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heard them.
"You're entitled to your opinion, Dr. Blue," he said affably. "Dr. Saddler's doing me a
favor, so in return I'm letting you all shoot questions at me. And I'm answering. I don't give a
damn whether you believe me or not."
MeGannon hastily threw in another question. "How is it that you have a birth certificate,
as you say you have?"
"Oh, I knew a man named Clarence Gaffney once. He got killed by an automobile, and I took
his name."
"Was there any reason for picking this Irish background?"
"Are you Irish, Dr. McGannon?"
"Not enough to matter."
"Okay. I didn't want to hurt any feelings. It's my best bet. There are real Irishmen with
upper lips like mine."
Dr. Saddler broke in. "I meant to ask you, Clarence." She put a lot of warmth into his
name. "There's an argument as to whether your people interbred with mine, when mine overran Europe
at the end of the Mousterian. It's been thought that the 'old black breed' of the west coast of
Ireland might have a little Neanderthal blood."
He grinned slightly. "Well-yes and no. There never was any back in the Stone Age, as far
as I know. But these long-lipped Irish are my fault."
"How?"
"Believe it or not, but in the last fifty centuries there have been some women of your
species that didn't find me too repulsive. Usually there were no offspring. But in the Sixteenth
Century I went to Ireland to live. They were burning too many people for witchcraft in
the rest of Europe to suit me at that time. And there was a woman. The result this time was a
flock of hybrids-cute little devils they were. So the 'old black breed' are my descendants."
"What did happen to your people?" asked McGannon. 'Were they killed off?"
The gnarly man shrugged. "Some of them. We weren't at all warlike. But then the tall ones,
as we called them, weren't either. Some of the tribes of the tall ones looked on us as legitimate
prey, but most of them let us severely alone. I guess they were almost as scared of us as we were
of them. Savages as primitive as that are really pretty peaceable people. You have to work so
hard, and there are so few of you, that there's no object in fighting wars. That comes later, when
you get agriculture and livestock, so you have something worth stealing.
"I remember that a hundred years after the tall ones had come, there were still
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Neanderthalers living in my part of the country. But they died out. I think it was that they lost
their ambition. The tall ones were pretty crude, but they were so far ahead of us that our things
and our customs seemed silly. Finally we just sat around and lived on what scraps we could beg
from the tall ones' camps. You might say we died of an inferiority complex."
"What happened to you?" asked McGannon.
"Oh, I was a god among my own people by then, and naturally I represented them in dealings
with the tall ones. I got to know the tall ones pretty well, and they were willing to put up with
me after all my own clan were dead. Then in a couple of hundred years they'd forgotten all about
my people, and took me for a hunchback or something. I got to - be pretty good at flintworking, so
I could earn my keep. When metal came in I went into that, and finally into blacksmithing. If you
put all the horseshoes I've made in a pile, they'd-well, you'd have a damn big pile of horseshoes
anyway."
"Did you limp at that time?" asked McGannon.
"Uk-huh. I busted my leg back in the Neolithic. Fell out of a tree, and had to set it
myself, because there wasn't anybody around. Why?"
"Vulcan," said McGannon softly.
"Vulcan?" repeated the gnarly man. "Wasn't he a Greek god or something?"
"Yes. He was the lame blacksmith of the gods."
"You mean you think that maybe somebody got the idea from
me? That's an interesting idea. Little late to check up on it, though." Blue leaned forward, and
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