Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that
the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]

During the night, Sim was born. He lay wailing upon the cold cave
stones. His blood beat through him a thousand pulses each minute. He
grew, steadily.
Into his mouth his mother with feverish hands put the food. The
nightmare of living was begun. Almost instantly at birth his eyes grew
alert, and then, without half understanding why, filled with bright,
insistent terror. He gagged upon the food, choked and wailed. He looked
about, blindly.
There was a thick fog. It cleared. The outlines of the cave appeared.
And a man loomed up, insane and wild and terrible. A man with a dying
face. Old, withered by winds, baked like adobe in the heat. The man was
crouched in a far corner of the cave, his eyes whitening to one side of
his face, listening to the far wind trumpeting up above on the frozen
night planet.
Sim's mother, trembling, now and again, staring at the man, fed Sim
pebble-fruits, valley-grasses and ice-nipples broken from the cavern
entrances, and eating, eliminating, eating again, he grew larger,
larger.
The man in the corner of the cave was his father! The man's eyes were
all that was alive in his face. He held a crude stone dagger in his
withered hands and his jaw hung loose and senseless.
Then, with a widening focus, Sim saw the old people sitting in the
tunnel beyond this living quarter. And as he watched, they began to die.
Their agonies filled the cave. They melted like waxen images, their
faces collapsed inward on their sharp bones, their teeth protruded. One
minute their faces were mature, fairly smooth, alive, electric. The
next minute a desiccation and burning away of their flesh occurred.
Sim thrashed in his mother's grasp. She held him. "No, no," she soothed
him, quietly, earnestly, looking to see if this, too, would cause her
husband to rise again.
With a soft swift padding of naked feet, Sim's father ran across the
cave. Sim's mother screamed. Sim felt himself torn loose from her
grasp. He fell upon the stones, rolling, shrieking with his new, moist
lungs!
[Illustration: _With a soft padding of naked feet Sim's father ran
across the cave._]
The webbed face of his father jerked over him, the knife was poised.
It was like one of those prenatal nightmares he'd had while still
in his mother's flesh. In the next few blazing, impossible instants
questions flicked through his brain. The knife was high, suspended,
ready to destroy him. But the whole question of life in this cave, the
dying people, the withering and the insanity, surged through Sim's
new, small head. How was it that he understood? A newborn child? Can a
newborn child think, see, understand, interpret? No. It was wrong! It
was impossible. Yet it was happening! To him. He had been alive an hour
now. And in the next instant perhaps dead!
His mother flung herself upon the back of his father, and beat down the
weapon. Sim caught the terrific backwash of emotion from both their
conflicting minds. "Let me kill him!" shouted the father, breathing
harshly, sobbingly. "What has he to live for?"
"No, no!" insisted the mother, and her body, frail and old as it was,
stretched across the huge body of the father, tearing at his weapon.
"He must live! There may be a future for him! He may live longer than
us, and be young!"
The father fell back against a stone crib. Lying there, staring,
eyes glittering, Sim saw another figure inside that stone crib. A
girl-child, quietly feeding itself, moving its delicate hands to
procure food. His sister.
The mother wrenched the dagger from her husband's grasp, stood up,
weeping and pushing back her cloud of stiffening gray hair. Her mouth
trembled and jerked. "I'll kill you!" she said, glaring down at her
husband. "Leave my children alone."
The old man spat tiredly, bitterly, and looked vacantly into the stone
crib, at the little girl. "One-eighth of _her_ life's over, already,"
he gasped. "And she doesn't know it. What's the use?"
As Sim watched, his own mother seemed to shift and take a tortured,
smoke-like form. The thin bony face broke out into a maze of wrinkles.
She was shaken with pain and had to sit by him, shuddering and cuddling
the knife to her shriveled breasts. She, like the old people in the
tunnel, was aging, dying.
Sim cried steadily. Everywhere he looked was horror. A mind came to
meet his own. Instinctively he glanced toward the stone crib. Dark, his
sister, returned his glance. Their minds brushed like straying fingers.
