Half stupid •with fatigue, Travis shook his head. “Got my bedroll with m’saddle.” And he was asleep almost before he was fully stretched out on that limited comfort.
In the day light of morning the camp looked disorganized.
But men were already at work sorting out the material, working as if this was a task they had often done before. Travis, helping to shift a large crate, looked up to see the Major.
“Spare me a moment, Fox.” He led the way from the scene of activity.
“You’ve got yourself—and us—in a muddle, young man. Frankly, we can’t turn you loose—for your own sake, as well as ours. This project has to be kept under wraps and there are some very tough boys who would like to pick you up and learn what they could from you. So, we either take you all the way in—or put you on ice. It’s up to you which it is going to be. You’ve been vouched for by Doctor Morgan.”
Travis tensed. What had they raked up now? Memories pinched as might a too-tight cinch about the belly. But if they’d been asking questions of Prentiss Morgan, they must know what happened last year—and why. Apparently they did, for Kelgarries continued:
“Fox, the time when anyone can afford prejudices is past-way past. I know about Hewitt’s offer to the University and what happened when he pressured to have you fired from the expedition staff. But prejudices can stretch both ways—you didn’t stand up to him very long, did you?”
Travis shrugged. “Maybe you’ve heard the term ‘second-class citizen,’ Major. How do you suppose Indians rate with some people in this country? To that crowd we are and well always be dirt}’, ignorant savages. You can’t fight when the other fellow has all the weapons himself. Hewitt gave that grant to the University to do some important work. When he wanted me off, that was that. If I’d let Doctor Morgan fight to keep me on his staff, Hewitt would have snatched his check away again so fast the friction would have burnt the paper. I know Hewitt and what makes him tick. And Doctor Morgan’s work was more important—“ Travis stopped short. Why in the world had he told the Major all that? It was none of Kelgarries’ business why he had quit and come back to the ranch. “There aren’t many like Hewitt left—fortunately. And I assure you we do not follow his methods. If you choose to join us after Ashe briefs you, you’re one of a team. Lord, man” —the Major slapped his hand vigorously against his dusty breeches—“I don’t care if a man is a blue Martian with two heads and four mouths—if he can keep those mouths shut and do his job! It’s the job which counts here, and, according to Morgan, you have something useful to contribute. Make up your mind and let me know. If you don’t want to play—well ship you out tonight, tell your brother that you’re on government work, and keep you quiet for a while. Sorry, but that’s the way it will have to be.”
Travis smiled at that promise. He thought he could get out of here safely on his own if he really wanted to. But now he prodded the Major a little.
“Expedition back to catch a Folsom man—“ But Kelgarries might not have heard, for he had already turned away. Travis followed, to come upon Ashe.
The latter was engaged in assembling a tripod of slender rods with the care of one handling brittle and precious objects. He glanced up as Travis’ shadow fell across his work.
“Decided to join us for a look-see into the past?”
“Do you really mean you can do that?”
“We’ve done more than look.” Ashe adjusted a screw delicately. “We’ve been there.”
Travis stared. He could accept the fact of a new and greatly improved Vis-Tex to provide a peephole into history and prehistory. But time travel was something else.
“It’s perfectly true,” Ashe finished with the screw. His attention passed from the tripod to Travis. And there was that in his manner which carried conviction.
“And we’re going back again.”
“After a Folsom man?” demanded the Apache incredulously.
“After a spaceship.”
3
THIS was no dream, not even a very realistic one. There was Ashe, his fingers busy, his brown face outlined against the red and yellow walls of the cliff and the crumbling ruins they enclosed. This was here and now—yet what Ashe was saying, soberly, and in detail, was the wildest fantasy.
“. . . so we discovered the Reds had time travel and were prospecting back into the past. What they dredged up there couldn’t be explained by any logic based on the history we knew and the prehistory we had pieced out. What we didn’t know then was that they had found the remains—badly smashed—of a spaceship. It was encased in the ice of Siberia, along with preserved mammoth bodies and a few other pertinent clues to suggest the proper era for them to explore. They muddied the trail as well as they could by establishing way stations in other periods of time. Then we chanced on one of those middle points. And the Reds themselves, by capturing our time agents, showed us the ship they were plundering some thousands of years earlier.”
The story made sense—in a crazy kind of way. Travis mechanically handed Ashe the small tool he was groping for in the tangled grass.
“But how did the ship get there?” he asked. “Was there an early civilization on earth which had space travel?”
“That was what we thought—until we found the ship. No, it was from the outside—a cargo freighter lost from some galactic run. Either this world was an astrogation menace of the same type as a reef at sea, or there was some other reason to cause forced landings here. We brought film from the Red time station pinpointing about a dozen such wrecks. And some of those were on this side of the Atlantic.”
“You’re planning to dig for one of those here?”
Ashe laughed. “What d’you think we’d find after about fifteen thousand years and a lot of land upheaval, even local volcanic activity? We want our ship in as good condition as possible.”
“To study?”
“With caution. If you’d check with Ross Murdock he’d give you a good reason for the caution. He was one of our agents who was actually aboard the ship the Reds were plundering. When they cornered him in the control cabin, he accidentally activated the com system and called in the real owners. They weren’t too pleased with the Reds—came down and destroyed their time base on that level and then followed them through the other way stations, destroying each. Remember that hush-hush bang in the Baltic early this year? That was the ‘space patrol,’ or whatever they call themselves, putting finis to the Red project. So far as we know they didn’t discover that we were and are interested in the same thing. So if we find our ship here, we walk softly along its corridors.”
“You want the cargo?”
“In part. But mostly we want the knowledge—what its designers had—the key to space.”
The thrill of that touched Travis. Mankind had reached for the stars for almost two generations. Men had had small successes, many searing failures. Now—what was a satisfactory flight to the barren moon compared to star flight and what lay far out?
Ashe, reading his expression, smiled. “You feel it too, don’t you?”
The Apache nodded absently, gazing down the canyon, trying to believe that somewhere about here, trapped in the solid wall of time, there lay a wrecked star ship waiting for them. But he could not even visualize this country as it must have been in pluvial times. When rain fell most of the year, it must have made a morass of the lands outside the encroaching arms of the shrinking glaciers lying not too far northward. “But why the Folsom points?” Out of the welter of facts and half facts he picked that as a starting point.
“We’ve sent back agents disguised as pre-Celts, as Tartars— or their remoter ancestors—as Bronze Age Beaker Traders, and in half a hundred other character parts. Now there’s a chance we may have to produce a few Folsom spearmen. One of the first and most important rules of this game, Fox, is that one does not interfere with time by introducing any modernisms. There must be no hint of our agents’ real identity. We have no idea •what might happen if one meddled with the stream of history as we know it, and we trust we’ll never have to find out the hard way.”
“Hunters,” Travis said slowly, hardly aware at that moment that he spoke at all. “Mammoth—mastodon—camels—the dire wolf—sabertooth—“
“Why do all those interest you?”
“Why?” Travis echoed and then stopped to examine his reasons. Why had his reaction to Ashe’s picture of the drifting prehistoric hunters in disguise been his own quick inner vision of a land peopled with strange beasts his own race had never hunted? Or had they? Had the Folsom hunters been his remote ancestors, as the pre-Celt and Beaker Trader Ashe mentioned been the other’s fore-fathers? He only knew that he had experienced a sudden thrust of excitement which lingered with him. There built up in him a desire to see that world which his own. age knew only by the dim and often contradictory evidence of rocks, a handful of flint points,-broken bones, the ancient smears of vanished cooking fires.