When the raiders started for us again, I fired the first stone and then another and another as fast as I was able. It occurred to me that I could fire more than one at once if I used smaller stones, so I began mixing up loads of small rocks with occasional shots of really hard-hitting large ones. Met by this barrage, the cavemen were quick to retreat out of range.
We rested. Geek made enthusiastic sounds to compliment me on my godly ingenuity. I was feeling pretty smug about it myself until just what I had done suddenly dawned on me.
I had invented the slingshot! I had made the first catapult! I, Steve Victor, had kept Geek from creating a bow-and-arrow on the theory that if Man’s weaponry was limited to objects held in the hand, or launched by his own muscle, then the H-bomb wouldn’t evolve and he wouldn’t destroy himself. So I had stopped Geek. And now I myself had done the very thing I’d prevented him from doing!
Steve Victor had invented the slingshot! Steve Victor was the discoverer of the principle underlying all mechanistic weapons. From the slingshot would come the giant catapult and the cannon and the rifle and the guided missiles and the rockets and, eventually, the ICBM with its nuclear load! Steve Victor—not some nameless caveman-—had taken the first step in the destruction of the world.
The Wise Man had pointed to a pivotal point in history and said that if it could be changed, the future could be changed. And I had tried to alter that pivotal point and instead I’d come up responsible for creating it! The implications increased as I watched the cavemen massing for their next attack.
They had picked up flat pieces of wood and rock and were holding them in front of them as they came. First the weapon—the slingshot—and then the counter-weapon -—the shield. First the guided nuclear missile—and then the missile interceptor. And then, inevitably, the missile to pierce the screen of interceptors. Such was the chain of destruction I, Steve Victor, had set in motion.
Now I used large rocks fired by the sling and the impact on their shields was enough to propel the attackers backwards and sometimes enough to shatter the shields themselves. This time, when the raiders retreated, it was for good. Seeing that we had routed them, Geek and I were jubilant. We each grabbed a handful of rocks and gave chase, pausing every couple of feet to hurl a stone after them.
Reaching the top of one of the hills, I stopped short to hurl the rest of my stones at the fleeing brutes. Geek, following at full speed, barreled into me. He knocked my feet out from under me and I went sprawling, face first, into what should have been the primeval slag.
Only it wasn’t. Instead my nose skidded off the rim of a hard, cylindrical object which, due to the force with which I’d encountered it, became wedged around my jaw, cheekbones, and the top of my head. I was stuck!
My head was stuck in a hand-crafted, ornately sculpted, jewel-encrusted, priceless Grecian urn!
CHAPTER THREE
“What’s a Grecian urn?”
“Two hundred a week, maybe, if he owns the restaurant.”
So goes the old gag—and admittedly it should. What’s a Grecian urn? All I know is that this one was a chamber pot! Yep, a hand-crafted, ornately sculptured, jewel-encrusted, priceless bedpan! I’d nosedived into it, and now I couldn’t get my head out. There are, believe me, more sweetly perfumed receptacles in which to put one’s nose.
I made noises like an asthmatic astronaut out of oxygen. Magnified by the metal encasing my head, they bounced off my eardrums with the dissonance of a stereo woofer having a dogfight with its tweeter. I scrambled to my feet and clutched the rim of the urn with both hands in an effort to free myself. Fortunately, the chamber pot had not been used recently.
Aside from the aroma, how was it in there? Very dark! Very dark, indeed!
Faintly, once I stopped verbalizing my predicament, the sound of a Greek lute reached my trapped ears. It was playing something vaguely Zorba-ish13 . Without meaning to, I responded. I’d been dancing around anyway in my efforts to dislodge my noggin. Now my feet fell in with the lute rhythm and I was doing a cockamamie version of a Greek dance.
It worked out well. Inadvertently, I snapped my fingers on the final beat and the pressure of the movement hit just the right spot to pry the chamber pot loose. It flew off my face.
But freedom shed no light immediately. It was just as dark outside the chamber pot as it had been inside it. And the sound which followed only told me that wherever I was, I wasn’t alone. I deduced that the utilitarian urn had bounced off somebody else’s cranium.
Silence followed the initial roar, and then, finally, there was light. It came from behind me. I wheeled around, squinted, and made out a burly fellow in Macedonian battle garb holding a torch. Turning back, I spotted the chamber pot.
It was between two hands in the process of lifting it off a bruised head. The hands were attached to an extremely handsome young man in his early twenties. He was lying on a rather elaborate pallet.
What made it seem so elaborate was that I could now see that I was inside a tent. From the battle gear, it was obviously the tent of a Greek warrior. From the lush furnishings, I guessed this lad to be a very high-ranking warrior.
I’m not usually so slow witted, but my tumble had dazed me, and it was only now that I realized I’d taken another jump on Papa Baapuh’s Time Gismo. At least, judging by my surroundings, it had been a jump forward. That was something to be grateful about. If I’d gone any further back than I’d been, I might have found myself floating around the universe waiting for Mama Earth to cool off her lava and jell.
Less lucky was the fact that the VIP in whose tent I’d landed was coming on like Zeus with heartburn. And I was the cook who’d mis-mixed the ambrosia. He was belching angry syllables as if they were bolts of lightning crackling at all too mortal me.
It was Greek to me. Classical Greek—which was another break. If I’d been dropped in Greece circa 1967, I wouldn’t have had the lingo to ask directions to the men’s room. But Classical Greek was something else again. I’d had to master it when I was going for my Ph.D. back in college. It was necessary because I’d been writing a thesis on the evolution of scatology and its relevance to sexology and a large chunk of research material was in Classical Greek which had never been translated.
I’d slaved over that paper. Scatology? I’d brooded at the time; scatology? A lot of crap!
But I’d been wrong, and now I was damn glad of the experience. I understood every word the angry man was shouting. Since most of them were scatological anyway, it wasn’t hard.
Pointing at me and shouting at the sentry with the torch, the man in the bed was demanding to know how I’d gotten into his tent. Bewildered, the sentry was protesting that he’d been standing guard outside and that I hadn’t come past him. He also insisted that none of the eight other guards stationed around the tent had left his post. Eight guards? I mused to myself. The angry young Greek must be a very, very VIP all right.
Now he bounded out of bed and circled the interior of the tent, stooping to examine the pegs holding the canvas down. Obviously, he thought I must have crawled under the tent or cut my way inside. But he couldn’t find any evidence to back up his theory, and finally he turned and addressed me directly.