He relaxed somewhat. He began to learn.
The father sighed, shut his lids down over his green eyes. "Feed the
child," he said, exhaustedly. "Hurry. It is almost dawn and it is our
last day of living, woman. Feed him. Make him grow."
Sim quieted, and images, out of the terror, floated to him.
This was a planet next to the sun. The nights burned with cold, the
days were like torches of fire. It was a violent, impossible world. The
people lived in the cliffs to escape the incredible ice and the day of
flame. Only at dawn and sunset was the air breath-sweet, flower-strong,
and then the cave peoples brought their children out into a stony,
barren valley. At dawn the ice thawed into creeks and rivers, at sunset
the day-fires died and cooled. In the intervals of even, livable
temperature the people lived, ran, played, loved, free of the caverns;
all life on the planet jumped, burst into life. Plants grew instantly,
birds were flung like pellets across the sky. Smaller, legged animal
life rushed frantically through the rocks; everything tried to get
its living down in the brief hour of respite.
It was an unbearable planet. Sim understood this, a matter of hours
after birth. Racial memory bloomed in him. He would live his entire
life in the caves, with two hours a day outside. Here, in stone
channels of air he would talk, talk incessantly with his people, sleep
never, think, think and lie upon his back, dreaming; but never sleeping.
_And he would live exactly eight days._
* * * * *
The violence of this thought evacuated his bowels. Eight days. Eight
_short_ days. It was wrong, impossible, but a fact. Even while in his
mother's flesh some racial knowledge had told him he was being formed
rapidly, shaped and propelled out swiftly.
Birth was quick as a knife. Childhood was over in a flash. Adolescence
was a sheet of lightning. Manhood was a dream, maturity a myth, old age
an inescapably quick reality, death a swift certainty.
Eight days from now he'd stand half-blind, withering, dying, as his
father now stood, staring uselessly at his own wife and child.
This day was an eighth part of his total life! He must enjoy every
second of it. He must search his parents' thoughts for knowledge.
_Because in a few hours they'd be dead._
This was so impossibly unfair. Was this all of life? In his prenatal
state hadn't he dreamed of _long_ lives, valleys not of blasted stone
but green foliage and temperate clime? Yes! And if he'd dreamed then
there must be truth in the visions. How could he seek and find the long
life? Where? And how could he accomplish a life mission that huge and
depressing in eight short, vanishing days?
How had his people gotten into such a condition?
As if at a button pressed, he saw an image. Metal seeds, blown across
space from a distant green world, fighting with long flames, crashing
on this bleak planet. From their shattered hulls tumble men and women.
When? Long ago. Ten thousand days. The crash victims hid in the cliffs
from the sun. Fire, ice and floods washed away the wreckage of the
huge metal seeds. The victims were shaped and beaten like iron upon
a forge. Solar radiations drenched them. Their pulses quickened,
two hundred, five hundred, a thousand beats a minute. Their skins
thickened, their blood changed. Old age came rushing. Children were
born in the caves. Swifter, swifter, swifter the process. Like all this
world's wild life, the men and women from the crash lived and died in a
week, leaving children to do likewise.
So this is life, thought Sim. It was not spoken in his mind, for
he knew no words, he knew only images, old memory, an awareness, a
telepathy that could penetrate flesh, rock, metal. So I'm the five
thousandth in a long line of futile sons? What can I do to save myself
from dying eight days from now? Is there escape?
His eyes widened, another image came to focus.
Beyond this valley of cliffs, on a low mountain lay a perfect,
unscarred metal seed. A metal ship, not rusted or touched by the
avalanches. The ship was deserted, whole, intact. It was the only ship
of all these that had crashed that was still a unit, still usable. But
it was so far away. There was no one in it to help. This ship, then, on
the far mountain, was the destiny toward which he would grow. There was
his only hope of escape.
His mind flexed.
