They speeded their time rate now, and flashed toward Earth at enormous speed that brought them within the atmosphere in minutes. They had landed in the valley of the Nile. Arcot had suggested this as a means of determining the advancement of life of man. Man had evidently established some of his earliest civilizations in this valley where water and sun for his food plants were a.s.sured.
"Look--there _are_ men here!" exclaimed Wade. Indeed, below them were villages, of crude huts made of timber and stone and mud. Rubble work walls, for they needed little shelter here, and the people were but savages.
"Shall we land?" asked Arcot, his voice a bit unsteady with suppressed excitement.
"Of course!" replied Morey without turning from his station at the window. Below them now, less than half a mile down on the patchwork of the Nile valley, men were standing, staring up, collecting in little groups, gesticulating toward the strange thing that had materialized in the air above them.
"Does every one agree that we land?" asked Arcot.
There were no dissenting voices, and the ship sank gently toward a road below and to the left. A little knot of watchers broke, and they fled in terror as the great machine approached, crying out to their friends, casting affrighted glances at the huge, shining monster behind them.
Without a jar the mighty weight of the ship touched the soil of its native planet, touched it fifty millenniums before it was made, five hundred centuries before it left!
Arcot"s brow furrowed. "There is one thing puzzles me--I can"t see how we can come back. Don"t you see, Morey, we have disturbed the lives of those people. We have affected history. This must be written into the history that exists.
"This seems to banish the idea of free thought. We have changed history, yet history is that which is already done!
"Had I never been born, had--but I _was_ already--I existed fifty-eighty thousand years before I was born!"
"Let"s go out and think about that later. We"ll go to a psych hospital, if we don"t stop thinking about problems of s.p.a.ce and time for a little while. We need some kind of relaxation."
"I suggest that we take our weapons with us. These men may have weapons of chemical nature, such as poisons injected into the flesh on small sticks hurled either by a spring device or by pneumatic pressure of the lungs," said Stel Felso Theu as he rose from his seat unstrapping himself.
"Arrows and blow-guns we call "em. But it"s a good idea, Stel Felso, and I think we will," replied Arcot. "Let"s not all go out at once, and the first group to go out goes out on foot, so they won"t be scared off by our flying around."
Arcot, Wade, Zezdon Afthen, and Stel Felso Theu went out. The natives had retreated to a respectful distance, and were now standing about, looking on, chattering to themselves. They were edging nearer.
"Growing bold," grinned Wade.
"It is the characteristic of intelligent races manifesting itself--curiosity," pointed out Stel Felso Theu.
"Are these the type of men still living in this valley, or who will be living there in fifty thousand years?" asked Zezdon Afthen.
"I"d say they weren"t Egyptians as we know them, but typical Neolithic men. It seems they have brains fully as large as some of the men I see on the streets of New York. I wonder if they have the ability to learn as much as the average man of--say about 1950?"
The Neolithic men were warming up. There was an orator among them, and his grunts, growls, snorts and gestures were evidently affecting them.
They had sent the women back (by the simple and direct process of sweeping them up in one arm and heaving them in the general direction of home). The men were brandishing polished stone knives and axes, various instruments of war and peace. One favorite seemed to be a large club.
"Let"s forestall trouble," suggested Arcot. He drew his ray pistol, and turned it on the ground directly in front of them, and about halfway between them and the Neoliths. A streak of the soil about two feet wide flashed into intense radiation under the impact of millions on millions of horsepower of radiant energy. Further, it was fused to a depth of twenty feet or more, and intensely hot still deeper. The Neoliths took a single look at it, then turned, and raced for home.
"Didn"t like our looks. Let"s go back."
They wandered about the world, investigating various peoples, and proved to their own satisfaction that there was no Atlantis, not at this time at any rate. But they were interested in seeing that the polar caps extended much farther toward the equator; they had not retreated at that time to the extent that they had by the opening of history.
They secured some fresh game, an innovation in their larder, and a welcome one. Then the entire ship was swept out with fresh, clean air, their water tanks filled with water from the cold streams of the melting glaciers. The air apparatus was given a new stock to work over.
Their supplies in a large measure restored, thousands of aerial photographic maps made, they returned once more to s.p.a.ce to wait.
Their time was taken up for the most part by actual work on the enormous ma.s.s of calculation necessary. It is inconceivable to the layman what tremendous labor is involved in the development of a single mathematical hypothesis, and a concrete ill.u.s.tration of it was the long time, with tremendously advanced calculating machines, that was required in their present work.
