Having come this far in discussion, the Nilotics determined to use the ancient weapons at their disposal to save Homo abnegus from himself. However, violent disagreements over the methods of reeducation to be employed led them to a bloody internecine conflict with those same weapons in the course of which the entire colony was destroyed and its site made untenable for life. About this time, his coal used up. Man reentered the broad, self-replenishing forests.
The reign of Homo abnegus endured for a quarter of a million years. It was disputed finally—and successfully—by a group of Newfoundland retrievers who had been marooned on an island in Hudson Bay when the cargo vessel transporting them to new owners had sunk back in the twentieth century.
These sturdy and highly intelligent dogs, limited perforce to each other’s growling society for several hundred millennia, learned to talk in much the same manner that mankind’s simian ancestors had learned to walk when a sudden shift in botany destroyed their ancient arboreal homes—out of boredom. Their wits sharpened further by the hardships of their bleak island, their imaginations stimulated by the cold, the articulate retrievers built a most remarkable canine civilization in the Arctic before sweeping southward to enslave and eventually domesticate humanity.
Domestication took the form of breeding men solely for their ability to throw sticks and other objects, the retrieving of which was a sport still popular among the new masters of the planet, however sedentary certain erudite individuals might have become.
Highly prized as pets were a group of men with incredibly thin and long arms; another school of retrievers, however, favored a stocky breed whose arms were short, but extremely sinewy; while, occasionally, interesting results were obtained by inducing rickets for a few generations to produce a pet whose arms were sufficiently limber as to appear almost boneless. This last type, while intriguing both esthetically and scientifically, was generally decried as a sign of decadence in the owner as well as a functional insult to the animal.
Eventually, of course, the retriever civilization developed machines which could throw sticks farther, faster, and with more frequency. Thereupon, except in the most backward canine communities, Man disappeared.
Afterword
The army was where I began writing this story—somewhere in the European Theater of Operations, in 1944. I didn’t have a typewriter, but I did have an early ballpoint pen (bought in Greenock, Scotland, the evening after we disembarked from the troop ship) and a pile of blank V-Mail (V-Mail was the unfolded one-page letter forms distributed to overseas soldiers for writing home).
My first intention was to write a satire about the inherent mediocrity of officialdom, especially as exemplified by the officers of the Army of the United States. By the time I completed that draft, in Saarbrucken, Germany, 1945, I had changed my opinion of the army several times over—and, to my chagrin, the army never seemed to notice, or care.
After discharge, but before I began my professional career as a writer, I whittled away at the piece, picking first this target, then that. By 1947, I had settled on the most mediocre man I could see in a high position: Harry S Truman, the President of the United States. He, I admit to my shame and sorrow, was the original original of George Abnego.