As soon as they were gone, Crap and I shinnied down the tree. He picked up the club he’d dropped at the bottom and looked at me questioningly, as if wondering if I was going to go along with him. Hell, I hadn’t made a date for that night anyway, so I followed him.
It was almost dark by the time we reached our destination. This was a spot set in the hills like a large bowl. Rocks formed a craggy rim around a flat, plateaulike surface there. A group of perhaps twenty people—-men, women and children—-were collected there. They were all as naked as Crap.
His appearance was greeted with respectful jubilation. From their attitude it was easy for me to see that he was a sort of headman, or chief, to the group. He introduced me reverently, and it followed that the whole bunch of them were soon on their knees, obviously accepting Crap’s identification of me as a god. Their eyes were very large as they bowed and scraped, paying homage to my golden testicles and my pink-and-purple hooves.
Thus I became the god-in-residence of this caveman clan. And I was treated as befits a god, too. The choicest cuts of dinosaur steak were reserved for me. (Of course, dinosaur steak being somewhat less tasty than average horsemeat, even the prime cuts left something to be desired by my gourmet palate.) I was waited on hand and pink-and-purple foot. I was covered with the warmest hides at night and fanned with large leaves against the sun of the day. Indeed, being a god was such a soft life that I soon showed signs of developing a Buddha-like paunch.
Only one thing troubled me. Because of the particular bodily area which had been gilded, Crap and his clan jumped to the conclusion that I must be a particular kind of god. You guessed it. They pegged me as a god of fertility. And it quickly became obvious that they expected me to exercise my godhood in this area.
I’d fallen out of the future Vietnam frying pan into the Cro-Magnon (or thereabouts) fire. My gold-plated groin was once again in demand. Only the filles in this particular fire weren’t exactly calculated to inspire even the most phallic of gods.
I don’t want to be unkind, but these chicks had all the appeal of a batch of Darwinian rejects. Let me describe them. Each was built close to the ground, with legs like tree stumps carved into longbows, long, dangling arms, shoulders and breasts that rippled with muscles, and haunches hairy as an unmilked peyote. Facially, they resembled the grinning fossils they would one day become—flat-boned and monkeylike. Moustaches were common among them and full sets of teeth weren’t. There wasn’t one of them that was calculated to make me want to end my sex fast.
Still, I must admit that their lack of appeal didn’t seem to turn off the other men. On the contrary. Sex was one of the functions that was performed as regularly as hunting, or eating, and it was performed publicly and without any inhibition. For instance-—
See that female over there, bending over the cooking cauldron? Now watch as the male with the fish strung around his neck comes up behind her. See them couple! (“Isn’t that remarkable?”) Notice how she doesn’t even seem to notice the dead fish dangling over her shoulder and under her nose. See how she keeps stirring the cauldron without missing a stroke? Catch that! She’s adding seasoning. Now she tastes the contents of the pot and it’s impossible to tell whether her sigh is from its flavor or because she and the man have just attained mutual satisfaction. He disengages and walks off—all in the day’s work. And not once has she even bothered to turn around to see which of the males of the tribe has seen fit to brighten her day!
That’s the way it went. At any time of day or night, I might see open sex activity. The ability of these people to do two things at once never failed to amaze me. A man might sit skinning a hide and a woman would come up to him and sit on his lap facing him and they’d make it while all the time he’d keep on working at his task. This happened while they were eating, fishing, or washing the hides they used for blankets, or during any of the other activities in which they engaged.
Hell, why not? They had a whole planet just waiting to be populated. After a while, I began to think it was damn conscientious of them.
After a while, also, they accepted the fact that I was taboo sexually. They grasped the concept that my golden testes were symbolic and that my gilded phallus was not meant to be utilitarian. I felt somewhat more secure after that.
It was about this time that I began to notice Geek. What attracted my attention was the fact that he never left the campsite. Every morning Crap and the other men went out hunting and stayed away until the sun began to set. But Geek always remained behind with the women and children.
So did I. But that was different. I was a god. From the way the others treated Geek, it was obvious he wasn’t in the same category as I was.
Their attitude towards him was indulgent, but not respectful. It almost smacked of his being the world’s first welfare case. Yet, while he wasn’t a provider, Greek always seemed to be busy.
Since we were the only two men around during the day, it was natural that we should become friendly. Verbal communication was impossible, but we did manage with gestures to reach each other to some limited extent. For lack of anything better to do, I became a sort of kibitzer watching Geek perform the tasks he set himself each day.
They were more varied than you might think. Take his artwork, for instance. On a large boulder, off to one side of the plateau, Geek had etched drawings with a stone he’d sharpened for the purpose. He showed them to me hesitantly, quite modest about his accomplishments.
He had reason to be modest. The drawings were lousy. Some day it would probably be lucky where Geek’s foothold on posterity was concerned that most archeologists don’t qualify as art critics. Geek was either myopic, or else he didn’t have the talent to draw what he saw. His sketches of the people of the tribe were anatomically inaccurate, shakily executed, and esthetically lacking. He was about as qualified to be artist-in-residence as I was to be god-in-residence.
His people looked like rocks, his rocks looked like dinosaurs, and his dinosaurs looked like doodles. Also, he had a pornographic bent. However, his pictorial graffiti were so out-of-whack with reality as to misrepresent the entire history of the copulation of the species.
Geek also whittled—-but no more successfully than he sketched, I’m afraid. The result of his working for hours over a piece of wood with a sharp-edged stone was frequently no more than a pile of shavings. The women of the tribe would use the shavings to start the evening fire.
Sometimes he just sat and combed animal hides with a piece of stone, seeming to take pleasure in the luster they’d reflect from the sun. Other times he’d just sit and stare, as if weighed down with intricate thoughts. It was hard for me to decide if he was the tribal dropout, or the clan intellectual. Well, down through the ages, that distinction would never be an easy one to make.
When I’d gotten to know him fairly well, Geek let me in on his pet project. He always worked on this one at some distance from the tribe where they wouldn’t be able to poke fun at him as they frequently did. When he showed me what he was working on, I realized that Geek was also an inventor—-and the nature of the invention on which Geek was working shook me up.
“The hydrogen bomb is the logical extension of the bow-and-arrow.”
That’s what the Wise Man back in Saigon had said. He’d pointed out that the advent of the bow-and-arrow was a pivotal point in human history. He’d implied that if it had never been invented, the ultimate atomic doom of man might be avoided. And now here I was looking at the world’s first bow-and-arrow in the process of being invented by my friend Geek!