them. He was fleet of foot. He had trapped the last of the four-footed animals that way. But Kogar realized that he was weaker now and not so swift. Besides, he wasn't certain how swift these strange creatures were in their own right. They might even be like the sky creatures, able to swoop up and away if frightened. Although he saw no signs of wings Kogar couldn't be sure.
Merena touched his arm again.
"They move," she whispered.
The creatures were indeed, moving toward them once more. Kogar wondered if there might not be a watering place nearby, unknown to him, to which they were going. He had found many such watering places by following the animals.
Kogar had a sudden idea. He turned to Merena.
"By that other great rock, over there," he pointed a few hundred feet away to a boulder lying just behind the strange creatures, "you take your place."
Merena looked uncomprehending Kogar picked up the second of his sharpened stones. He handed it to her. He had taught Merena to hurl the sharpened stones with a fair amount of skill and cunning. From short distances—if the targets moved slowly as these did—she was deadly.
"Behind that great rock," Kogar repeated, "you take a place!"
Merena nodded, understanding. She smiled at her mate in open admiration of his superior cunning. Kogar was infinitely pleased by the implied compliment. Merena took the stone and flattened herself out on the ground, preparing to inch along to the other boulder.
"After I throw," Kogar reminded her. "Wait until then."
Stealthily, with the ability of long practice[1] Merena moved away toward the position her mate had indicated. Kogar watched her progress, aware at the same time that the strange creatures had given them additional advantage by halting again and making angry sounds at each other.
Almost at the same time that the strange creatures resumed their movement toward his boulder, Kogar saw Merena gain the shelter of the other great rock a hundred feet behind them.
ONE of the strange creatures as it moved closer, brought forth a stick from its chest and put it in its mouth. Kogar frowned bewilderedly at this. Then the same strange creature produced a glittering thing and held it up to the stick.
The glittering thing puffed a tiny spurt of orange, then the stick smoked odd blue clouds. The tiny spurt of orange had disappeared now, and the creature put the glittering thing away. But the stick still made small blue clouds. And the blue clouds issued
- ↑ Science has many instances on record of human beings, who, when placed in a savage environment, developed the faculties of the beast to a high degree. The ability to stalk a quarry, to move noiselessly, and to remain hidden from the eyes of an intended victim, is thought by some scientists to be an ingrained heredity, handed down to man by his ancestral past, when he was in the process of evolving from the actual beast, to the true man. But other scientists deny this, and insist that it is environment alone that makes a man develop animalistic abilities. In this story we have an interesting commentary on this scientific conception. Here, the author's characters, placed by a terrible, civilization-wrecking war in a very primitive environment, forced to use mind, muscle, and stealthy cunning to procure food and to satisfy the most powerful of all urges, hunger, have slipped back in a few years to an animalistic plane that is actually not any different from that of the dawn man himself. Kogar and Merena are the products of our own civilization—yet, after the greatest of all wars, they become savages on a swift swoop back through time. Are we really as civilized as we think we are? And are we really as savage as we ever were in the past? Are men like Hitler really throwbacks?—Ed.
