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 cavestones. His blood beat through him a thousand pulses each minute. Hegrew, steadily.
Into his mouth his mother with feverish hands put the food. Thenightmare of living was begun. Almost instantly at birth his eyes grewalert, and then, without half understanding why, filled with bright,insistent terror. He gagged upon the food, choked and wailed. He lookedabout, 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 dyingface. Old, withered by winds, baked like adobe in the heat. The man wascrouched in a far corner of the cave, his eyes whitening to one side ofhis face, listening to the far wind trumpeting up above on the frozennight planet.
Sim's mother, trembling, now and again, staring at the man, fed Simpebble-fruits, valley-grasses and ice-nipples broken from the cavernentrances, and eating, eliminating, eating again, he grew larger,larger.
The man in the corner of the cave was his father! The man's eyes wereall that was alive in his face. He held a crude stone dagger in hiswithered hands and his jaw hung loose and senseless.
Then, with a widening focus, Sim saw the old people sitting in thetunnel beyond this living quarter. And as he watched, they began to die.
Their agonies filled the cave. They melted like waxen images, theirfaces collapsed inward on their sharp bones, their teeth protruded. Oneminute their faces were mature, fairly smooth, alive, electric. Thenext minute a desiccation and burning away of their flesh occurred.
Sim thrashed in his mother's grasp. She held him. "No, no," she soothedhim, quietly, earnestly, looking to see if this, too, would cause herhusband to rise again.
With a soft swift padding of naked feet, Sim's father ran across thecave. Sim's mother screamed. Sim felt himself torn loose from hergrasp. He fell upon the stones, rolling, shrieking with his new, moistlungs!
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 stillin his mother's flesh. In the next few blazing, impossible instantsquestions flicked through his brain. The knife was high, suspended,ready to destroy him. But the whole question of life in this cave, thedying people, the withering and the insanity, surged through Sim'snew, small head. How was it that he understood? A newborn child? Can anewborn child think, see, understand, interpret? No. It was wrong! Itwas impossible. Yet it was happening! To him. He had been alive an hournow. And in the next instant perhaps dead!
His mother flung herself upon the back of his father, and beat down theweapon. Sim caught the terrific backwash of emotion from both theirconflicting minds. "Let me kill him!" shouted the father, breathing