The Second Murray Leinster Megapack (81 page)

“We of Antares seek new worlds for our race to inhabit. We have chosen your world for later use and shall remain upon it for perhaps a hundred of your years, to survey it. We shall be able to see the first results of what we do today. Then we shall go back to our own world, and when we return we will see the final result of our gifts to you. What happens on the land, of course, will not affect our use of the seas.”

Another mental voice interrupted, protesting that the man was not given a fair chance to refuse the gifts. The instructor went on dryly, “Your species can now multiply without limit. We think that you will overrun all the land and destroy all other animals for food, and ultimately destroy yourselves. But we are not sure. We are curious to learn. You can refuse the gift if you choose.”

Tork blinked. He understood—temporarily. But he was human and a savage. The prospect of unlimited food outweighed all other possible considerations. He was frightened, but he wanted all the food that could be had. Definitely.

Instructions continued. Presently Tork understood the spears, and was naïvely astonished. He understood the bows and arrows, and was amazed. He grew excited. He wanted to use the marvelous new things. He felt that the shapes were amused by him.

The land-suited figures floated back to the water lock of the ship. It closed. He was left alone. He fingered the weapons. Another great plate lowered. But this was not a lock; it was a window. A vast expanse of transparent stuff appeared. Behind it was water, and in the liquid the Antareans no longer in their rubbery suits—swam within the great metal egg, watching.

Tork, newly instructed, examined the beautifully fashioned stone point of a spear and then lifted the spear as he had been told to do. He remembered sharp-pointed, sharp-edged stones he had seen. He remembered stones breaking when struck together. He knew he could make a point like this. But—

He was a savage. He went to that extraordinary circular confusion where rabbits hopped hypnotically toward the great silver egg and at a certain distance were released and turned to flee, and again became subject to the irresistible urge to approach it. Tork went out to them, his mouth slavering.

He made a monstrous slaughter before it palled on him. Then he saw the elk. Fifty yards from the ship it stopped, stared about it, and bounded away. It turned and came back toward the great ship until suddenly it stopped and stared…

Tork killed it while it marched toward the ship in dazed obedience to the urge. Then he went crazy with triumph. He gorged himself upon the raw flesh and went back to the shadow of the ship—in his triumph he knew no more fear—and squatted down before the device he had been given. He thought of Berry. Inevitably, his thoughts went also to One-Ear and to the other members of the cave colony by the river. He wished each one of them to see his triumph and his greatness. With a reeking mass of raw meat beside him, he gloated over their admiration of him when they should come…

They came. Berry remembered that Tork had gone to the east. She wished to follow him. One-Ear wished to go to the east. Somehow, in his fumbling brain, the urge became associated with notions of vast quantities of food. The women wished to go east. Seeking unconsciously for a reason, they decided that their children would be safer there. So the colony of cave folk took up the march.

They did not all reach the giant egg. Bent-Leg succumbed to a giant hyena who tried to carry off one of his children. A woman died when she fell behind the others. The rest heard her shriek, but that was all. And there was one small boy missing when, moving like automatons, the rest of the cave people walked with blank faces and empty eyes to within yards of the grinning, triumphant Tork. Then they were released.

There were confusion and panic such as he had felt, until he seized them one by one and held them fast while he boasted and explained. Then they still cringed fearfully for a while—but there was food. One-Ear drooled when Tork thrust a haunch of elk meat upon him. He squatted down and wolfed it, tending to snarl and glare with his wicked, red-rimmed eyes if anyone drew near. But there was food for all. More, there were weapons. Tork shared them, expansively. Small boys killed rabbits. Women used the new stone knives and skinned them.

More humans came. They were not members of Tork’s tribe, but fortunately Tork’s people were so stuffed with food by the time the strangers came that they felt no inclination to rise and kill them. They howled with laughter at the strangers’ release, instant panic and flight, and return and release and panic again. Presently, with vast amusement, they explained and offered food. The strangers stuffed themselves. Behind the great transparent window the Antareans swam and watched. The strangers were shown the new weapons. They wanted to try them. Tork languidly called more animals to be killed for demonstration—and food.