They had worked out the problem of the time-field, but there they had been aided by the actual apparatus, and the possibilities of making direct tests on machines already set up. The problem of artificial matter, at length fully solved, was a different matter. This had required within a few days of a month (by their clocks; close to thirty thousand years of Earth"s time), for they had really been forced to develop it all from the beginning. In the small improvements Arcot had inst.i.tuted in Stel Felso Theu"s device, he had really merely followed the particular branch that Stel Felso Theu had stumbled upon. Hence it was impossible to determine with any great variety, the type of matter created. Now, however, Arcot could make any known kind of matter, and many unknown kinds.
But now came the greatest problem of all. They were ready to start work on the data they had collected in s.p.a.ce.
"What," asked Zezdon Afthen, as he watched the three terrestrians begin their work, "is the nature of the thing you are attempting to harness?"
"In a word, energy," replied Arcot, pausing.
"We are attempting to harness energy in its primeval form, in the form of a s.p.a.ce-field. Remember, ma.s.s is a measure of energy. Two centuries ago a scientist of our world proposed the idea that energy could be measured by ma.s.s, and proceeded to prove that the relationship was the now firmly intrenched formula E=Mc^{2}.
"The sun is giving off energy. It is giving off ma.s.s, then, in the form of light photons. The field of the sun"s gravity must be constantly decreasing as its ma.s.s decreases. It is a collapsing field. It is true, the sun"s gravitational field does decrease, by a minute amount, despite the fact that our sun loses a thousand million tons of matter every four minutes. The percentage change is minute, but the energy released is--immeasurable.
"But, I am going to invent a new power unit, Afthen. I will call it the "sol," the power of a sun. One sol is the rating of our sun. And I will measure the energy I use in terms of sun-powers, not horsepower. That may tell you of its magnitude!"
"But," Zezdon Afthen asked, "while you men of Earth work on this problem, what is there for us? We have no problems, save the problem of the fate of our world, still fifty thousand years of your time in the future. It is terrible to wait, wait, wait and think of what may be happening in that other time. Is there nothing we can do to help? I know our hopeless ignorance of your science. Stel Felso Theu can scarcely understand the thoughts you use, and I can scarcely understand his explanations! I cannot help you there, with your calculations, but is there nothing I can do?"
"There is, Ortolian, decidedly. We badly need your help, and as Stel Felso Theu cannot aid us here as much as he can by working with you, I will ask him to do so. I want your knowledge of psycho-mechanical devices to help us. Will you make a machine controlled by mental impulses? I want to see such a system and know how it is done that I may control machines by such a system."
"Gladly. It will take time, for I am not the expert worker that you are, and I must make many pieces of apparatus, but I will do what I can,"
exclaimed Zezdon Afthen eagerly.
So, while Arcot and his group continued their work of determining the constants of the s.p.a.ce-energy field, the others were working on the mental control apparatus.
Chapter XV
ALL-POWERFUL G.o.dS
Again there was a period of intense labor, while the ship drifted through time, following Earth in its mad careening about the sun, and the sun as it rushed headlong through s.p.a.ce. At the end of a thirty-day period, they had reached no definite position in their calculations, and the Talsonian reported, as a medium between the two parties of scientists, that the work of the Ortolian had not reached a level that would make a scientific understanding possible.
As the ship needed no replenishing, they determined to finish their present work before landing, and it was nearly forty thousand years after their first arrival that they again landed on Earth.
It was changed now; the ice caps had retreated visibly, the Nile delta was far longer, far more prominent, and cities showed on the Earth here and there.
Greece, they decided would be the next stop, and to Greece they went, landing on a mountain side. Below was a village, a small village, a small thing of huts and hovels. But the villagers attacked, swarming up the hillside furiously, shouting and shrieking warnings of their terrible prowess to these men who came from the "shining house,"
ordering them to flee from them and turn over their possession to them.
"What"ll we do?" asked Morey. He and Arcot had come out alone this time.
"Take one of these fellows back with us, and question him. We had best get a more or less definite idea of what time-age we are in, hadn"t we?
We don"t want to overshoot by a few centuries, you know!"
The villagers were swarming up the side of the hill, armed with weapons of bronze and wood. The bronze implements of murder were rare, and evidently costly, for those that had them were obviously leaders, and better dressed than the others.
"Hang it all, I have only a molecular pistol. Can"t use that, it would be a plain ma.s.sacre!" exclaimed Arcot.