They had not come far. Two red bodies barely three feet tall sprawled near each other face down in the grass. Paul noticed oval bulges between shoulder blades modified to accommodate them, the pathos of fingers—seven-fingered hands—holding earth in a final grasp. The male wore a loincloth of black fabric and a quiver almost full of arrows; the female had a grass skirt, and her hand was tight on a stone-headed spear longer than herself. A bow of carved wood lay some distance away; one could see how the little man had crawled in his agony after the bow was lost. Wright turned them over gently—bald skulls, no trace of body hair on skin of a rich copper color exciting to a painter's vision, green eyes with no visible whites in human faces heavily tattooed, wide-open eyes, accusing no one. The bodies were in rigor, a shaft in the man's neck, the woman pierced by an arrow in the side. Blood colored the grass, dry but eloquent.
"War too," said Wright, and pulled out the arrows, showing Paul the stone heads, the intricate carving of the wood, thin-whittled wooden vanes taking the place of feathers. "Stone Age war...."
The male pygmy was the smaller of the two, and softer, his shape not feminine but rounded and smooth. Both seemed mature, so far as age could be guessed at all. The woman was rugged, with a coarser skin and the scar tissue of old wounds; her two pairs of breasts were scarcely more prominent than the ridged muscles of her midget chest.
Wright mulled it over, kneading his wrinkled throat. "Physical refinements of evolution as far along as our own. Straight thigh and neck, perfect upright posture; there was no slouch or belly sag when they were on their feet. Human jaw, big brain case. That furry giant I saw in the woods had complete upright posture too. Oh, it's natural, Paul. You stick fins on an ocean vertebrate, turn him into a four-legged land animal, give him a few hundred million years. Almost bound to free his front limbs if they've stayed unspecialized." In the gaunt face, sadness and pity struggled with a bitter sort of mirth. "The brain gets large, boy, and away you go, to—ach—to the Federation versus the Asian Empire—Lincoln, Rembrandt, the state papers of Abraham Brown. And to you and Dorothy and the baby." Wright stood erect, brushing bony knees, calm again. "I'm almost pleased to find it this primitive. I don't think it can have gone further anywhere on the planet, or we'd have seen cities, farms, roads, in the photographs. Unless——"
"Unless what, Doctor?"
"Oh—unless there might be forms with no Earth parallel. In the forests perhaps—even underground. Thought of that? But that's speculations, and our little soldiers here are fact. They have a civilization—arrows say so, tattooing, garments. Rigid, tradition-bound—or maybe not, depending on how much language they've developed to tie 'emselves in knots with."
"Bow and arrow—why, suh, almost as advanced as not being afraid to end a sentence with a preposition."
"Hell with you. Twenty thousand years ago, or whenever it was we reached our present physique, if there'd been anything external to teach men how to behave like grown-ups——. Well, we had to sweat it out—tribal wars, bigger wars, venerated fears, errors, and stupidities. But maybe here——"
Wright shut his eyes. His thin cheeks were too bright; there was a tremor in the rifle tip. "Wish I knew, Paul. We have to try."