In this cliff, deep down in a confinement of solitude, worked a handful
of scientists. To these men, when he was old enough and wise enough, he
must go. They, too, dreamed of escape, of long life, of green valleys
and temperate weathers. They, too, stared longingly at that distant
ship upon its high mountain, its metal so perfect it did not rust or
age.
The cliff groaned.
Sim's father lifted his eroded, lifeless face.
"Dawn's coming," he said.

II
Morning relaxed the mighty granite cliff muscles. It was the time of
the Avalanche.
The tunnels echoed to running bare feet. Adults, children pushed with
eager, hungry eyes toward the outside dawn. From far out, Sim heard
a rumble of rock, a scream, a silence. Avalanches fell into valley.
Stones that had been biding their time, not quite ready to fall, for
a million years let go their bulks, and where they had begun their
journey as single boulders they smashed upon the valley floor in a
thousand shrapnels and friction-heated nuggets.
Every morning at least one person was caught in the downpour.
The cliff people dared the avalanches. It added one more excitement to
their lives, already too short, too headlong, too dangerous.
Sim felt himself seized up by his father. He was carried brusquely down
the tunnel for a thousand yards, to where the daylight appeared. There
was a shining insane light in his father's eyes. Sim could not move. He
sensed what was going to happen. Behind his father, his mother hurried,
bringing with her the little sister, Dark. "Wait! Be careful!" she
cried to her husband.
Sim felt his father crouch, listening.
High in the cliff was a tremor, a shivering.
"Now!" bellowed his father, and leaped out.
An avalanche fell down at them!
Sim had accelerated impressions of plunging walls, dust, confusion. His
mother screamed! There was a jolting, a plunging.
With one last step, Sim's father hurried him forward into the day. The
avalanche thundered behind him. The mouth of the cave, where mother and
Dark stood back out of the way, was choked with rubble and two boulders
that weighed a hundred pounds each.
The storm thunder of the avalanche passed away to a trickle of sand.
Sim's father burst out into laughter. "Made it! By the Gods! Made it
alive!" And he looked scornfully at the cliff and spat. "Pagh!"
Mother and sister Dark struggled through the rubble. She cursed her
husband. "Fool! You might have killed Sim!"
"I may yet," retorted the father.
Sim was not listening. He was fascinated with the remains of an
avalanche afront of the next tunnel. A blood stain trickled out from
under a rise of boulders, soaking into the ground. There was nothing
else to be seen. Someone else had lost the game.
Dark ran ahead on lithe, supple feet, naked and certain.
The valley air was like a wine filtered between mountains. The heaven
was a restive blue; not the pale scorched atmosphere of full day, nor
the bloated, bruised black-purple of night, a-riot with sickly shining
stars.
This was a tide pool. A place where waves of varying and violent
temperatures struck, receded. Now the tide pool was quiet, cool, and
its life moved abroad.
Laughter! Far away, Sim heard it. Why laughter? How could any of his
people find time for laughing? Perhaps later he would discover why.
The valley suddenly blushed with impulsive color. Plant-life, thawing
in the precipitant dawn, shoved out from most unexpected sources. It
flowered as you watched. Pale green tendrils appeared on scoured rocks.
Seconds later, ripe globes of fruit twitched upon the blade-tips.
Father gave Sim over to mother and harvested the momentary, volatile
crop, thrust scarlet, blue, yellow fruits into a fur sack which hung at
his waist. Mother tugged at the moist new grasses, laid them on Sim's
tongue.
His senses were being honed to a fine edge. He stored knowledge
thirstily. He understood love, marriage, customs, anger, pity, rage,
selfishness, shadings and subtleties, realities and reflections. One
thing suggested another. The sight of green plant life whirled his mind
like a gyroscope, seeking balance in a world where lack of time for
explanations made a mind seek and interpret on its own. The soft burden
of food gave him knowledge of his system, of energy, of movement. Like
a bird newly cracking its way from a shell, he was almost a unit,
complete, all-knowing. Heredity had done all this for him. He grew
excited with his ability.
