He turned his lumpish back on her, left the hut, and went back to his work. He was a god, she decided. He hadn’t been a god when he’d been with her. He’d been her man then, a good man. He wasn’t a man any longer. Daniel was a very primitive god. A very small-scale god. A primitive steam-engine god. An amphibian god dutifully slogging the mud for some coming race of reptiles. A very minor god, maybe something like a garden gnome, a dryad, a tommy-knocker. He’d done his best with the allowable technology, but the allowable technology was just barely enough. Machines were so evanescent. Machines just flitted through the fabric of the universe like a fit through the brain of God, and in their wake people stopped being people. But people didn’t stop going on.