This star shall be free
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 was 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 monstrous 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-called-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 kidnapped 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 arrows was in a
better position still 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, naively. For a little while, Tork was flattered and
open-handed. 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 got away.
* * * * *
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-which-called-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 bumbling,
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-which-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 out-spread fingers with charcoal. It
produced a recognizable picture of a hand. Tork essayed to trace his
memory 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 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, and 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.