The two sections of the new miniaturized camera were now lowered into the underground room through the opening in the top of the mound. Its electric cables extended to the computer and reproducer units, still aboard the truck.
Tom trained the camera detectors on the wall, then switched on power. Moments later, Dick Folsom, who had remained topside, called down the reading which appeared on the time dial.
“Hold onto your hat, skipper!” he shouted. “Those symbols were carved around 1000 b.c.!”
“Wow!” Bud gasped. “Just think, Tom-those space friends of yours were advanced enough in science to make interplanetary voyages almost three thousand years ago!”
“My ancestors came here three thousand years ago?” Quetzal exclaimed.
“If they were ancestors, yes,” Tom replied.
More photographing revealed that the warrior on the rocky wall had been carved much later-about a.d. 800. Tom said he thought the spacemen’s carvings had been put on rocks out-of-doors. Later, they were considered sacred and a temple had been built around the symbols to preserve them. An excited discussion of the spacemen’s probable fate followed. Had they perished, remained, or returned to their own planet?
Chow finally changed the subject. “Brand those jaguar whiskers, but I think the main point o’ this whole expedition is that Tom’s retroscope is a bang-up success.”
Everyone cheered this statement, then Bud said, “Well, genius boy, what’s next? Another invention, or a mystery?”
Both were to come to the boys in their adventure with Tom’s Spectromarine Selector.