There was such festival and such feasting as had never before been known in the brief history of Man. By the end of the second day, no fewer than fifty humans either gobbled at more food than they had ever seen before in their lives, or else slept the noisy slumber of repletion, while the Antareans watched.

On the third morning, without any notice, the ship rose quietly from the ground and sped skyward. A thousand feet up, it slanted toward the west, toward the great ocean in which an exploring party from Antares would be most interested.

The humans’ first reaction to the departure of the ship was panic. But Tork went to the box—the stone-that-calls animals—and tried a new picture. He thought of graceful, timid deer. The device called a herd of the spotted creatures, and the cave folk killed them and were reassured.

The feasting might have gone on indefinitely, but that Tork was a savage and therefore like a child. He kept the neighborhood of the camp so crowded with food animals that other creatures came of their own accord to prey on them. When the brutish roaring of the cave bear was heard, terror fell upon the people. They seized the weapons and such food as they could carry, and they fled. Mostly, they scattered.

But Tork’s own tribe naturally stayed together. It fled back toward its normal habitation, Tork carrying the stone-that-calls-animals.

Tork and Berry dissuaded the new members of the tribe from looking covetously upon Berry. Berry, in fact, used a spear upon an admirer who was pressing Tork too hard with a club. But nevertheless, when Tork took possession of the one cave that had been empty in the chalk cliff, Berry uttered a purely formal outburst of shrieks as he dragged her inside to begin housekeeping.

Her father, One-Ear, did not go to her rescue. He was stuffed to bursting with deer meat, and he merely cocked a tolerant, sleepy eye when his daughter was thus kidnaped from his very presence. In any case, he knew that she would have used a spear or knife on him or anybody else who interfered, so he merely belched slightly and settled back to slumber.

So Tork and Berry were married. But the end of the Antarean experiment was not yet.

Those who had been called to the shadow of the silver ship and there released spread through the land. Most of them had not joined Tork’s tribe. They had new, modern, priceless weapons. Non-possessors of beautiful, up-to-date flint spears tried to do murder for their possession. Their owners did a little murdering on their own. Possessors of spears and arrows which would actually cut and pierce were supermen. And in time it became apparent that a man who practiced and gained skill with the even more scientific bow and arrow was in a still better position to win wives and influence the next generation. So every human who saw or heard of the new weapons craved them passionately.

But, being humans and savages, they did not think of making them for themselves. They tried to get them from Tork and his tribe. At first they journeyed to the chalk-cliff village and asked for the new weapons, naïvely. For a little while, Tork was flattered and openhanded. Then he began to run short of worked flint. He grew stingy; he gave no more away. Then envious men grew desperate. They stole a spear here, an arrowhead there… Tork had to establish a flint curtain, permitting no visitors in his village. He was unquestioned chieftain now. One-Ear had become too fat either to hunt or fight. And then furtive, burning-eyed sneak thieves hung about the village. Some had traveled for weeks through dangers to make the flesh crawl, merely in hope of a chance to steal a spear or flint knife or arrowhead. They developed great adeptness at such sneak thievery.

There came a day when Tork’s own personal spear was stolen from the mouth of his own cave. The thief was a youth of an unknown tribe who seemed to appear from nowhere. He dashed to the spear, seized it, and dived overboard with it. He swam underwater, rising only to gasp for breath, until so far offshore as to be out of range of thrown stones. Stone-tipped arrows were far too precious to be fired into the river. He escaped.

Something had to be done. Tork needed that spear. Berry—being now a wife of some months’ standing—upbraided him shrilly for his carelessness. Tork went gloomily into the deepest recesses of his cave, to think. The stone-that-calls-animals was there. He regarded it miserably. He thought of the creatures who had given it to him.

