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Col. Breen:
Mars is dead, nothing there but a coulpe of scraps of lichen.
Professor Bernrad Quatermass:
Five million years ago it may have been very different. Suppose at that time there were living beings on it with techniques that let them visit the Eatrh at a time when the most highly evolved creatures here, our own ancestors, were only a type of Pliocene ape.
Minister of Defense:
Go on.
Professor Bernard Quatermass:
They may have wnated to found a second colony, when their own world was doomed, but could not endure our atmosphere, so they experimented.
Minister of Defense:
Oh, and the insects were responsible?
Professor Bernard Quatermass:
There is celarly some connection. My guess is that those were ape mutations bieng brought back for release on Earth.
Col. Breen:
And you really beileve this was possible? That apes were systematically taken from this planet to a second and...
Professor Bernard Quatermass:
Altered, by selective breeding, atomic surgery, methods we can't guess, and with new faculties instilled in them, high intelligence, perahps something else.
Howell:
In effect, a colonization.
Professor Bernard Quatermass:
It would be a way of possessing the Earth.
Only a colony by proxy, but better than leaving nothing at all behind.
Howell:
Surely it had to be carried out on a hugh scale.
Professor Bernard Quatermass:
Yes, if I am right, if I am right, we've come on a single instance, probably an accident, a landing that went wrong and they all died. The Thaems valley was swamp then.
Minister of Defense:
You realize what you are implying? That we owe our human condiiton here to the intervention of insects.
Professor Bernrad Quatermass:
I suppose I am.
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