Of course, no modern beer drinker would do that, but one of the little furry people might have-gladly. In their diet, brains were a delicacy. Even each other's.
The visitors didn't think much of the furry people's eating habits. Still, the creatures had one anatomical characteristic that interested the visitors a lot-in a sort of winky-jokey way, with sexual overtones. Like the visitors, the australopithecines were bipeds. Unlike the visitors, their legs were positioned so close to each other that they actually rubbed together at the thighs when they walked-and for the males, at least, that seemed to the visitors to present real problems, since the male sexual organs hung between the thighs.
(Some hundreds of thousands of years later, the then paramount denizens of Earth, the human race, would ask themselves similar questions about the long-gone visitors ... and they, too, would fail to understand.)
So the visitors from space looked the little furry creatures over for a while, then chirruped their disappointment to each other, got back in their spaceships, and went glumly away.
Their visit had not been a total loss. Any planet that bore life at all was a rare jewel in the galaxy. Still, they had really been hoping for a more sophisticated kind of life-someone to meet and be friends and interchange views and have discussions with. These little furry animals definitely weren't up to any of that. The visitors didn't leave them quite untouched, though. The visitors had learned, from dismal experience, that faintly promising species of creatures might easily die off, or take a wrong turning somewhere along the evolutionary line, and so never realize their promise. So the visitors had a policy of establishing a sort of, well, call them "game preserves." Accordingly, they took a few of the australopithecines away with them in their spaceships when they left. They put the little beasts in a safe place, in the hope that they might amount to something after all. Then the visitors departed.
Time passed . . . a lot of time.
The australopithecines never did get very far on Earth. But then their close relatives-the genus Homo, better known as you and me
and all our friends-came along. The genus Homo people worked out a lot better. Over some five hundred thousand years, in fact, they did just about all the things the visitors had hoped for from the australopithecines.
These "humans," as they called themselves, were pretty clever at thinking things up. As the ages passed they invented a lot of neat stuff-the wheel, and agriculture, and draft animals, and cities, and levers and sailing ships and the internal combustion engine and credit cards and radar and spacecraft. They didn't invent them all at once, of course. And not everything they invented turned out to be an absolute boon, because along the way they also invented clubs and swords and bows and catapults and cannon and nuclear missiles. These humans had a real talent for messing things up.
For instance, a lot of their inventions were the kind that looked as though they ought to do something, but really did something very different-which was the case with all their "peacekeeping" gadgets, none of which kept any peace. "Medicine" was another case in point. They invented what they called medicine quite early-that is, they invented the practice of doing all sorts of bizarre things to people who were unfortunate enough to get sick. Ostensibly the things they did were intended to make the sick person better; often enough they went the other way. At best, they generally didn't
help. The man who was dying of malaria may have been grateful to his local doctor for putting on the devil mask and dancing around the bed, hut the patient died anyway. By the time human medicine reached the point where a sick person's chances of recovery were better with a doctor than without one-that took about 499,900 of those 500,000 years-humans had managed to find a more efficient way of screwing things up. They had invented money. Human medicine became fairly good at curing many human ailments, but more and more of the human race began to have trouble finding the money to pay for it.
And along about the same time, the humans who lived on this little green planet called Earth finally reached the point where they could get off it for the first time. The age of human exploration of space had begun.
In a sense, this was a happy coincidence. By the time human beings reached the point of being able to launch a spaceship, it may well have been true that it was also getting to be a good time to think seriously about leaving the Earth, for good. The Earth was a pretty good place to be rich in. It was a very bad one to be poor.
By then, of course, the people who had dropped in on the australopithecines were long gone.
