"Did you ah limp at that time?" asked McGannon.
"Uh-huh. I busted my leg back in the Neolithic. Fell out of a tree, and had to set it myself, because there wasn't anybody around. Why?"
"Vulcan," said McGannon softly.
"Vulcan?" repeated the gnarly man. "Wasn't he a Greek god or something?"
"Yes. He was the lame blacksmith of the gods."
"You mean you think that maybe somebody got the idea from me? That's an interesting theory. Little late to check up on it, though."
Blue leaned forward and said crisply: "Mr. Gaffney, no real Neanderthal man could talk so fluently and entertainingly as you do. That's shown by the poor development of the frontal lobes of the brain and the attachments of the tongue muscles."
The gnarly man shrugged again. "You can believe what you like. My own clan considered me pretty smart, and then you're bound to learn something in fifty thousand years."
Dr. Saddler beamed. "Tell them about your teeth, Clarence."
The gnarly man grinned. "They're false, of course. My own lasted a long time, but they still wore out somewhere back in the Paleolithic. I grew a third set, and they wore out, too. So I had to invent soup."
"You what?" It was the usually taciturn Jeffcott.
"I had to invent soup, to keep alive. You know, the bark-dish-and-hot-stones method. My gums got pretty tough after a while, but they still weren't much good for chewing hard stuff. So after a few thousand years I got pretty sick of soup and mushy foods generally. And when metal came in I began experimenting with false teeth. Bone teeth in copper plates. You might say I invented them, too. I tried often to sell them, but they never really caught on until around 1750 A.D. I was living in Paris then, and I built up quite a little business before I moved on." He pulled the handkerchief out of his breast pocket to wipe his forehead; Blue made a face as the wave of perfume reached him.
"Well, Mr. Shining Hawk," snapped Blue with a trace of sarcasm, "how do you like our machine age?"
The gnarly man ignored the tone of the question. "It's not bad. Lots of interesting things happen. The main trouble is the shirts."
"Shirts?"
"Uh-huh. Just try to buy a shirt with a twenty neck and a twenty-nine sleeve. I have to order 'em special. It's almost as bad with hats and shoes. I wear an eight and one half hat and a thirteen shoe." He looked at his watch. "I've got to get back to Coney to work."
McGannon jumped up. "Where can I get in touch with you again, Mr. Gaffney? There's lots of things I'd like to ask you."
The gnarly man told him. "I'm free mornings. My working hours are two to midnight on weekdays, with a couple of hours off for dinner. Union rules, you know."
"You mean there's a union for you show people?"
"Sure. Only they call it a guild. They think they're artists, you know. Artists don't have unions; they have guilds. But it amounts to the same thing."
Blue and Jeffcott saw the gnarly man and the historian walking slowly toward the subway together. Blue said: "Poor old Mac! Always thought he had sense. Looks like he's swallowed this Gaffney's ravings, hook, line, and sinker."
"I'm not so sure," said Jeffcott, frowning. "There's something funny about the business."
"What?" barked Blue. "Don't tell me that you believe this story of being alive fifty thousand years? A caveman who uses perfume! Good God!"
"N-no," said Jeffcott. "Not the fifty thousand part. But I don't think it's a simple case of paranoia or plain lying, either. And the perfume's quite logical, if he were telling the truth."
"Huh?"
"Body odor. Saddler told us how dogs hate him. He'd have a smell different from ours. We're so used to ours that we don't even know we have one, unless somebody goes without a bath for a month. But we might notice his if he didn't disguise it."
Blue snorted. "You'll be believing him yourself in a minute. It's an obvious glandular case, and he's made up this story to fit. All that talk about not caring whether we believe him or not is just bluff. Come on, let's get some lunch. Say, see the way Saddler looked at him every time she said 'Clarence'? Like a hungry wolf. Wonder what she thinks she's going to do with him?"
Jeffcott thought. "I can guess. And if he is telling the truth, I think there's something in Deuteronomy against it."
The great surgeon made a point of looking like a great surgeon, to pince-nez and Vandyke. He waved the X-ray negatives at the gnarly man, pointing out this and that.
"We'd better take the leg first," he said. "Suppose we do that next Thursday. When you've recovered from that we can tackle the shoulder. It'll all take time, you know."
The gnarly man agreed, and shuffled out of the little private hospital to where McGannon awaited him in his car. The gnarly man described the tentative schedule of operations, and mentioned that he had made arrangements to quit his job. "Those two are the main thing," he said. "I'd like to try professional wrestling again some day, and I can't unless I get this shoulder fixed so I can raise my left arm over my heard."
"What happened to it?" asked McGannon.
The gnarly man closed his eyes, thinking. "Let me see. I get things mixed up sometimes. People do when they're only fifty years old, so you can imagine what it's like for me.
"In 42 B.C. I was living with the Bituriges in Gaul. You remember that Cćsar shut up Werkinghetorich Vercingetorix to you in Alesia, and the confederacy raised an army of relief under Coswollon."
"Coswollon?"
The gnarly man laughed shortly. "I meant Warcaswollon. Coswollon was a Briton, wasn't he? I'm always getting those two mixed up.
"Anyhow, I got drafted. That's all you can call it; I didn't want to go. It wasn't exactly my war. But they wanted me because I could pull twice as heavy a bow as anybody else.
"When the final attack on Cćsar's ring fortifications came, they sent me forward with some other archers to provide a covering fire for their infantry. At least, that was the plan. Actually, I never saw such a hopeless muddle in my life. And before I even got within bowshot, I fell into one of the Romans' covered pits. I didn't land on the point of the stake, but I fetched up against the side of it and busted my shoulder. There wasn't any help, because the Gauls were too busy running away from Cćsar's German cavalry to bother about wounded men."
The author of "God, Man, and the Universe" gazed after his departing patient. He spoke to his head assistant: "What do you think of him?"
"I think it's so," said the assistant. "I looked over those X rays pretty closely. That skeleton never belonged to a human being. And it has more healed fractures than you'd think possible."
"Hm-m-m," said Dunbar. "That's right, he wouldn't be human, would he? Hm-m-m. You know, if anything happened to him-"
The assistant grinned understandingly. "Of course, there's the S.P.C.A."
"We needn't worry about them. Hm-m-m." He thought, you've been slipping; nothing big in the papers for a year. But if you published a complete anatomical description of a Neanderthal man or if you found out why his medulla functions the way it does Hm-m-m. Of course, it would have to be managed properly
"Let's have lunch at the Natural History Museum," said McGannon. "Some of the people there ought to know you."