* * * * *
They walked, mother, father and the two children, smelling the smells,
watching the birds bounce from wall to wall of the valley like
scurrying pebbles and suddenly the father said a strange thing:
"Remember?"
Remember what? Sim lay cradled. Was it any effort for them to remember
when they'd lived only seven days!
The husband and wife looked at each other.
"Was it only three days ago?" said the woman, her body shaking, her
eyes closing to think. "I can't believe it. It is so unfair." She
sobbed, then drew her hand across her face and bit her parched lips.
The wind played at her gray hair. "Now is my turn to cry. An hour ago
it was you!"
"An hour is half a life."
"Come," she took her husband's arm. "Let us look at everything, because
it will be our last looking."
"The sun'll be up in a few minutes," said the old man. "We must turn
back now."
"Just one more moment," pleaded the woman.
"The sun will catch us."
"Let it catch me then!"
"You don't mean that."
"I mean nothing, nothing at all," cried the woman.
The sun was coming fast. The green in the valley burnt away. Searing
wind blasted from over the cliffs. Far away where sun bolts hammered
battlements of cliff, the huge stone faces shook their contents; those
avalanches not already powdered down, were now released and fell like
mantles.
"Dark!" shouted the father. The girl sprang over the warm floor of the
valley, answering, her hair a black flag behind her. Hands full of
green fruits, she joined them.
The sun rimmed the horizon with flame, the air convulsed dangerously
with it, and whistled.
The cave people bolted, shouting, picking up their fallen children,
bearing vast loads of fruit and grass with them back to their deep
hideouts. In moments the valley was bare. Except for one small child
someone had forgotten. He was running far out on the flatness, but he
was not strong enough, and the engulfing heat was drifting down from
the cliffs even as he was half across the valley.
Flowers were burnt into effigies, grasses sucked back into rocks like
singed snakes, flower seeds whirled and fell in the sudden furnace
blast of wind, sown far into gullies and crannies, ready to blossom at
sunset tonight, and then go to seed and die again.
Sim's father watched that child running, alone, out on the floor of
the valley. He and his wife and Dark and Sim were safe in the mouth of
their tunnel.
"He'll never make it," said father. "Do not watch him, woman. It's not
a good thing to watch."
They turned away. All except Sim, whose eyes had caught a glint of
metal far away. His heart hammered in him, and his eyes blurred.
Far away, atop a low mountain, one of those metal seeds from space
reflected a dazzling ripple of light! It was like one of his
intra-embryo dreams fulfilled! A metal space seed, intact, undamaged,
lying on a mountain! There was his future! There was his hope
for survival! There was where he would go in a few days, when he
was--strange thought--a grown man!
The sun plunged into the valley like molten lava.
The little running child screamed, the sun burned, and the screaming
stopped.
Sim's mother walked painfully, with sudden age, down the tunnel,
paused, reached up, broke off two last icicles that had formed during
the night. She handed one to her husband, kept the other. "We will
drink one last toast. To you, to the children."
"To _you_," he nodded to her. "To the children." They lifted the
icicles. The warmth melted the ice down into their thirsty mouths.
* * * * *
All day the sun seemed to blaze and erupt into the valley. Sim could
not see it, but the vivid pictorials in his parents' minds were
sufficient evidence of the nature of the day fire. The light ran like
mercury, sizzling and roasting the caves, poking inward, but never
penetrating deeply enough. It lighted the caves. It made the hollows of
the cliff comfortably warm.
Sim fought to keep his parents young. But no matter how hard he fought
with mind and image, they became like mummies before him. His father
seemed to dissolve from one stage of oldness to another. This is what
will happen to me soon, though Sim in terror.
Sim grew upon himself. He felt the digestive-eliminatory movements
of his body. He was fed every minute, he was continually swallowing,
feeding. He began to fit words to images and processes. Such a word was
love. It was not an abstraction, but a process, a stir of breath, a
smell of morning air, a flutter of heart, the curve of arm holding him,
the look in the suspended face of his mother. He saw the processes,
then searched behind her suspended face and there was the word, in her
brain, ready to use. His throat prepared to speak. Life was pushing
him, rushing him along toward oblivion.
