This star shall be free
They even considered blasting the cliff, to smash the instrument they
had presented to Tork. But anything that would smash the device would
blow up the ship. The hundred-thousand-year-old Antarean civilization
was helpless against the naive desires of cave-men who simply wanted
more pieces of worked flint.
“Man,” snapped a voice in Tork’s mind, “how did you creatures keep your
thought steadily upon us so that we were called?”
“We made pictures of you,” said Tork happily. “It was not easy to do,
but we did it.”
He beamed at them. There was pained silence. Then a mental voice said
bitterly: “We will give you the spears and arrows, Man, if you will
destroy every one of the pictures.”
“We will do that,” promised Tork brightly, “because now we can draw
them again when we need you.”
He seemed to hear groans inside his head. But the Antareans were
civilized, after all. He seemed also to hear wry chucklings. And the
dry voice said, inside his skull: “It is agreed. Go down and blot out
the pictures of us. We will give you what you wish. Then we can go
away.
“And--you will never be able to summon us again, Man! We had intended
to stay on this earth for a hundred of your years, and if our
experiment seemed too deadly to you, we would have stopped it. But now
we will not take that risk. Your species is a land-species, and we are
of the sea, but we think it best that you disappear. We have given you
the means to destroy yourselves. We will depart and let you do so. Now
go and blot out the pictures.”
Tork went happily down into his cave. He commanded the wiping-out of
the pictures of Antareans. Within an hour the ship was gone. And this
time it rose straight into the sky, as if it weren’t coming back.
At first Tork was made happy by a huge new store of worked flint; but
within two months disaster fell. The pictures of animals--so needful
when using the Antarean device--blew into a cooking-fire and burned.
Then there was deep mourning, and Tork and Berry and all the tribe
tried earnestly to call back the ship to get a fresh supply.
But nothing happened.
This was catastrophe; they could no longer call animals to be killed.
But then Berry suggested re-drawing the burned pictures on the cave’s
walls, and again art was attempted, by men working from the motive
which has produced most of the great art-works of earth ... to get
something to eat.
The Antarean device worked just as well with pictures of the
cave-folk’s own drawing, as with those the Antareans had provided. But
of course the Antareans could not know about it, because they had left
the planet altogether....
Tork and Berry lived long lives and had many offspring, all of whom
thrived mightily because of the Antarean experiment. Of course, the
experiment was not ended. In time, the tribe in the chalk-cliff village
had increased so much in numbers that there was lack of room for its
members. Colonies were sent out from it, and they thrived, too. And
every colony carried with it three distinct results of the Antarean
experiment in ecological imbalance.
One was stone weapons, which in time they rather painfully learned to
make for themselves. Another was the belief that it was a simple trick
to call animals to be killed. The actual Antarean device--being tucked
away in the back of Tork’s cave--in time got covered over with rubbish
and in two generations was forgotten. Since it needed no attention, it
got none. In time, when its power grew weaker and its effect less,
nobody even thought to uncover and tinker with it. And the third result
of the Antarean contact with Tork’s tribe was the practice of drawing
and painting pictures of animals on cave-walls. The art of those
Cro-Magnon artists is still admired.
The experiment still went on. Men learned to make weapons. Presently
they discovered metal. The spears and arrowheads became bronze, and
then iron, and presently gunpowder replaced bow-strings to hurl metal
missiles. Later still there was the atom bomb. In the art line, there
were Praxiteles and Rodin and Michael Angelo and Picasso.... And the
consequences of the experiment continued to develop....
* * * * *
A good thirty thousand years after the time of Tork, the Antareans
decided that they needed the oceans of Earth for the excess population
of several already-colonized planets. They prepared a colonizing fleet.
The original survey was not complete, but it was good enough to justify
a full-scale expedition for settlement.
More than two million Antareans swam in the vessels which launched
themselves into space to occupy Earth. It was purely by accident that
members of a society of learned Antareans, going over the original
survey reports, came upon the record of the experiment. The learned
society requested, without much hope, that an effort be made to trace
the ancient meddling with the laws of nature, and see if any results
could be detected.
The Antarean fleet came out of overdrive beyond Jupiter and drove in
toward Earth with placid confidence. There was blank amazement on board
when small spacecraft hailed the newcomers with some belligerence. The
Antareans were almost bewildered. There was no intelligent race
here.... But they sent out a paralyzing beam to seize one ship and hold
it for examination. Unfortunately, the beam was applied too abruptly
and tore the Earth ship to pieces.
So the many-times removed great-great-grandchildren of Tork and Berry
and the others of the cave-folk tribe--they blasted the Antarean fleet
in seconds, and then very carefully examined the wreckage. They got an
interstellar drive out of their examination, which well paid for the
one lost Earth ship. But the Antarean learned society never did learn
the results of that experiment in ecological imbalance, started thirty
thousand years before.
In fact, the results aren’t all in yet.
[Transcriber’s note: This story appeared in the November 1949 issue
of _Super Science Stories_.]