Galactic Derelict tt-2 Page 3

  “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. Apparentiy 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 we’ll always be dirty, 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 jobl It’s the job which counts here, and, according to Morgan, you have something uselful to contribute. Make up your mind and let me know. If you don’t want to play—we’ll 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 injthe 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 ohance 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 s
trange 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.

  “My people were hunters—long after yours followed another way of life,” he said, making the best answer he could.

  “Right.” Ashe’s tone held a note of satisfaction. “Now-just reach me that rod.” He went back to the job at hand and Travis settled down as his somewhat bewildered assistant. The Apache knew that he had made the choice Kelgarries wanted—that he was going to be a part of this whole unbelievable adventure.

  The one thing he was sure of during the next two crowded days was that they were indeed working under pressure and against time. Whether the unexplained threat which seemed to overhang the whole project came from outside the country or from fear of a policy change here at home, no one bothered to make clear. But Travis was willing not to inquire about that. It was far more interesting and absorbing to work with Ross Murdock. They set the proper kind of shafts to the pseudo-Folsom spear points and then experimented with the spear thrower. This made the efficient weapons they finally turned out twice as powerful. A seven-foot javelin could be hurled a good hundred and fifty yards or more by the use of that two-foot shaft of the thrower, and Travis knew that in close infighting it would add tremendous thrusting power. No wonder a party of hunters so armed dared to go against the mammoth and the other giant mammals of the period.

  In addition to the spears they had flint knives, the counterparts of those found in the debris of Folsom camp sites across most of western America. Travis did not know why he was so sure that he was actually going to use knife and spears and play the role of a wandering prehistoric hunter. Still, he was sure. He learned from Ross that the rest of the time agents’ equipment would not be assembled at the base until the experts had taped film reports out of the past to use as samples.

  On the third day Kelgarries and Ashe took a three-man expedition, loading one ’copter to its limit, out of the canyon. They were gone for almost a week, and upon their return some reels of film were sent out in a hurry. Ashe joined Travis and Ross that same night and lay down beside the fire with a sigh of weary pleasure.

  “Hit pay dirt?” Ross wanted to know.

  His chief nodded. There were dark smudges under his eyes, a fine, drawn look to his features. “The wreck is there, all right. And we located hunters on the fringe of the territory. But I think we can follow Plan One. The tribe is small and there doesn’t appear to be more than one. Our guess that the district was thinly populated must be correct. It won’t be necessary to really establish our scouts with the tribe—just let them keep track of wandering hunters.”

  “And the transfer?”

  Ashe glanced at the watch on his wrist. “Harvey and Logwood are assembling the new one. I give them about forty-eight hours. H.Q. will fly in the extra power packs tonight. Then our men go through. We haven’t the time to spend on finer points now. A working crew follows as soon as the scouts give the ‘all clear.’ H.Q. is analyzing the film reports. They’ll have the rest of the equipment to us as soon as possible.”

  Travis stirred. Who was going to be part of that scouting team into the far past? He wanted to ask that—to hope that he might be one. But what had happened a year ago to smash other plans, kept him tongue-tied now. Ross voiced that all-important question.

  “Who makes the first jump, chief?”

  “You—me—we’re on the spot. Our friend here, if he wants to.”

  “You mean that?” Travis asked slowly.

  Ashe reached for the waiting coffeepot. “Fox, as long as you don’t go loping off on your own to test that flint-tipped armory you’ve been constructing on the first available mammoth, you can come along. Mainly because you look the part, or will when we get through with you. And maybe you can adapt better than we can. Briefing for a time run used to take weeks. Ask Ross here; he can tell you what a cram course in our work is like. But today we haven’t weeks to spare. We’ve only days and they grow fewer with each sunrise. So we’re gambling on you, on Ross, on me. But get this—I’m your section leader, the orders come from me. And the main rule is —the job comes first! We keep away from the natives, we don’t get involved in any happenings back there. Our only reason for going through is to make as sure as we can that the technical boys are not going to be distrubed while they work on that wreck. And that may not be an easy job.” “Why?” Ross asked.

  “Because this ship didn’t make as good a landing as the one you saw the Reds stripping. According to the films we took through the peeper there was a bad smash when it hit dirt. We may have to let it go altogether and track down Number Two on our list. Only, if we can come up with just one good find on board this one, we can stave off the objections of the Committee and get the appropriation for future exploration.”