He sensed the expansion of his fingernails, the adjustments of his
cells, the profusion of his hair, the multiplication of his bones and
sinew, the grooving of the soft pale wax of his brain. His brain at
birth as clear as a circle of ice, innocent, unmarked, was, an instant
later, as if hit with a thrown rock, cracked and marked and patterned
in a million crevices of thought and discovery.
His sister, Dark, ran in and out with other little hothouse children,
forever eating. His mother trembled over him, not eating, she had no
appetite, her eyes were webbed shut.
"Sunset," said his father, at last.
The day was over. The light faded, a wind sounded.
His mother arose. "I want to see the outside world once more ... just
once more...." She stared blindly, shivering.
His father's eyes were shut, he lay against the wall.
"I cannot rise," he whispered faintly. "I cannot."
"Dark!" The mother croaked, the girl came running. "Here," and Sim was
handed to the girl. "Hold to Sim, Dark, feed him, care for him." She
gave Sim one last fondling touch.
Dark said not a word, holding Sim, her great green eyes shining wetly.
"Go now," said the mother. "Take him out into the sunset time. Enjoy
yourselves. Pick foods, eat. Play."
Dark walked away without looking back. Sim twisted in her grasp,
looking over her shoulder with unbelieving, tragic eyes. He cried out
and somehow summoned from his lips the first word of his existence.
"Why...?"
He saw his mother stiffen. "The child spoke!"
"Aye," said his father. "Did you hear what he said?"
"I heard," said the mother quietly.
The last thing Sim saw of his living parents was his mother weakly,
swayingly, slowly moving across the floor to lie beside her silent
husband. That was the last time he ever saw them move.

IV
The night came and passed and then started the second day.
The bodies of all those who had died during the night were carried in a
funeral procession to the top of a small hill. The procession was long,
the bodies numerous.
Dark walked in the procession, holding the newly walking Sim by one
hand. Only an hour before dawn Sim had learned to walk.
At the top of the hill, Sim saw once again the far off metal seed.
Nobody ever looked at it, or spoke of it. Why? Was there some reason?
Was it a mirage? Why did they not run toward it? Worship it? Try to get
to it and fly away into space?
The funeral words were spoken. The bodies were placed upon the ground
where the sun, in a few minutes, would cremate them.
The procession then turned and ran down the hill, eager to have their
few minutes of free time running and playing and laughing in the sweet
air.
Dark and Sim, chattering like birds, feeding among the rocks, exchanged
what they knew of life. He was in his second day, she in her third.
They were driven, as always, by the mercurial speed of their lives.
Another piece of his life opened wide.
Fifty young men ran down from the cliffs, holding sharp stones and rock
daggers in their thick hands. Shouting, they ran off toward distant
black, low lines of small rock cliffs.
"War!"
The thought stood in Sim's brain. It shocked and beat at him. These men
were running to fight, to kill, over there in those small black cliffs
where other people lived.
But why? Wasn't life short enough without fighting, killing?
From a great distance he heard the sound of conflict, and it made his
stomach cold. "Why, Dark, why?"
Dark didn't know. Perhaps they would understand tomorrow. Now, there
was the business of eating to sustain and support their lives. Watching
Dark was like seeing a lizard forever flickering its pink tongue,
forever hungry.
Pale children ran on all sides of them. One beetle-like boy scuttled up
the rocks, knocking Sim aside, to take from him a particularly luscious
red berry he had found growing under an outcrop.
The child ate hastily of the fruit before Sim could gain his feet. Then
Sim hurled himself unsteadily, the two of them fell in a ridiculous
jumble, rolling, until Dark pried them, squalling, apart.
Sim bled. A part of him stood off, like a god, and said, "This should
not be. Children should not be this way. It is wrong!"
Dark slapped the little intruding boy away. "Get on!" she cried.
"What's your name, bad one?"
"Chion!" laughed the boy. "Chion, Chion, Chion!"
