Malherne gingerly felt the lump on his temple. "So I did," he grimaced. "But how did I get here? Did those entomological nightmares really let me live, even after I carved them up?"
Zor Ala nodded somberly. "For awhile, at least," he said. "They intend to drain all knowledge possible from any of the 'fish' they catch from the future before the—" He shrugged, left his sentence unfinished.
"But your companions," he continued. "Where are they?"
Malherne winced. "Still somewhere in the Hive, I guess. I got caught before I got started. Let's hope the others have better luck. I'm still alive, though," he added thoughtfully. He stretched painfully, then sat up, grimacing as the wrenched muscles responded.
"Zor Ala," he said, "how does it happen that these insects are so much further advanced way back here in time, while in my day insects apparently have nothing but complex instincts? Seems as though they should have progressed up the evolutionary scale the same as everything else."
The future-man shook his head, sat down on the crude bench. "No one knows what happened to the Kralons after the Carboniferous Period," he said. "Nor does anyone understand why later insects retrogressed from the logical thinking of the Kralons' level of intellect, back to a mere set of complex instincts.
"We do know that the Kralons made a mighty stride ahead of the rest of Earth life many millions of years ago. They've admitted to me that they have not progressed at all for untold ages now, and they're very worried. They don't know why they do not progress in an evolutionary sense as the rest of the life forms seem to be doing.
"And they are exceedingly worried about the future, for we have let them know that apparently the Kralon race vanished around the end of the Carboniferous Period, leaving only diminutive descendants with instinct rather than intelligence to show that their race might ever have existed.
"Of course, we of the future know that there is another similar parallel in the disappearance of the dinosaurs. As you probably have read in paleontological treatises, those huge reptiles seemed to have had everything their own way through the late Triassic, the Jurassic and the Cretaceous Periods."
The engineer nodded. "I remember a paragraph from Gamow's 'Biography of the Earth' which I learned by heart," he said. "It went like this: 'The kingdom of giant reptiles, with its innumerable representatives on the land, in the sea, and in the air, was certainly the most powerful and most extensive animal kingdom during the entire existence of life on the Earth, but it also had a most tragic and unexpected end. During a comparatively short period toward the end of the Mesozoic era the tyrannosaurus, stegosaurus, ichthyosaurus, plesiosaurus, and all the other 'sauri' disappeared from the surface of the Earth as if wiped away by some giant storm, leaving the ground free for miniature mammals that had awaited this opportunity for more than 100 million years.'"