  “Might do to run one of the Committee through,” Ross remarked.

  Ashe grinned. “Want to lose your job, boy? Give ’em a good look around in some of the spots we’ve prospected and they’d turn up their toes—quick.”

  Just three days later a bright shaft of sunlight illuminated a small side pocket of the canyon spotlighting the three as they worked. They were under the highly critical eyes of a small, neat man who regarded them intently through the upper half of his bifocals and made terse suggestions in a dry, precise voice. Stripping, they rubbed into their skins inch by inch the cream their instructor had provided. And under that oiling their tanned, or naturally dark, skins took on the leathery, uniform brownness of men who wore very litde clothing in any kind of weather.

  Ashe and Ross had been provided with contact lenses so that their eyes were now as dark brown as Travis’. And their closely cropped hair was hidden under finely made wigs of straggling, coarse black locks which fell shoulder-length at the sides and descended as a pony’s mane between their shoulder blades.

  Then each took his turn flat on his back while the makeup artist, working from film charts, proceeded to supply his victims with elaborate patterns of simulated tatoos, marking chests, upper arms, chins, and upper cheekbones. Travis, undergoing the process, studied Ashe, who now represented the finished product. Had he not seen all the steps in that transformation, he would not have guessed that under that savage shell now existed Dr. Gordon Ashe.

  “Glad we’re allowed sandals,” the same savage commented as he tightened the thongs which held about him a combination loincloth-kilt of crudely dressed hide.

  Ross had just thrust his bare feet into a pair of such primitive footwear. “Let’s hope they’ll stay on if we have to scramble, chief,” he said, eying them dubiously.

  Finished at last, the three stood in line to be checked by the make-up man and Kelgarries. The Major carried some furred skins over his arm, and now he tossed one to each of the disguised men.

  “Better hold on to those. It gets cold where you’re going. All right—the ’copter’s waiting.”

  Travis slung a hide pouch over his shoulder and gathered up the three spears he had headed with pseudo-Folsom points. All the men were armed with the same weapons and there was a supply bag for each man.

  The ’copter took them up and out, swinging away from the Canyon of the Hohokam into a wide sweep of desert land, bringing them down again before a carefully camouflaged installation. Kelgarries gave Ashe his last instructions.

  “Take a day—two if you have to. Make a circle about five miles out, if you can. The rest is up to you.”

  Ashe nodded. “Can do. We’ll signal in as soon as we can give an ‘all clear.’”

  The concealed structure housed a pile of material and an inner erection of four walls, one floor, no roof. Together the three agents crowded in
to that, watched the panel slide to behind them, while a radiance streamed up around their bodies. Travis felt a tingling through bone and muscle, and then a stab which was half panic as the breath was squeezed from his lungs by a weird wrenching that twisted his insides. But he kept his feet, held on to his spears. There was a second or two of blackness. Then once again he gulped air, shook himself as he might have done climbing out of strong river current. Ross’s dot-bordered lips curved in a smile and he signaled “thumbs up” with his scarred hand.

  “End of run—here we go….”

  As far as Travis could see they were still in the box. But when Ashe pushed open the door panel, they looked out not on the piled boxes which had lain there before but upon an untidy heap of rocks. And clambering over those in the wake of his companions, the Apache did find a very different world before him.

  Gone was the desert with its burden of sun-heated rock. A plain of coarse grass, thigh-, even waist-high, rolled away to some hills. And that grassy plain was cut by the end of a lake which stretched northward beyond the horizon. Travis saw brush and small trees dotting in clumps. And, too distant for him to distinguish their species, he could make out slowly moving lumps which could only be grazing animals.

  There was a sun overhead, but a cold, harassing wind whipped with an ice-tipped lash around Travis’ three-quarters-bare body. He pulled the hide robe about his shoulders, and saw that his companions had copied that move. The air was not only chilly, it was dank with a wealth of moisture.

  And there were new, rank smells, which his nostrils could not identify, carried by each puff of breeze. This world was as harsh and grim as his own, but in a very different fashion.

  Ashe stooped and rolled aside one of the nearby rocks to disclose a small box. From his supply bag he produced three small buttons, giving one to each of the younger men.

  “Plant that in your left ear,” he ordered, and did so with his own. Then he pushed a key on the side of the box. Instantly a low chirruping sound was audible. “This is our homing signal. It acts as radar to bring you back here.”