Sim glared at him with all the ferocity in his small, unskilled
features. He choked. This was his enemy. It was as if he'd waited
for an enemy of person as well as scene. He had already understood
the avalanches, the heat, the cold, the shortness of life, but these
were things of places, of scene--mute, extravagant manifestations of
unthinking nature, not motivated save by gravity and radiation. Here,
now, in this stridulent Chion he recognized a thinking enemy!
Chion darted off, turned at a distance, tauntingly crying:
"Tomorrow I will be big enough to kill you!"
And he vanished around a rock.
More children ran, giggling, by Sim. Which of them would be friends,
enemies? How could friends and enemies come about in this impossible,
quick life time? There was no time to make either, was there?
Dark, as if knowing his thoughts, drew him away. As they searched for
desired foods, she whispered fiercely in his ear. "Enemies are made
over things like stolen foods; gifts of long grasses make friends.
Enemies come, too, from opinions and thoughts. In five seconds you've
made an enemy for life. Life's so short enemies must be made quickly."
And she laughed with an irony strange for one so young, who was growing
older before her rightful time. "You must fight to protect yourself.
Others, superstitious ones, will try killing you. There is a belief, a
ridiculous belief, that if one kills another, the murderer partakes of
the life energy of the slain, and therefore will live an extra day. You
see? As long as that is believed, you're in danger."
But Sim was not listening. Bursting from a flock of delicate girls who
tomorrow would be tall, quieter, and who day after that would gain
breasts and the next day take husbands, Sim caught sight of one small
girl whose hair was a violet blue flame.
She ran past, brushed Sim, their bodies touched. Her eyes, white as
silver coins, shone at him. He knew then that he'd found a friend, a
love, a wife, one who'd a week from now lie with him atop the funeral
pyre as sunlight undressed their flesh from bone.
Only the glance, but it held them in mid-motion, one instant.
"Your name?" he shouted after her.
"Lyte!" she called laughingly back.
"I'm Sim," he answered, confused and bewildered.
"Sim!" she repeated it, flashing on. "I'll remember!"
Dark nudged his ribs. "Here, _eat_," she said to the distracted boy.
"Eat or you'll never get big enough to catch her."
From nowhere, Chion appeared, running by. "Lyte!" he mocked, dancing
malevolently along and away. "Lyte! I'll remember Lyte, too!"
Dark stood tall and reed slender, shaking her dark ebony clouds of
hair, sadly. "I see your life before you, little Sim. You'll need
weapons soon to fight for this Lyte one. Now, hurry--the sun's coming!"
They ran back to the caves.
* * * * *
One-fourth of his life was over! Babyhood was gone. He was now a young
boy! Wild rains lashed the valley at nightfall. He watched new river
channels cut in the valley, out past the mountain of the metal seed.
He stored the knowledge for later use. Each night there was a new
river, a bed newly cut.
"What's beyond the valley?" wondered Sim.
"No one's ever been beyond it," explained Dark. "All who tried to reach
the plain were frozen to death or burnt. The only land we know's within
half an hour's run. Half an hour out and half an hour back."
"No one has ever reached the metal seed, then?"
Dark scoffed. "The Scientists, they try. Silly fools. They don't know
enough to stop. It's no use. It's too far."
The Scientists. The word stirred him. He had almost forgotten the
vision he had short hours after birth. His voice was eager. "Where are
the Scientists?" he demanded.
Dark looked away from him, "I wouldn't tell you if I knew. They'd kill
you, experimenting! I don't want you joining them! Live your life,
don't cut it in half trying to reach that silly metal thing on the
mountain."
"I'll find out where they are from someone else, then!"
"No one'll tell you! They hate the Scientists. You'll have to find them
on your own. And then what? Will you save us? Yes, save us, little
boy!" Her face was sullen; already half her life was gone, her breasts
were beginning to shape. Tomorrow she must divine how best to live
her youth, her love, and she knew no way to fully plumb the depths of
passion in so short a space.