od said, "Gabe, run down and see how things are going on Earth." He hadn't showed much concern lately, and I wasn't sure whether it was a deliberate hands-off policy or that he had lost interest.
"Sure you don't want to come?"
"No, I'm busy." He wasn't, not as far as I could see, but you can't always tell. He could be working a thousand wonders in one part of his head while he is carrying on a casual conversation with you in another.
I didn't find things on Earth in very good shape. Adam and Eve, because that was her name since she left Eden, wasn't faring too well. In fact, they was just one step ahead of starvation, having to survive on what berries and roots Eve could find, because Adam was the world's worst at farming. He'd go along and scrape bare a little spot no bigger than your hand and drop a seed on it and that was it. And here would come a bird of some kind right behind him and gobble it up. And if the birds missed it and it did happen to sprout, weeds would come up and choke it out. And Adam would come back a month later and say, "See there, just like I thought, not a blamed thing. God has done cursed the earth so nothing will grow."
To tell you the truth, Adam wasn't the most energetic person in the world. Eve on the other hand was busy from daylight till dark trying to find enough food to keep the two of them going. And when she tried to tell him he ought to cover the seed and keep it watered and weeded, he disregarded anything she said because she was a woman and therefore inferior. It made you wonder if maybe he wasn't too bright, either.
I reported back to God and told him that left alone, I didn't think they'd make it.
"What do you suggest?"
"I think the real problem is ignorance. In Eden they didn't know anything because they didn't need to. In the world, they have to have knowledge to survive. I guess they could learn by trial and error, but that takes more time than they've got. Somebody is going to have to teach them, and with Adam, that's not going to be easy."
"Not too swift, is he?"
"Not too fond of work. And bigoted to boot."
God studied a minute and said, "Mr. Michael!"
Old Michael appeared beside us, and I dropped back a little, because old Michael is the Archangel and I'm just second class.
And God said, "Morning, Mr. Michael. I hate to bother you but I'm going to need the use of a few angels for a while. I want them to go down on Earth and teach my people how to take care of theirselves and just generally watch over things."
Everybody knew old Michael didn't think much of the Earth project, saw it as just another of God's experiments which he would soon lose interest in. "Hurrumph, that's going to present a problem because right now we haven't got any angels to spare," he said.
"Now, Mr. Michael, this is important to me."
"Well, hurrumph, in that case, why, of course we must work something out. You say they would just need to be able to teach elementary skills and supervise? I could draw you up specs for a class of beings, not quite angels, you understand, to handle simple tasks like that."
And God said, "Fine. You do that, and I'll create them. And Mr. Michael, I really appreciate it."
We called them the Watchers, and the word I got was that in trying to teach Adam farming they wound up planting and working his crops for him while he looked on from a convenient shade tree, because the one thing Adam was good at from the first was shifting the burden to somebody else.