And Tork, the cave man, had the inspiration which, in the humbling, unintentional manner in which men achieve their greatest triumphs, actually determined the future of the human race.

There was a ship from Antares upon Earth. Its crew mapped the Earth’s oceans for later colonists. The Antarean civilization was already a hundred thousand years old and very far advanced indeed. Men had just been introduced to flint spears and knives and arrows by the Antareans as an interesting experiment, to see what would happen. But Tork had an inspiration. He thought about the Antareans, while he squatted by the stone-that-calls-animals! It was the greatest single inspiration that any man has ever known. But for it, Earth would be an Antarean colony, and Man—Man would be at best a tolerated animal on the continents the Antareans had no use for.

Tork squatted by the Antarean device and remembered the Antareans in their water-filled suits. Then he thought about them as they had looked in the huge transparent window, paddling in the monster aquarium which was their ship and looking out at the cave folk. The effort made his head hurt.

Presently he called Berry to help him think.

Presently Berry grew impatient. She had housewifely tasks to perform. She told Tork that there should be a picture to look at; then he could keep thinking of them without trouble.

It had long been a pastime of cave children to press one hand against the cave wall and outline the outspread fingers with charcoal. It produced a recognizable picture of a hand. Tork essayed to trace his remembered image of what Antareans looked like, on the wall. The result was extremely crude; but while he worked on it, it was easy to keep thinking about Antareans.

Berry disapproved of his drawing. She changed it, making it better. Presently One-Ear, wheezing, came amiably into the cave of his son-in-law and was informed of the enterprise. His sharp, red-rimmed eyes perceived flaws even in Berry’s artistry. He was the first human art critic. Other members of the tribe appeared. Some criticized; others attempted drawings of their own. A continuous session of artistic effort began—with everybody thinking about Antareans all the time.

Of course, the Antareans felt the urge. Perhaps at the beginning it was very faint. But the cave-folk’s memories of the Antareans grew sharper as they improved their drawings. The tuning of the device improved; and the impulse to move toward the calling device grew stronger. At best, it was nagging. In the end it grew unbearable.

So there came a day when the great silver ovoid appeared in the sky to westward. It came swiftly, undeviatingly, toward the cliff village. It landed on the solid ground above the caves. Instantly it had landed, it was within the space where the call did not operate, and its crew was freed of the urge. The ship took off again, instantly. But instantly it was back in the overwhelming grip of the device the Antareans themselves had made. It returned, took off and returned, and took off and returned…

Presently it settled down solidly on the plateau above the river. Tork went, beaming, to meet the land-suited creatures who came out of the water lock. Two figures floated toward him, menacingly. Voices came in his brain, unreasonably irritated. One said severely, “Man, you should not use the calling device we gave you to call
us!”

“We need more spears,” said Tork, beaming, “and bows and arrows and knives. So we called you to ask you to give them to us.”

Crackling, angry thought came into his mind. The Antareans raged. Tork could not understand it. He regarded them blankly. More Antareans came out. He caught comprehensible fragments of other thoughts.

“So long as they think about us, we are helpless to leave! We cannot go beyond the space of freedom…” Another voice said furiously, “We cannot let mere animals call us! We must kill them!” Another voice said reasonably, “Better destroy the device. That will be enough. After all, the experiment—”

Then a dry voice asked, “Where is the device?”

The creatures fretted. Tork stood hopefully, waiting for them to give him spears and knives and arrowheads. He was aware of highly technical conversation. The Antareans located the device. It was deep in the sloping chalk cliff below the ship. But in order for an Antarean to get to it, he would first have to go away from it, to get down the cliff. And he could not go away from it!

A crackling mental voice suggested that they call the humans to them—away from the device. But the same objection applied. In order to approach a similar device inside the ship, the humans in the caves would have to go away from it, and they couldn’t do that, either. It was a perfect stalemate. The Antareans were trapped.