“This was insinuated once”—Ashe was lying flat now, gazing speculatively up at the projection of logs and earth which made them a partial roof— “along with a lot of other bright ideas, by a gentleman named Charles Fort, who took a lot of pleasure in pricking what he considered to be vastly over-inflated scientific pomposity. He gathered together four book loads of reported incidents of unexplainable happenings which he dared the scientists of his day to explain. And one of his bright suggestions was that such phenomena as the vast artificial earthworks found in Ohio and Indiana were originally thrown up by space castaways to serve as SOS signals—an intriguing idea. We know that example was wrong, but others might not be.”
“But if such spaceships were wrecked on this world, I still don’t see why we didn’t find traces of them in our own time.”
“Because that wreck you explored was bedded in a glacial era. Do you have any idea how long ago that was, counting from our own time? There were at least three glacial periods—and we don’t know in which one the Russians went visiting. That age began about a million years before we were born, and the last of the ice ebbed out of New York State some thirty-eight thousand years ago, boy. That was the early Stone Age, reckoning it by the scale of human development, with an extremely thin population of the first real types of man clinging to a few warmer fringes of wilderness.
“Climate changes, geographical changes, all altered the face of our continents. There was a sea in Kansas; England was part of Europe. So, even though as many as fifty such ships were lost here, they could all have been ground to bits by the ice flow, buried miles deep in quakes, or rusted away generations before the first true homo sapiens arrived to wonder at them. Certainly there couldn’t be too many such wrecks to be found. What do you think this planet was, a flypaper to attract them?”
“But if ships crashed here once, why didn’t they later when men were better able to understand them?” Ross countered.
“For several reasons—all of them possible and able to be fitted into the fabric of history as we know it on this world. Civilizations rise, exist, and fall, each taking with it into the limbo of forgotten things some of the discoveries which made it great.
“The Sumerians once had a well-traveled trade route to India. Bronze Age traders opened up roads down into Africa. The Romans knew China. Then came an end to each of these empires, and those trade routes were forgotten. To our European ancestors of the Middle Ages, China was almost a legend, and the fact that Chinese fleets had successfully sailed to East Africa was unknown. Suppose our space voyagers represented some star-born confederacy or empire which lived, rose to its highest point, and fell again into planet-bound barbarism all before the first of our species painted pictures on a cave wall?
“Or take it that this world was an unlucky reef on which too many ships and cargoes were lost, so that our whole solar system was posted, and skippers of star ships thereafter avoided it? Or they might even have had some rule that when a planet developed a primitive race of its own, it was to be left strictly alone until it discovered space flight for itself.”
“Yes.” Every one of Ashe’s suppositions made good sense, and Ross was able to believe them. It was easier to think that both Furry-face and Baldy were inhabitants of another world than to think their kind existed on this planet before his own species was born. “But how did the Russians locate that ship?”
“Unless the information is on the tapes we were able to bring along, we shall probably never know,” Ashe said drowsily. “I might make one guess—the Russians have been making an all-out effort for three hundred years to open up Siberia. In some sections of that huge country there have been great climatic changes almost overnight in the far past. Mammoths have been discovered frozen in the ice with half-digested plants in their stomach. It’s as if the beasts were given some deep-freeze treatment instantaneously. If in their excavations the Russians came across the remains of a spaceship, remains well enough preserved for them to realize what they had discovered, they might start questing back in time to find a better one intact at an earlier date. That theory fits everything we know now.”
“But why would the aliens attack the Russians now?”
“No ship’s officers ever thought gently of pirates.” Ashe’s eyes closed.
There were questions, a flood of them, that Ross wanted to ask. He smoothed the fabric on his arm, that stuff which clung so tightly to his skin yet kept him warm without any need for more covering. If Ashe were right, on what world, what kind of world, had that material been woven, and how far had it been brought that he could wear it now?
Suddenly McNeil slid into their shelter and dropped two hares at the edge of the fire.
“How goes it?” he said, as Ross began to clean them.
“Reasonably well,” Ashe, his eyes still closed, replied to that before Ross could. “How far are we from the river? And do we have company?”
“About five miles—if we had wings.” McNeil answered in a dry tone. “And we have company all right, lots of it!”
That brought Ashe up, leaning forward on his good elbow. “What kind?”
“Not from the village.” McNeil frowned at the fire which he fed with economic handfuls of sticks. “Something’s happening on the side of the mountains. It looks as if there’s a mass migration in progress. I counted five family clans on their way west—all in just this one morning.”
“The village refugees’ stories about devils might send them packing,” Ashe mused.
“Maybe.” But McNeil did not sound convinced. “The sooner we head downstream, the better. And I hope the boys will have that sub waiting where they promised. We do possess one thing in our favor—the spring floods are subsiding.”
“And the high water should have left plenty of raft material.” Ashe lay back again. “We’ll make those five miles tomorrow.”
McNeil stirred uneasily and Ross, having cleaned and spitted the hares, swung them over the flames to broil. “Five miles in this country,” the younger man observed, “is a pretty good day’s march”—he did not add as he wanted to—”for a well man.”
“I will make it,” Ashe promised, and both listeners knew that as long as his body would obey him he meant to keep that promise. They also knew the futility of argument.
Ashe proved to be a prophet to be honored on two counts. They did make the trek to the river the next day, and there was a wealth of raft material marking the high-water level of the spring flood. The migrations NcNeil had reported were still in progress, and the three men hid twice to watch the passing of small family clans. Once a respectably sized tribe, including wounded men, marched across their route, seeking a ford at the river.
“They’ve been badly mauled,” McNeil whispered as they watched the people huddle along the water’s edge while scouts cast upstream and down, searching for a ford. When they returned with the news that there was no ford to be found, the tribesmen then sullenly went to work with flint axes and knives to make rafts.
“Pressure—they are on the run.” Ashe rested his chin on his good forearm and studied the busy scene. “These are not from the village. Notice the dress and the red paint on their faces. They’re not like Ulffa’s kin either. I wouldn’t say they were local at all.”
“Reminds me of something I saw once—animals running before a forest fire. They can’t all be looking for new hunting territory,” McNeil returned.
“Russians sweeping them out,” Ross suggested. “Or could the ship people—?”
Ashe started to shake his head and then winced. “I wonder . . .” The crease between his level brows deepened. “The ax people!” His voice was still a whisper, but it carried a note of triumph as if he had fitted some stubborn jigsaw piece into its proper place.
“Ax people?”
“Invasion of another people from the east. They turned up in prehistory about this period. Remember, Webb spoke of them. They used axes for weapons and tamed horses.”
“Tartars”—McNeil was puzzled— “This far west?”
“Not Tartars, no. You needn’t expect those to come boiling out of middle Asia for some thousands of years yet. We don’t know too much about the ax people, save that they moved west from the interior plains. Eventually they crossed to Britain; perhaps they were the ancestors of the Celts who loved horses too. But in their time they were a tidal wave.”
“The sooner we head downstream, the better.” McNeil stirred restlessly, but they knew that they must keep to cover until the tribesmen below were gone. So they lay in hiding another night, witnessing on the next morning the arrival of a smaller party of the red-painted men, again with wounded among them. At the coming of this rear guard the activity on the river bank rose close to frenzy.