To Your Scattered Bodies Go by Phillip Jose Farmer

“Have you noticed the complete absence of animal life?” Frigate said.

“Not even an insect.” Burton exclaimed. He strode to a pile of broken rock and picked up a fist-sized chunk of greenish stone. “Chert,” he said. “If there’s enough, we can make knives, spearheads, adzes, and axes. And with them build houses, boats, and many other things.”

“Tools and weapons must be bound to wooden shafts,” Frigate said. “What do we use as binding material? “Perhaps human skin,” Burton said.

The others looked shocked. Burton gave a strange chirruping laugh, incongruous in so masculine-looking a man. He said, “If we’re forced to kill in self-defense or lucky enough to stumble over a corpse some assassin has been kind enough to prepare for us, we’d be fools not to use what we need. However, if any of you feel self-sacrificing enough to offer your own epidermises for the good of the group, step forward! We’ll remember you in our wills.” ”

Surely, you’re joking,” Alice Hargreaves said. “I can’t say I particularly care for such talk.”

Frigate said, “Hang around him, and you’ll hear lots worse,” but he did not explain what he meant.

6

Burton examined the rock along the base of the mountain. The blue-black densely grained stone of the mountain itself was some kind of basalt. But there were pieces of chert scattered on the surface of the earth or sticking out of the surface at the base. These looked as if they might have fallen down from a projection above, so it was possible that the mountain was not a solid mass of basalt. Using a piece of chert, which had a thin edge, he scraped away a patch of the lichenous growth. The stone beneath it seemed to be a greenish dolomite. Apparently the pieces of chert had come from the dolomite, though there was no evidence of decay or fracture of the vein.

The lichen could be Parmelia saxitilis, which also grew on old bones, including skulls, and hence, according to The Doctrine of Signatures, was a cure for epilepsy and a healing salve for wounds.

Hearing stone banging away on stone, he returned to the group. All were standing around the subhuman and the American, who were squatting back to back and working on the chert. Both had knocked out rough handaxes. While the others watched, they produced six more. Then each took a large chert nodule and broke it into two with a hammerstone. Using one piece of the nodule, they began to knock long thin flakes from the outside rim of the nodule. They rotated the nodule and banged away until each had about a dozen blades.

They continued to work, one a type of man who had lived a hundred thousand years or more before Christ, the other the refined end of human evolution, a product of the highest civilization (technologically speaking) of Earth, and, indeed, one of the last men on Earth – if he was to be believed.

Suddenly, Frigate howled, jumped up, and hopped around holding his left thumb. One of his strokes had missed its target. Kazz grinned, exposing huge teeth like tombstones. He got up, too, and walked into the grass with his curious rolling gait. He returned a few minutes later with six bamboo sticks with sharpened ends and several with straight ends. He sat down and worked on one stick until he had split the end and inserted the triangular chipped-down point of an axehead into the split end. This he bound with some long grasses.

Within half an hour, the group was armed with handaxes, spears with bamboo hafts, daggers, and spears with wooden points and with stone tips.

By then Frigate’s hand had quit hurting so much and the bleeding had stopped. Burton asked him how he happened to be so proficient in stone working.

“I was an amateur anthropologist,” he said. “A lot of people – a lot relatively speaking – learned how to make tools and weapons from stone as a hobby. Some of us got pretty good at it, though I don’t think any modern ever got as skillful and as swift as a Neolithic specialist. Those guys did it all their lives, you know.