"Andrew J. Offutt - Gone With the Gods" - читать интересную книгу автора (Offutt Andrew J)

I stopped them. Though I considered making better use of her, I refrained. I said near-people.
Getting my new and revised message across to this more-developed gaggle of humanoid geese was
just as hard as last time, but I prevailed. I had to do a lot of gesturing and a lot of scratching out symbols
in the dirt before, with an obvious mixture of fear and awe, they began to get the message. I worked
harder, and they showed they had it all, but weren't happy about it.
 Here's what I told those poor progenitors of us all, liar that I am:
"Look, I am a Good Guy from the heavens, right? I came down here to this strange world among
you in my skywalking thing, old fader over there. I was fleeing some Bad Guys, I mean real hard cases
and lots of 'em, who are after me. Now I am afraid that I may have gotten all you nice handsome (ugh)
folks in a bit of a spot, because those bad dudes may track me here even as one tracks the foodbeasts.
So, you folks'd better stand by to dig in for swift shelter in case you need itтАФfrom aerial attack."
Now that shook them a bit, but it also sounded like work. They weren't too darned happy about the
Bad Sky-people, but they weren't too enchanted with the prospect of all that digging, either.
So I "told" them a few tales about the Followers. Communication was a problem, and it took awhile.
Signs and drawings and even postures and facial expressions served well, particularly inasmuch as I was
obviously a god, anyhow.
Besides, I'm a writer, and everybody knows writers are brilliant and resourceful, right?
I punctuated the hair-raising tales (they raised the hairs all over the bodies of my audience) with
bloodless little displays of god-power. The matches made them go goggle-eyed and back away. The
cherry bombs I tossedтАФno, not at anyoneтАФwere even more effective. With the semi-automatic rifle,
United States Army surplus (how can they sell these things so cheap?), I cut down a tree a hundred or so
feet away. The thermal drill felled another, almost as spectacularly and far more aromatically. The small
quantity of nitric acid I dribbled onto an animal-hide blanket brought -more wide eyes and oohs and ahs.
Then, using the veedub and some fine and careful settings, I moved some exceedingly weighty chunks
of rock. The mighty BANG that accompanied each mini-jump didn't hurt my cause any.
My demonstrations, along with my tales of possible followers of the inimical persuasion, served, in a
few words, to shake the shinola out of them.
Besides, I showed them how to set this kid's broken leg . . .
Right willingly, they went to work.
Despite their sorrowful importunings, I departedтАФand "returned" a couple of years later. (Took me
less than five minutes.)
"Oh-ohтАФgod's back," their attitudes said, but I was taken on a little tour of inspection.
Fascinating. Caves and tunnels, miracles of hard work and applied genius. Interesting, though crude,
drawings adorned the walls: drawings of me, in my atmosphere suit. All about them, as decor, had been
traced pictogram representations of what I had scratched out in the dust in my efforts at communication.
Circles for suns and planets, squiggles, beelines with arrowheads, this and that. I smiled with pride at the
genius and hard work of my people; some of those pictures were very artistic indeed. Phidias and
Michelangelo were on their way.
But their mandated labors were otherwise pretty much petering out. After all: two years, no sky
people, no returning Good Guy. So I conferred with the high priest (of the Harvey Moss cult).
"Get their tails back to work on those tunnels and things," I laboriously conveyed to that pot-bellied
high-rolling do-naught, "or I'll fry yours the same way I did that shrub!"
With a glance over at the burning bush, he got the message. In short order our people were back at
work, digging and carving.
I time-jumped, returned to them one month after I'd left (a day and a half later, my time), and gave
them their reward: enough fresh game and exotic fruits to feast twice their number. I let the headman fire
the rifle, too, and preserved his fragile dignity by blocking him as, taken by surprise by the recoil, he
started going over backward. I'm sure he wore that bruise on his weighty shoulder like a badge, and
lamented its passing.
(In a cavern deep beneath what is now Normandy there is a pictorial representation of a primitive