Space Science Fiction Super Pack. Randall Garrett
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that, the smashing of the jug was part of the ceremony of worshipping him. It left him unhappy at first, but sober. After awhile, the unhappiness disappeared, but the soberness remained. From now on, he would act as a god should act.
The natives were not stupid, he saw that very clearly. The first jugs they had offered him had been beautiful objects, of excellent workmanship. But when they perceived that the only use he had for them was to break them, the quality deteriorated rapidly. Now the jugs they brought him were crude things indeed, made for the sole purpose of being smashed. He wondered how many other tribes had tricked their gods similarly.
No, they were not at all stupid. It struck him that with such advantages of civilization as he himself had enjoyed, they would have gone much further than he did. Two weeks or so after he had come down from the sky to be their god, he saw that they had learned from him. One of the young men appeared during the day wearing a wooden helmet. It was a helmet obviously patterned after his own, although it had no glass or plastic, and the openings in front of the eyes were left blank. The mythical Earth-hero, Prometheus, had brought fire down from the skies. He had brought the Helmet. He was Bradley, the Helmet-Bringer.
Even at that he had underestimated his worshippers. He had thought at first that the helmets were meant merely for ornament and decoration. He learned better one day when a swarm of creatures like flying lizards swept down out of a group of trees in a fierce attack. He had not known that such creatures existed here, and now that he saw them, he realized how fortunate it was that they were not more numerous. They had sharp teeth and sharper claws, and they tore at his head with a ferocity that struck fear into his heart. His gun was of less use than usual against them. He could catch one or two, but the others moved too swiftly for him to aim.
By this time, others of the natives wore wooden helmets, and he could see how the sharp claws ripped splinter after splinter from them. But the birds or lizards, or whatever they were, didn’t go unscathed. From a sort of skin bellows, several of the natives blew a gray mist at them, and where the mist made contact with the leather skin, the flying creatures seemed to be paralyzed in mid-flight, and they fell to the ground, where they were easily crushed to death. By the time they had given up the fight and fled, half a dozen of them were lying dead.
They were evidently useless for food because of the poison they contained. He was surprised to see, however, that the natives still had a use for them. They dragged the dead creatures into a field of growing crops, and left them there to rot into fertilizer.
But such incidents as this, he found, were to be rare. For the most part, the life here was peaceful, and he found himself liking it more and more. Now, without laughter, he wondered again what his mother would have thought of him.
She would have been proud. He realized now that she had done her best for him. And when every one else had given up hope for him, she had not. Perhaps she had protected him too much—but she had early learned the need for protection. He could look at her now in a new light. Her own father had died early in life, and then her husband soon after her son had been born. She had faced a tough fight, and had thought to spare him what she herself had gone through. Too bad she hadn’t realized exactly what she was doing. She was bringing him up with the ability, as the old epigram had it, to resist everything but temptation.
The temptation to steal that petty cash, to put his hands into a drunk’s pocket and lift the man’s wallet, to lie to a pretty girl, to slug a helpless victim—he had resisted none of them. He had resisted nothing until that day he had poured the jugful of liquor on the ground and smashed the jug itself.
But could he blame his mother for all that? It had all been his own fault.
*
And it would be his own fault if he failed to resist the new temptation that now reared its pretty head—Aoooya. She had taken to coming to his hut-shrine for a private little ceremony of her own. You might almost have thought that she had fallen in love with him as an individual. He wondered whether she had been impressed by his helmet. Did she take that to be his actual head? No, of course not. They had made helmets for themselves, therefore they knew that the thing he wore was also a helmet. Perhaps they knew more about him than he thought.
But they continued to worship him, that was the main thing. And Aoooya brought him, every day, little presents, special flowers and food delicacies, that argued a personal affection.
This was a danger that he recognized from the beginning. Perhaps a god might fall in love with a mortal without losing his godliness. Perhaps. It had happened before. But, however the rest of the tribe might react to the idea, Bradley had noticed one young man who liked to stay near the girl, and he knew that this rival wouldn’t take kindly to it at all. He might resent the god’s behavior. And what happened when these people didn’t like the way a god behaved? Why, they struck his head off.
The god might act first, of course. The young man wouldn’t stand a chance against him if he used his gun. In fact, Bradley could blast the other man unobserved, make him disappear into vapor, without leaving any traces of how he died. That was murder, but if a god couldn’t get away with murder, what sort of god was he? A pretty poor, cheap sort indeed. Yes, he could make his own rules.
And he could go on, maintaining his godhood by little murders of that sort, and other deadly miracles, until they hated him more than they loved him. That would follow inevitably. And then, when they all hated him, not even his gun would save him. Then—
“You’re a liar,” he told himself fiercely. “That isn’t the thing you’re afraid of. Your weakness is that you don’t have a murderous nature. You could kill one or two of them and get away with it, and you’d be able to control yourself and kill no more. That time you hit the man over the head, you didn’t intend to kill him either. You were more frightened, at first, anyway, by the thought that you might have killed him, than by the danger of being caught. You were overjoyed when he lived.
“You hate to kill, that’s your trouble. You’ve had a sense of responsibility all along, but it never had a chance to develop. Now it’s developed. You feel responsible for these people, for Aoooya and for the rest of them. That’s why you can’t take advantage of them. You’ve been posing as a rebel all your life, and you’re just a respectable, law-abiding citizen at heart.”
He winced at the thought. His own society had never accepted him at his own valuation. This one took him for a much greater being than he took himself, and there seemed to be nothing to do but to live up to what he was expected to be.
*
All the same, Aoooya continued to be a tempting morsel, and sooner or later, he feared, he would not be able to resist her. And then the planet itself provided a diversion.
They had never seen such a thing and had no idea of what it presaged, but he knew. He had heard of it on Earth and on Venus, and he had seen it on other planets where the rock formations had not yet settled down. A little hollow appeared first in the ground, and then the hollow was pushed out and suddenly blown into the air. Steam whistled through the newly made vent, a shower of steam and hot dust and red hot fragments of rock. Slowly the vent grew, until the cloud from the terrifying geyser darkened the sky and spread panic through the tribe.
He knew what would happen next. They were running around in terror, but not for one moment was he himself in doubt. He donned his complete space suit, in order to impress them the more, then stalked into the middle of them, and said, “Pick up all your possessions and follow me.”
They stared at him, and he showed them what he meant by picking up the belongings of one household in his gloved hands, and handing them to a waiting woman. Then, when they had grasped the idea and were gathering all they owned, he led them toward the safety of the trees. Five minutes after they had set off, the lava began to flow from the new-born volcano, scorching the ground for a hundred yards around, sparks smoking and smoldering in the treetops.
The head start he had given them was enough to help them escape the resultant forest fire. All that day they traveled, until finally they came to a forest which couldn’t burn, and here they rested. And here they settled down to build their lives anew.
It