Chapter 16

All the way off, as I dragged the dead dumbass, I wondered if I'd gone too far by just blowing him away. Of course behavior like that would have had me in jail before quick could get ready if I'd still been anywhere near where I'd come from. I wasn't there though. In fact I wasn't sure just where I was. I did know that the concept of laws to bring order to one's life hadn't reared its ugly head here yet.

Laws were not a concern here. Hell, what I'd call decent behavior wasn't even a hint in a judge's eye yet. Here and now, wherever they were, it wasn't exactly dog eat dog, but it was man kill man to establish who was right or wrong.

One of the most surprising things to me was the ability of the women to work together peacefully while the men continued to think they could get their way about things just by dominating the women and steering clear of conflict with other men somewhere down the line before they made another man mad enough to kill them.

Even with the limited interaction I'd had with the people here I'd already seen that the ones who were quickest to kill ended up running things. It was as if their whole society was built on the bark until the big dog bites you and then back off scenario. Like a pack of male dogs sniffing and chasing after a bitch in heat.

Another thing was apparent. The men here and now were slow learners. Either that, or I was expecting too much from them. It was just bad luck for them that I was ahead of the game on knowledge of where things would go if I let them keep doing as they'd been doing. Things would go right into the crapper for the next few tens of thousands of years according to the lessons of history.

Many of the men were perfectly willing to let the women keep doing most of the work while they sat around on their asses, killed something to eat every now and then, or knocked off some other man to steal his women and his things.

Oh yeh, I'd noticed most of the men looking at the gaggle of women I had and the things I had and spending a little time wondering if they could get them away from me. They didn't have a chance and for the life of me I couldn't figure out a use for those that were too stupid to catch on to the fact.

Physically, one to one I could kick the shit out of any of them, probably any three. The greenies had made sure of that. I was stronger and faster than anyone and everyone here. My firearms simply made me even closer to invincible.

Maybe I'd have been better off to just let the other camp go on bickering among themselves and killing each other off. Being a crusader for civilized behavior wasn't in my plans, but the other camp had been unlucky enough to be near where the spacemen had put me down. I didn't need a world of shit developing so close by every few days. If nothing else I was going to put a stop to that. I was going to keep getting rid of troublemakers until I didn't have any left. I wasn't in the market to be a King, but I sure as hell intended to be a democratic majority of one until things suited me.

Sure, I knew we needed children coming and that we'd be better off with some genetic diversification. Well, we'd have some for a while, even if I were the only man around. I wasn't related to any of these women at all. If we could keep a few of the men, so much the better, up to a point.

If the men we kept couldn't learn to adapt to the new situation there was no need to have them around. We didn't need more men to keep trying to put all the work on the women and then teaching their sons to do the same thing.

Don't get me wrong, I'm not a raving women's libber. I do have common sense though, and I didn't know of a single reason to have a bunch of men laying around, doing nothing but getting fat, and teaching their sons to do the same thing.

Protection from dangerous animals wasn't that big a deal anymore, not for me and mine anyway. Hell, they couldn't even get into the caves. They came around all the time and we could even afford to attract them with the refuse pile because they had almost no chance of hurting anyone.

Before long the refuse pile would be gone, because we'd be feeding any leftovers to the pigs instead of putting them outside for bait. All we had to do was kill anything dangerous that came around, stop leaving their entrails outside, and sooner or later the pattern would be over and done with by killing anything that was on to it.

Hell, I'd just have to do the same with the men. I didn't have time to see if I could retrain the disagreeable among them. If they couldn't buy a clue for themselves they had to go, and there was no reason to send them away and hope they didn't hang around trying to catch me napping and put a spear in me. That would just be stupidity. Killing them while I had them on hand was much safer for me and the others I was going to let live.

I know that some people believed every human life was sacred, but I wasn't one of them. To me, sacred things came from other sacred things. Humans came from fucking and that didn't seem all that sacred. It was a hell of a lot of fun, no doubt about it, but it wasn't sacred. Shit, it was as common as dirt.

Children weren't sacred. They were precious but not sacred. They also would end up worthless without meaningful training and social indoctrination toward a productive goal. They needed someone to tell them how things had to be, and I didn't want a bunch of lazy assholes teaching their sons to follow in their father's footsteps. If father figures ended up few and far between from thinning the herd, so be it. Quality beat quantity every time as far as I was concerned.

I couldn't see any reason to feed a bunch of lazy men just so we could say all the children had his or her own father. I was pretty sure the spacemen put me down in good enough shape to make babies, and if I had to make most of them for the foreseeable future, I could probably hold up under the hard use. Hell, I liked pussy as much as anyone.

My dragging duty was over and by now I'd made it back to the rear entrance. I walked around to the front one and tried to climb back down off the soapbox I'd been using while I convinced myself that doing away with malcontents was the right thing.

In my estimation it wasn't so much that I was playing God with the lives of others. I was busily about the job of being the leader of my own little clan that I'd assembled. Getting rid of troublemakers was a duty that was incumbent on the leader of any group of people. Yes, I was using drastic measures to get the job done, but in a situation where disorganization and infighting could get people killed, drastic measures were called for. That was my story anyway and I was sticking to it.

When I walked into the residence cave I was surprised to see that everything seemed to be going fairly smoothly. Shanay and the women she'd picked were cooking and the men were going about arranging their things into a semblance of order. Damned if two of them weren't in the pseudo bathroom. One was taking a bath and the other seemed to be examining the plumbing as if to learn how it worked. I hoped that the bathing part at least would catch on fast.

Doing my best not to be obvious about it, I made a count of the new men. We had ten left after the thinning they'd made me do. Paying a little more attention I could see that none of them seemed in the least distressed to be doing what the last asshole had called woman's work. In fact, most of them seemed to be familiar with the things they were doing and they actually looked like they enjoyed it. Maybe I was done with troublemakers for a while.