“The step from a weapon held in the hand to a weapon which left the hand and covered distance” foretold disaster according to the Wise Man. It was a little more complicated than that, of course. A rock or a spear could be thrown. It was the weapon which was propelled by more than the mere muscle of Man which had to be guarded against. The bow-and-arrow Geek was working on was just such a weapon.
What an opportunity! Right now, I, Steve Victor, was in a position to save the world from its ultimate destruction. Now, perhaps millions of years before the problem would become manifest, I could prevent it from ever happening. All I had to do was stop Geek from inventing the bow-and-arrow!
One nice thing about being a god is that you usually get your way. Geek didn’t stand a chance. One gesture with my pink-slippered foot, one wiggle of the purple pom-pom, and the disapproval of the entire tribe fell on him. I frowned and his fellow cavemen saw the hand of the devil in Geek’s creativity. They smashed the devil’s handiwork to smithereens and Geek went back to his rock carvings, saved from further wrath by the benevolence of my godhood. I felt pretty smug about it. I’d kept the bow-and-arrow from being invented and in so doing, perhaps I’d altered the course of history and enabled Man to save himself from himself. In a way, such an accomplishment really was godlike.
But if I was a god, I still had my problems in the heavenly hierarchy. I’d been trying to solve them by rousing Charles Putnam on the wrist radio, but for a while he just didn’t answer. Then, finally, he did.
“Steve, my boy,” he greeted me, “what have you been doing with yourself?”
“I’ve been being a god,” I told him.
“The strain must be too much for him,” Putnam said. It was an aside and it came through the tiny receiver muflied.
“Who are you talking to?” I demanded.
“Ti Nih,” he admitted.
“Putnam, what are you trying to do? You know that if her father catches you two together my chances of getting back are nil.”
“You’re just jealous, Steve,” he decided. “Steve Victor is a jealous god.” He chuckled.
“Don’t be irreverent,” I cautioned him.
“Steve, you’re flipping!”
“It wouldn’t surprise me if I was. First you lose me in the the future and now you’ve got me back with Peter Piltdown. What happened?”
“Papa Baapuh couldn’t control time distance in reverse. He says the only way he can work this gismo is by sending you all the way back and then bringing you forward to the future slowly.”
“I’ve gone that route once already,” I reminded him. “And look what happened.”
“Can’t be helped. It’s the only way he can do it.”
“A11 right then. But what’s holding him up? Why doesn’t he start jumping me forward?”
“The way he explains it, that big jump put a strain on the machine and he blew some kind of doohickey. He’s got to make another one before he can start bringing you forward.”
“How long will that take?”
“He’s working on it. You can’t hurry these things. It’s a matter of creativity.”
Creativity! I wondered if I mightn’t start Geek working on the problem from this end. It would keep his mind off the bow-and-arrow; he and Papa Baapuh were brains of a feather; and two heads were better than one even if one was prehistoric. The trouble was Geek would have to invent a washing machine first. I discarded the idea.
“Well, if he doesn’t get a move on, I may end up lining the stomach of a dinosaur,” I told Putnam.
“Nonsense, my boy,” he reassured me. “Dinosaurs don’t eat gods.” Ti Nih giggled.
“Putnam, will you get that girl out of there before you get caught!”
“Don’t worry. We’re very discreet. And after all, I have to do something to pass the time.”
“Pass some my way,” I told him moodily. “Like a billion years or so, I think.” I broke the connection and brooded about Putnam’s lack of concern with my plight. I didn’t have much time to brood. The very next morning things began popping. Using the sign language by which we managed to communicate, Crap got across to me that the men of the tribe were off on a very special venture and that they wished me to accompany them so that the magic of my godhood would insure its success.
It was all very mysterious, but I went. After all, a god has a responsibility to those who worship him. Conscious of my deification, I couldn’t let them down.
After a day’s march, we camped for the night. Midway through the next morning, We reached our destination. For the first time the nature of the venture on which we were embarked became clear to me.
Crap gathered the men behind an outcropping of rock on a small hill. From here we could see a clearing without being seen by the members of the tribe which had settled there. We waited until the men of the tribe had gone off on the day’s hunt. Only the usual collection of ugly, naked, prehistoric cavewomen were left. The purpose of the raid, it seemed, was to kidnap some of them as mates.
First, led by Crap, the men made obeisance to me. They knelt in front of me, one by one, and touched their foreheads to the tip of my gilded wand. Since my gold-painted organs had labeled me specifically as a god of fertility, my presence was particularly important in this raid for a fresh supply of mates.
I watched from the hill as they descended on the clearing. There was nothing subtle about their courtship methods. They fell on the women with clubs, conked them over the head, and dragged them off by their hair. Not much attention was paid to the selection until a half-dozen or so had been dragged back to the shelter of the hillock. Then Crap made an inspection of the female booty.
The raiders evidently had had some experience in forays of this sort. They seemed to know just how hard to bop the women so that they’d be rendered unconscious without actually harming them. I appreciated the knack when I saw that by the time the women were dragged back to where I was waiting, most of them were regaining consciousness.
As a beauty contest judge, Crap could never have made it in Atlantic City. By my standards the three women he picked to keep were the ugliest of the bunch. Two of the three he motioned back to the clearing were almost as ugly as those he kept. But the third reject was something else again.
She was a blonde, about five-two, slender but voluptuous. Taller and thinner than the other women, she stood out among them like a race horse in a herd of oxen. Somehow, genetics had skipped a few millennia and this girl wouldn’t have been out of place as a Playboy center spread. The contrast was marked.
Where their features were anthropoid, hers were cleanly etched, marked by high, well-defined cheekbones, a pert little nose and bright blue eyes set far apart. Her hair was long, a shiny yellow, and hung in ringlets rather than in the scraggly fashion of the other women. Her breasts were high and cone shaped, rather than shapeless and saggy, her waist was small, her hips well defined, quite different from the thickness and squat demeanor of the others. Her legs were shapely and slender, alluring rather than grossly utilitarian. She was a knock-out, a diamond in a rough field of cracked glass.
But there’s no accounting for tastes. To Crap she was double ugly and the runt of the litter. He saw her as a three-legged kitten to be put out of its misery.
His solution of what to do with her was in keeping with his appraisal. There wasn’t a murmur of disapproval when he tied some rocks around her neck and led her to the bank of a nearby stream. All of the others—-the raiding men and their victims—seemed to look upon disposing of her by drowning as a mercy killing.