Divinity | Page 2

people--
They must have seen him tumble down from the sky and land unhurt.
They carried food and flowers, and now they were kneeling down to
him as to a--Suddenly he realized. To them he was a god.
The thought of it made him weak. To Malevski and the ship's crew he
was a criminal, a cheap chiseler and pickpocket, almost a murderer,
escaping credit for that crime only by grace of his own good luck and
his victim's thick skull. They had felt such contempt for him that they
hadn't even bothered to guard him too carefully. They had thought him
a complete coward, without the courage to risk an escape, without the
intelligence to find the opportunities that might be offered to him.
They hadn't realized how terrified he was of the thing with which they
threatened him. Regeneration, the giving up of his old identity? Not for
him. They hadn't realized that he preferred the risks of a dangerous
escape to the certainty of that.
And here he was a god.
* * * * *
He lifted his hand without thinking, to wipe away the perspiration that
covered his forehead. But before the hand touched his helmet he
realized what he was doing, and let the hand drop again.
To the people watching him the gesture must have seemed one of
double significance. It was at once a sign of acceptance of their food
and flowers, and their offer of good-will, and at the same time an order
to withdraw. They bowed, and moved backwards away from him.
Behind him they left their gifts.
They seemed human, human enough for the features on the men's faces
to impress him as strong and resourceful, for him to recognize that the
women were attractive. And if they were human, the food must be fit

for human beings. Whether it was or wasn't, however, again he had no
choice.
He waited until they were out of sight, and then, stiffly, he removed his
helmet and ate. The food tasted good. And with his helmet off, with the
wind on his face, and the woods around him whispering in his ears, it
was a meal fit for the being they thought him to be.
He was a god. Possibly it was the space suit which made him one,
especially the goggle-eyed helmet. He could take no chance of
becoming an ordinary mortal, and that would mean that he would have
to wear the space suit continually. Or at least the helmet. That, he
decided, was what he would do. That would leave his body reasonably
free, and at the same time impress them with the fact that he was
different from them.
By manipulating the air valve he would be able to make the viewplates
cloud and uncloud at will, thus giving dramatic expression to his
feelings. It would be a pleasant game to play until he had learned
something of their language. It would be safer than trying to make
things clear to them with speech and gestures that they could not
understand anyway.
He wondered how long it would be before Malevski would find the
shattered lifeboat drifting in space, and then trace its course and decide
where he had landed. That would be the end of his divinity. Meanwhile,
until then--
Until then he was a god. Unregenerated. Permanently unregenerated.
Holding his helmet, he threw back his head and laughed loud and long,
and wondered what his mother would have thought.
* * * * *
For awhile he was being left alone. They were afraid of him, of course,
fearful of intruding with their merely mortal affairs upon the
meditations of so divine a being. Later, however, curiosity and perhaps
a desire to show him off to newcomers might draw them back. In the

interval, it would be well to find out what sort of place this was in
which he had landed.
He looked around him. There were trees, with sharp green branches,
sharp green twigs, sharp red leaves. He shuddered as he thought of
what would have happened to him if he had fallen on the point of a
branch. The trees seemed rigid and unbending in the wind that caressed
his face. There were no birds that he could see. Small black objects
bounded from one branch to another as if engaged in complicated
games of tag. He wondered if the games were as serious as the one he
had been playing with Malevski, with himself as It.
* * * * *
There were no ground animals in sight. If any showed up later, they
couldn't be too dangerous, not with the natives living here in such
apparent peace and contentment. There probably wouldn't be anything
that his pocket gun, which he had taken